Displaying items by tag: painting

An $8 million Basquiat painting and a Roman Togatus statue that were illegally smuggled into the United States by a convicted São Paulo banker were returned to the government of Brazil today at a ceremony in New York. The artworks’ former owner, Edemar Cid Ferreira, was convicted in Brazil in 2005 of fraud and laundering one billion dollars as the founder and president of Banco Santos. Before being caught, he had been converting some of these ill-gotten profits into a 12,000-piece art collection worth an estimated $20 to 30 million, according to Brazilian officials.

"Auvers, Landscape with Plough," an oil painting dating from 1877 by Charles-François Daubigny (French, 1817-1878) has been acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art.

Daubigny lived northwest of Paris in Auvers-sur-Oise during his later years and painted the surrounding farmlands as early 1860. This landscape painting was finished during the last year of the artist’s life.

The best-known portrait of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach was welcomed back in his home city in an emotional ceremony Friday after an odyssey sparked when the Nazis came to power.

Back in the city of Leipzig thanks to the largesses of a late US millionaire and classical music lover, the 1748 work was unveiled in a packed church, going on public view for the first time in centuries.

Russborough House has decided not to sell an important Rubens oil painting for which it obtained an export licence earlier this year.

The painting, titled "Portrait of a Monk, Bust-Length," was one of three by Rubens for which Russborough obtained an export licence on March 16th last. The other two are among a group of nine pictures from Russborough due to be auctioned at Christie’s in London in the coming weeks.

A federal judge in Los Angeles has declined to order the return of an Impressionist painting to the relatives of a Jewish woman who was forced to sell the work for $360 to a Nazi art appraiser in 1939.

The ruling came after a decade-long dispute over ownership of the 1897 canvas, “Rue Saint-Honoré, Après-midi, Effet de Pluie,” a Paris street scene by Pissarro, which is in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. The judge, John F. Walter of United States District Court, rejected a claim by relatives of the woman, Lilly Cassirer, who sued the museum and Spain seeking to have the painting turned over to them or to be awarded damages.

A rare, never-before-displayed Andy Warhol painting depicting socialite and Manhattan-based real estate attorney Olga Berde Mahl will make its public debut at Masterpiece London from June 25–July 1. Aptly titled "The Socialite," it was created between 1986–87, and comes to the fair courtesy of Indianapolis gallery Long-Sharp Gallery.

While Warhol's portraits of celebrities, models, and society women are among his most well-known, the Mahl portrait has never been displayed as it was sold directly to the subject.

The Cantor Arts Center has announced the major new acquisition of a painting by Edward Hopper, "New York Corner (Corner Saloon)," 1913. One of Hopper's early paintings, the oil on canvas was created when Hopper was just 31 and still struggling to establish himself, but it heralds the artist's influential career and prominence as one of America's great realist painters. When it was first exhibited in New York shortly after it was completed, the critics praised it as a "perfect visualization of a New York atmosphere" and for its "completeness of expression."

A work from of Francis Bacon’s most famous series of paintings, of seated and often screaming popes, is to go on sale with an estimated value of £25m to £35m. When the canvas last went under the hammer in 2005, “Study for a Pope I” (1961) fetched £10 million — at the time this was a record for the artist. But even if the work goes under the hammer for the lower end of the latest price estimate, it would still equate to a rise in value of 150 percent.

"Saul and David"—a painting once thought to be one of Rembrandt’s greatest pictures until it was dismissed in 1969 as a work by a follower—has been reattributed to the Dutch master following a lengthy investigation. The Hague’s Mauritshuis revealed the news today in the run-up to the opening of an exhibition detailing the painting’s extensive technical investigation and recent restoration. The CSI-style show is due to open on June 11 and run until September 13.