Displaying items by tag: photograph

A Richard Avedon photograph has reportedly been withdrawn from an auction at Christie's over complaints by the Avedon Foundation.

The photo, a 1962 portrait of ballet icon Rudolf Nureyev, belongs to ballet dancer Eric Walters, who says he bought it at Christie's in 1995 for just $1,610, according to the New York Post. But when Walters tried to sell the photo this year at the same auction house with a high estimate of $15,000, the Avedon Foundation, which is based in New York, stepped in.

Andrew Butterfield, an art dealer and Renaissance scholar, had seen the two-and-a-half-foot tall wooden sculpture several years before, in a photograph, and thought it was “really fantastic.”

“It felt so much like the embodiment of the early Renaissance,” he said recently. He passed on making an offer then. But the gilded figure of a plump, graceful cherub, or putto, nagged at him, and when he finally did buy it, in 2012, it set him off down an art-historical detective trail that made him glad he followed his instincts. Mr. Butterfield and several other experts he has enlisted now believe the statue is a lost work by Donatello, one of the defining artists of the Renaissance, and a rare example of the artist’s work in wood, making the discovery not only a major addition to Donatello’s surviving corpus but also to the history of Western sculpture.

A rare early portrait by Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), a self-portrait by Jan Miense Molenaer (1610–1668), a groundbreaking work by Arshile Gorky (1904–1948), and a remarkable photograph of Alice and Lorina Liddell by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), better known as Lewis Carroll, are among works recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Three rare illustrated books and a portfolio, all highlighting aspects of the New World, were donated by Harry W. Havemeyer in memory of his father, Horace Havemeyer. Harry W. Havemeyer also pledged an extraordinary collection of 117 early American views and historical prints assembled by him and his father, in whose memory the pledge was made.

The Belgian artist Luc Tuymans was found guilty of copyright infringement in a legal dispute over a portrait he created in 2011. A civil court in Antwerp ruled on 15 January that Tuymans’s painting "A Belgian Politician"—a dramatically cropped image of the MP Jean-Marie Dedecker—borrowed too heavily from a photograph taken one year earlier by Katrijn Van Giel, a photojournalist for the Flemish newspaper "De Standaard."

The court has forbidden Tuymans from publicly exhibiting the painting or making additional versions of the work; he faces a €500,000 penalty if he does not comply.

Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany in 1945. A new life can rarely have started in a less promising place and time. To enter the world as the Third Reich fell was to be a baby surrounded by human ash.

Does that seem a tasteless way of putting it? Well, Kiefer is not tasteful. Ever since he posed for a photograph in 1969 giving the sea a Nazi salute, he has resurrected the terrors of the 20th-century in a shocking, pungent and explicit way that defies both the politeness of forgetting and the evasiveness of appropriate speech. He would rather you were angry than amnesiac. He will not let the ashes of history’s victims blow away, but thrusts them in your face as a handful of truth.

A rare negative of legendary movie star Marilyn Monroe, taken during her first professional photo shoot when she was 20 years old, has been sold at auction.

The photograph was taken when the unknown Norma Jeane Baker was a factory girl hoping to become a model.

The picture, along with the negative and copyright, was sold for £4,250. It had been expected to fetch between £5,000 and £8,000.

The New York artist Andres Serrano has awakened fresh controversy with his 1987 work "Piss Christ," which famously sparked a culture war in the US that led to the end of NEA grants to individual artists. Around 50 protesters gathered yesterday, 26 August, outside the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio, Corsica, to demand the immediate removal of the photograph from an exhibition of 120 works by the artist.

A member of the Catholic organization Cristiani Corsi told France TV Info that the protest aimed to have the work removed from the museum and returned to the Lambert Collection in Avignon, which co-organized the exhibition. “[Corsica] is soiled by the presence of this picture. It’s an insult to every Corsican,” he said.

A painting by Artemisia Gentileschi achieved €865,000 ($1,179,832) at Sotheby’s in Paris, nearly three times its presale estimate of €200,000–300,000 ($272,000–$408,000), reports Art Daily. The price sets a new world record price for the 17th-century Baroque artist.

The work existence was until recently only documented in an old black and white photograph from the archives of an Italian dealer (see artnet News report). It’s believed the consignor’s family acquired the painting from that dealer at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England will partner with the Hall Art Foundation to present a series of exhibitions of contemporary and post-war art drawn from the collections of the Hall Art Foundation and Andrew and Christine Hall. Together, the Foundation’s collection and that of the Halls includes some 5,000 works by Richard Artschwager, George Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Eric Fischl, Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol and many other important contemporary art figures.

The collaboration will kick off on October 8, 2013 with an exhibition of works by leading British-born artist, Malcolm Morley. Malcolm Morley at the Ashmolean: Paintings and Drawings from the Hall Collection will present 30 works dating from 1964 to the present. Morley, who often paints colorful scenes of man-made disasters, is considered one of the founders of hyperrealism, a genre of painting resembling a high-resolution photograph. Malcolm Morley at the Ashmolean will be on view through March 30, 2014.

The partnership between the Hall Art Foundation and the Ashmolean Museum is expected to develop into a long-term relationship and will eventually include a new contemporary art gallery at the institution.