Displaying items by tag: Paintings

The portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit, a young and successful couple that Rembrandt van Rijn painted just before their wedding in 1634, might hit the market very soon, "El País" reports.

The sale could be a sensational event, as the paintings have been in France since 1877, when they were bought by Baron Gustave de Rothschild, and have rarely been displayed in public since.

The current owner, Eric de Rothschild, has obtained an export permit, granted by the French Ministry of Culture and the Louvre Museum, and according to the French publication "La Tribune de l'Art," has put a €150 million price tag on the paintings in the documents.

Gabriele Finaldi has been appointed the new head of the National Gallery, replacing Nicholas Penny who announced his retirement last year.

The 49-year-old is currently deputy director for collections and research at the Prado museum in Madrid.

Finaldi was a curator at the National from 1992 to 2002, where he was responsible for the later paintings in the Italian and Spanish collections.

He said he was "deeply honored" to take on the directorship.

It’s been called the biggest art heist in U.S. history, perhaps the biggest in the world. But 25 years later, the theft of 13 works from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum remains unsolved.

The theft has spawned books, rumors and speculation about who was responsible — and multiple dead ends.

Yet authorities and museum officials remain hopeful, noting that stolen art almost always gets returned — it just sometimes takes a generation or so.

From the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, 140 works by Marc Chagall, one of the best-loved artists of the 20th century, are now in Italy for the first time. So universal as to be known, recognized and loved by everyone, he of all the artists of the last century remained true to himself while going through wars and catastrophes as well as political and technological revolutions. Through drawings, some oil paintings, gouaches, lithographs, etchings and watercolors, the show reveals an artistic vision influenced by Chagallʼs great love for his wife Bella and grief over her early death in 1944. It traces the course of his life and his art, a mixture of the major European traditions, from his original Jewish and Russian culture to the meeting with French avant-garde painting.

Curated by Ronit Sorek and produced by DART Chiostro del Bramante and the Arthemisia Group in collaboration with the Israel Museum under the patronage of Roma Capitale, the exhibition Chagall. Love and Life will be held in the Chiostro del Bramante from March 16 to July 26, 2015.

For most people, Canaletto is the artist who depicted Venice – the painter of some of the best known and most beautiful views of his home city. But for nearly ten years he was an adopted English artist chronicling a society which, unlike Venice, was changing at an unimaginable pace.

A new exhibition opening to the public on Saturday will for the first time bring together paintings Canaletto produced in Britain. Unlike previous shows, it will examine his stay between 1746 and 1755 in a social as well as an art history context.

“He is painting a new, vibrant and confident Britain,” said the show’s curator, Steven Parissien. “Things are looking good in Britain and it often takes an outsider to see it.

John James Audubon painted many birds, but for sheer stage presence, his great gray owl is hard to beat. Perched on a rotten branch, it turns halfway, as though disturbed, and fixes the viewer with an imperious stare. The yellow eyes glow, their intensity magnified by concentric ringlike markings that spread outward, like a feathery vortex. The plumage is regal — thick drapery, in a gray and brown pattern, falling in soft folds. The owl exudes the heavy solemnity of one of Velázquez’s popes or Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More.

The owl has stiff competition in “Audubon’s Aviary: The Final Flight.”

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts presents "Telling Tales: Stories and Legends in 19th-Century American Art" through June 7, 2015, in the Center’s Upper-Level Galleries. The exhibition features paintings and sculptures that recount stories relating to American cultural aspirations and everyday life throughout the 19th century. Narrative landscapes by Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand of the Hudson River School, genre scenes by William Sidney Mount and Francis W. Edmonds and sculptures by John Rogers are among the highlights of the exhibition.

Assembled from the collection of the New-York Historical Society, Telling Tales integrates genre, historical, literary and religious subjects—through styles ranging from Neoclassicism to Realism—to paint a vivid portrait of American art and life during the country’s most formative century. The exhibition is organized into six sections: “American History Painting,” “English Literature and History,” “Importing the Grand Manner,” “Genre Paintings,” “Economic, Social, and Religious Division” and “Picturing the Outsider.”

On Friday, March 13, 2015, the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) -- the most distinguished art and antiques show in the world -- will open to the public. Held in Maastricht, a picturesque medieval city in the southernmost part of the Netherlands, this year’s fair will feature 275 leading galleries from twenty countries.

In addition to the traditional areas of Old Master paintings and antique furniture, TEFAF presents a wide variety of modern and contemporary art, jewelry, and twentieth-century design, which is featured in a small yet mighty section titled TEFAF Design.

“I showed the America I knew,” Norman Rockwell once declared. His America, of course, is the one many of us know and love. We recognize in his famous images the energetic and optimistic folks who are emblematic of this nation’s spirit.

For more than 60 years, this lanky, pipe-smoking fellow, who had the air of a gawky clerk in a country store, set out his vision of this country on magazine covers and illustrations.

Skarstedt announces an exhibition of work by American artist Keith Haring, at their Chelsea gallery this March. The exhibition uniquely presents 5 major works on canvas, all at a monumental scale and dating from 1984-1985, exposing a lesser-known side to the iconic artist. "Keith Haring: Heaven and Hell" is on view at Skarstedt (550 W. 21st Street) through April 18, 2015.

The exhibition’s title, "Heaven and Hell," recalls William Blake’s 18th century poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—a study in opposites of good and evil, angels and devils. As William Blake wrote, “Without contraries is no progression.” Haring similarly examined the duality between two sides of contemporary life in his 1984-1985 paintings. The apparent antagonism and struggle between the figures is one of the key features of Haring’s art.