Displaying items by tag: Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso “detested” Pierre Bonnard, says Guy Cogeval, president of Paris’s Musée d’Orsay. It’s easy to see why. In the early 20th century, Picasso and members of experimental groups such as the cubists and the futurists were finding shocking new ways to render the world. They tended to view a decorative-minded painter like Bonnard as a lightweight.

Meanwhile, conservative critics and collectors lionized his work as an alternative to the demands of modernism.

Pejorative labels like “decorative” began to stick, and by midcentury, Bonnard was in need of rehabilitation. Over the last few decades, a number of exhibitions have brought new attention to Bonnard (1867–1947) by emphasizing his vivid colors and subtle compositions. His rediscovery will culminate this spring with a Paris exhibition that organizers say is the first to look at the whole of his career.

In January of this year the German state-owned bank Portigon AG of North Rhine-Westphalia, the rebranded successor of the WestLB which folded in 2012 during the financial crisis, decided to deaccession its entire art collection. The bank holds approximately 400-pieces of art, which includes works by Pablo Picasso, August Macke, Joseph Beuys, and Günther Uecker. Now preliminary measures to save the art collection of the state-owned bank, have been introduced by officials in the German state, "Monopol" reports.

The officials have presented a three-step plan devised to save the collection of Portigon, the bank considered selling its museum-quality art collection to pay back an EU bailout loan.

In Spain, police have busted up a group that allegedly created and sold fake works of art to unsuspecting collectors.

According to The Associated Press, the brazen gang was trying to pass of works from such easily identifiable masters as pop artist Andy Warhol, the surrealist Joan Miro, and even the most famous painter of the 20th century Pablo Picasso.

The officers have arrested nine suspects in the eastern region of Valencia.

An Interior Ministry statement said the people arrested are both those who have allegedly created the fake art, as well as possible accomplices who helped the paintings be sold in galleries and online.

Pablo Picasso’s 1911 painting "La Coiffeuse" (The Hairdresser) which has been missing for over a decade, has surfaced in the United States. The Cubist canvas was discovered by federal Customs and Border Protection officials in a FedEx shipment heading from Belgium to a climate-controlled warehouse in Long Island City, New York, in December 2014. The package’s shipping label described the contents as an “art craft” holiday present worth $37.

The painting, which is owned by the French government, is part of the Musee National d’Art Moderne’s collection. It was last exhibited in Munich in 1998, and returned to Paris, where it was placed in storage at the Centre Georges Pompidou.

Last month the German state-owned bank Portigon AG of North Rhine-Westphalia, the rebranded successor of the WestLB which folded in 2012 during the financial crisis, decided to deaccession its entire art collection. The bank holds approximately 400-pieces of art, which includes works by Pablo Picasso, August Macke, Joseph Beuys, and Günther Uecker.

Now officials in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia are preparing a plan to save the collection of the state-owned bank, Rheinische Post reported.

Would Picasso have donated 271 works to an electrician who worked for him for a few years in south-east France?

A French court has begun to contemplate that mystery as the three-day trial begins of Pierre Le Guennec and his wife, Danielle. They claim the artist or his wife gave them the 180 lithographs, collages, and paintings and 91 drawings in about 1970 when Le Guennec began working as a general handyman at Picasso’s estate. Picasso heirs and a state prosecutor describe the couple’s account as ridiculous.

Since Marina Picasso was a child, living on the edge of poverty and lingering at the gates of a French villa with her father to plead for an allowance from her grandfather, Pablo Picasso, she has struggled with the burden of that artist’s towering legacy.

When she was in her 20s and inherited the 19th-century villa, La Californie, as well as a vast trove of Picasso’s art treasures, she turned the paintings to face the walls in resentment. Through 15 years of therapy, she dissected bitter family memories of her grandfather’s perceived indifference and her brother’s suicide. In her 2001 memoir, “Picasso: My Grandfather,” she bared her pain and anger at the Picasso clan.

The splendidly sturdy "Miss Bentham," a painting by the American George Bellows which was once owned by Andy Warhol, has become the first nude acquired by the renowned collection of the Barber Institute in Birmingham, where she joins works by Botticelli, Rubens, Van Dyck, Van Gogh, and Picasso.

It is only the second work by the painter, regarded as one of the greatest of early 20th-century American artists and much better known for his gritty urban and brutally realistic boxing scenes than for naked ladies, to enter a British collection.

At the start of the 20th century, Picasso was already living in Paris. The city had established itself as the center of international art at a time when the new machines that had been invented the century before, such as the automobile, the camera and the airplane, were starting to become democratized and to have an effect on lifestyles in the modern metropolis. Film made it possible for the first time to record and reproduce moving images. The speed of movement of people, goods and images had an impact on both life and the worldview, with movement becoming the protagonist and cultural episodes taking place in sequences that were as intense as they were brief. The Avant-gardes appeared as rapidly as they were soon to vanish.

Well aware of the revolutionary spirit of this time of change, Pablo Picasso employed highly unusual formal effects in his painting. With this tactic of transgression, he was able to bring inharmonious elements together in the same picture, in such a way that the resulting work destabilized the notion of static meaning.

Three suspected members of an art forgery ring were arrested in the Spanish cities of Zaragoza and Tarragona, "El Pais" reported. Accused of peddling drawings falsely attributed to Miró, Picasso, and Matisse, they’ve been charged with crimes against intellectual property and fraud.

The police first caught whiff of their dealings in July 2014, during a routine check on the border of Spain and Andorra. Inside the car of an Andorran resident they found drawings signed by Miró. Though the man was carrying documents attesting to their authenticity, police decided to go ahead and have them inspected by several experts. All confirmed that the drawings were counterfeit.