Displaying items by tag: restored

One of Alexander Calder’s largest and most complex mobiles is to be shown outside Brazil for the first time this week after being restored by his grandson, Alexander Rower. Black Widow (around 1948) will be hung in its own space as the finale of the exhibition Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture (11 November-3 April 2016) at Tate Modern in London—the largest show of Calder’s work ever held in the UK.

Rower, the head of the Calder Foundation in New York, is on a mission to restore as many sculptures as possible.

A newly restored Rembrandt will go on show this week harboring a little-known surprise, a full-scale portrait by the Dutch master hidden from the viewer.

Conservators have spent the last three and half years restoring "Portrait of Frederick Rihel on Horseback," a life-size depiction of a nobleman from Amsterdam and his steed painted in the early 1660s towards the end of the painter's turbulent life.

"Neptune's Daughter," a bronze sculpture that stood prominently in the Garden of Enchantment to the right of the de Young Museum until 2011, was vandalized that year and quietly removed from the garden without any press attention. The four-foot statue of a young girl atop a sea horse, created by artist Melvin Earl Cummings in 1926, was on prominent display at the museum for nearly 90 years before unidentified vandals pried off one of its arms and disappeared with it. And now, thanks to some Good Samaritans and the good will of the insurers, the arm has been restored and "Neptune's Daughter" will be rededicated next month.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the museum had insured the sculpture with Lloyd's of London, who paid the museum just under six figures for it after a search of Golden Gate Park three years ago turned up no trace of the missing bronze arm.

A tomato ketchup-stained work by LS Lowry has been restored ahead of its public debut in Salford.

The oil painting, titled "The Thames at Greenwich," is thought to have picked up the stains in a family home where it has hung since the 1970s.

A spokeswoman for The Lowry arts center said the work "had a light layer of surface dirt [and] two small and very old, ketchup stains".

It will be on show at the center, along with a related drawing, until December.

Just another face lift on Manhattan’s tony East Side? Not quite.

On September 16, representatives of the United Nations’ 193 member states will return to a completely renovated General Assembly Hall — and the famous Fernard Léger murals that flank its iconic green marble podium will be there, restored to their original glory.

“I just don’t understand this. It looks to me to be scrambled eggs,” Harry S. Truman reportedly declared in 1952 when he first laid eyes on the abstract larger-than-life murals.

In the early summer of 1819, a British hunting party was heading through thick jungle near Aurangabad, in Maharashtra, western India, when the tiger they were tracking disappeared into a deep ravine. Leading the hunters was Captain John Smith, a young cavalry officer from Madras. Beckoning his friends to follow, he tracked the animal down a semi-circular scarp of steep basalt, and hopped across the rocky bed of the Wagora river, then made his way up through the bushes at the far side of the amphitheatre of cliffs. Halfway up, Smith stopped in his tracks. The footprints led straight past an opening in the rock face. But the cavity was clearly not a natural cave or a river-cut grotto. Instead, despite the long grass, the all-encroaching creepers and thorny undergrowth, Smith was looking at a manmade facade cut straight into the rockface. The jagged slope had been painstakingly carved away into a perfect portico. It was clearly a work of great sophistication. Equally clearly, it had been abandoned for centuries.

A €10m artwork by Claude Monet all but destroyed when a man put his fist through it is once again hanging where it belongs after a painstaking restoration.

The impressionist painting was ripped apart in a devastating three branch tear in June 2012 while it hung in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

After a delicate 18 month restoration, "Argenteuil Basin With A Single Sailboat," dating from 1874, has been restored to near its former glory and is back on the walls.

The tears on the canvas laid end to end would have been about a foot long in a painting less than four feet square.

A painting by the 17^th century Flemish Baroque artist, Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), was discovered in a storage room belonging to the Bowes Museum in England. Portrait of Olive Boteler Porter was purchased by the Bowes Museum’s founders, John and Josephine Bowes, in 1866 and has been in the institution’s collection since it opened to the public in 1892.

The painting’s poor condition led museum officials to record it in files as ‘School of van Dyck’ rather than an original van Dyck masterpiece. Relegated to a storage room, the work was discovered when it was photographed earlier this year for a project committed to putting all of the UK’s publically owned oil paintings on a single website. Art historian and dealer, Dr. Bendor Grosvenor, who is working on the digital venture, recognized the wrongly identified painting as an original Van Dyck.

The oil on canvas painting features the expert drapery and coloring often present in van Dyck’s female portraits from the 1630s. Originally thought to be a painting of Queen Henrietta Maria, additional research identified the sitter as Olive Boteler Porter, the queen’s lady-in-waiting and the wife of van Dyck’s friend and patron Endymion Porter.

After being examined by various van Dyck scholars, the painting has been authenticated. The recently restored masterpiece is now on view at the Bowes Museum.

Henry Moore’s (1898-1986) severely damaged sculpture Knife Edge Two Piece (1965) will finally be restored according to the Parliamentary Art Collection. The sculpture, which is prominently displays outside of the Houses of Parliament in London, is England’s most revered work by the British sculptor.

Moore and the Contemporary Art Society donated Knife Edge Two Piece to England in 1967 but the work fell into disrepair after administrative changes left it with no legal owner. Eventually, the British government suggested that the House of Commons take ownership for the sculpture and that the Parliamentary Art Collection take responsibility for the its care.

The bronze sculpture, which is marred by discoloration, deterioration, and incised graffiti, will undergo conservation beginning February 16, 2013. Conservator Rupert Harris will lead the effort, which involves removing the sculpture’s protective lacquer and abrading its surface to eliminate the damage. The work will then be repatinated and treated with wax in order to protect it from future environmental damage.

The conservation project is expected to cost a little over $50,000 with most of the funding coming from the Parliamentary Art Collection. The Henry Moore Foundation will contribute about $17,000 to the effort. The Knife Edge Two Piece restoration project is expected to reach completion at the end of March 2013.

On June 13, 2012 a vandal spray-painted a stencil of a bullfighter killing a bull and the word “conquista” (Spanish for conquer) on Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) Woman in a Red Armchair (1929). Officials named Houston-resident Uriel Landeros, 22, the assailant but were unable to locate him until he surrendered to authorities on Tuesday, January 8, 2013 at the border of the United States and Mexico.

The vandalism incident took place at Houston’s Menil Collection and was caught on a cellphone video taken by a fellow museum patron. Landeros, an artist himself, claims that his act of defacement was meant to send a message promoting revolution and change. He was later charged with criminal mischief and felony graffiti, which prompted Landeros to flee the country. Officials believe he has been hiding out in Mexico since June.

Woman in a Red Armchair, which is valued at several million dollars, has since been restored.