Displaying items by tag: Willem De Kooning

An East Hampton man accused of selling dozens of fake paintings and sketches purported to be by famous artists, and using some of the money to buy a submarine, pleaded guilty in federal court on Monday to one count of wire fraud.

Prosecutors said the man, John Re, 54, claimed the pieces were by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and caused about $2.5 million in losses to victims. For nine years beginning in 2005, Mr. Re tricked art collectors by creating a false provenance, the document that shows the history of a piece of art, prosecutors said. He bought the submarine, which he called the Deep Quest, with the proceeds from a fake Pollock painting, they said.

  Willem de Kooning, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, is best known for his moody, gestural paintings that flutter between figuration and abstraction. It wasn’t until he was 65 and already a celebrated artist that he began experimenting with sculpture, the least-known aspect of his oeuvre. While in Rome in 1969, de Kooning began making small clay sculptures, soon moving on to produce large-scale bronze works. Made by building-up layers of wet clay on wood and metal armatures, these sculptures echoed the dynamic energy that pervaded de Kooning’s painted figures.

Between 1969 and 1974, de Kooning created twenty-five sculptures, including “Clamdigger,” which will be offered at Christie’s next month.

Critics think they have the last word, but sometimes art keeps talking. In 2008, while organizing the Jewish Museum’s boisterous survey of Abstract Expressionism, “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning and American Art, 1940-1976,” the curator, Norman L. Kleeblatt, noticed that two paintings — Lee Krasner’s “Untitled” (1948) and Norman Lewis’s “Twilight Sounds” (1947) — seemed to be speaking to each other. He had the good sense to listen and, later, to orchestrate a deeper conversation. The result is “From the Margins: Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis, 1945-1952,” a nuanced, sensitive and profound exhibition.

The show isn’t really a dialogue, in the conventional sense. But it bravely elides differences of gender, race and religion, finding that Krasner and Lewis — a Jewish woman and an African-American man — shared a visual language that was a subtler, more intimate dialect of Abstract Expressionism.

On September 21, Stanford University will reveal the Anderson Collection, one of the most valuable gifts in its history. Assembled over the course of fifty years by Bay area collectors Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson along with their daughter Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, the collection features 121 works by 86 artists, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Ellsworth Kelly. While Abstract Expressionist works form the collection’s core, the Andersons’ gift also includes a number of works from California art movements such as the Bay Area Figurative School, which started in San Francisco in the 1950s, and the Light and Space movement, which originated in Southern California in the 1960s.

The Andersons began collecting art after their first visit to the Louvre in 1964. Before focusing on works by Abstract Expressionists, Color Field painters, and Pop artists, they acquired a number of works by French Impressionists and American modernists.

 The Hamptons region of Long Island, New York, has long been a popular destination for the stylish, wealthy, and influential. Thanks to its astonishing natural beauty, it has also been a popular retreat for creative types, including pioneering artists like Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. A new book by architectural publisher and art critic Anthony Iannacci showcases nineteen private houses in the fabled enclave, giving readers an unprecedented glimpse of some of the most beautiful architecture, interiors, and gardens in the country.

“Design in the Hamptons” features works by celebrated designers, including Jonathan Adler, Simon Doonan, John Barman, Fox-Nahem, Thad Hayes, Tony Ingrao, Todd Merrill, Roman & Williams, and Joe d’Urso.

Their Degas is de-gone.

Two Manhattan art dealers are suing an art seller they say is responsible for losing their $3 million Degas sculpture.

In papers filed in Manhattan Federal Court, the Degas Sculpture Project and Modernism Fine Art say they struck a deal with Rose Ramey Long to sell an Edgar Degas sculpture called “The Little 14-Year-Old Dancer” earlier this year.

Long had told the businesses she was buying the works on behalf of a reputable collector who wanted to purchase it and other works they had, including paintings by Willem de Kooning and etchings by Picasso, for a total of $11 million, the suit says.

Whitney Museum of American Art Director Adam Weinberg spoke with The Chronicle while visiting the Bay Area for the opening of "Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection," a major show at the San Jose Museum of Art of contemporary works on loan from the New York museum.

Like the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection sampled in "Modernism from the National Gallery of Art" at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Landau Collection includes works by many names considered safe, if not already canonical: Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, James Rosenquist, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin.

A high-end art dealer was robbed at knifepoint in his Upper East Side pad by a handyman who took off with some cash — but left a showroom full of pricey artwork on the walls, officials said.

Paul Quatrochi, whose stable of wealthy collectors includes Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, Baron Heinrich von Thyssen and Austrian Princess Michaela von Hapsburg, said he had a knife pressed against his throat for nearly 30 minutes while his guest rifled through his pockets and stole $300 in cash.

A convicted tax evader and trout poacher from San Francisco has been charged with mail fraud for allegedly falsely claiming that he had $11 million to buy artwork.

Luke Brugnara, 50, was named in a complaint unsealed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Federal prosecutors accused him of taking delivery of the art and then refusing to pay for the pieces or return them.

A new exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey charts the developments in abstract painting that took place between 1950 and 1990. The show examines how postwar artists such as Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Jean Dubuffet, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, and Frank Stella ushered in advancements in abstraction thanks to their individual approaches to line, color, and form.

“Rothko to Richter: Mark-Making in Abstract Painting” presents nearly thirty paintings on loan from the collection of Preston H. Haskell III, a Princeton University alumnus and a longstanding Museum benefactor. The exhibition touches on a number of monumental movements, including Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Minimalism, Op art, and Postmodernism.