Displaying items by tag: ronald s. lauder

In 2006, the art collector Ronald S. Lauder purchased Gustav Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” (1907) for $135 million, then the highest price paid for a painting, and made it the crown jewel of the Neue Galerie, the museum he founded in 2001. Since then other paintings have sold for considerably higher sums, adjusted for inflation, including those by Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin.

If some of the luster was lost from Klimt’s masterpiece as other works eclipsed its sale price, it is being renewed with the release of the movie “Woman in Gold.” It tells the tale of how Adele Bloch-Bauer’s niece, Maria Altmann (1916-2011), played by Helen Mirren, succeeded in gaining ownership of her aunt’s portrait from the Austrian government decades after it was looted by the Nazis and displayed by the Belvedere in Vienna.

A monumental mural by Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923), an American painter and sculptor often associated with color field painting and the Minimalist movement has found a temporary home at the Barnes Foundation just outside of Philadelphia.

The Barnes, an educational art institution, is currently hosting the exhibition Sculpture on the Wall, which includes Kelly’s Sculpture for a Large Wall. Created between 1956 and 1957, the work was commissioned for the Philadelphia Transportation Building and it was the first public abstract sculpture in Philadelphia. The work was removed from the Transportation Building after it closed in 1993 and was later acquired by Ronald S. Lauder, the former chairman of the Museum of Modern Art. Lauder and his wife promptly donated the work to MoMA where it has only been exhibited twice.

Sculpture for a Large Wall, which measures over 65 feet long and 11 feet high, is accompanied by four other works from later in Kelly’s career including the geometric Red Curve (1986) and the minimalist Two Curves (2012). The sculptures will be on view at the Barnes Foundation through September 2, 2013.