Displaying items by tag: painting

A late landscape painted by Vincent Van Gogh in Arles the year before he died, and one of the last great Suprematist paintings by Kazimir Malevich in private hands will headline Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art sales in New York on 5 November.

The auction house, which has led rival Christie’s in the past eight of ten sale seasons in this field, will be selling a group of ten works from a collection assembled in the 1940s and 50s by the Belgian collectors Louis and Evelyn Franck. “This is one of those fantastic post-war time-capsule collections that there are now so few of,” says Simon Shaw, the co-head of Sotheby’s worldwide Impressionist and Modern art department.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art recently acquired Maya’s Quilt of Life, 1989, (acrylic on canvas and painted, dyed and pieced fabrics) by Faith Ringgold, from the art collection of the late author and activist, Maya Angelou. The work hung in Angelou’s home and was commissioned by Oprah Winfrey for Angelou’s 61st birthday.

Ringgold is well-known for her painted story quilts, which unite a tradition of representational painting with the rich history of quilting in the African-American community. The border of Maya’s Quilt of Life is made from pieced-together fabric that frames Angelou, who is surrounded by flowers in her signature patterned African dress and head wrap.

A Nazi-era restitution claim for a Renoir landscape at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery has been rejected. The Spoliation Advisory Panel recommended in a report that The Coast at Cagnes, Sea, Mountains (around 1910) should not be returned to the heirs of Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer because there is insufficient evidence that it had been the subject of a Nazi forced sale in Berlin. The Oppenheimers, a German Jewish couple, had fled to France in 1933. Jakob died in an internment camp in 1941 and Rosa was murdered in Auschwitz two years later.

X-ray radiography is a standard technique widely used by art conservators, art historians, and curators to discover information about the manufacturing process and the condition of a painting. However, cradling—wooden slats attached to the back of many old paintings executed on wooden panels—creates lattice patterns that appear as grids or a series of stripes on an X-ray image. These patterns can obscure the image and distract art conservators from reading the image and analyzing paint layers.

“Cradle patterns in X-ray images has been an ages-old problem for conservators studying collections of Old Master paintings, and until Platypus, required many hours of tedious manipulation of the X-ray image in Photoshop or various other techniques, some of which could be damaging to the painting,” says William Brown, chief conservator at the NCMA.

Eli Wilner & Company recently completed the restoration of an important period frame for the Cleveland Museum of Art. Curator Mark Cole approached Wilner with images of the period frame on Gilbert Stuart’s Portrait of Elizabeth Beltzhoover Mason, circa 1803-1805. The Wilner team identified the frame as an English or early American “Carlo Maratta” style frame, with an acanthus leaf-and-shield ornament applied in a simple cove. This frame style was popular in America in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It was determined that the frame was both appropriate to the painting and likely to be the original, as the museum’s records indicated that the frame had been with the painting for at least a century. Having established the quality and importance of the frame, it was decided that extensive restoration would be appropriate.

Since the late 1960s, art historians have known that another painting lay underneath Rembrandt’s famous An Old Man in Military Costume (painted about 1630-1631), a compelling character study (tronie) of age and one of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s most beloved Dutch paintings. Until now, however, seeing that hidden image in detail has been frustratingly elusive.

A recent collaborative study conducted by experts from Los Angeles, Antwerp, and Delft, using two complementary, element-specific imaging techniques, has provided the most detailed representation of the underlying painting—an image of a young man wrapped in a cloak—to date.

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) announced today that it will have a major exhibition about female Abstract Expressionists in summer 2016. Titled “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” the show will feature more than 50 works by 12 artists. Following its run at the DAM, the show will travel to the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Palm Springs Art Museum in California.

Abstract Expressionism has long been defined by its male adherents—including Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, and Barnett Newman, among others—whose fame greatly exceeds the women in the movement.

Paul Gauguin's  1892 painting, Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?), is coming to the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.

The most expensive painting ever sold was reportedly purchased by the Qatar Museums for nearly $300 million back in February, smashing the old record for Paul Cézanne's late 19th century work, The Card Players, which sold for an estimated $250 million.

A Manhattan judge has ruled in favor of Mount Sinai Beth Israel, allowing the hospital to keep $4 million in donations, including an Édouard Manet painting, given by the late heiress Huguette Clark. Her relatives had sued, claiming Clark was manipulated into giving away her fortune.

Clark spent the last two decades of her life at Beth Israel. After an operation in 1992, she opted to remain under the institution's care, rather than returning home. She died in 2011, at 104 years old.

It has been one of the more intriguing art historical mysteries for more than a century: did the great pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti touch up a Botticelli painting he owned by giving the sitter a vibrant red rinse?

On Thursday, curators at the Victoria and Albert Museum gave the definitive answer – the red hair of the 15th-century woman known as Smerelda Bandinelli is her own and the supposed Rossetti intervention can finally be laid to rest as a myth.