Displaying items by tag: Paintings

Though “Dance: Movement, Rhythm, Spectacle” occupies just one large room (arranged to feel like three) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it seems to open windows in many directions. Its exhibits range from the 1890s to the 1980s, vividly demonstrating how radically that century brought change to social dance, dance theater and ideas of dance in art. Diversely diverse, the show, which opened this month, offers a panoply of artistic media (photographs, paintings, watercolors, prints, woodcuts, etchings, graphite drawings, lithographs and film), dancers of various races and a huge assortment of dance costumes.

Opening this weekend at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art is the first major one-man exhibition in Japan of Cy Twombly, featuring some 70 drawings, paintings, and monotypes culled from a fifty-year period from 1953 to 2002.

First held in 2003 at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, where the museum’s first non-Russian curator Julie Sylvester organized the exhibit, the show was notable for the way in which the artist himself participated in the selection of the pieces.

“This show will really bring something new to the Kahlo discussion,” says curator Adriana Zavala of the human-plant hybrids and foliate still lifes presented in “Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life,” which opened May 16 at the New York Botanical Garden. 

The exhibition explores the artist’s passion for the natural world, evident not only in the rich diversity of Mexican flora and fauna depicted in the 14 paintings and drawings on view, but in her garden of exotic tropical vegetation — which is being re-created for the show — that she tended at Casa Azul, the house she shared with Diego Rivera in Coyoacán.

In the spring of 1889, following his mental breakdown in Arles, which culminated with the infamous ear-cutting incident, Vincent van Gogh voluntarily committed himself to an asylum in nearby Saint-Remy. The doctor there diagnosed his mania and hallucinations as the result of a kind of epilepsy. Van Gogh, lucid by this time but feeling in need of a rest, settled in and did what he always did: He painted.

In fact, the restorative year he spent at Saint-Remy was remarkably productive. He painted the asylum's garden and the view from his bedroom window.

A French art dealer has been taken into custody after Picasso's step-daughter accused him of stealing some of the artist's works, a judicial source said Wednesday.

Catherine Hutin-Blay, the daughter of Pablo Picasso's second wife Jacqueline Roque, filed a complaint against art dealer Olivier Thomas in March after noticing some of her paintings were on the market, the source said, confirming a report in British daily "The Telegraph."

A $5 million reward for masterworks stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum a quarter century ago has failed to lead to their recovery, prompting authorities Tuesday to announce a new offer: $100,000 for the return of one of the least valuable items, a bronze eagle finial.

The reward far exceeds the value of the 10-inch-high gilded eagle, which was swiped from the top of a pole supporting a silk Napoleonic flag. It was taken along with 12 other pieces valued at $500 million, including masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Manet, in what remains the world’s largest art heist and one of Boston’s most baffling crime mysteries.

Some paintings act like object lessons in tracking the global migration of wealth, bouncing from one owner to the next in timely turns. Such was the case Tuesday when Sotheby’s sold a $46.5 million Mark Rothko abstract that previously belonged to U.S. banker Paul Mellon and later to French luxury executive François Pinault.

Rothko’s latest taker? An anonymous Asian collector who outbid two rivals to win the work.

A court handling the late art collector Cornelius Gurlitt's inheritance says it has formally authorized the return of the first two paintings from his trove to their rightful owners' descendants.

The Munich district court said Tuesday it approved the handover of Henri Matisse's "Woman Sitting in an Armchair" and Max Liebermann's "Two Riders on the Beach" after both potential heirs to Gurlitt's collection endorsed the move.

In an effort to maintain the financial future of Russborough, a historic Georgian house in Ireland, a selection of Old Master paintings from The Alfred Beit Foundation will be on offer at the Christie’s London Old Master & British Paintings Evening Sale on July 9.

Nearly 300 years old, the heritage home requires constant restoration and upkeep entrusted to the Beit family, notable patrons of the arts. The proceeds of the sale will go to an endowment fund managed by the Beit’s that will ensure the future of Russborough.

You may recognize Frida Kahlo from her self-portraits paintings, or from the many black and white photographs taken of her—often dressed in elaborate and traditional Mexican clothing. But few know that over 300 of her belongings were hidden in the bathroom of her Mexico City home for nearly 50 years.

After the artist’s death in 1954, her husband Diego Rivera ordered that her wardrobe and other personal objects be locked up until 15 years after his death.