Displaying items by tag: Private Collection

El Greco’s Vincenzo Anastagi, acquired a century ago by Henry Clay Frick, is one of The Frick Collection’s most celebrated paintings and one of only two full-length portraits by the master. It was executed during the artist’s six-year stay in Rome, before he moved to Spain, where he spent the rest of his career. Much of the force of this work emanates from the resplendent half-armor worn by Anastagi. Rich highlights applied with broad brushstrokes accentuate the steel, its metallic sheen contrasting with the velvety texture of Anastagi’s green breeches and the dark crimson curtain. To mark the 400th anniversary of El Greco’s death, the Frick will pair Vincenzo Anastagi with the rarely seen Jacopo Boncompagni by the artist’s Roman contemporary Scipione Pulzone. With its gleaming, highly detailed polish, Pulzone’s portrait of Boncompagni, on loan from a private collection, epitomizes the elegant style that dominated high-society portraiture in Rome during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. El Greco’s painterly portrayal of Anastagi stands in stark contrast, underscoring the artist’s innovative departures from convention. The exhibition, held in the Frick’s East Gallery, is organized by Jeongho Park, Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow. It is generously funded by gifts from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Sidney R. Knafel and Londa Weisman in memory of Vera and Walter A. Eberstadt. The Frick will continue its celebration of El Greco this autumn and winter with a collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Moti Shniberg shuffles through the lobby of the trendy Manhattan building where his company is based to a quiet corner table. A boyish 41-year-old with red hair and a soft Israeli accent, he’s slightly out of place among the dressy-casual office workers who weren’t yet in high school when he launched the Artist Pension Trust, which may hold the largest private collection of contemporary art on the planet.

“Look around,” Shniberg says, gesturing to the walls. “You see all the art there? All of these are APT artists.” And who created the video installation in the corner? “I’m not sure,” says Shniberg, half sheepish, half defiant. “We have so many artists.”

The National Gallery (NG) in Prague today put on display Gustav Klimt’s painting "Lady with a Muff" from 1916–17, considered missing for decades.

The painting was borrowed from a private Czech collection in which it has been since the early 1930s.

"Lady with a Muff" will feature alongside another two paintings by Klimt (1862–1918) in the NG for a period of time.

Britain’s Royal Collection is to undergo the most ambitious condition survey ever carried out on a major group of paintings. On the eve of the conservation project, The Art Newspaper can give the precise number of paintings for which the collection is responsible: 7,564 works in oil. This is the first time that the number has been confirmed in the past 500 years. The works will all be condition-checked and properly photographed, and images of most of the paintings will be published online, revealing for the first time the extent of the world’s greatest private collection.

The Painting Condition Survey is due to begin this summer with the “lesser” palaces—Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, Sandringham in Norfolk and Balmoral in Scotland. A team of four conservators and frame technicians will move systematically through each of the royal residences, room by room. Desmond Shawe-Taylor, the surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, says that the paintings will be taken off the wall, one by one, and removed from their frames. This will be a complex logistical exercise, since the pictures hang in 13 royal residences throughout the UK.

Adam Weitsman is a 45-year-old mogul of a $1 billion scrap metal empire with a dozen locations in New York, stretching from the Port of Albany to Rochester and across the Southern Tier.

He flies in a private Gulfstream jet with his wife, Kim, a former fashion model in her early 30s. They drive a $250,000 Rolls-Royce Ghost between a condominium overlooking Central Park in New York City and their other homes. For a change of pace, they climb into a Lamborghini and cruise to a Finger Lakes summer retreat he renovated for $20 million and filled with museum-quality furnishings.

He employs a publicist.

Weitsman, president of Upstate Shredding, based in Owego in Tioga County, lives large while straddling the disparate worlds of his twin passions: hard-charging junk dealer by day, knowledgeable art collector by night.

Now, Weitsman has donated one of the world's largest private collections of 19th-century American decorated stoneware, valued at about $10 million, to the State Museum.

A 1921 portrait by Matisse found in the private collection of the reclusive Cornelius Gurlitt was looted by the Nazis from a prominent French art collector and should be returned to his heirs, a team of international experts said on Wednesday.

The painting, “Seated Woman/Woman Sitting in Armchair,” depicting a subject in a flowered blouse with a blue fan in her lap, is the first picture from Mr. Gurlitt’s private collection to have its ownership history clarified. The team’s investigation followed an outcry over German authorities’ initial lack of transparency in handling the works, which have become known as the Munich Art Trove.

Today's modern art forger is capable of producing fake works of art so perfect that even trained experts are unable to spot them. Even down to the most minute details of the pigments, binders, and canvas, these fakes are almost better than the works they're based on. But thanks to a byproduct of the Atomic age, the art world has a potent tool for finding forgeries.

Since the start of the 1960s, the art world—especially the modern art world—has been besieged by a torrent of faked "masterpieces." Peggy Guggenheim (yes, that Guggenheim) was once famously duped into purchasing what was believed to be a canvas painting by French artist Fernand Léger completed around 1913. It hung in her private collection for decades before being revealed as a forgery. This problem only expanded through the 1980s and 1990s as the market for modern art exploded.

The Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, announced that a painting that had been relegated to storage for a decade has been authenticated as a work by Rembrandt. The canvas, which has been in the museum’s collection for 72 years, was previously attributed to “The Circle of Rembrandt.” A recent reassessment by Rembrandt expert Ernst van de Wetering proved that the painting was made by the Dutch master himself.

“Portrait of Dirck van Os” was purchased by the Joslyn Art Museum in 1942 from a private collection as an authentic Rembrandt. A later assessment saw the painting reclassified as a work by one of Rembrandt’s students. After a visit to the Joslyn Art Museum in 2010, Van de Wetering had the work sent to Amsterdam for restoration. After later additions of paint were removed, a very different portrait was revealed, leading the scholar to deem the work a late painting by Rembrandt.

There are approximately 300 Rembrandts known to exist. “Portrait of Dirck van Os” will go on view at the Joslyn Art Museum in May.

The first four paintings from private collections to undergo conservation treatment in the Dallas Museum of Art’s new Paintings Conservation Studio are currently on view in the institution’s European galleries. The studio, which opened in November, is part of the museum’s initiative to create a more comprehensive in-house conservation program.

One of the works, ‘The Blacksmith Cupids’ by the French painter Charles-Antoine Coypel, has entered the Dallas Museum of Art’s permanent collection. It is the first work by the artist to enter the museum’s collection. The other newly restored works -- Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s ‘Dogs Playing with Birds in a Park,’ a Renaissance painting titled ‘Saint Ursula Protecting the Eleven Thousand Virgins with her Cloak’ and an Italian 14th-century painted wood panel--will remain on loan to the museum.

The institution’s new conservation program involves collaborating with private collectors on the study and care of their illustration collections. The works will then be presented in the Dallas Museum of Art’s galleries for public viewing. The museum’s conservation studio, which features cutting-edge technology including a digital X-ray system, is enclosed by a glass wall so that guests of the museum can observe daily conservation activity.

The New York Police Department is asking for the public’s help in locating a Norman Rockwell painting that sold for over a $1 million at Sotheby’s in May. Sport, which appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in 1939, was being kept in a storage warehouse in Queens. Police said that the painting went missing last month.

While the buyer has not been identified, the painting was sold from a private collection in Birmingham, AL. The oil on canvas painting, which features a fisherman clad in a yellow raincoat in a boat, will be nearly impossible to sell if the alleged thief is hoping to turn a profit.