Displaying items by tag: collection

It’s a collection that includes artworks by Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning, René Magritte, and many others. It has been valued at approximately $3 billion. And since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran most of it has been in storage. That’s about to change.

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is set to put on a stunning exhibition filled with Western works acquired by Iran’s former Empress Farah Diba Pahlavi, many of which have not been so boldly displayed since she and her late husband, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, were deposed in the revolution that severed relations between Iran and much of the West. Under the empress’s direction, Iran purchased the works at a time when the global art market was depressed and Iran’s coffers were full of oil revenue.

Thousands of artifacts from the British Museum's priceless collections went online Thursday in a partnership with Google that will allow web-users to take a virtual stroll through its galleries.

The deal with the Google Cultural Institute, which has 800 partners from over 60 countries, also allows objects to be scrutinized by researchers around the world thanks to high-definition Gigapixel technology.

Among artifacts viewable online is the famous Rosetta Stone, which helped unlock the secret of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and sculpture from the Parthenon in Athens.

One of the world’s largest watch collections, owned by a Dutch dynastic family that dates back to the 13th century, is going under the hammer at Bonhams in December.

Containing 2,000 timepieces, the collection belongs to the late Jan Willem Frederik baron van Wassenaer, and is so vast that the pieces will be sold in instalments, via various auctions, throughout 2016.

Renowned for its collection of lamps by Tiffany Studios, the New York Historical Society on Central Park West will renovate the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture and dedicate the space to displaying the 100 lamps it owns.

Designed by architect Eva Jiřičná, the 3,000-square-foot, two-story space is scheduled to open in early 2017, and will feature the Tiffany lamps lit in a darkened gallery, creating a dramatic, glowing effect for visitors.

From December 2-5, 2015 Sotheby’s New York will present the single-owner sale of Property from the Collection of Robert S Pirie, one of the world’s leading book collectors. Over 60 years, Mr. Pirie built the finest collection of 16th and 17th-century English literature in private hands with significant copies of works by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, and John Donne among others. Mr. Pirie was a knowledgeable and dedicated collector whose library is made all the more extraordinary by the particular emphasis he placed on the hardest to find works with distinguished provenance. In addition to his prominence in the world of rare books, Mr. Pirie was a leading financier and widely admired New York Renaissance Man.

The Art Institute of Chicago announced that Gloria Groom has been named the chair of the museum’s European Painting and Sculpture department. She will now oversee the museum’s collection of Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, early 19th-century, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist art.

Groom, who is also currently the Art Institute’s David and Mary Winton Green Curator, is known best for her work related to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and has written about the work of Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.

The Tate Modern in London has announced that its hotly anticipated £260 million ($401 million) extension, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, will open to the public on June 17, 2016.

The extension and renovation will increase the Tate's display space by a whopping 60 percent, allowing a much greater portion of the museum's collection of modern and contemporary art to be shown. To mark the occasion, the new Tate Modern will reopen with a complete re-hang, showing works by over 250 artists from 50 countries.

The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) will give pay raises and bonuses to three of its top executives in recognition of their work securing the museum’s collection during the city of Detroit’s bankruptcy negotiations. Former Director and President Graham Beal (who left the DIA on June 30) will get a retroactive $20,000 raise for the fiscal years 2014 and 2015, plus a $30,000 performance bonus; Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Annmarie Erickson and Chief Financial Officer Robert Bowen will receive 3% raises for the fiscal years 2014 and 2015, plus bonuses of $65,000 and $40,000, respectively.

Walking into the dramatic first-floor gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, visitors are confronted with the towering bis poles collected by Michael Rockefeller on his final expedition to New Guinea. Rockefeller disappeared on that trip in 1961 at the age of 23, reported drowned at sea under mysterious circumstances that have led to speculation that he may have been eaten by cannibals.

The intricately carved poles are on display in the wing of the Met that bears his name. The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing houses a collection of non-Western art obtained by Rockefeller’s father, New York governor, multimillionaire and subsequent Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.

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.