Displaying items by tag: commission

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has unveiled John Trumbull’s life-size portrait of founding father Alexander Hamilton for the first time ever. The international financial services group Credit Suisse donated the painting to both the Met and the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas back in March. The painting had been on loan to the Crystal Bridges Museum since it opened to the public in 2011.

Credit Suisse acquired the striking portrait in 2000 when it absorbed the New York-based investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. Richard Jenrette, one of the bank’s founding partners, had assembled a remarkable art collection for the company that became part of Credit Suisse’s acquisition. Credit Suisse decided that giving the portrait to two well-known institutions would maximize the public’s enjoyment of the work by expanding its audience.

The painting, which was commissioned by the New York Chamber of Commerce in 1771 while Hamilton was serving as President Washington’s Secretary of Treasury, will remain on view at the Met until 2014 when it will return to the Crystal Bridges Museum. Eventually the painting will be on view at each institution for two-year stretches.

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas has acquired a portrait by John Singer Sargent depicting Edwin Booth, the renowned 19^th century Shakespearean actor and brother of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. The Players, a private club for actors founded by Booth and his peers, commissioned the full-length portrait in 1890.

Edwin Booth was housed at The Players club until 2002, when debt forced the organization to sell the work to a private collector. The painting had only gone on public display twice before being acquired by the Amon Carter Museum: once in 1926 as part of Sargent’s memorial exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and from November 2003 to February 2004 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Andrew Walker, Director of the Amon Carter Museum, said, “Sargent is one of the most important American artists and we are thrilled to add another one of his masterpieces to our collection. We are particularly intrigued by this painting as it is among his most brilliantly conceived full-length male portraits.” The museum also owns Sargent’s Alice Vanderbilt Shepard, which was acquired in 1999.

Edwin Booth, which was purchased for about $5 million, is currently on its first extended display in the museum’s main gallery.

The Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, NJ will celebrate its 100^th anniversary on January 15, 2014. Beginning this fall and continuing throughout the following year, the museum will hold a variety of celebratory events and activities. In addition, the Montclair Museum will install the first in what it hopes to be a series of commissioned works for the institution’s outdoor sculpture garden. The sculptor Jean Shin will create works for this year’s installation.

Highlights from the upcoming centennial celebration include 100 Year, 100 Voices, a crowdsourced audio-tour project that invites members of the Montclair community to comment on their favorite work in the upcoming exhibition 100 Works for 100 Years; a lecture by University of San Francisco professor and author of Riches, Rivals and Radicals: 100 Years of the Museum in America, Marjorie Schwarzer; and Robert Smithson’s New Jersey, an exhibition highlighting the monumental works of New Jersey native and one of the founders of the Land Art movement, Robert Smithson.

The Montclair Art Museum is devoted to American art and Native American art forms. Its collection consists of over 12,000 works and includes paintings, prints, drawings, photographs and sculpture dating from the 18^th century to the present. The museum has the only gallery in the world dedicated solely to the work of the 19^th century American painter George Inness, who lived and worked in Montclair.

The Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands purchased a rare antique Japanese chest once used as a television stand for $9.5 million. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum had been searching for the 17^th century lacquer chest, one of only ten in the world, since 1941.

The saga of the chest began in 1640 when the head of the Dutch East India Company’s Japanese office commissioned the chest along with three others just like it. All four of the chests were later sold to a French diplomat who passed two of the works off to the British poet William Beckford. Beckford, whose daughter was married to the Duke of Hamilton, inherited the chests and they became part of the Hamilton Palace’s collection. During a sale in 1882 to raise funds for the palace’s upkeep, the Victoria and Albert Museum purchased one of the chests while the other eventually went missing. What the museum didn’t know was that an unassuming Shell Oil engineer had purchased the missing chest in 1970 for a mere $150. The elusive chest was used as everything from a television stand to a storage cabinet until auctioneer Philippe Rouillac and his brother, Aymeric, recognized it.  

While the Victoria & Albert Museum would have liked to have been able to bid on the chest when it went to auction, they simply didn’t have the funds. Julia Hutt, curator of the V&A’s East Asian department, said, “I was delighted to hear the Rijksmuseum had won the auction – it is a very fitting home for the chest.”

Online retail giant Amazon is expected to launch a virtual art gallery later this year. The website is planning on offering over 1,000 objects from at least 125 galleries. It has been rumored that the online seller of books, electronics and apparel already has over 100 galleries on board. The Seattle-based company has been approaching a litany of galleries across the U.S. in recent months.

The virtual art gallery will follow a similar model as Amazon Wine, which debuted last fall and works with over 400 vineyards and winemakers across the country. Amazon will take a commission from all sales on its art site instead of charging galleries a monthly service fee. Commissions will range from 5% to 15% based on the work’s sale price.

Online art galleries are not unheard of in today’s web-dominated world. Costco currently runs a virtual art gallery that offers prints by artists such as Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Marc Chagall (1887-1985) as well as original works by lesser-known artists.    

A man was arrested on June 13, 2013 at London’s Westminster Abbey for defacing a portrait of Queen Elizabeth the II. The painting was commissioned in honor of her 60 years as England’s matriarch and was put on display May 23.

The incident took place during the afternoon when the assailant, a 41-year-old male, spray-painted The Coronation Theatre by Australian-born artist Ralph Heimans. The work, which is part of Westminster Abbey’s permanent collection, has been taken off public view.

Police arrested the man for alleged criminal damage and he was taken to a London police station where he remains in custody.

England’s Ashmolean Museum has acquired one of the most important Pre-Raphaelite paintings remaining in private hands. John Everett Millais’ (1829-1896) portrait of John Ruskin, the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, has been on loan to the institution since January 2012. The work was officially given to the museum by the Art Council England under the Acceptance in Lieu of Inheritance plan, which stipulates that under British tax law debts can be written off in exchange for objects of national significance. The painting recently appeared in Tate Britain’s highly successful exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde.

Millais, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, was commissioned to paint the portrait in 1853 by Ruskin himself. While working on the painting, Milliais fell in love with Ruskin’s wife, which ultimately led to the breakdown of the Ruskins’ marriage, Millais’ friendship with Ruskin, and the artist’s involvement with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. After marrying Ruskin’s wife, Effie, Millais gave the portrait to a friend in Oxford, Henry Wentworth Acland. The portrait remained in Acland’s family until his descendants sold it at Christie’s in 1965, where the late owner of the painting purchased it.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which formed in 1848, was a group of English painters, poets, and critics who rejected the traditional approaches to art and painting established by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael (1483-1520) and Michelangelo (1473-1564). Instead, the Pre-Raphaelites turned to medieval and early Renaissance art for inspiration often painting subjects from Shakespeare and the Bible. Pre-Raphaelitism, which rattled Britain from 1848 to 1900, was considered the country’s first avant-garde movement.

Fourteen watercolors by the Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador Dali (1904-1989), will be sold at Bonham’s Impressionist and Modern Art auction in London on June 18, 2013. Commissioned by the publisher Jean-Paul Schneider in 1969, the watercolor fruit studies have been in private collections since their creation. The paintings are expected to garner a total of $1.5 million.

In the ‘FruitDali’ series, the painter takes traditional 19^th century botanical lithographs, which were originally used as scientific illustrations, and paints over them using his iconic surrealist twist. Dali infuses each fruit with humanistic qualities including legs, arms, and facial expressions. The works are a testament to Dali’s ability to find human forms in the ever-inspiring natural world.

William O’Reilly, Director of Bonhams Impressionist department, said, “These compositions are a fabulous illustration of Dali’s artistic approach. By overlaying such traditional images with his famous artistic vocabulary of dragons, hooded figures, crutches and weeping eyes, he gives us an insight into his own hyper-fertile imagination.”

A monumental mural by Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923), an American painter and sculptor often associated with color field painting and the Minimalist movement has found a temporary home at the Barnes Foundation just outside of Philadelphia.

The Barnes, an educational art institution, is currently hosting the exhibition Sculpture on the Wall, which includes Kelly’s Sculpture for a Large Wall. Created between 1956 and 1957, the work was commissioned for the Philadelphia Transportation Building and it was the first public abstract sculpture in Philadelphia. The work was removed from the Transportation Building after it closed in 1993 and was later acquired by Ronald S. Lauder, the former chairman of the Museum of Modern Art. Lauder and his wife promptly donated the work to MoMA where it has only been exhibited twice.

Sculpture for a Large Wall, which measures over 65 feet long and 11 feet high, is accompanied by four other works from later in Kelly’s career including the geometric Red Curve (1986) and the minimalist Two Curves (2012). The sculptures will be on view at the Barnes Foundation through September 2, 2013.  

Henri Matisse: La Gerbe is currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and highlights the artist’s final commissioned work. Henri Matisse (1869-1954) created La Gerbe (The Sheaf), a 2,000 lb., 18 x 20-foot ceramic piece, in 1952 for the home of Los Angeles-based philanthropists Sidney and Frances Brody. Mrs. Brody promised the work to LACMA in honor of the museum’s 25^th anniversary and donated it to the institution in 2010. This event marks the first time that La Gerbe has been displayed alongside its full-scale maquette, which is on loan from the University of California’s Hammer Museum.  

Late in his career, Matisse developed his cut-out technique, which involved cutting organic shapes out of colored paper and arranging them on his studio’s walls. Giving the artist a renewed sense of freedom, Matisse lauded the technique for its immediacy and simplicity, which he believed helped him express his artistic urgencies more completely.

When he received the commission from the Brody’s, Matisse created a full-scale paper cut-out of his design, which he showed the couple during their visit to his studio in Nice, France. The Brody’s rejected the first design but accepted a second full-scale cut-out, which is the maquette included in LACMA’s exhibition. The final La Gerbe was executed in ceramic and consisted of 15 sections, which were shipped to Los Angeles in 1954 following the artist’s death. The work was installed on the Body’s patio wall where it remained until Frances’ death in 2009. The work was permanently installed at LACMA in 2010.

LACMA’s exhibition includes other major works from Matisse’s cut-out period including Madame de Pompadour (1951) and Jazz (1947), a historic book of 20 prints, which is considered the artists’ first major project using the cut-out technique.

The La Gerbe exhibition will be on view at LACMA through September 8, 2013.