Displaying items by tag: Portrait

He may be seated in his familiar armchair, but the portrait revealed today by the National Portrait Gallery reveals a less familiar side of one of our best loved writers.

Matthew Smith captured the young Roald Dahl in 1944 when he was in his late twenties and a flight lieutenant (war-substantive) in the RAF.

At the time of the portrait Dahl had experienced a short but lively time as a Hurricane pilot in the Mediterranean and North African theatres of war. His exploits had led to him being recognised as a fighter ace but he was invalided out of the RAF in late 1941 when the serious injuries he had sustained in an earlier crash landing in the Libyan desert caught up with him.

Edouard Manet’s portrait of an actress will star at Christie’s fall auction where it’s estimated to bring $25 million to $35 million.

The work is widely known by its French title, “Le Printemps” (lu PRAHN’-tahm), which means “spring.” It’s been on loan at the National Gallery of Art for two decades.

The 1881 painting depicts actress Jeanne Demarsy (zhahn day-mahr-SAY’) with a frilly parasol, lacy bonnet and floral dress.

The problematic Musée Picasso in Paris, which has been going through political upheaval has received some good news. Pablo Picasso’s eldest daughter, Maya Widmaier-Picasso, has donated two works by her father to the institution. Last June, Anne Baldassari, president since 2005 was fired, replaced by Centre Pompidou-Metz director Laurent Le Bon. This has created a split in the Picasso family. The changes have occured because of the delayed five-year renovation project, which has caused a massive spending deficit.

A 1908 drawing of a woman’s face in the Cubist style, containing a portrait of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire on the reverse of the page has been gifted by the artist's daughter.

A bite of the apple is said to have gotten Adam and Eve thrown out of the Garden of Eden.

Now the Norton Simon Museum wants another bite at the apple as it tries to have a legal threat to one of its most prized artworks thrown out of court. At stake are Lucas Cranach the Elder’s 1530 paired paintings “Adam” and “Eve,” which have hung in the Pasadena museum since the 1970s.

The museum has asked for a rehearing of a June decision that went against it in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, when two members of a three-judge panel revived Marei Von Saher’s claim to “Adam” and “Eve” after it had been dismissed two years earlier in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

After a triumphant tour of Japan, then the United States and ending in Italy, the "Girl with a Pearl Earring" has returned home to the Mauritshuis royal picture gallery in The Hague. For ever. The museum, which reopened last month after two years' renovation work, will no longer allow Vermeer's masterpiece out. Officially the Mona Lisa of the North has been gated in order to please visitors to the Mauritshuis who only want to see that painting. Its fame has steadily increased since Tracy Chevalier published her novel in 1999 followed in 2004 by the film by Peter Webber starring Scarlett Johansson. Anyone wanting to see the portrait will have make the trip to the Dutch city.

"Girl with a Pearl Earring" thus joins the select band of art treasures that never see the outside world. Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" never leaves the Uffizi in Florence; "Las Meninas" by Velázquez stays put at the Prado in Madrid; Picasso's "Guernica" remains just down the road at the Reina Sofia museum; and his "Demoiselles d'Avignon" can only be seen at MoMA in New York.

In her 21 years leading the Wexner Center for the Arts, Sherri Geldin has stretched the contemporary art center’s reach beyond the Ohio State University campus on which it’s located. Geldin has elevated the institution’s national profile and positioned it as the center of contemporary culture in Ohio’s capital city.

Geldin’s successful staging of the first-ever exhibition of portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz’s Master Set in 2013 exemplified both her influence and aspirations as director of the Wexner Center.

She’s back.

Sotheby’s is offering a portrait of Roman noblewoman Lucretia, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, in a private-sales exhibition at its Bond Street, London, salesroom. If the bare-breasted lady looks familiar, she is. The circa-1509 painting was last offered at Sotheby’s in New York quite recently, in January 2012. It sold for $5.122 million, the fourth highest price ever paid for a Cranach at auction. (The record, $8.6 million, was set in 1990.)

In 2012, the painting in the “Important Old Masters Sale” was given quite the white-gloved hard sell. A video of department chairman George Wachter praised her voluptuousness and noted that museums were likely to be interested. It sold in the midrange of its $4 million to $6 million estimate (outpaced only by a Caneletto Venice scene.)  The sale sheet listed as going to a “European private” in an auction that was only 59.7 percent sold.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston announced Monday that it has acquired a famous portrait of President John F. Kennedy.

The Kennedy family asked Jamie Wyeth to paint the portrait in 1967, after JFK was assassinated.

The then 20-year-old fledgling artist agreed to make an unofficial portrait that he would keep if the family didn’t approve of the finished work.

MFA Art of the Americas curator Elliot Bostwick Davis said the artist received mixed reviews.

“Robert Kennedy didn’t care for it — he found it was too painful a reminder of his brother,” Bostwick Davis explained, “whereas Jacqueline Kennedy felt it was a very striking and stirring likeness of her husband. As a result it remained in the artist’s own collection, and hence has come to the museum and come to the public.”

A painting that was “targeted for removal” from the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh won a last-minute reprieve after a technical examination determined that it was not a “modern fake”, but a 16th-century Florentine portrait that was significantly “tarted up” in the 19th century.

“I was convinced it was a total modern fake,” says Lulu Lippincott, the institution’s curator of fine arts, referring to what was purportedly a portrait of Eleanor of Toledo by the Italian Mannerist Bronzino. “One look at the picture and I thought, ‘you’ve got to be kidding—this is not a Bronzino’,” she says. Convinced that the work was not the Old Master it claimed to be, Lippincott sent the picture to the conservation studio with a note asking Ellen Baxter, the museum’s chief conservator, to confirm that it was a fake.

Since Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” (1969) sold at Christie’s for $142.4 million in New York last November a rash of paintings by that Irish-born artist have emerged for sale. The auction at Sotheby’s on Monday night, which kicked off the contemporary art sales here, will be remembered for buoyant bidding on a triptych by Bacon from 1964, which brought $45.4 million, well above its $33.6 million high estimate.

Four telephone bidders fought for the painting, “Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (on Light Ground),” which depicts the artist’s lover and was painted at the height of their affair.