Displaying items by tag: canvases

Jackson Pollock’s former Greenwich Village apartment is up for sale for $1.25 million. The 800-square-foot penthouse located at 46 Carmine Street—very convenient to the historic Cedar Tavern, where Pollock and the Ab Ex crew hung out—has 14-foot Tudor-style ceilings, a working fireplace, and “Pirelli floors,” which we assume means they’re great for laying large canvases on to make drip paintings.

What makes it interesting to Luis Ortiz, the Douglas Elliman broker who has the listing. is the address.

Experts investigating the catastrophic art heist that rattled the Netherlands in October 2013 have found the burned remains of at least three oil paintings in a home belonging to the mother of one of the chief suspects. Olga Dogaru, who had previously admitted to burning the works and then withdrew her claim, originally said that she incinerated the canvases – two Monets and one Picasso – in an attempt to protect her son.

Investigators found traces of three or four paintings in ashes taken from a wood-burning stove along with nails and tacks. Ernest Oberlaender-Tarnoveanu, head of Romania’s National History Museum, which analyzed the contents of the stove, said, “The number and the type of nails we found (in the ashes) indicate that we have at least three paintings there. There are also tacks that could belong to a fourth one.” While investigators did find the remains of burned oil paintings, it is yet to be determined whether or not they are the same works that were stolen from the Kunsthal Museum.

Dogaru, her son, Radu, and four other Romanians will go on trial on Tuesday, August 13, 2013 in Bucharest. The thieves made off with Pablo Picasso’s Tete d’Arlequin, Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, London and Charing Cross Bridge, London, Henri Matisse’s La Liseuse en Blanc et Jaune, Paul Gauguin’s Femme devant une fenetre ouverte, dite la Fiancee, Meyer de Haan’s Autoportrait, and Lucian Freud’s Woman with Eyes Closed. The works were on loan from the Triton Foundation to celebrate the Kunsthal Museum’s 20^th anniversary.

Four of the stolen works were oil paintings and three – including Pablo Picasso’s Tete d’Arlequin and Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge – were either pastel or colored ink on paper and would be impossible to identify if burned.

The online retailer Amazon launched “Amazon Art,” a website that will be used to market works from galleries across the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Canada. The site currently features over 40,000 works from more than 150 galleries and dealers. Offerings range from modest $44 canvases to Norman Rockwell’s Willie Gillis: Package from Home, which carries a price tag of $4.85 million.

Amazon Art’s slogan, “from gallery walls to your walls,” communicates the site’s mission – to make collecting easy and accessible to all. Consumers can search the site by medium, subject, style, size, frame and color. The majority of the galleries involved with Amazon Art are not high end and most of the artworks offered range in price from $100 to $5,000.

Peter Faricy, vice president for the Amazon Marketplace, which is overseeing the art site’s launch, said, “Amazon Art gives galleries a way to bring their passion and expertise about the artists they represent to our millions of customers.”

The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. is currently hosting the exhibition Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945, the first in-depth look at the Cubist master’s works preceding World War II. During this period, Braque used the theme of still life to hone his pioneering Cubist style. The exhibition presents 44 works from this period as well as related objects that help trace the artist’s evolution from a painter of still lifes to interiors in the late 1920s, to large-scales spaces in the 1930s, to personal interpretations of everyday life in the 1940s.

The exhibition brings together Braque’s Rosenberg Quartet (1928-1929) for the first time in 80 years. The four canvases were used as models for marble panels in the Paris apartment of Braque’s art dealer, Paul Rosenberg. All in varying degrees of completion, the works come together to reveal the different stages of Braque’s artistic process.

Duncan Phillips, founder of the Phillips Collection, was a well-known champion of Braque’s work and helped introduce his paintings to a wider American audience through acquisitions and exhibitions. Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945 will be on view at the Phillips Collection through September 1, 2013.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York is celebrating Ellsworth Kelly’s (b. 1932) 90^th birthday by reuniting his Chatham Series for the first time in 40 years. The series of paintings were the first works Kelly made after leaving New York City for upstate New York in 1970. Ellsworth Kelly: Chatham Series will be on view at MoMA through September 8, 2013.

All of the 14 paintings in the Chatham Series are made out of two joined canvases, which come together to create an inverted “L” shape. All of the works vary in color and proportion and were made intuitively by the artist. For the final paintings in the series, Kelly used pieces of colored paper to determine the right hues and ratios for the finished works. The Chatham series was first exhibited in 1972 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. Following the show, the works were split up until their reunion at MoMA.

Kelly, who was already an established artist when he created the Chatham Series, is best known for his hard-edge and color field paintings, which are defined by an overarching minimalist aesthetic. Kelly aimed to erase any trace of the artist’s hand, making what he described as “anonymous” art.

On May 1, 2013 the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam will re-open after being closed for months due to ongoing renovations. The exhibition that will inaugurate the newly updated space is Van Gogh at Work, an extensive overview of Vincent van Gogh’s (1853-1890) oeuvre that happens to coincide with the 160^th anniversary of the artist’s birth. What the Van Gogh Museum kept quiet until now is that the exhibition will reveal research amassed during an eight-year analysis of the artist’s work.

The project, which was led by scientists at Shell in collaboration with the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency and curators at the Van Gogh Museum, entailed analyzing hundreds of van Gogh’s canvases, pigments, letters, and notebooks. The research provided previously unknown insights into van Gogh’s temperament and personality. Contrary to popular belief spurred by the artist’s struggles with mental illness, van Gogh was not a manic painter, but painstakingly methodical. The use of an electric microscope and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry revealed that van Gogh used grids to accurately portray proportions and to create precise depth of field in his early landscapes.

Another insight the researchers uncovered involved van Gogh’s pigments. Tests done at the Shell Global Solutions labs revealed that some of the pigments used by van Gogh were chemically unstable and faded prematurely. In particular, scientists discovered that the color of the walls in van Gogh’s seminal painting The Bedroom was inaccurate. Van Gogh had used red and blue paints to create a violet hue but the red faded, leaving behind a much bluer color than he intended.

Beginning in September, the Van Gogh Museum will exhibit two versions of The Bedroom – one from its own collection and one from the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection. Van Gogh painted three versions of his room in Arles between 1888 and 1889 and all three of them have the same blue-hued walls. The presentation will also include a digital reconstruction of what the painting may have looked like when van Gogh first created it.

Van Gogh at Work will be on view through January 12, 2014.

Thirty-five out of forty-four senior art students were left without their sketchbooks, canvases, brushes, books, and completed works after a fire broke out at Pratt Institute in New York City on February 15, 2013. The fire, which ignited in Pratt’s historic Main Building due to faulty electrical wiring, also destroyed much of the structure’s roof and the studios that painting students are given in their final year.

In an effort to ease the students’ crushing loss, art dealer Larry Gagosian has partnered with Pratt to present a special drawing and painting exhibition. Gagosian was especially moved by Pratt’s fire as he almost lost a sizable chunk of his own collection after a fire broke out at his home in the Hamptons in 2011.

Flameproof will feature 100 works by Pratt’s 44 senior drawing and painting students and will be curated by Eugenie Tsai, the John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition is focused on the students’ collective experience at Pratt and was largely facilitated by the Pratt recovery effort, which provided students with donated supplies and gift cards from the school’s administration and local art stores.

Flameproof will be held at the Seagram Building on Park Avenue from May 9-14, 2013.