Displaying items by tag: Acquisitions

Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art has acquired 50 works from the Carnegie International, North America's oldest exhibition of contemporary art from around the globe.

The purchases were approved by the museum on Thursday, December 12 and they are the first of two rounds of acquisitions from the International, which opened on October 5. Additional purchases will be announced in the New Year. So far, the Carnegie Museum has added a number of films to its collection as well as a large-scale sculpture by British artist Phyllida Barlow, photographs by Zoe Strauss, and drawings by Iranian artist Rokni Haerizadeh.

The International was launched in 1896 by industrialist Andrew Carnegie to help grow the museum’s collection as well as educate and inspire the public.

Scott Schaefer, the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Senior Curator of Paintings, will retire on January 21, 2014. Schaefer joined the Getty in 1999 after stints at Sotheby’s, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Schaefer, who helmed the Getty’s Paintings department for four years, helped the museum acquire a total of 70 paintings and pastels and five sculptures. Among the most important recent acquisitions are the Getty’s first paintings by Paul Gauguin, J.M.W. Turner’s Modern Rome, and a rare self-portrait by Rembrandt.

Timothy Potts, the Getty’s director, said, “Through his acquisitions, Scott has made an impact on every one of the Museum’s paintings galleries and, in particular, transformed our eighteenth-century French collection. We will miss his discerning eye, keen intelligence and above all his unswerving commitment to the Museum.”

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas has acquired a portrait by John Singer Sargent depicting Edwin Booth, the renowned 19^th century Shakespearean actor and brother of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. The Players, a private club for actors founded by Booth and his peers, commissioned the full-length portrait in 1890.

Edwin Booth was housed at The Players club until 2002, when debt forced the organization to sell the work to a private collector. The painting had only gone on public display twice before being acquired by the Amon Carter Museum: once in 1926 as part of Sargent’s memorial exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and from November 2003 to February 2004 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Andrew Walker, Director of the Amon Carter Museum, said, “Sargent is one of the most important American artists and we are thrilled to add another one of his masterpieces to our collection. We are particularly intrigued by this painting as it is among his most brilliantly conceived full-length male portraits.” The museum also owns Sargent’s Alice Vanderbilt Shepard, which was acquired in 1999.

Edwin Booth, which was purchased for about $5 million, is currently on its first extended display in the museum’s main gallery.

On September 25, 2013 The Boston Athenæum will present the exhibition Collecting for the Boston Athenæum in the 21^st Century: Paintings and Sculptures. The show will feature a portion of the 50 works the Athenæum, which is one of the oldest independent libraries in the United States, has acquired since 2000.

Highlights from the upcoming exhibition include nineteenth century portraits by William McGregor Paxton, early genre paintings by William Holbrook Beard, scenes of Boston by Frank Duveneck, works by prominent Boston School artist William Morris Hunt, and paintings by the Ashcan painter John Sloan. Collecting for the Boston Athenæum will also include a number of important paintings that have been promised as future gifts to the institution.

The Boston Athenæum began collecting significant works of art shortly after its founding in 1807 and held its first formal exhibition in 1827. It continues to acquire works through gifts and purchases and recently received a grant from the National Endowment of the Art for the compilation of a comprehensive, scholarly catalogue of its fine art collection, which includes books, maps, manuscripts, prints, photographs, paintings and sculptures.

Collecting for the Boston Athenæum, the first in a series of four exhibitions to be held in the institution’s Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery between 2013 and 2018, will be on view through February 15, 2014. Together, the exhibitions will celebrate the Athenæum’s commitment to scholarship, preservation and the dissemination of knowledge as represented by its extensive collections of rare and unique materials.

Collectors Charles and Irene Hamm have donated $1 million and 165 works from their collection of coastal art to the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, CT. The collection includes oil paintings by Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton and Rockwell Kent as well as watercolors by Fairfield Porter and William Trost Richards. The generous monetary gift will help fund the construction of an 18,000-square-foot New Wing, which will include a Charles and Irene Hamm Gallery. The bequest will also increase the museum’s endowments for operations and acquisitions.

John R. Rathgeber, Chairman of the museum’s Board of Trustees, said, “With the donation of Charles and Irene Hamm, the New Britain Museum will have one of the most outstanding collections of coastal art in the country.” The museum plans to hold thematic exhibitions drawn from the Hamm’s holdings. A number of the significant works will be loaned to other institutions throughout the country and, in the future, the New Britain Museum plans to organize a traveling exhibition of highlights from the Hamm Collection.

Charles Hamm, a successful advertising and financial mogul, and his wife Irene, an educator, have been collecting for several decades. Charles’ affinity for maritime scenes was spurred by his love of sailing.

Construction is expected to begin on the New Britain Museum’s New Wing in 2014.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts will sell a painting by Edward Hopper to start an endowment fund to acquire contemporary art. East Wind Over Weekhawken is one of two paintings by the American Modernist artist in the museum’s collection. The work will be sold at auction at Christie’s in New York in December and is expected to garner between $22 million and $28 million.

East Wind Over Weehawken was purchased by the museum from Hopper’s dealer, Frank K.M. Rehn, in 1952 for $2,750. If the painting realizes its pre-sale estimate, it will quintuple the funds generated annually for acquisitions. While a portion of the endowment will be used for purchasing historic art, the majority of new acquisitions will be in contemporary art, mainly American painting and sculpture.

The Pennsylvania Academy will keep its other Hopper painting, Apartment Houses, which was purchased from the artist directly and was the first oil painting by Hopper to enter the Pennsylvania Academy’s collection.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. announced that they have acquired 100 photographs from The Irving Penn Foundation. Irving Penn, one of the most celebrated artists of the 20^th century, revolutionized fashion photography and was also well known for his still lifes and portraits that frequently appeared in Vogue.

The recently acquired photographs include rare, mostly unpublished works from the late 1930s and 1940s, images of post-war Europe and iconic portraits of celebrated figures such as Agnes de Mille, Langston Hughes and Truman Capote. The collection also includes commercial photography, self-portraits and some of Penn’s most recognizable fashion images. Penn had donated 61 photographs, spanning from 1944 to 1986, to the Smithsonian during his lifetime. He also gifted 60 works to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in 1990.

To celebrate the acquisition and the expansion of the Smithsonian’s Penn holdings, the museum will organize a touring exhibition of approximately 160 works that will open at the Smithsonian in the fall of 2015.

The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. is currently hosting the exhibition Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945, the first in-depth look at the Cubist master’s works preceding World War II. During this period, Braque used the theme of still life to hone his pioneering Cubist style. The exhibition presents 44 works from this period as well as related objects that help trace the artist’s evolution from a painter of still lifes to interiors in the late 1920s, to large-scales spaces in the 1930s, to personal interpretations of everyday life in the 1940s.

The exhibition brings together Braque’s Rosenberg Quartet (1928-1929) for the first time in 80 years. The four canvases were used as models for marble panels in the Paris apartment of Braque’s art dealer, Paul Rosenberg. All in varying degrees of completion, the works come together to reveal the different stages of Braque’s artistic process.

Duncan Phillips, founder of the Phillips Collection, was a well-known champion of Braque’s work and helped introduce his paintings to a wider American audience through acquisitions and exhibitions. Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945 will be on view at the Phillips Collection through September 1, 2013.

The Rijksmuseum in The Netherlands has purchased one of the earliest depictions of America in the history Western art. Discovery America by the Dutch Renaissance painter Jan Mostaert (circa 1475—1555/56) was created between 1525 and 1540 and features a made-up scene of Spanish aggressors firing cannons and rifles at indigenous people who are armed with bows and arrows.

Discovery America, which is also known as Episode from the Conquest of America, was one of 202 paintings returned to the daughter-in-law of Jacques Goudstikker, a Jewish art dealer whose collection was plundered by the Nazis. Following World War II, the painting was displayed in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem until Goudstikker’s heirs demanded that the work be handed over to the family in 2006. Goudstikker’s daughter-in-law approached the Rijksmuseum about purchasing the painting earlier this year. Nathan and Simon Dickinson Gallery, which has headquarters in New York and London, brokered the sale. The gallery had brought the painting to the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht in March where they asked $14 million for the masterpiece.    

Discovery America’s importance is bolstered by the fact that it is one of the oldest Dutch paintings mentioned in the definitive Dutch art history book, Het Schilder-boeck from 1605.

First Look: Collecting for Philadelphia, which opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on July 13, 2013, will present a selection of works from the 8,000 individual acquisitions the institution has made since July 1, 2008. The generosity of various donors is hugely responsible for the collection that is presented to museum visitors each day. Whether it is artworks or funds to make purchases, donations have helped sustain the institution since its founding in 1876.

First Look presents a cross-section of the many works acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the past five years, most of which will be on view for the first time. The new acquisitions span centuries, continents and media. Highlights include paintings by Claude Monet (1840-1926), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Charles Wilson Peale (1741-1827).

 First Look: Collecting for Philadelphia will be on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through September 8, 2013.