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The traveling exhibition, Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal, marks the 25th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) death. The tribute to the pioneering pop artist features over 300 works including paintings, photographs, screen-prints, sculptures, and films and presents Warhol’s famous Campbell’s soup cans as well as his iconic portraits of Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, and Mao Zedong.

15 Minutes Eternal, the largest traveling exhibition of Warhol’s work to date, has already been on display in Singapore and is currently on view at the Hong Kong Museum of Art through March 31, 2013. However, a few changes will have to be made before the works appear in Beijing next year as China’s Ministry of Culture has requested that the 10 Mao paintings be left out of the Beijing leg of the tour. Created in 1972 after Richard Nixon made his historic visit to China, the Mao portraits were made by applying acrylic and silkscreen-ink to canvas and went on to become some of Warhol’s best-known works.

The 26-month Asian tour has already been a success with 175,000 people visiting the exhibition in Singapore. Officials hope that the absence of the Mao paintings will not affect attendance in Beijing. The last stop on the tour is Tokyo, where the exhibition will be on view from February 1, 2014 to May 6, 2014.

Published in News
Tuesday, 04 December 2012 13:05

Copy of Lost Da Vinci Masterwork Found

A division of the Italian police department that specializes in art thefts has located a 400-year-old copy of a lost Leonardo da Vinci fresco. Depicting the Battle of Anghiari, the masterpiece was never finished.

The copy, widely known as the Tavola Doria, once adorned a wall of Florence’s city hall, the Palazzo Vecchio, and illustrates a historic battle between Florence and Milan that took place in 1440. It is believed that da Vinci experimented with various fresco-painting techniques before he started work on the battle scene in 1503. Despite his efforts, the paints began to drip and da Vinci was never able to finish the fresco. Over the next few years, the piece deteriorated and the Italian painter, Giorgio Vasari, was commissioned to paint over what was left of the incomplete fresco.

Since the unfinished da Vinci painting no longer exists, copies of the lost artwork are extremely important to art historians and scholars. This particular copy, painted on a small wooden panel, was last seen in public 73 years ago at a Leonardo da Vinci exhibition held in Milan on the eve of World War II. After the exhibition, the work disappeared.

Experts have since determined that the panel was stolen from its owners in Naples and ended up in the hands of a Swiss art dealer. The work was sent to Germany for restoration in the 1960s, made a brief appearance in the 1970s at an art gallery in New York, and by the 1990s was the property of a wealthy Japanese art collector.

Finally back in Italy, the Tavola Doria will be on view at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery during 2013. The work will then spend four years in Japan as part of a loan agreement worked out with the Fuji Art Museum in Tokyo, where it was last exhibited.

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