Displaying items by tag: painting

A commercial statement filed in New York this summer has raised questions about the circumstances surrounding the sale of a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat at Christie’s, New York, on 13 May.

The work, The Field Next to the Other Road (1981), was consigned to the auction house by the dealer Tony Shafrazi and included in the Post-War and Contemporary evening sale where it sold for $37.1m, the sixth-highest price of the night.

The St. Louis Art Museum has announced a significant acquisition: “Sunday Morning Breakfast,” a 1943 painting by the highly regarded African-American folk artist Horace Pippin.

The painting, the purchase of which was approved by the museum’s board of commissioners on Monday evening, cost $1.5 million.

The stream of news and discoveries about Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa are seemingly never ending. In a shocking twist, it's now been reported that a second version of the iconic portrait might have been discovered in a private collection in St. Petersburg.

Experts are now analyzing the artwork in order to establish whether it is a genuine work by Leonardo da Vinci or simply one of the many convincing replicas in existence around the world.

The Lock, one of John Constable’s most famous compositions sold for £9,109,000 / €12,562,266 / $13,699,025 at Sotheby’s London, 160 years after its last appearance on the market. The monumental landscape depicting the countryside of the painter’s “careless boyhood” was the highlight of the Old Master & British Paintings Evening sale which featured a significant number of museum-quality works and totalled £22.6 million / €31.2 million / $34 Million (est. £21.8-32.6 million).

A rare surviving English medieval panel painting has been given a new lease of life after conservation at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge. Remarkably, new evidence found by conservators shows the painting owes its survival to recycling during the Protestant Reformation of the Church in England.

Now on display at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, The Kiss of Judas, is one of the rarest artworks of its type.

The estate of a Paris art dealer filed a suit against the Nahmad family in New York State Supreme Court on Tuesday over the restitution of a $25 million Nazi looted portrait by Amedeo Modigliani purportedly in the possession of the Nahmads, the New York Times reports.

The same court dismissed a previous attempt by the original owner's grandson, 71-year-old Philippe Maestracci, to secure the return of Modigliani's Seated Man With a Cane (1918) in 2012, after a judge ruled the France-based claimant lacked standing to pursue the case in the US.

Arts Council England has announced the acceptance in lieu of inheritance tax of a painting by Sir Anthony Van Dyck of his close friend Olivia Porter. This exceptional portrait which has been allocated to The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham, is a major acquisition for the North of England.

Portrait of Olivia Mrs. Endymion Porter by Van Dyck, one of the most important painters working in England in the seventeenth century, was painted circa 1637 when the artist was at the height of his career and is one of his finest female portraits.

Liu Yiqian, a former taxi driver turned billionaire art collector, confirmed on Tuesday that he was the buyer of the painting of a nude woman by Amedeo Modigliani that sold for $170.4 million at Christie’s New York on Monday night.

Speaking by telephone from Shanghai, the Chinese collector said he planned to bring the work back to the city, where he and his wife have two private museums.

Christie's on Monday smashed world record prices at auction for Amedeo Modigliani and Roy Lichtenstein, selling works by the artists for $170.4 million and $95.37 million respectively.

Modigliani's "Nu Couche" or "Reclining Nude," painted in 1917-18, sold in New York after a frantic nine-minute bidding war in the first time the painting has ever come to auction. 

It was the second highest price ever achieved at auction for a work or art, Christie's said. Applause erupted in the packed room when the sale concluded.