Displaying items by tag: sculpture

One of the Getty's most prized ancient artworks is hanging in a legal balance this week in Italy's highest court, leaving the L.A. museum's leaders feeling as if they have landed in a Franz Kafka tale, a judicial and bureaucratic nightmare they can neither understand nor escape.

But unlike a hapless Kafka character, the Getty has an inkling as to why its nearly life-size statue, known as "Victorious Youth" or the "Getty Bronze," is back in a maze of judicial and investigative proceedings. And rather than suffer passively, the Getty — the world's richest art institution, with a $6-billion endowment — may well draw a line.

The Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) announced today its annual Awards for Excellence in the categories of museum Catalogues, Articles/Essays, and Exhibitions. All AAMC members are eligible for nomination. The AAMC Prize Committee and member juror groups determine awards prior to the AAMC’s Annual Conference and Meeting in May. New to this year’s vetting process, the categories of Awards for Exhibitions and Catalogues were subdivided based on the operating budgets of the members’ museums.

"We were impressed by the quality and depth of the nominations,” says Judith Pineiro, Executive Director of the Association of Art Museum Curators, "It is wonderful that our new selection process allowed for celebrating the outstanding work of so many curators.”

Christie’s Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art on Tuesday, May 6, realized $285,879,000 (£168,668,610/€205,832,880), selling 89% by lot and 96% by value. This marks the highest total for Christie’s New York in this category since May 2010. Of the 53 works offered, 9 lots sold for over $10 million, 18 for over $5 million, and 43 for over $1 million. The sale was led by works from distinguished private collections, including Monet’s Nymphéas from The Clark Family Treasures and Picasso’s Portrait de femme (Dora Maar) from the Viktor and Marianne Langen Collection. Two additional sales, Works on Paper and the Day sale, will complete the series on Wednesday, May 7.

Brooke Lampley, Head of Department, Impressionist & Modern Art, Christie’s New York, commented, “Our strong performance tonight, the highest since May of 2010, is a testament to the continued strength of the global market for Impressionist and Modern works of art. Bidders from 36 countries competed in our sale tonight for a wide variety of works, from Monet’s classic Nymphéas and Modigliani’s engaging portrait of a red-haired man, to bold, modern works by Picasso and Kandinsky. Our global team has worked tirelessly to source the best works available this season, many of which had never been offered at auction, including star lots from the leading collections of the season: the Clark Family Treasures, the Estate of Edgar M. Bronfman and the Viktor and Marianne Langen Collection.”

Yet another ancient statue looted in the 1970s from a single remote temple in the jungles of Cambodia has turned up in the United States, this time at Christie’s, which is voluntarily paying to return it to its homeland.

Christie’s sold the statue, a 10th-century sandstone depiction of a mythological figure known as Pandava, to an anonymous collector in 2009, but bought it back earlier this year after officials determined that the sculpture had been looted.

In 2011, when asked about the recently announced Dia:Beacon retrospective of his work, his first in North America in more than three decades, Carl Andre told Randy Kennedy of The New York Times that he had informed the Dia curators, “I can’t stop you from doing it, but don’t expect me to do anything to help.” As it turned out, this wasn’t true; according to Yasmil Raymond, the co-curator of the show, he cooperated plenty. “He had to endure our visits almost every month,” she said a few days before the show’s public opening, “and he came here three times to see the installation.”

The result of more than three years of hard work on the part of Raymond and Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles Philippe Vergne, “Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010,” which will be on view until next March before traveling to other venues, stretches over six galleries and two floors.

Thievery of fine art is nothing new. One of the more infamous heists involved the 1990 theft of The Concert, a masterpiece by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, taken from a Boston museum. The most spectacular heist of a painting may still be Leonardo da Vinci’s The Mona Lisa, seized from the Louvre in 1911 and then returned two years later.

Dallas sculptor Michael Christopher Matson knows all about those stories. He just never thought it would happen to him. It did.

Matson, 42, has worked as an artist “my entire adult life.” He reveled in the fact that, last June, he was asked to showcase his trio of large sculptures outside in a show called “Steel and Light” at one of Dallas’ premier venues, Kirk Hopper Fine Art. The rust-colored pieces stood proudly 7, 8 and 9 feet tall, made for the outdoors.

Michelangelo's famous statue of the biblical figure David is at risk of collapse due to the weakening of the artwork's legs and ankles, according to a report published this week by art experts.

The findings, which were made public by Italy's National Research Council, show micro-fractures in the ankle and leg areas.

The "David" statue dates from the early 16th century and is housed in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence. The results of the report were published this week in the Journal of Cultural Heritage, a publication devoted to research into the conservation of culturally significant works of art and buildings.

Auction houses expect to sell as much as $2.3 billion of art in New York this month as billionaires from China to Brazil compete for trophy works by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Jeff Koons in a surging market.

Two weeks of semiannual sales of Impressionist, modern, postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, Sotheby’s (BID) and Phillips begin May 6, with online bidding as early as today. Their combined sales target represents a 77 percent increase from estimates for a similar round of auctions a year ago.

The Museum of Biblical Art in New York City will host an unprecedented exhibition of sculptures by Donatello along with works by Filippo Brunelleschi, Luca della Robbia, Nanni di Banco, and others. The works, which were created for the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, have never been on view in the United States.

“Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral” will feature 23 works created for Florence’s Duomo by leading masters of the Italian Renaissance. Highlights include Donatello’s “Lo Zuccone (Habbakuk),” which was created during the most productive period of his career; two recently restored bronze heads, one by Donatello and the other by Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, which were made for the singing gallery that Donatello fashioned for the Duomo’s interior; and three early 15th-century stone reliefs derived from scenes from the Florence Baptistery’s Gates of Paradise by Lorenzo Ghiberti. A full-scale cast of Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise will be on view in New York City at a location that will be announced in the months leading up to the monumental exhibition.

The Museum of Biblical Art, an independent museum that explores the Bible’s impact on art, is the sole venue for the exhibition. The Duomo is currently undergoing an expansion and renovation that is expected to reach completion in October 2015.      

“Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral” will be on view at the Museum of Biblical Art from February 20 through June 14, 2015.

On Friday, April 18, the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, will receive Roy Lichtenstein’s towering sculpture, “Tokyo Brushstroke I & II.” The work, which is being loaned to the museum by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, courtesy of Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman and the Fuhrman Family Foundation, will be placed on the Parrish’s front lawn, near the Montauk Highway. It will be the first long-term outdoor installation at the museum’s new Herzog & de Meuron-designed building, which opened in November 2012.

The two-part sculpture, which stands 33 feet tall at its highest point and weighs around 17,000 pounds, will be installed with a crane into a cement brace and joined together on site. The work is from Lichtenstein’s “brushstroke” sculpture series from the 1990s. Similar works can be found in Madrid, Paris, Singapore, and Washington, D.C.

Lichtenstein, a pioneer of the Pop art movement, relocated to Southampton (less than five miles from the Parrish’s current campus) in 1970 and began an enduring relationship with the museum.