Displaying items by tag: private collectors

One of the most comprehensive displays of works by Diego Velázquez is opening this week at Paris’s Grand Palais. Showcasing 119 artworks from museums around the globe, it will cover the breadth of his career. But pulling together this large retrospective of the influential 17th-century Spanish painter was no easy feat for curator Guillaume Kientz.

Mr. Kientz, the chief conservationist for Spanish paintings at the Louvre, which is jointly producing the exhibition, spent the past two years negotiating with private collectors and museums to assemble some of the Spanish master’s most famous works in what will be the Grand Palais’s blockbuster show of the year.

The National Arts Club presents a rare collection of work from Spanish surrealist, Salvador Dali. The month-long free exhibition, entitled "Dali: The Golden Years," celebrated its opening with a reception on Wednesday February 4th between 6pm - 8pm to which the general public was invited.

The exhibition will show 65 pieces in total, including early works that have never been shown before on loan from private collectors. Early drawings and prints make up three full collections including; "The Les Chants Maldoror" (1934), "12 Tribes of Israel" (1971), and "Memories of Surrealism" (1973). Each marks a major graphic series in Dali's career, while four never-before-seen pieces and an iconic photo of the artist himself by Anton Perich provide invaluable insight into Dali's creative process.

All exhibitions during the 50th anniversary year in 2015 are inspired by the MFA’s stellar collection. Masterpieces created by French artists and by others working in France are a hallmark, and four are included in "Monet to Matisse—On the French Coast."

Exceptional paintings are also coming from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and closer to home, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Private collectors in both the U.S. and Europe are sharing their treasures.

"Monet to Matisse," set for Saturday, February 7-Sunday, May 31, brings together paintings created on both the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of France and opens on the same day the MFA opened to the public in 1965. To commemorate this joyous occasion, the MFA is presenting a Founders Day Open House—free for everyone—on the first day of the exhibition from 10 a.m.-3 p.m.

Art Basel’s 13th edition in Miami Beach closed Sunday, December 7, 2014, amidst strong praise from gallerists, private collectors, museum groups and the media. Highlights of the show included the introduction of the new Survey sector, which brought 13 art-historical projects to the fair, including many rare works never before exhibited in an art fair context; and Art Basel's staging with Performa of Ryan McNamara's "MEƎM 4 Miami: A Story Ballet About the Internet" at the Miami Grand Theater. Solid sales were reported across all levels of the market and throughout the run of the show. Featuring 267 leading international galleries from 31 countries, the show – whose Lead Partner is UBS – attracted an attendance of 73,000 over five days. Attendees included representatives of over 160 museum and institution groups from across the world – and a surging number of new private collectors from the Americas, Europe and Asia.

Following a 100 percent reapplication rate for the Galleries sector and with new galleries coming from across the world, the list of exhibitors was the strongest to date in Miami Beach, firmly solidifying the show's position as the leading international art fair of the Americas.

The Getty’s “Rococo to Revolution: 18th-Century French Drawings from Los Angeles Collections” displays high points of the museum’s drawing collection alongside loans from private collectors. The surprise is how well the loans stand up. There are  privately owned drawings by Watteau (a counterproof of one of the first drawings the Getty bought, in 1982), Boucher, Fragonard, Greuze, and David. There are also sheets by artists lately rediscovered by scholars and collectors. On loan are an impressive Gabriel de Saint-Aubin and a famous François-André Vincent. His trois crayons Bust-Length Study of a Young Woman (1780) was one of the first drawings to be reproduced as a color engraving. In case you missed the memo, Vincent was David’s archrival, husband to Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. The Getty also has an important Vincent drawing, The Secret.

An East Hampton man stands accused this week of selling over 60 forged paintings, which he claimed to be by Jackson Pollock, to private collectors and on eBay, netting him nearly $1.9 million.

A special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in seeking a warrant for the arrest of John D. Re, 54, said he had engaged in the scheme since March 2005 and at least until this past January. According to the complaint by the agent, Meredith Savona of the bureau’s art theft and art fraud division, Mr. Re falsely told collectors he had come across a trove of Pollock paintings in 1999, when he was hired to clean out the basement of an East Hampton woman, Barbara Schulte, three years after the death of her husband, George Schulte, a woodworker and antiques restorer.

This past November, Francis Bacon’s triptych portrait Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s, setting an artist’s record and becoming the most expensive work ever sold at auction. Less than a month later, the massive contemporary masterpiece turned up on loan, not at a modern-day art mecca like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (as Edvard Munch’s The Scream did), but on the opposite end of the US, at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. The painting, which remained on view there through early April, was loaned by its new owner Elaine Wynn, ex-wife of casino mogul and top collector Steve Wynn. Mrs. Wynn, a resident of Nevada, was reportedly entitled to save more than $10 million in taxes by first parking the painting at the Portland Art Museum before bringing it to her home state.

German police arrested two people and raided 28 locations in an effort to halt a multi-million dollar international forgery ring responsible for selling fake paintings they claimed were by Russian avant-garde artists including Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Apartments, business premises, and art galleries in Wiesbaden, Mainz, Suttgart, Munich, and Hamburg were searched by police officers. Over 1,000 items were seized including supposed forgeries and sales documents. Additional searches were carried out in Switzerland and Israel.

The forgers are believed to have sold over 400 works ranging in price from $1,332 to over $1 million since 2005, accruing more than $2.7 million. The two men who were arrested are believed to be the leaders of an international group of six counterfeiters. Private collectors in Germany and Spain acquired most of the fakes sold by the forgery ring.

Confidence in the German art market has been unstable since it was shaken by the largest forgery scandal to date in 2011. Art forger Wolfang Betrachhi was sentences to six years in jail after admitting to painting copies of works by Fernard Leger (1881-1955) and Max Ernst (1891-1976) and then selling them as masterpieces to unwitting collectors.  

After two years in beta, Art.sy’s public version went live this past Monday. Using intuitive sites such as Pandora and Netflix as guides, Art.sy gets to know its users and presents them with suggestions and recommendations based on their individual likes and dislikes. Art.sy offers a free repository of 20,000 and counting digitized fine art images as well as an art appreciation guide. Art.sy can already count 275 galleries, private collectors, and 50 museums such as the Dallas Museum of Art, SFMoMA, and Fondation Beyeler as partners.

A start-up backed by millions of dollars in venture capital from art world giants such as Larry Gagosian and Dasha Zhukova, Art.sy already has 600,000 registered users. The site is moving past mere image sharing and has begun partnering with major art fairs, serving as the exclusive online platform for Design Miami/ in December and the Armory Show in March.

Art.sy offers a unique experience to collectors, allowing them to speak with a specialist, connect directly to a gallery, or submit offers on works remotely. A different feature on the site will allow collectors to buy outright as long as the dealer chooses to utilize the e-commerce option. Art.sy plans to bring in most of its revenue from sales commissions on works sold through the site.