All posts tagged: Painting

Christie’s to Offer M. Renoir Painting Owned by Whitney Family

Christie’s to Offer $35 M. Renoir Painting Owned by Whitney Family

Published by Jenni Sidey

For the first time in 97 years, Pierre-Auguste Renoir‘s La femme aux lilas (Portrait de Nini Lopez) will hit the auction block, with an estimate of $25 million to $35 million. Set for Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale on May 18, the 1876–77 painting depicts Nini Lopez, a young Parisian actress, as a golden-haired woman with milky-pale skin and ruddy cheeks gazing into the distance, as she clasps a bouquet of white and pink flowers. The painting has a unique provenance: since 1929, it has been owned by the Whitney Payson family, a historic American family that Max Carter, Christie’s global chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art, described to the New York Post as “one of the greatest, if not the greatest, American collecting family over the 20th century.” Related Articles The painting was purchased for $100,000 in 1929 by Joan Whitney Payson and her husband, Charles Payson. The work was one of the first pieces Whitney Payson bought, as she went on to build one of the most storied collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist …

AI Model Reveals New Information About 17th-Century El Greco Painting

AI Model Reveals New Information About 17th-Century El Greco Painting

Published by José Betancourt

A group of scientists at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, has built a new machine-learning program that might help art historians determine how many artists’ hands contributed to the creation of centuries-old artworks. The dozen researchers who published the paper in Science Advances range from physicists and computer scientists to art historians and anthropologists. The AI model is called PATCH, which stands for pairwise assignment training for classifying heterogeneity. It works by comparing 1-centimeter-square “patches” of artworks that are known to have been painted by an individual artist (rather than a group of artists, or a workshop, as was common during the early modern period). The consistency in brushwork and paint texture found in these tiny segments can then be compared to another artwork with more questionable background to indicate if it was made by the same individual artist, a different individual artist, or perhaps a group. Related Articles The paper in question focused on the Spanish Renaissance painter El Greco. The researchers used PATCH to compare El Greco’s Christ on the Cross, …

Finding Gertrud Kauders | Simon During

Finding Gertrud Kauders | Simon During

Published by José Betancourt

In the last years of his life my father wrote a memoir. Born in 1916 in Munich to Bohemian parents—his father Jewish, his mother not—he had spent his boyhood at a Bavarian boarding school, until the Nazis made it impossible for him to stay on in Germany. At that point he fled to Czechoslovakia, then to England and finally to New Zealand, where I was born and raised. For reasons I don’t quite understand, I didn’t immediately look at the fifty or so typescript pages he produced for family consumption only. But, in 2019, after my partner and I had bought an apartment in Berlin and I’d applied for German citizenship, I fished out his reminiscences and read them, newly curious about the life into which he had been born. The memoirs were more engaging than I’d expected. Though he had been dead for fifteen years, my father’s bleak, anachronistic worldview—a mix of old haute European class consciousness, bitterness, and civic-mindedness—became vivid again. One section left an especially strong impression on me. He devoted several …

French Engineer Turns 8 Raffle Ticket Into .2 M Picasso Painting

French Engineer Turns $118 Raffle Ticket Into $1.2 M Picasso Painting

Published by Jenni Sidey

A 58-year-old Paris-based engineer named Ari Hodara bought a raffle ticket on a whim, and ended up winning a gouache-on-paper painting by Picasso a few days later. The 1941 painting, Head of a Woman, is a portrait of the French artist’s lover and muse Dora Maar, an artist in her own right who was frequently painted by Picasso. Before Hodara, the portrait was owned by Opera Gallery, an international operation with branches in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the U.S. The gallery sold 120,000 tickets for 100 euros (about $110) each, to hopeful art enthusiasts around the world. The first 1 million euros ($1.2 million) raised went to Opera Gallery, with the rest being donated to the Fondation Recherche Alzheimer, a French organization. Related Articles The charitable endeavor, called “1 Picasso for 100 Euros,” was launched in 2013 by the Beirut-born French journalist Péri Cochin. The first iteration of the lottery was won by Jeffrey Gonano, a 25-year-old man from a suburb of Pittsburgh, who won a L’Homme au Gibus (1914), also a gouache …

Sotheby’s to Sell M. Picasso Painting from Donati Collection

Sotheby’s to Sell $40 M. Picasso Painting from Donati Collection

Published by José Betancourt

A $40 million Pablo Picasso painting from the artist’s Cubist period will hit the block at Sotheby’s this May during the marquee New York auctions. Part of a cache of works from the collection of late Surrealist artist Enrico Donati and his wife Adele, who died last year, Arlequin (Buste), from 1909, is likely to be one of the most expensive works by Picasso sold during the marquee sales this season. It features a harlequin that appears to emerge from a cascade of three-dimensional geometric forms. Related Articles The auction house said on Monday that the work was valued within “the region of $40 million,” suggesting that it has increased dramatically in monetary worth since Enrico bought it for around $12,000 in the 1940s. He purchased it through Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, one of Picasso’s most famous dealers, having become enamored of the piece upon seeing it at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. It’s the second high-profile attempt by Sotheby’s to sell Arlequin, which made its way to market at the auction house in 2008, …

Record-Breaking 0.5 M. Basquiat Painting to Go on View in Miami

Record-Breaking $110.5 M. Basquiat Painting to Go on View in Miami

Published by José Betancourt

The Pérez Art Museum Miami announced this week that it will host an exhibition bringing together about 10 works by Jean-Michel Basquiat that are owned by Kenneth C. Griffin, one of the world’s top collectors. Titled “Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols,” the exhibition will feature nine paintings and one sculpture by the artist and concentrate on his “implementation of classic themes such as portraiture and the figure, script and language, and his conceptual amplification of color, form, and composition,” according to a release. Related Articles “Figures, Signs, Symbols” is curated by PAMM director Franklin Sirmans, who was a cocurator of a traveling show on the artist that debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2005, and Megan Kincaid, who is the museum’s collection curator. Griffin is providing support to realize the show via his Griffin Catalyst initiative. “At PAMM, this exhibition feels both inevitable and vital,” Sirmans said in a statement. “Miami’s layered histories, diasporic communities, and global outlook create a context where Basquiat’s visual language—rooted in memory, migration, and cultural hybridity—can be experienced with particular depth and …

Indian Art Market Hits New High as Raja Ravi Varma Painting Fetches .9 Million

Indian Art Market Hits New High as Raja Ravi Varma Painting Fetches $17.9 Million

Published by José Betancourt

A painting by Raja Ravi Varma has set a new auction record for the work of an Indian artist, signaling continued strength at the top end of the market. Yashoda and Krishna (ca. 1890s) sold for $17.9 million at Saffronart in Delhi on April 1, surpassing the previous benchmark for Indian painting at auction, held by M.F. Husain’s Untitled (Gram Yatra), which sold for $13.8 million at Christie’s New York last year and was purchased by ARTnews Top 200 Collector Kiran Nadar. The result also comfortably eclipses Varma’s prior record of $4.5 million, set in 2023 Related Articles The buyer was pharmaceutical billionaire Cyrus Poonawalla, founder of the Serum Institute of India, according to Artsy.   Characterizing Varma as “indisputably remains the most influential pioneer of early modern Indian art,” Saffronart called Yashoda and Krishna “one of the artist’s most accomplished works,” in its lot description. “In this painting,” the essay continues, “he interprets the universally resonant theme of maternal love through the mythological figures of the infant Lord Krishna and his foster mother Yashoda, a subject strongly embedded in Indian …

Bic Family Heirs File Lawsuit for Return of Fra Angelico Painting

Bic Family Heirs File Lawsuit for Return of Fra Angelico Painting

Published by José Betancourt

The heirs of the Bic family fortune filed suit in March for the return of a painting by Fra Angelico that sold at Christie’s for $5.4 million in 2018. That sale was only possible, the heirs allege, because a chauffeur for the family had stolen the work, then sold it to a prominent art dealer who then consigned it to the auction house. There is no publicly listed record for the painting on the website for Christie’s, which is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit, potentially indicating that the piece may have been sold privately. Instead, the defendants are the executors of the estate of dealer Richard L. Feigen, who allegedly consigned the painting before his death, as well as Chilean billionaire Álvaro Saieh and his wife Ana Guzman, whom the suit claims bought the work at Christie’s. Related Articles The suit was filed on March 19 in the Supreme Court for the State of New York. According to the suit, the painting, titled Saint Sixtus (ca. 1453–55), was purchased by Bic founder …

Wilhelm Sasnal review – his wild juxtapositions are almost obscene | Painting

Wilhelm Sasnal review – his wild juxtapositions are almost obscene | Painting

Published by Sam Flores

Wilhelm Sasnal has transformed the ground floor of Sadie Coles’ elegant gallery into a parade of broken images: the Oval Office, a ghastly forest, a blasted tree trunk, the artist’s wife and daughter, a British post-punk band, and the sitting US president surrounded by cronies, his face resembling the burn produced by screwing a lit cigarette into a photograph. These paintings, most of which are untitled, are broken in the sense that an online link can be broken: it is difficult to connect them to their source. (It would be useful to know the location of that tree, for instance.) They are also broken in that they do not fit together as a whole. What connects that revolting White House interior, with its acid greens and faecal browns, with a spooky forest? What links President Trump to the founders of industrial music? Cigarette burn … Untitled, 2025. Illustration: Katie Morrison/© Wilhelm Sasnal. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Some connections gradually suggest themselves, if only because we are wired to find patterns in …

Pinakothek in Munich Returns Nazi-Looted Lesser Ury Painting

Pinakothek in Munich Returns Nazi-Looted Lesser Ury Painting

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Pinakotheken in Munich will return a painting by the German painter Lesser Ury that was auctioned under duress during the Nazi regime in Bavaria. First reported by Monopol, the news signals a renewed push for restitution within Bavaria’s museum sector, long scrutinized for its sluggish handling of Nazi-looted art. Ury, a German-Jewish Impressionist who died in 1931, was known for his evocative depictions of Berlin and Bavaria—nocturnal cafés, rain-drenched streets, and fleeting domestic scenes.  Related Articles The Pinakothek museums have returned his painting Interior with Children (The Siblings), which was originally ownedby the Berlin banker Curt Goldschmidt. Undone by the economic policies of the National Socialists—the Nazi Party—the family bank collapsed, forcing the Goldschmidts to auction their assets, including the Ury painting. It is believed to have sold for around 800 Reichsmarks (roughly $4,000 today); by comparison, Ury’s Berlin Impressionist scenes have fetched between $40,000 and $100,000 at auction in more recent years. According to the museum, Goldschmidt fled to Paris in 1937, where he lived in hiding throughout the German occupation, until his death in 1947. “Curt Goldschmidt’s fate is representative of that …