Displaying items by tag: Venice

The city of Venice is considering selling works by artists such as Gustav Klimt and Marc Chagall. The city’s mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, told the Italian news agency Ansa that he may seek to reduce Venice’s soaring debt by deaccessioning major pieces from the city’s most famous public museums.

Venetian Mayor Luigi Brugnaro has revealed plans to sell off some of the city's artworks to help settle the municipality's mounting debts. The shortlisted works include notable paintings such as Gustav Klimt's Judith II (Salome) (1909).

According to Der Standard, Klimt's masterpiece, which hangs in the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Ca ‘Pesaro, has been estimated to sell for €70 million ($79.6 million).

London’s National Gallery announced that they will send three cherished works from their collection on a tour of galleries and museums around the country between 2014 and 2016. Édouard Manet’s (1832-1883) The Execution of Maximilian (circa 1867-8), Canaletto’s (1697-1768) A Regatta on the Grand Canal (circa 1740), and Rembrandt’s (1606-1669) Self Portrait at the Age of 63 will comprise the traveling exhibition titled The Masterpiece Tour (1669).

Officials at the National Gallery hope that The Masterpiece Tour will promote understanding, knowledge, and appreciation of Old Master paintings to a wider audience. Christie’s is assisting the museum with the endeavor and will send one masterpiece on tour per year. Each annual tour will run from January to July and visit three different regional museums, spending approximately six weeks in each venue.

The first painting to go on tour in 2014 will be Manet’s masterpiece depicting Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian’s deadly capture by Mexican forces. The work was cut up after the artist’s death and the fragments were eventually purchased by Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and reassembled on a single canvas. The painting has been a part of the National Gallery’s collection since 1918.

Canaletto’s painting of the annual carnival regatta in Venice will tour during 2015 and Rembrandt’s self-portrait, which was painted during the final year of the artist’s life, will go on tour in 2016. The poignant work has been on display at the National Gallery since 1851.

French president Francois Hollande has given special allowance to Édouard Manet’s (1832-1883) Olympia (1863), permitting the masterpiece to travel from Paris to Venice for an exhibition. It will be the first time the influential painting has left the French city since it was given to the nation in 1890. Olympia, which features a nude woman and her fully clothed maid, shocked audiences with its subject’s provocative gaze and the suggestion that she was a prostitute.  

Olympia, which is part of the Musée d’Orsay’s collection, will travel to Italy to anchor an exhibition at the Doge’s Palace in Venice. The painting will appear alongside Titian’s (1485-1576) The Venus of Urbino (1538), which is on loan from Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, as part of the exhibition Manet: Return to Venice. The exhibition features 70 works including 42 paintings by Manet on loan from the Musée d’Orsay, which will received a considerable amount in fees for the unprecedented loan. A number of paintings will also be on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Manet: Return to Venice will explore how Italian artists such as Vittore Carpaccio (1460-1520), Antonello da Messina (1430-1479), and Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556) influenced the French painter. The exhibition will be on view from April 25 to August 4, 2013.

On February 6 in London, a painting by the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) will lead Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Sale. Painted in 1919, Jeanne Hebuterne (au chapeau) is a portrait of Modigliani’s common-law wife seated in a wooden chair wearing a black hat and dress, illustrating the elongated form he is known for.

While Modigliani is one of Europe’s highest-selling modern artists, the market for Impressionist and modern art has slowed lately due to a lack of exceptional works in circulation. However, the upcoming sale at Christie’s is expected to bring as much as $237 million with the Modigliani portrait selling for as much as $35.5 million.

Jeanne Hebuterne appeared in a posthumous Modigliani retrospective in Venice in 1922. The portrait was bought from Sotheby’s, London for $26.4 million by a New York collector who is now putting it up for sale.

After recent financial struggles, the American Folk Art Museum received a hefty gift from David L. Davies, a former trustee and noted folk art collector who passed away in March, and his partner Jack Weeden. The $1 million bequest came as a welcome surprise after the recent hardships the museum has endured.

In July of 2011 the Folk Art Museum was forced to sell their 53rd Street home to the Museum of Modern Art in order to pay back a nearly $32 million debt related to a bond payment. In addition to vacating their flagship location, the museum's director, Maria Ann Conelli, resigned and the museum canceled a highly anticipated exhibition in Venice. The museum was in need of the good news.

Now located in a smaller building in Lincoln Center, the Folk Art Museum will use the money to establish the David Davies and Jack Weeden Fund for Exhibitions. Davies, a trustee of the museum for two decades, also donated a number of artworks to its collection including Morris Hirshfield's The Artist and His Model (1945). Hopefully the positive news signals fruitful times to come for the Folk Art Museum.

British musician and art collector Elton John found time for a spot of shopping yesterday in Venice as he toured a show organised by his friend, the Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk. John and his partner David Furnish visited the Palazzo Papadopoli on the Grand Canal for a private tour of work by artists shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize, a biennial $100,000 award given to a young, international artist by the Pinchuk Art Centre and the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kiev.

As the singer and his partner surveyed the contemporary art on display in the frescoed halls of the 16th-century palace, three monumental concrete slabs by the artist Ruben Ochoa from Los Angeles, which appear to have been ripped out of a highway and transposed to the palazzo, caught their attention.

After a quick chat with Ochoa, John pointed to the sculpture in the middle of the room and proudly declared "sold". When asked what the pop star had talked about, the artist said: "He showed me a picture of his new baby."

The Italian artist and prankster Maurizio Cattelan has announced his intention to stop making the hyperrealist sculptures for which he is known. "I have come to the end of a cycle of my art," he told The Art Newspaper at a reception in Venice on the eve of the biennale preview opening. "I have to get out of a system which seduces you into repeating yourself," he said, adding that his upcoming Guggenheim retrospective in New York, which opens in November, had provided him with a good opportunity to look back on his career.

"After New York, I'm finished with the sculptures. I can reinvent myself as a new artist, perhaps as a photographer," added Cattelan who has recently launched a photography magazine called Toilet Paper. "Art is like therapy. If it works, you don't have to see a therapist. You have to ensure it keeps working," he said.

If what Cattelan says is true, then the current biennale may be one of the last opportunities to see newly-commissioned work by the artist. For Bice Curiger's biennale exhibition, Cattelan has expanded an installation, entitled The Tourists, which he first made for the Venice Biennale in 1997. It consists of a giant flock of two thousand pigeons which peer menacingly down on visitors to the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Giardini from beams, pipes and rafters in every hall of the building.

When asked to describe the experience of visiting the Venice Biennale, old hands often compare the gargantuan international festival of contemporary art to a theme park or travelling circus.

A friend of mine who saw the last Biennale, though, has a more evocative way of encapsulating what it’s all about. He likens it to the flying island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels, which floats above the ground using magnetic levitation.

The tyrants of Laputa, my friend reminded me, controlled the land beneath them by occasionally lowering the island’s adamantine base to flatten rebellious cities – literally crushing the opposition. This, my friend says, is how you should think of the international art set, constantly moving from city to city, visiting one biennial after another. And when they descend upon Venice for the opening of the biggest art fair of them all – La Biennale, which has been going strong since 1895 – then they are the only show in town.

After spending time at the 54th Biennale this week, I can report that my friend is right. Of course, there are as many tourists as ever plodding past the pigeons in St Mark’s Square. But, for a few spectacular days as the Biennale opens, the city becomes a caravanserai for the gilded denizens of the art world: artists, dealers, collectors, gallery owners, curators, and art historians, accompanied by celebrities, fashionistas, and a swollen mass of advisers, hangers-on, freeloaders – and journalists, like me.

Ostensibly, the world’s biggest art fair is a purely cultural event that offers a definitive take on the current direction of contemporary art, generating extensive tourism for the city (it opens to the public tomorrow and runs until the end of November).

But there are professional interests at work, too. Museum directors and curators make discoveries at the Biennale that inspire their exhibition schedules for years afterwards. Behind the scenes, dealers feverishly solicit business, encouraging collectors to buy works that, unbeknown to the public, are unofficially for sale. And for anyone with some financial involvement in the art world, there is ample opportunity for networking at all the receptions, dinners and cocktail parties on yachts and in the city’s magnificent palazzos.

This is my first time at the Venice Biennale. For someone who writes regularly about contemporary art, it is a shameful admission, like confessing to being a 40-year-old virgin. Thankfully, this year, the stars aligned, and it was finally time to pop my Biennale cherry.

Traditionally, the Biennale’s focus is the shady stretch of parkland known as the Giardini, where countries exhibit work in around 30 pavilions – vestiges of an antiquated age of empire, when Britannia ruled the waves (though, just to make things confusing, countries sometimes exhibit work by artists of different nationalities – so the old line about the Biennale being the “Olympics of the art world” is misleading).

Nearby is the Arsenale, a sprawling complex of shipyards where the vessels responsible for the wealth of the Venetian Republic were once constructed. During the Biennale, this becomes a dramatic setting for an official festival exhibition – as well as an ad hoc home for countries without pavilions in the Giardini. As if this wasn’t enough (and you could happily spend several days just drifting through the Giardini and Arsenale), there is also a host of “collateral” events elsewhere in the city.

Just looking at an official guide is overwhelming; attempting to see everything is impossible. Despite its size, though, the extraordinary thing about the Biennale is how rapidly a consensus emerges about what’s hot, and what’s not. “What have you seen?” is the first question on everybody’s lips. It was stunning to watch as word quickly spread about Mike Nelson’s hit installation of rooms inside the British Pavilion, curated by the British Council. By the second day of previews, there were already queues stretching from the pavilion’s entrance practically to the Giardini’s gates.

But what fascinates me is the way that the attention deficit disorder of most time-starved Biennale-goers seems to shape much of the art that gets shown – and, in turn, noticed.

To stand a chance as an artist at the Biennale, you need to do something daring or bold. Take this year’s American pavilion, which is showing work by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. Outside the pavilion itself, the neo-Surrealist artists are presenting “Track and Field”, which consists of a live athlete, wearing a vest emblazoned with the letters “USA”, running on a treadmill, which in turn powers the caterpillar tracks of an overturned British Centurion battle tank. As the tracks spool round, they make an almighty clatter: this deafening piece has grabbed a great deal of attention.

After comparing notes about what they have seen, people at the Biennale usually ask a second question: “What are you doing tonight?”