Volkswagen AG (VOW) and the Museum of Modern Art announced a two-year, multimillion-dollar sponsorship in New York today.

The deal will provide funding for: an exhibition of international contemporary art at MoMA’s Long Island City, New York, branch, PS1, in 2013; a series of installations in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden; an expansion of online education; and the acquisition of two works by Belgian artist Francis Alys, whose current retrospective at the museum is sponsored by Volkswagen.

The company and the museum declined to disclose the total amount of the sponsorship.

“The scale of support is absolutely remarkable from our perspective,” said MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry.

The collaboration with MoMA is part of the German automaker’s expansion in the U.S. and its push to become the world’s leading carmaker. The press conference announcing the sponsorship came a day before the opening ceremony for Volkswagen’s $1 billion factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

“MoMA is one of the world’s most admired cultural institutions,” said Martin Winterkorn, chief executive officer of the Wolfsburg, Germany-based company.

The Venice Biennale (June 4-Nov. 27) is always the same, and always different.

It’s the world’s most colossal jamboree of contemporary art and reliably huge -- in fact, huger every time. Long ago it overflowed the public gardens where the whole event began, and now there’s scarcely a church or palazzo in town that’s not pressed into service as an exhibition space or party venue.

The individual ingredients -- artists, curators, stunts -- are reshuffled every time, and there’s usually a talking point. For example, the exhibition organized by the curator of the Biennale, which generally comprises enough cutting-edge video and installation work to fill a shopping mall, will this time also contain three large canvases by Jacopo Tintoretto (1518- 94).

In the national pavilions -- selected by the individual countries, and making up in total a sort of avant-garde UN -- there will be no Old Masters, but plenty of media more exotic than oil paint. Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla (representing the U.S.) are displaying, among other items, a 52- ton military tank, a gigantic pipe organ incorporating a fully functioning ATM, and a team of eight trained athletes.

That will be hard to upstage, though the French installation specialist Christian Boltanski -- the best-known participant, Tintoretto apart -- is likely to be a contender for top prize.

Royal Academy

In London, there’s the more traditional nuttiness of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition (June 7-Aug. 15), an annual event in the art calendar since 1768. A large, transparent, brilliantly colored sculpture by Jeff Koons already has been placed in the courtyard of Burlington House, next to the statue of the RA’s founding president, Joshua Reynolds. This sums up the stylistic incongruities that characterize the Summer Exhibition, sponsored by Bank of New York Mellon Corp. (BK)’s Insight Investment.

Another unexpected juxtaposition of Old Master and contemporary artist will be on show in “Twombly & Poussin: Arcadian Painters” at Dulwich Picture Gallery (June 29-Sept. 25). Cy Twombly, the veteran American painter, noted for abstract splatter and graffiti-like jottings, is not the most obvious art historical partner for the French classicist Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). They do have a few things in common, including both being expatriates dwelling in Rome.

At Tate Britain, there will be a survey of the first U.K. avant-garde movement of the 20th century, “The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World” (June 14-Sept. 4). As often with plucky British contenders in various fields, notably sport, the nagging question about the Vorticists is: Were they really good? This should help clarify the answer to that question.

A stolen 14th-century panel painting depicting the Virgin Mary with a child has been recovered at a Kentucky art museum, which agreed Monday to return the piece to Italian authorities.

The triptych, taken from an Italian villa in 1971, was traced to the permanent collection of the J.B. Speed Art Museum in Louisville. Court records state that the Speed Art Museum bought the painting in 1973 from the Newhouse Galleries in New York for $38,000.

The piece was one of 14 taken from the Italian villa. Federal prosecutors say the stolen art had a total value of $33 million.

U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman Robert Nardoza in Brooklyn, N.Y., said no one has been charged in the theft. Nardoza declined to say how the painting was traced to Kentucky and said he couldn't get into the details of the investigation.

Charles Venable, director of the Speed, said a scholar in Italy matched a photograph that the family had taken with photos of the work in the Speed collection a couple of months ago and the match was reported to authorities in that country.

"To be honest, works of art have complicated histories sometimes, particularly ones that could be very old works of art," Venable said.

An email sent to Newhouse Galleries in New York was not immediately answered Monday.

Recovering stolen art is sometimes difficult. The FBI lists more than 6,200 pieces of art as stolen on its website. Interpol, the international law enforcement group, lists Italy and France as the two countries most affected by art thefts.

The three-panel painting recovered in Kentucky features the Virgin Mary and a child in the center, surrounded by two saints, John the Baptist and Catherine of Alexandria. The right panel depicts the crucifixion of Jesus and the annunciation to the Virgin Mary, with the left panel showing two saints.

The painting has been attributed to Jacopo del Casentino, who died in 1358.

There’s a moment in the first episode of Channel 4’s new antiques show Four Rooms when everything you would traditionally expect from an antiques programme is suddenly and summarily consigned to the dustbin of history.

The set-up is familiar: a member of the public brings in an item of interest – something they bought or have been keeping in the attic – and the show’s four resident experts look it over. They include items as diverse as a nose section of Concorde, a piece of wall by the graffiti artist Banksy, a tattooed piece of skin, and in the first programme, a bust of Adolf Hitler that had been taken from a concentration camp.

From there, however, things begin to change. The show soon starts to resemble Dragons’ Den more than Antiques Roadshow. All the pieces have been brought in to be sold. The experts are all established dealers. The seller can go into any of four rooms to visit the dealer of their choice, who will make them an offer for it, even if it is only the price of their bus fare home. They can take it, haggle, or move on to the next room. They can’t go back.

In the first show, among the items brought in is a collection of Christmas cards sent by Diana, Princess of Wales to her personal chef, which the owner had purchased at auction. They begin with photos of Charles and Diana, progress to images of the royal couple with their young family and end with pictures of the Princess alone with her two sons.

There’s some discussion about the significance of the collection and the fact that the signatures on the cards are handwritten. “I can just tell you want a fortune,” says 54-year-old dealer Gordon Watson, who specialises in selling rare, “museum-quality” pieces to the ultra-wealthy.

The owner chooses to go first into the room occupied by 39-year-old Emma Hawkins, who grew up in Australia, the daughter of an antiques dealer. She specialises in exotic taxidermy and curiosities, such as deformed narwhal tusks. “No item is too weird for her,” the show claims. Not strictly true, she tells me later: “I was offered a mummified hand that was used in black magic rituals. Things like that, anything Satanic, I don’t necessarily feel I would want to touch.”

The seller turns down her offer, and before long finds himself in another of the four rooms discussing a sale with Jeff Salmon, the scarf-wearing owner of Decoratum in London, a gallery whose clients include Kate Moss, Lily Allen and Uma Thurman.

The 57-year-old self-confessed “maverick” wonders aloud “What will I pay for them?” while rolling a red dice between thumb and forefinger like a character in an Ian Fleming novel. Then he asks: “Are you a gambling man?”

Salmon proposes a deal: “If you throw odds, you’ll take ten thousand quid, if you throw evens, you’ll take £25,000.”
At that moment, given the sensitivity surrounding what they are gambling for, Antiques Roadshow suddenly seems as if it belongs to another age entirely.

“Perhaps I was feeling a little bored that day,” says Salmon, later. “It’s not the most conventional way to do business but I just wanted to mirror everything that happens in my own office.” He says the dice actually come out far more often in his everyday dealings – once a week or so.

“I’m a trained negotiator,” he says. “If I can see weakness, if I can smell blood, I’ll go for that blood. I’m like a heat-seeking missile. Just by looking at somebody, I know what somebody is thinking. My father used to say, ‘If a mug comes along, take his trousers off.’ But I would never ever take advantage... unless,” he adds with a laugh, “I really want something.”

Sales of Chinese antiques surged by 180 percent in London this month, as owners profited from a boom in demand for Imperial items by an increasing number of dealers and agents visiting the U.K.

The capital’s main auctions fetched a record 58 million pounds ($93.9 million), almost three times the 20.6 million pounds achieved last May, according to Bloomberg calculations.

Asian antiques are threatening to usurp Old Masters as the third biggest-selling category of the West’s auction market. Impressionist and modern works are in first place, and contemporary works in second.

“The number of new millionaires in Asia is shooting up,” Charles Dupplin, a partner at the London-based insurer Hiscox Plc, said in an interview. “So too is the number of them who want to buy art. I can’t see anything that will hold this back. The client base that buys Old Masters is pretty constant and there is a problem with supply.”

Asian dealers visited regional auction houses in Dorset and Wiltshire after London sales by Sotheby’s (BID), Christie’s International and Bonhams. In December, the three houses’ equivalent auctions of Old Masters, the traditional mainstay of the European art trade, tallied 48.4 million pounds.

Multiple-estimate auction prices for stand-out Imperial pieces -- as well as the sheer volume of other smaller transactions -- have helped turn the trade in Chinese antiques into a worldwide business with an annual value of more than $10 billion.

Oriental Surge

“Last year, Oriental art accounted for more than 50 percent of our turnover,” Guy Schwinge, director of Dorchester- based Duke’s, said in an interview. “Five years ago it would have been less than 10 percent. It can all be put down to the insatiable desire of the Chinese to repatriate works that have left their country over the last 300 years.”

More than a dozen Asian dealers and agents went to Duke’s on May 19 for an 86-lot sale. The event included 11 pieces looted from Beijing in 1860, when Captain James Gunter of the King’s Dragoon Guards was among the British troops who overran the Summer Palace.
Among the “Treasures from the Summer Palace” being sold by Gunter’s descendants was an 18th-century Qianlong-period yellow jade pendant carved in the shape of a dragon.

Similar in style to an Imperial jade scepter that fetched 1.3 million pounds at Bonhams on May 12, the 5-inch-wide pendant sold for 478,000 pounds to a telephone bidder. It had been valued at as much as 50,000 pounds.

Pale Green

“Though this was the best quality 18th-century Imperial art and provenance, the color was a bit too green and pale,” Hai-Sheng Chou, a Taiwan-based dealer, said. “If the color had been more yellow it would have made more than 600,000 pounds.”

A Qianlong-period white jade cup and saucer was also among the objects Gunter took from the Summer Palace. Notable for the purity of its color, this was bought in the room by the London- and New York-based dealers Littleton & Hennessy, bidding for a client, at 513,850 pounds against a high estimate of 200,000 pounds.

The U.K.’s regional auction houses have become a favorite hunting ground for Chinese buyers.

On May 18, the Salisbury auction house Woolley & Wallis offered a Qianlong period Imperial white jade teapot that had been in U.K. private collections since the mid-19th century. Estimated at 200,000 pounds to 300,000 pounds, this sold to a Hong Kong-based telephone bidder for 2.1 million pounds.

A similarly dated white jade vase and cover from a 19th- century Scottish collection sold to a Chinese dealer in the room for 1.2 million pounds, more than 10 times the lower estimate.

Karol Wight, the Getty Museum's senior curator for antiquities, is leaving the organization to become the executive director of the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York. Wight will assume her new post Aug. 15, according to the Corning.

A spokeswoman for the Corning said Wight has been in conversations "for several months" about taking on the directorship.

Wight was named the Getty's antiquities curator in 2007. She succeeded Marion True, whose job she had held on an acting basis since True's controversial resignation in 2005 amid charges the Getty bought looted antiquities. Wight joined the Getty in 1985 as a graduate-student intern and was made a curator in 1992. Her specialty is in glass from the Roman empire, and she co-wrote  "Looking at Glass," published by the Getty in 2005.

At the Corning Museum, Wight, 52, will succeed David Whitehouse, executive director since 1999. She will oversee the museum's 45,000-object collection as well as its studio, library, programming and publications.

NEW YORK CITY – “The auction market for American art continued its climb back today,” said Christie’s American art chief Eric P. Widing, characterizing the mixed results of the auction house’s May 18 sale of paintings, drawings and sculpture.
 
The morning session at Rockefeller Plaza generated $22.2 million on 88 lots, leaving another 50 lots unsold. The sale was projected to exceed $29 million. Christie’s slightly surpassed its December 2010 sale of American art, which garnered $21.2 million on 96 lots.
 
Westervelt Company
The centerpiece of Christie’s sale was 29 lots consigned by the Westervelt Company, formerly the Gulf Paper Corporation.  The works were assembled over four decades by the noted Alabama collector and retired paper executive Jonathan “Jack” Westervelt Warner, who  started buying Audubon prints in the 1950s and over four decades amassed one of the nation’s finest holdings of American paintings, sculpture, furniture and decorative arts produced between the late 18th century and the early 20th century.  A decade ago, Warner opened the Westervelt-Warner Museum of American Art in Tuscaloosa.
 
Predicted to surpass $10 million, the Warner group tallied only $6.7 million including premium. Christie’s passed 16 of the 29 lots, roughly 55 percent. The group represented only a small fraction of Warner’s extensive holdings.
 
“The Westervelt material was terribly overestimated. It just wasn’t competitive,” said one insider, echoing widespread opinion in the trade.
 
“Auction houses often get pushed to be too strong with the estimates. A lot of these works were just average. Most of the things that have sold privately from the Warner collection have been well over $1 million. They have been a whole different level of work.  But Christie’s was successful with the major pieces,” said New York dealer Debra Force, an active participant at Christie’s and again at Sotheby’s the following day.
 
Leading the Westervelt group was William Trost Richard’s “Mackerel Cove, Jamestown, Rhode Island.” Painted in 1894, the panoramic view sold to Caldwell Gallery for $1,650,500 against an estimate of $700/$1,000,000, tripling the record at auction for the artist.
 
“I personally feel that there is no finer Richards,” said Manlius, N.Y., dealer Joe Caldwell. “It is late but great.  Most people think that Richard’s early work is his best but this is an example of how wonderful his painting was later in his career.”
 
A masterpiece from Frederick Carl Frieseke’s Giverny years, “Sunspots,” surpassed estimate to sell to a European buyer for $1,022,500 (est. $800/1,000,000). The circa 1915 oil on canvas depicts a nude in a dappled landscape.
 
Three Bierstadts also performed well.  From the Westervelt group, “Seal Rock, California,” a circa 1872 oil on paper laid down on canvas, made $794,500 (est. $500/700,000). From other consignors, “Rocky Mountain Sheep” fetched $542500 from a European bidder. “The Falls of St. Anthony” made $362,500.
 
Various Owners
“It’s likely to be the largest work I ever sell,” Eric Widing said of Maxfield Parrish’s monumental “North Wall Panel,” which brought the day’s top price, $2,882,500 (est. $2/3,000,000). Commissioned by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and consigned by her granddaughter, the 221 ½ inch long oil on canvas frieze of 1928 depicts revelers in renaissance dress against a colonnaded backdrop at twilight.  The mural was originally commissioned by Whitney for her Fifth Avenue apartment but was installed in her studio on Long Island. A subsequent lot, the “Du Pont Mural,” brought $158,500. Christie’s holds four of the top five prices at auction for Parrish.
 
Small in scale, California painter Guy Rose’s oil on canvas landscape “Martin’s Point, Carmel” left the room at $890,500 (est. $350/500,000). The painting once hung in a Greene and Green house in Pasadena that was built for Cordelia Culbertson in 1911.
 
A 1947 oil on canvas self-portrait by Milton Avery left the room at $602,500 (est. $300/500,000). The following day, Sotheby’s auctioned “March Playing the Cello,” an Avery portrait of his daughter, for $1,426,500.
 
John Singer Sargent’s “Ladies in the Shade: Abies” went to Michael Altman Fine Art of New York for $566,600 (est. $500/700,000). Completed in the French Alps, the watercolor and pencil on paper descended in the family of Philadelphian George D. Widener. The same price was paid for Norman Rockwell’s “Milkmaid” (est. $300/500,000), an oil on canvas of 1931.
 
Christie’s passed its cover lot, “Eleanor and Benny,” an Impressionist work by Boston painter Frank W. Benson of his daughter and grandson in the family garden in Maine. The 1916 oil on canvas was estimated at $3/5,000,000.
 
Said Widing, “We saw very nice prices on individual lots but we had hoped to see more things selling, and selling well. The American market has historically been the last to pull out of recession because, unlike Impressionist and Modern art, it is almost entirely domestic. If the art-market recession of the 1990s is any guide, we are about half way through this one.”

Prices quoted include the buyer’s premium.
 
Write to Laura Beach at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

NEW YORK CITY – Work from two private collections and the Wichita Center for the Arts sparked competitive bidding at Sotheby’s auction of American paintings, drawings and sculpture on May 19.
 
Sotheby’s shook off marketplace jitters to generate $27.1 million on 84 lots, exceeding its global low estimate of $25.3 million. Heaviest in 19th century and Impressionist paintings and works on paper, the varied selection included only a smattering of sculpture.
 
Thirty-seven lots failed to find buyers, a better result than that achieved by Christie’s a day earlier when high-profile property from the Westervelt Company was heavily bought in.  Experts in the trade generally agreed that material was overestimated at both houses and that great property is scarce in a market still recovering from recession.
 
Six paintings at Sotheby’s surpassed $1 million and records were set for Ernest Blumenschein, William J. McCloskey and William Aiken Walker, painters who enjoy strong regional followings.
 
Edward P. Evans Collection
Casanova, Va., collector Edward P. Evans, who died in January, avidly acquired everything from sporting art to American Impressionism. Like his father, Thomas Mellon Evans, the former chairman of Macmillan Publishing was a noted breeder of race horses.
 
The Evans consignment generated $12,726,750, handsomely exceeding low estimate and producing five of the day’s top ten lots.
 
“Dock Builders,” an important early modernist oil on canvas by George Bellows, went to a private collector for $3,890,500 (est. $2/3,000,000). This pivotal Maine painting of 1916 is the first of the artist’s studies of American workers in the countryside. According to expert Michael Quick, it is also a foremost example of Cezanne’s influence on the Ashcan School artist.
 
“Quai St. Michel,” an 1888 Paris street scene by Childe Hassam, who arrived in Paris from Boston in 1886, sold to the Caldwell Gallery for $2,098,500 (est. $2,5/3,000,000).
 
“It is an extraordinary painting and a surprising result,” said dealer Joe Caldwell. “Hassam’s Paris street scenes are very much sought after. This one sold for almost $3 million in 1998. I was frankly surprised to buy it for this price.”
 
Hassam painted his best work between 1888 and 1906 and during World War I, Caldwell said. Richly detailed, “Quai St. Michel” depicts an attractive young woman browsing at an outdoor book stall with architectural landmarks in the background.
 
Debra Force underbid “The Old Sand Road” by William Merritt Chase. Painted en plein air circa 1894, the tranquil Shinnecock, Long Island, N.Y., scene fetched $1,202,500 (est. $7/900,000).  Two small figures in the middle ground are Chase’s daughters.
 
Force had better luck when it came to “Wrapped Oranges on a Tabletop,” claiming the 1897 trompe l’oeil depiction of fruit for a record $782,500 (est. $250/350,000). She also acquired, from a private New York collection, Winslow Homer’s signed and initialed watercolor “Listening to the Birds,” for $326,500.
 
“It’s a charming little piece,” said the New York dealer.
 
Sotheby’s will continue with sporting paintings, furniture and decorations from Evans’ New York and Virginia residences this fall with sales in New York and London.
 
East Coast Collection
Two other major lots came from a consignment of more than 100 works from an unidentified East Coast collection.
 
Thomas Hart Benton’s timely “Flood Disaster (Homecoming - Kaw Valley)” sold to the phone for $1,874,500 (est. $800,000/1,200,000). The price is the second highest at auction for a work by Benton, who created the oil and tempera on canvas in response to the devastating 1951 flooding of the Kansas and Missouri rivers.
 
Two phones competed for Milton Avery’s oil on canvas “March Playing the Cello,” which went for $1,426,500 (est. $800/1,200,000). The liquid looking portrait of the artist’s daughter dates to 1943.
 
Regional Interest
Bidders clamored for paintings of Western and Southern interest.
 
Two of  New Mexico’s top dealers in historic Santa Fe and Taos school paintings, Nedra Matteucci and Gerald Peters,  were in the room to watch Taos founder Ernest Blumenschein’s  monumental oil on canvas “White Blanket and Blue Spruce” of 1919 soar past its low estimate of $700,000 to sell for a record $1,538,500.
 
The Blumenschein was consigned by the Wichita Center for the Arts, which acquired it from the artist in 1928. Walter Ufer’s “After the Chapel Hour,” a lively Pueblo Indian scene purchased from the artist by the museum in 1923, fetched $818,500 (est. $6/800,000.) William Penhallow Henderson’s “Lucero’s Place, Springtime” crossed the block at $410,500 (est. $100/150,000). The Arizona collector who consigned it acquired it from the Gerald Peters Gallery around 1990.

Born in Charleston, S.C., William Aiken Walker (1828-1921) painted sentimental genre scenes of the old South.  “The Cotton Wagon,” an 18 by 30 inch oil on canvas, went to the phone for $434,500 (est. $150/250,000), while a pair of Walker portraits made $27,500 (est. $20/30,000). A smaller genre scene, “The Old Cabin,” grossed only $8,750 (est. $10/15,000).
 
Other notable paintings included Sanford Gifford’s “Haverstraw Bay (Shad Fishing on the Hudson),” $290,500; Severin Roesen’s “Abundant Bouquet with Pomegranate,” $302,500;  Alfred Henry Maurer’s “Woman in White,” $590,500; and David Johnson’s “View from Garrison, West Point, New York,” $278,500.
 
Hirschl & Adler Galleries of New York claimed “Spring Evening,” a drybrush and watercolor on paper of a nude by Andrew Wyeth, for $458,500.
 
“It’s a very important picture but not a big price,” said Guilford, Ct., dealer Thomas Colville, who purchased “A White Note” by James McNeill Whistler for $290,500. Originally owned by English artist Walter Sickert, the unfinished portrait depicts Whistler’s companion, Joanna Hifferman, who posed for “Symphony in White No. 1” and “No. 2,” at the National Gallery of Art and the Tate Gallery, respectively.
 
Passed
Sotheby’s misgauged its cover lot, Albert Bierstadt’s “Light in the Forest,” atypical in both its subject matter, deer grazing in a forest clearing, and in its vertical format.  Estimated at $2/3,000,000, the oil on canvas painted in the mid to late 1890s passed at $1.7 million.

Other notable failures included a 1985 recast of Augustus Saint-Gauden’s “Diana of the Tower,”  passed at $190,000, and the tiny “Fruit, Nuts and Grapes” still life by Raphaelle Peale, passed at $220,000. Painted in 1923, Marsden Hartley’s 22 by 41 ½ inch oil on canvas, “New Mexico Recollection #8,” passed at $590,000. A similar Hartley painting of the same year and size fetched $242,500, well under its $5/700,000 estimate, a day earlier at Christie’s.

Prices quoted include buyer’s premium.
 
Write to Laura Beach at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

It has been a while since sculpture could be dismissed as “something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting,” as Ad Reinhardt, the Abstract Expressionist painter, once said. Even before Reinhardt died, in 1967, the medium was going supernova, expanding and diversifying at an astounding pace. First it began incorporating all manner of found objects and nontraditional materials; then it lifted brilliant color from painting and achieved new levels of abstraction. Since then it has come to include installations, environments, land art, performance and all manner of spectacle.

Right now sculpture is enjoying a high-profile moment, thanks to a head-spinning assortment of solo shows in Chelsea and elsewhere. Some present recent work by living artists spanning several generations; others showcase fascinating historical material of varying vintages. There are more shows than can comfortably be encompassed here, so what follows is a selective tour.

In Chelsea work by three major figures of postwar American art — John Chamberlain, 84; Jasper Johns, 81; and Donald Judd, who died in 1994 but would now be 82 — form something of a high-end trifecta. All played pivotal if very different roles in turning sculpture away from traditional figuration and toward new relationships with found objects, materials, process, color and the viewer’s space.

Mr. Chamberlain, having recently joined the Gagosian franchise, is making a stunning debut at that gallery’s West 24th Street big-top space. (There is also a relatively scattershot, seemingly sour-grapes exhibition of his work at his former representative, the Pace Gallery, in its West 22nd Street space, but never mind).

Among the largest works he has ever made, the Chamberlain sculptures at Gagosian all incorporate his signature crushed car bodies, fashioned with tremendous compositional variety and verve, and his usual unerring color sense. Variously comical, stately, architectural and gestural, these pieces erupt from the gallery’s expansive concrete floors like unusually well-shaped mesas, turning the totality into an exhilarating indoor landscape.

Mr. Johns’s show at Matthew Marks’s West 22nd Street gallery is as quiet as Mr. Chamberlain’s is boisterous. It centers on a series of reliefs that perfectly illustrate Mr. Johns’s best-known axiom: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” As stated in Mr. Johns’s revealing conversation with the painter Terry Winters in the show’s catalog, these works stem from a relieflike SculptMetal grid of the numbers zero through nine that Mr. Johns made somewhat hurriedly and a bit on the cheap as a commission for Lincoln Center in 1964.

Recently he made a sturdier, more precise version from scratch, which unexpectedly yielded a wax model of the piece, in addition to the radiant aluminum final cast on view at Marks. With typical economy, he did “something else” with the wax work, creating six smaller, exquisite two-sided relief fragments in bronze, aluminum and even silver that conflate painting, sculpture and printmaking in a new way.

It takes a while to enter into the obsessive concentration that suffuses these works, with their shifting textures, newsprint scraps and other small objects, all embalmed in cast metal. Their combination of lapidary detail and casual process reveals the intensity of Mr. Johns’s mind with unusual clarity.

The 1981 self-portrait taken by celebrated photographer Cindy Sherman was sold at a Christie's auction Wednesday. The sale surpassed Christie's estimates of $1.5-2 million ringing in at a final price of $3,890,500. That's not only a record for the photographer, but also the "highest price ever realized for a photograph," says Daniel Kunitz, editor in chief of Modern Painters.

The buyer, according to Art Info, was New York dealer Philippe Segalot, a former head of contemporary art for Christie's, now a private adviser to some of the world's richest art collectors.

So what's so special about a photo of a girl on a tile floor? And what drives that unimaginable price? David Ross, former director of the Whitney and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, says that mainly, it's a function of two people wanting the same thing:

"What matters to most of those collectors is winning. When art becomes a competitive sport," Ross says on the phone, "all it takes to win is the guts and the money to go further than anyone else, and then, voila, you win. And winning feels really good."

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum announced that it will open its new wing, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, on Thursday, January 19, 2012. The public opening celebration will begin with a ribbon cutting ceremony, with Boston Mayor Thomas Menino officiating. The Museum will honor its legacy by opening the new wing in January, as Isabella Gardner originally unveiled the Museum on January 1, 1903.

Among the inaugural season programming highlights announced are exhibitions in the new Special Exhibition Gallery and historic building, as well as an expanded concert series showcasing three works commissioned in honor of the new Calderwood Performance Hall. The wing will house essential programming and visitor amenities in purpose-built spaces, enabling preservation and restoration work in the historic 1903 building. Eight months out from the opening, the new wing is almost completely clad in its exterior materials of glass, brick and patinated copper with many interior systems going into place.

“The new wing will reveal the vibrant programming that has been constrained by the historic building’s spaces—a true opening up of the Gardner Museum. Our opening celebration in 2012 will feature all of this programming in purpose-built spaces for the first time in the museum’s history. We invite the public to join us as we celebrate the renewal of the Gardner Museum and the premiere of Renzo Piano’s brilliantly designed spaces which give contemporary form to Gardner’s legacy,” says Anne Hawley, Norma Jean Calderwood Director of the museum.

Sotheby’s (BID) shares have lost a quarter of their value in the past month, a much steeper decline than this volatile stock has seen during any of the critical spring auction periods of the past five years.

The closing price of $40.46 on Tuesday represented a 25.6 percent decline from a 3 1/2-year high of $54.41 on April 5. Sotheby’s gained yesterday to close at $41.95, making the decline about 23 percent.

After falling as low as $6.47 on March 6, 2009, the auction house came back strongly starting late that year and rode its recovery to the April peak. Then the stock got hit hard by disappointing sales in Hong Kong and New York.

“The expectations were getting higher and higher and it was reflected in the stock price,” said Jason Benowitz, portfolio manager at Roosevelt Investment Group Inc., one of Sotheby’s major shareholders which bought the stock in the beginning of 2010 for a price in the low $20s.

In March, a Chinese vase estimated to fetch $800 to $1,200 soared to $18 million at Sotheby’s, becoming the most expensive lot among a dozen Asia Week auctions in New York.

“That story began to change during the last days of the Hong Kong auctions in April where the results were within the estimate range, not exceeding them,” Benowitz said.

The Hong Kong auctions brought in $447 million, a 75 percent increase from last year’s total, said William F. Ruprecht, Sotheby’s president and chief executive officer, during a teleconference with investors last week.

‘First Crack’

Still, Hong Kong saw a major setback with the Meiyintang Collection, marketed as one of the greatest private collections of imperial Chinese porcelain in the world. It brought in $51.2 million including fees, below the $91 million to $137 million presale estimate. Even with some pieces selling privately after the auction, the $88.4 million total fell short of the low estimate.

“That was the first crack in the bubbly confidence that characterized the Asian buying until then,” said Vikram Mansharamani, author of “Boombustology: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before They Burst.”

The founders of the Frieze art fair have announced a new Frieze for New York, an attempt to transport the success of the contemporary art fair in a tent, which in 10 years has become a major fixture in the London art calender, into the heart of one of the richest art markets in the world.

The New York fair, launching next year, will pack 170 American and overseas dealers on to Randall's Island, a park overlooking the East river, with visitors travelling by ferry. The temporary home will be designed by the awardwinning Brooklyn architects SO-IL.

The fair regularly sells out more than 60,000 visitors' tickets each October. In 2004, art worth more than £20m was sold but the level of sales has not been disclosed in recent years – the organisers insist the figures are misleading as thousands of collectors come for the fun of the fair and the deals are actually done afterwards.

The fair has become famous for spectacular annual installations: last year Simon Fujiwara burrowed into the ground to create a fake archaeological excavation partly revealing a Roman city lavishly supplied with art dealers and brothels, apparently newly discovered in the heart of Regents Park. This year, 171 exhibitors from 33 countries have applied for space.

The work of Irving Penn proved irresistible to a passionate collector on May 2 at the Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion as the famed photographer’s Harlequin Dress, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, 1950, brought $131,450 to lead Heritage Auctions’ $697,000+ Signature® Vintage & Contemporary Photography Auction. All prices quoted include 19.5% Buyer’s Premium.

“This image dates directly from the very peak period of Penn’s powers as a fashion photographer,” said Ed Jaster, Senior Vice President at Heritage Auctions. “It features his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, herself one of the top models of the day, in a photograph that is particularly revered among Penn’s 150 cover photos for Vogue.”

Another Penn fashion photo of his wife, Woman in Dior Hat with Martini (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), 1952, also took the second spot in the auction’s top lots with a $56,763 finish on the day, while a vintage gelatin silver print of Edward Weston’s Pepper (No. 14), 1929, signed, dated and numbered, showed the continuing allure of the artist’s work to the tune of $50,788.

A 1980 dye destruction print of Annie Leibovitz’s John and Yoko, New York, December 8, 1980, one of the most famous rock and roll photographs ever taken, showed its enduring power amidst spirited bidding to rise to $26,290.

“Leibovitz captured this intimate moment in John and Yoko's apartment just hours before John was shot,” said Rachel Peart, Consignment Director at Heritage Auctions, “and, when another example of this photograph was used on the cover of January 1981 Rolling Stone magazine commemorating the former Beatle, it became an instant classic.”

Massimo Vitali’s sweeping Chromogenic Calafuria #1774, 2002 was one of the top contemporary highlights of the day, realizing $17,925 while one of the most unexpected bright spots was O. Winston Link’s Birmingham Special, Rural Retreat, Virginia, 1957, one of the photographer’s most stirring images, which more than tripled its pre-auction estimate of $4,000+ to finish the auction at $13,145. A later print of Yousuf Karsh’s famous Winston Churchill, 1941, which realized $11,353 and Weston’s Nude, 1936 brought $10,158 to round out the auction’s top offerings.

NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s set a new record for a piece of American Indian Art at auction when an Oglala Sioux Beaded and Fringed Hide War Shirt which once belonged to the famous and celebrated Sioux Chief, Black Bird sold to an anonymous buyer for $2,658,500 (est. $250/350,000). The War Shirt led the sale which totaled $4,809,503. This was comfortably over the high estimate and the highest ever total for a various owner sale in this category (overall est. $2.8/4 million).

When it comes to Dutch painters, Rembrandt and Vermeer are the best known. But have you ever heard of Gabriel Metsu? Vermeer and Metsu were contemporaries, but Metsu was the star in the Golden Age of Dutch painting during the 17th century — and long afterward.

"Metsu was still the top boy in the 19th century," says David Jaffe of the National Gallery in London. "Vermeer is a very early 20th-century discovery."

In his day, Metsu was well-loved in Europe — but it has taken 400 years for his paintings to get much attention in this country. Now, the first Metsu retrospective in the U.S. has opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

In 1664, Metsu painted one of his most important crowd pleasers, A Man Writing a Letter. The scribe is young, handsome, in black velvet, with long blond curls. He is sitting in a sumptuous study, with a very expensive Persian tapestry spread out on the table where he writes.

Hung right beside him in the exhibit, bathed in Vermeerish light pouring in from a side-window, is Metsu's A Woman Reading a Letter — the letter the handsome young blond was writing, no doubt. She has kicked off one shoe — a sexy little gold-encrusted mule. There is more gold on her long pink skirt, and her yellow top is trimmed with ermine, which is "the most expensive cloth you can wear," Jaffe explains. It "used to be a royal cloth. You can see the black flecks on her fur. She's accessorized to the hilt."

Expensive clothing, all gorgeously painted with fabulous technique and meticulously rendered details. In his early works, Metsu created rustic or Biblical scenes in his small hometown of Leiden. Once he moved to Amsterdam in the 1650s, he depicted bustling market scenes, fancier folks and fripperies, in a successful attempt to meet the tastes of the city's booming, sophisticated art market.

Important museum pieces will be protected under rules adopted by the New York state Board of Regents.

The Regents approved new rules that would restrict the sale of museum pieces as facilities face continued hard fiscal times.

The rules would require proceeds from sales to be used for acquisitions and would also seek to keep museum relics and pieces in the public domain even if a museum shuts down.

Former Assemblyman Richard Brodsky of Westchester says the rules will prohibit important cultural pieces being sold to private collectors in order to pay for operating expenses.

Brodsky, now a fellow at Wagner College on Staten Island, calls this an extraordinary moment in New York's cultural history.

Brodsky and the Legislature have sought the protections since the recession cut into museums' revenues.

—Copyright 2011 Associated Press

IS Andy Warhol's market as vigorous as his auction results would have us believe? The artist always plays a prominent role in the twice-yearly contemporary sales in New York, but this season his work saw a phenomenal turnover of $181m, almost a third of the week's total proceeds at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips de Pury. The top lot in all three evening sales was a Warhol painting. But the consignment and bidding stories behind these star Warhols vary greatly. Each reveals a different market dynamic: a determined but thin response to rare masterpieces; the passion of Warhol owners for trading the work; and the skewing effects of guarantees (which ensure a work will sell, either to the auction house or a third-party backer). Indeed, there is more to the Warhol market than first meets the eye.

The most expensive work of the week was a four-panel self-portrait from 1963-4, which hit the block at Christie's. Warhol himself had arranged the four crisply silkscreened canvases in various shades of blue. Moreover, the image had been made in a photo-booth; a ready-made format that affirms Warhol's place as the heir to Marcel Duchamp. Only three bidders went for the work, but two of them were fervent. After a 15-minute duel, an anonymous buyer on the phone with Brett Gorvy, Christie's Head of Contemporary Art, prevailed over a client of Philippe Ségalot, a French-born New York-based dealer, and secured the work for $38.4m, the highest price ever paid at auction for a portrait by the artist.

Other Warhol paintings also elicited real competition and sold for high prices. A lush red shadow painting from 1978 sold at Sotheby's for $4.8m and a 1985 canvas entitled "Third Eye", painted by both Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, sold at Phillips for $7m, a record price for a collaboration. These pieces were vibrantly coloured and conservatively estimated, two factors that whet appetites.

At Phillips the highest price of the night was commanded by a 1963 Warhol portrait of Elizabeth Taylor titled "Liz #5 (Early Colored Liz)". Steven Cohen, a hedge-fund manager, agreed to consign it to Phillips in exchange for a third-party guarantee (also called an "irrevocable bid") rumoured to be from the house's principal owners, Leonid Friedland and Leonid Strunin (known in the art world as "the Leonids"). The painting sold at a hammer price of $24m hammer to a client on the phone. As it happens, the second-highest price in the Phillips sale was also a guaranteed Warhol—a large "Flower painting", consigned by José Mugrabi, a dealer with a huge stock of Warhols. It sold on one bid to what could have been the same telephone buyer, this time for $8.1m. Did Messrs Friedland and Strunin acquire the top two lots in their own sale? Generally if a work sells on one bid, it sells to its backer.

"These sales are no longer auctions," says Allan Schwartzman, an art advisor. "To attract material at the top end, auction houses pre-sell the material to 'irrevocable bidders'. They are deliberate, orchestrated events." These deals spare the work the ignominy of being "bought in", but create misleading benchmark prices that tend to flout ordinary rules of supply and demand. Guarantees can help auction houses by securing an important artwork around which an entire sale can be promoted. They may also appeal to a collector's gambling instincts. If he chooses to be the guarantor, he can either win the work or win a financing fee or both. Whatever the case, when the work sells on one bid, a guaranteed lot is effectively a private sale done in public.

The top lot at Sotheby's was again a Warhol, although one that was neither much coveted nor guaranteed. "Sixteen Jackies" is a posthumous compilation of small 1964 portraits of Jackie Kennedy, 15 of which came out of Warhol's estate. Although the work has the benefits of celebrity, death and repetition, Jackie is a very American icon and the arrangement of canvases is awkward. They were put together by Peter Brant, its consignor, with advice from Jeff Koons, an artist with a good eye for old masters but a poor track record in curating contemporary art.

Mr Brant is a key player in the Warhol market. He began collecting the artist in the 1960s and was responsible for the very first appearance of an important Warhol at auction in 1970, when he consigned "Soup can with peeling label" to Sotheby's Parke-Bernet. The work sold for a record price of $60,000 to Bruno Bischofberger, a Warhol dealer and friend of Mr Brant. At the time, the press reported that the lot was "bid up to establish a higher market level."

If the company that is recreating the “miracle” medicine that earned a fortune for Albert C. Barnes have their way, the cantankerous chemist’s art collection might stay in its suburban home in Merion rather than move to a new home being built nearby in central Philadelphia.

Argyrol Pharmaceuticals promises that an injection of cash from its future revenues—10% of profits—could be a cure for the Barnes Foundation’s financial difficulties, which first prompted the relocation.

Argyrol, an antiseptic, “can treat sexually transmitted diseases”, according to Christine McKinney, who owns the trademark to Argyrol’s essential molecule. In a startling claim, the company marketing the drug says that it attacks genital herpes and HIV, besides treating eye infections and acne, foreseeing a potential global market. Trademarked in 1902, Argyrol was widely used to treat infections, particularly gonorrhoea, in the last century.

In 1925 Barnes built the Paul Cret-designed Merion gallery to house his collection of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings and artefacts. Barnes sold the Argyrol trademark to the pharmaceutical firm Zonite in 1929, using the profits to bankroll his acquisitions.

Barn Star Productions and Frank Gaglio are pleased to announce their two premiere antiques shows during Antiques Week in New Hampshire will be returning to the Furniture World Design Center for August 2011.

The Manchester Pickers Market Antiques Show, Monday August 8, and Mid*Week in Manchester Antiques Show Wednesday, August 10 and Thursday, August 11 will both take place in the same building one following each other with no repeat dealers and a fresh excitement for each event.

Comments show manager Frank Gaglio, “We are thrilled to be back in this magnificent facility for the third year offering visitors to “Antiques Week” the best experience possible both in exhibitors and their merchandise plus show amenities including free parking, gourmet catering, on site shipper, air conditioning and the friendliest show staff in New Hampshire”.

This year, Pickers celebrates its’ 17th year anniversary with a roster of dealers and real pickers from across the country bringing early American furniture, folk art and every imaginable variety of decorative and functional accessory worthy of a quality antiques show. Picker’s exhibitors are encouraged to “push the envelope” when it comes to making our show stand out and every year they do just that. Expect the unexpected and embrace the thrill of decorating with a new twist at The Manchester Pickers Market. 

The flagship of Barn Star Productions Antiques Shows is the Mid*Week in Manchester Antiques Show started in 1994 and the show that launched “Antiques Week in New Hampshire”.

Remarks Gaglio, “When I review photos of Mid*Week after each show, I am amazed at the quality and level of effort that goes into every dealer’s booth display and design. We are so grateful to have top names in our industry exhibiting with us from Winter Antiques Show dealers to folk arts’ elite, they can all be found at Mid*Week offering outstanding value for collectors without the “City” price point”.

Don’t forget the two show discounted ticket which gives you Early Buyer Admission at Pickers and saves you five dollars off general admission to Mid*Week!