Displaying items by tag: Paintings

Three Japanese sliding door paintings from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago were found in a park district storage facility, the city announced Wednesday.

The paintings, known as fusama, are attributed to Japanese artist Hashimoto Gaho. They were believed to be missing or destroyed after the fair.

In 1872, painter Albert Bierstadt finished "View From Donner Lake, California," which encompassed the mile-high waters of the Sierra Nevada with the sinewy wagon trails and the muscular, ramrod-straight tracks of the newly built transcontinental railroad.

But a funny thing happened in a different Bierstadt painting finished a year later. In "Donner Lake From the Summit," a celebrated 10-foot-wide oil-on-canvas commissioned by Collis P. Huntington, the wagon trail practically disappears. The railroad tracks are barely there too, at first glance possibly mistaken for a fallen tree. The emphasis is all warm sun, fluffy clouds and glorious terrain, untouched by man.

German public broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), which controversially put some of its art collection up for sale to pay off debts, has been banned from exporting two paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann.

A spokesperson for North-Rhine Westphalia's culture minister Ute Schäfer confirmed that the state filed a request to add the works to the list of nationally important cultural goods, Rheinische Post reported.

When it comes to Hungarian-born American artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), the only thing more difficult than pronouncing his name is grasping the significance of his art.

Partly that's because his artistic ideas often outstripped his ability to fully manifest them in his work. Theory regularly trumped practice.

At the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, a modest exhibition attempts to come to terms with one part of the artist's eclectic output. It's only partly successful.

“Le Onde: Waves of Italian Influence (1914–1971)” runs Aug. 22–Jan. 3, 2016, at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. This exhibition of nearly 20 works from the museum’s collection follows Italian contributions to the transnational evolution of abstraction, through movements and tendencies such as futurism, spatialism, op art and kinetic art.

The exhibition includes several works that have been exhibited only rarely or not at all since entering the collection. Among those that have not been on view since the Hirshhorn’s inaugural exhibition in 1974–1975 are works by Zero group founder Heinz Mack, French op artist Yvaral and Italian painter Carlo Battaglia and several works by Italian artist Enrico Castellani.

Max Beckmann (1884-1950) was one of the most important German visual artists of the first half of the 20th century. The St. Louis Art Museum has the largest collection of his paintings in the world.

In recognition of that fact, the museum has just published “Max Beckmann at the Saint Louis Art Museum: The Paintings,” by Lynette Roth (published by Prestel, 272 pages, $65). It’s a volume that provides an intelligent layman’s guide to Beckmann — painter, sculptor, printmaker — and his world, as well as a detailed guide to the canvases in St. Louis.

With the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill and Frederic Church’s home Olana, a New York state Parks Historic Site, in Greenport, it’s fair to say that Greene and Columbia counties form the heartland of the Hudson River School of Painting.

As such, movement in the art world that pertains to their works is always of interest to many in the area, and there has, in fact, been movement.

The FBI and Portland police on Tuesday announced a reward of up to $20,000 for information leading to the recovery of two paintings by N.C. Wyeth stolen from Portland developer and art collector Joseph Soley in May 2013.

Police Chief Michael Sauschuck traveled to the Boston FBI office to join Vincent B. Lisi, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston division, to make the announcement. It comes a month after a New Hampshire man was convicted of illegally transporting four other N.C. Wyeth paintings stolen from Soley at the same time. Two other men have been convicted of possessing those stolen works.

In 1913, Edward Hopper—then 30 years old—sold his first painting ever at the inaugural Armory Show in New York to Thomas F. Vietor, a merchant from New Jersey. The piece, titled Sailing, is now in the permanent collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art, along with 16 other Hopper paintings, drawings, and etchings.

For the first time, the Pittsburgh museum is displaying its Hopper collection in its entirety as part of the new exhibition “CMOA Collects Edward Hopper.”

New technology and fresh perspectives are jumpstarting efforts to assemble exhaustive lists of works by 19th-century American painters, sometimes in progress for decades. Next month a consortium of museums interested in the Massachusetts maritime painter Fitz Henry Lane (1804-65) will introduce a website, fitzhenrylaneonline.org, documenting about 320 paintings, drawings and prints at various institutions. Much of the material is being drawn from the Cape Ann Museum, in Mr. Lane’s hometown, Gloucester, Mass., and images on the website will be linked to infrared paint analyses, biographies of Mr. Lane’s clients, newspaper ads for his suppliers, maps of harbors where he sketched and portraits of owners of the ships moored there.