ARTFIXdaily News Feed - Breaking News from the Art World

Los Angeles Antiques Show adds more Continental furniture dealers

Culture Kiosque / April 5th, 2010

New exhibitors to the Los Angeles Antiques Show this year are Bernard Steinitz of Paris and Carlton Hobbs of New York, both respected dealers of Continental furniture. From April 21 to 25, sixty-five exhibitors from across the U.S. and Europe will be featured in room-setting vignettes ...

Tiny masterpieces re-examined in Russian exhibition

The Moscow Times / April 5th, 2010

Little known in his native Russia, Ivan Pokhitonov (1850-1923) won fame in France for his delicate miniature paintings of landscapes. The Tretyakov Gallery, a Russian national museum, is now providing audiences with a chance to re-evaluate the artist with the exhibit “Painter-Sorcerer” — timed to ...

Hottest museum shows of 2009

The Art Newspaper / April 3rd, 2010

The Art Newspaper has listed the 30 most visited museum exhibitions worldwide for the 2008- 2009 season. Topping the list are four blockbusters at Japanese museums. Shows on twentieth-century masters ranked high including Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Joan Miró at MoMA in New ...

Crichton art collection may exceed $75 million at Christie's

Washington Post / April 3rd, 2010

Popular thriller writer Michael Crichton, of "ER" and "Jurassic Park" fame, died in 2008. He left behind a top-notch art collection which his family is selling 80% of at Christie's in New York on May 11-12. Among the works to watch for record-setting status is Jasper Johns' "Flag," which ...

Princess Diana family to offer Rubens masterpiece

Reuters / March 29th, 2010

Earl Spencer, Diana's brother, is planning to sell works from the family's collection of paintings, furniture, porcelain and horse-drawn carriages at Christie's in London on July 6. The auction may raise about $30 million. Highlights in the sale include Peter Paul Rubens's "A Commander being ...

Tulipmania revived in Amsterdam

New york Times / March 28th, 2010

Tulips were once a hot commodity, an integral part of the Dutch Golden Age, and a perenially popular subject for Dutch artists of the 17th and 18th centuries. Fortunes tumbled when, in 1637, the “tulip bubble” burst, leaving speculators with hands full of worthless bulbs. Opening June 1 at the ...

Turner's 'Modern Rome' masterpiece poised to be record-breaker

Times Online / March 28th, 2010

Sotheby's is touting Modern Rome — Campo Vaccino as "arguably the finest" J.M.W. Turner painting left in private hands. With rarity, condition, and provenance adding to its allure as a work of art, this painting, by one of Britain's most beloved artists, may easily exceed the estimate of £12 ...

Artists' estates complicate collecting their work

Financial Times / March 27th, 2010

Georgiana Adams writes about the bitter battle over the Victor Vasarely (1906–1997) estate. Prices for his pioneering op-art compositions are re-heating as is the complex story about ownership issues. Also, Adams notes that German auctioneer Robert Ketterer is trying to raise money for a ...

Women artists celebrated at Chrysler Museum

Hampton Roads / March 24th, 2010

A dazzling, impressionistic scene titled "Lilies, Lanterns, and Sunshine," painted by Helen M. Turner in 1923, is among more than 150 works by women artists now on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. "Women of the Chrysler: A 400-Year Celebration of the Arts" comes with a ...

Parisian curators spotlight dark-themed art

Bloomberg / March 24th, 2010

The Musee d’Orsay in Paris has assembled more than 400 paintings, prints, drawings, posters and photographs under the title “Crime and Punishment.” Sinister works, with subjects from serial killers to femmes fatales, by artists from David to Degas, comprise this thematic exhibition which also ...

'Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917' on view at the Art Institute of Chicago

LA Times Arts / March 22nd, 2010

This exhibition, on through June 30, includes some of the greatest, most enigmatic works of Henri Matisse's long career, as the artist responded to the cruel chaos of World War I. Among the 117 works in the show, a weirdly beautiful 1913 still life, "Flowers and Ceramic Plate," an almost ...

Excellence sells in Maastricht

Bloomberg / March 22nd, 2010

The 10-day Dutch art fair Tefaf attracted 72,500 visitors, an increase of 7 percent on 2009, say the organizers. Most were white, middle-aged Americans and Europeans, and they were in a buying mood. Middle market sales were soft, but the seven-figure sales soared. For example, Basquiat’s 1982 ...

Behind one of Boston's big museum expansions

Wall Street Journal / March 22nd, 2010

Anne Hawley, Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, says her slogan is 'Elitism for all.' She believes the public is hungry for 'real meaning,' which the Gardner translates into scholarly art shows. Now, Hawley is going full steam ahead with ambitious (and controversial) plans to ...

Larry Salander pleads guilty, ordered to pay $120 million

New York Post / March 21st, 2010

Last Thursday, the debacle perpetuated by bankrupt Manhattan gallery owner Lawrence Salander culminated in a guilty plea. His $120 million fraud scheme included duping clients such as actor Robert De Niro, tennis star John McEnroe as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Salander's crimes ...

Young art dealer, Old Master heritage

Financial Times / March 21st, 2010

Jan Six XI, age 31, has opened a new gallery in Amsterdam specialising in Dutch and Flemish Old Master. In a promising powerhouse move, Jan Six Fine Art has teamed up with London art dealership Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, famous for identifying a long-lost Rembrandt self-portrait in 2007. Six, ...

Irish beauties, rarities on the block

Seattle PI blog / March 17th, 2010

The Irish Sale on March 23 at New York's Bloomsbury Auctions includes such star lots as Sir John Lavery's 1936 oil on canvas "Sunbathers" (estimate: $350,000 to $450,000) and the only known full-sized tricolor flag from the 1916 uprising (estimate: $500,000 to $700,000). For book lovers, there's ...

Picasso's Absinthe Drinker under the gavel

The Australian / March 17th, 2010

Christie's in London will sell a coveted Blue Period Picasso portrait, owned by the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber's Art Foundation, with a conservative estimate of between ₤30 million ($49.8 million) and ₤40 million, the highest for a work of art offered at auction in Europe. The June 23 sale of ...

Van Gogh's 'The Bedroom' gets a blog

Mediabistro Unbeige blog / March 17th, 2010

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is restoring one of Vincent Van Gogh's most famous works. While "The Bedroom" is out of view, the museum's staff will keep the painting in the public eye with a blog about the restoration process. The new blog, called "Bedroom Secrets; Restoration of a ...

FBI seeks help of Boston commuters in art heist

Boston Globe / March 16th, 2010

Rembrandt’s “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,’’ his only seascape, has been plastered on Massachusetts billboards along two interstates in an effort by the FBI to publicize the Gardner Museum theft two decades after it transpired. In 1990, two men disguised as Boston police officers talked ...

Steady sales at The European Fine Art and Antiques Fair

Telegraph / March 16th, 2010

American museums have prowled TEFAF, the Maastricht art fair on through the end of this week, and made significant purchases. Washington's National Gallery of Art bought a 17th-century winter landscape with skaters by Adam van Breen for €910,000 (£830,000). The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of ...