Probably produced under the direction of Passchier Grenier, tapestry merchant, Tournai (Belgium), 1470s, Assault on Asilah (detail), 1475-1500, wool and silk, Diocese of Sigüenza-Guadalajara and Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, Pastrana, Spain. © Fundación Carlos de Amberes. Photograph by Paul M.R. Maeyaert.
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French artist Georges Rouault was fascinated by the world of the circus. Photo: Courtesy of the Syracuse University Art Collection.
SALT LAKE CITY, UT.- The Utah Museum of Fine Arts presents Georges Rouault: Cirque de l’Etoile Filante (Circus of the Shooting Star), an exhibition of etchings and wood engravings organized by the Syracuse University Art Galleries. The exhibition, which will be on view in the UMFA Emma Eccles Jones Education Gallery from February 3-May 13, 2012, encourages adults and children to explore circus themes through art, art making, and programs.
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Among a fine selection of illuminated manuscripts is a fifteenth-century Book of Hours. Photo: Sotheby’s.
LONDON.- Sotheby’s announced the Single Owner sale on 14th March 2012 of property from The Collection of Giovanni & Gabriella Barilla: Important Porcelain, Venetian Fine and Decorative Arts from their Residence in Geneva. Descendants of the founder of the most important pasta producer in the world, Giovanni Barilla and in particular his wife Gabriella created one of the greatest collections of ceramics and porcelain in Europe. This collection especially focuses on exceptional Meissen figures – including a wonderful collection of some of the earliest Commedia dell’Arte figures – and some of the rarest groups of Capodimonte and Buen Retiro ever offered on the market. Also featuring an exquisite selection of Venetian eighteenth-century furniture and paintings, sixteenth-century majolica, silver and a group of illuminated books of Hours, the sale comprises in excess of 400 lots and is expected to fetch in excess of £2.5 million.
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A copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa that was painted at the same time as the original in the same studio is displayed at the Prado Museum in Madrid Wednesday Feb. 1, 2012. Spain’s Prado Museum says the copy it has of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was painted at the same time as the original perhaps making it the earliest replica of the masterpiece. A museum spokeswoman said the work was painted side by side with the 16th century original that hangs in the Louvre in Paris and was done by one of Leonard’s key students. AP Photo/Paul White.
MADRID (AP).- A “Mona Lisa” copy owned by Spain’s Prado Museum was almost certainly painted by one of Leonardo da Vinci’s apprentices alongside the master himself as he did the original, museum officials said Wednesday.
The stunning find of what the Prado now says is probably the earliest known copy of La Gioconda will give art lovers and experts an idea of what the Mona Lisa looked like back in the 16th century, said Gabriele Finaldi, the museum’s deputy director collections.
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Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Cain slaying Abel, 1608-1609, after treatment. Oil on oak panel , 131.2 x 94.2 cm© The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London.
LONDON.- The newly-conserved masterpiece Cain Slaying Abel by Sir Peter Paul Rubens went back on public display at The Courtauld Gallery, today. The magnificent painting, widely considered to be one of the most important in the Gallery’s world-class collection of works by Rubens, has been restored as part of the Bank of America Art Conservation Project which was launched in 2010.
The Flemish master Rubens (1577-1640) was one of the most exciting and explosive artistic talents of early modern Europe . His energetic compositions, such as Cain Slaying Abel, greatly influenced his contemporaries as well as future generations of artists. One of the first works of Rubens’s artistic maturity and representing a pivotal moment in his early career, Cain Slaying Abel was painted around 1609, shortly after he had returned to his home town of Antwerp following years spent living and working in Spain and Italy. The dynamic composition and powerful portrayal of the Old Testament scene demonstrate the artist’s remarkable virtuosity in the depiction of flesh and musculature although the violence of the subject is at odds with Rubens’s beautiful rendition of Abel’s body.
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Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup I Tomato, 1968, ©AWF.
PITTSBURGH, PA.- The Andy Warhol Museum announced its latest traveling exhibition Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal, opening March 17, 2012 at the ArtScience Museum, Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.
Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal is the largest retrospective of Warhol’s artwork to travel to Asia, spanning his career from the 1940s to 1980s. The exhibition is arranged by decade and features more than 300 paintings, photographs, screen prints, drawings, and sculptures. Iconic works in the exhibition include Jackie (1964), Marilyn Monroe (1967), Silver Liz (1963), Mao (1972), Campbell’s Soup (1961), The Last Supper (1986), and Self-Portrait (1986).
The exhibition, sponsored by BNY Mellon and curated by The Warhol, chronicles the breadth of Warhol’s career and demonstrates the scope of his interests. It will travel to five Asian cities over 27 months. Following Singapore, the exhibition will then tour to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and finally Tokyo in 2014. Further details on these venues will be confirmed as they become available.
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Important spinach jade brushpot, est. $40,000-$50,000. I.M. Chait image.
BEVERLY HILLS, CA.- When the doors are opened to I.M. Chait’s elegant Manhattan gallery space during Asia Week New York (March 16-24), the management and staff of the family-owned southern California firm expect to welcome many old friends to their preview and March 21 auction of Important Chinese Ceramics & Asian Works of Art.
The company’s venerable founder and auctioneer Isadore “I.M.” Chait, who is celebrating his 45th year as a specialist dealer of Asian art, takes pride in the fact that collectors who bought from him decades ago are still amongst his active clientele.
“What is particularly interesting about the Asian market is the cycle of buying, holding and selling,” Chait said. “We’ve noticed that pieces purchased five to fifteen years ago in Hong Kong or New York auctions are now resurfacing. It has been an ongoing practice for some Chinese art collectors to buy an object, put it in their collection, then 10 or 20 years later, put it up for sale at the same venue and buy something else they like.”
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Mary Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878. Oil on canvas, overall: 89.5 x 129.8 cm (35 1/4 x 51 1/8 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.
WASHINGTON, DC.- Following a two-year renovation, the galleries devoted to impressionism and post-impressionism in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art reopened to the public on January 28, 2012. Among the greatest collections in the world of paintings by Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, the Gallery’s later 19th-century French paintings returned to public view in a freshly conceived installation design.
“The Gallery’s French impressionist and post-impressionist holdings, comprising nearly 400 paintings, are among the most prized in the collection, and rightly so,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. “While the appearance of these revered rooms has changed very little—preserving the conditions of light, the room proportions, and wall colors that make the Gallery one of the great places to view art in the world—the paintings themselves will be shown in a newly innovative arrangement.”
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Jan Matulka (1890–1972), Composition, c. 1930. Oil on canvas, 30 × 40 in. (76.2 × 101.6 cm). Collection of Bunty and Tom Armstrong©Estate of Jan Matulka. Photo: Joshua Nefsky.
PURCHASE, NY.- From the late 1920s to the early 1940s, many of America’s most inventive and important artists, including Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Adolph Gottlieb, forged their identities, dramatically transforming conceptions of what a painting or sculpture could be. A group linked by friendship and common aspirations, many had shared experiences in the classes of influential Czech Cubist Jan Matulka at the Art Students League and in the Federal Art Project during the Great Depression. Most significantly, they were all closely associated with John Graham (1887-1961), the enigmatic Russian-born artist, connoisseur, and theorist. They, along with others such as Jackson Pollock and David Smith, all drawn together by their common commitment to modernism and their eagerness to exchange ideas, played a critical role in developing and defining American modernism.
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Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Noah Leading the Animals into the Ark, c. 1655. Brush and oil paint, overall: 39.4 x 54.8 cm (15 1/2 x 21 9/16 in.) Partial Gift of Gilbert Butler, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art.
WASHINGTON (AP).- An exhibition at the National Gallery of Art will showcase its rich holdings of works on paper by the Italian baroque master Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609–1664), as well as works by his contemporaries and followers. On view in the Gallery’s West Building from January 29 to July 8, 2012, The Baroque Genius of Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione suggests, for the first time, the complex sources of his style such as Rembrandt van Rijn and Claude Lorrain, as well as its importance for later artists, from Giambattista Piranesi and the Tiepolo family to Antoine Watteau and François Boucher.
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