Displaying items by tag: stockholm

Between the late 1950s and early 1970s Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) completed two major concrete murals on separate government buildings in Oslo, Norway. After suffering severe damaged during a terrorist attack on the city in 2011, the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage fears that the monumental public masterpieces could be demolished.

Officials have been considering tearing down the buildings, which make up Oslo’s government quarter, and integrating the salvaged murals into a new structure or relocating the work to an entirely new site. However, some feel that altering and moving the work would destroy Picasso’s vision. A number of architects are working on proposals that include both retaining the buildings, which are important examples of Norwegian architecture, and leveling them. The various plans will be presented to the minister for government administration this summer.

Picasso made sketches for five murals that were executed as both interior and exterior works. The project in Oslo was the first time Picasso had ever worked with breccia, a rock material composed of broken rock and mineral fragments held together by a fine-grained matrix. Although He went on to create similar works in Barcelona and Stockholm, the Oslo murals remain seminal works for Picasso.

A painting worth $1 million by the French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was recovered in Essex, England. Stolen from the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm in 1987, the location of Le Jardin (1920) has remained a mystery for more than twenty years.

The discovery occurred when British art dealer Charles Roberts of Charles Fine Art was offered the Matisse painting by a Polish collector. Roberts ran a search on the Art Loss Register (ALR) database, a hub for information regarding stolen artworks, and found Le Jardin listed. Christopher A. Marinello, executive director and general counsel of the ALR, facilitated the painting’s recovery and it is currently being held in the organization’s office before being returned to Sweden in the coming weeks.

Le Jardin was the only artwork stolen during the 1987 burglary when thieves broke through the museum’s front entrance with a sledgehammer and unscrewed it from the wall. The burglars escaped just minutes before private guards arrived to investigate the scene. Following the robbery, the thieves made several attempts to sell the painting back to the museum for an exorbitant sum. Museum officials resisted, knowing that the Matisse painting was too well known to sell on the open market and that it would resurface eventually.