A version of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe will travel from London’s Cortauld Institute to Hull for a show at the Ferens gallery, thanks to a £9.4m grant from the British government. The project will also help fund renovations and improvements to the institution’s galleries. (more…)
The Cincinnati Art Museum has announced that Cameron Kitchin will become the museum’s new director on October 1st. A graduate of Harvard University and William & Mary, Kitchin has directed museums for the last twelve years, including six years at the Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis. As director of the Cincinnati Art Museum, Kitchin will oversee a collection that includes works by Édouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, and Edward Hopper. (more…)
British citizens have raised £8 million to save Edouard Manet‘s “Portrait of Fanny Claus” from leaving the country. The painting was originally sold last year to a foreign buyer, but the government placed and export bar on the work and therein made its sale available to British public institutions. Donations were made by over 1,000 members of the public , and were combined with £5.9 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund and £850,000 from The Art Fund to reach the £7.83 million needed to purchase the work for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
‪‬Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum seeks to raise £7.83 million to stop Edouard Manet’s Portrait of Mademoiselle Claus (1868) from being sold to a foreign private collector at £28.35 million. The Ashmolean has until August before the work is required to be sent overseas, but will send the painting on a British tour if they raise the money from philanthropists and foundations. [AO Newslink]
All images by Caroline Claisse for Art Observed.
“Manet, the Man Who Invented Modernity,” is currently on view at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. This is Édouard Manet‘s first ever solo retrospective at the museum, and his first in France after almost 30 years. Since a 1983 show at the Grand Palais, which marked the 100th anniversary of the artist’s death, appreciation of his biography and boundary-breaking impressionism has been reshaped.
During his lifetime, Manet was a widely known and chronicled personality. Poet Théodore de Banville described him as a “laughing blonde,” considered a charismatic Casanova who frequented cafes. Renowned impressionist painter Edgar Degas once fought with him so bitterly that Manet slashed a gifted work- the story goes that Degas forgave him for being so charming. Manet died of syphilis in 1883, following a prolific 20-year career.
More images and text after the jump…
Alberto Giacometti, Grand Buste de Diego Avec Bras, executed 1957, cast 1958 (est. £3.5–5 million, bought in), via Sothebys.com
Tuesday evening’s forty-two lot sale of Impressionist and Modern Art at Sotheby’s London brought in £68.8 million (or $111 million) for thirty-two lots sold. The auction house reports being “very pleased” with the total, which is the fourth highest ever in the department at the London location. The featured lot, Picasso’s La Lecture, exceeded its presale estimate after slow, thoughtful bidding by at least seven interested parties that increased in increments of £500,000. It sold to a telephone bidder for £25.2 million against a presale estimate of £12-18 million (estimates do not include the buyers premium, prices realized do). The real surprise, though, came when both Giacometti lots which carried the second and third highest presale estimates failed to sell. Bidding for an oil on canvas portrait of the artist’s brother ended at £2.7 million and a bronze sculpture of the same subject passed at £3.2 million.
The sale room at Sotheby’s London on Tuesday, via Art Observed
more story and images after the jump…
Self-Portrait with a Palette, Edouard Manet sold for a record £22,441,250 (est. £20-30 million) Image via Sotheby’s
Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern sale last night marked a sluggish start to the summer auction season in London as sixteen of the 51 lots offered failed to find buyers. In percentage terms, 31 percent went unsold by lot and 16 percent by value. The sale totaled £112,101,350 ($165,282,230) – surpassing the low end of the pre-sale estimate of £101 million ($150 million), but far off the £148 million ($220 million) high estimate. The total is the third-highest ever achieved for an Impressionist and Modern evening sale at Sotheby’s in London and stands in stark contrast to the £33.5 million realized in June 2009. In another encouraging sign of a surging market, nineteen lots fetched over a million pounds, and of those, three made over ten million pounds. In all, four artist records were set. The sale was topped by the cover-lot Edouard Manet‘s Self-Portrait with a Palette, which reportedly sold to the New York based dealer Frank Giraud for a record £22,441,250 ($33,087,379). The previous Manet record was set at Christie’s when La Rue Mosnier Aux Drapeaux sold for $26.4 million in 1989. The work, consigned by hedge-fund billionaire Steven A Cohen, had been estimated to fetch between £20 million and £30 million.
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Nymphéas, Claude Monet (est. £30 – 40million)
The June sales in London are packed with potentially record-breaking Impressionist and modern works that are expected to fetch a combined total of £300-450 million. If the pre-sale estimates are realized, these the most lucrative series of auctions ever held in London, easily surpassing the £298 million realized in June 2008 before the global economic meltdown during which the June sales achieved just £96 million. Giovanna Bertazzoni, Director and Head of Impressionist and Modern art at Christie’s, London has noted the recent confidence renewed in vendors in light of the the strong results witnessed at auction over the last year, “we are witnessing a great willingness from clients to consign works of art of the highest quality. There is a fierce international demand in the art market, particularly for the rarest and the best, and the market itself is now truly global as illustrated at our auction in New York in May where we saw bidding from Russia, China and the Middle East, as well as from Europe and the Americas.”
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Portrait of Ãngel Fernández de Soto, Pablo Picasso (est. £30-40million)
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Tracey Emin’s ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1996’ via The Independent
In an act that summons issues of appropriation of artistic works, the Chapman brothers, just before Tracey Emin’s White Cube show in London, announce an unauthorized rebuild of Emin’s infamous tent which was destroyed by the same 2004 art storage warehouse fire that burned their work as well [The Independent]
Damien Hirst is looking for identical twins to sit in front of his spot paintings for 100 days in the Tate Modern [Boing Boing]
A Q&A with Michael Moses, co-creator of the Mei Moses Fine Art Index [Monocle]
Video from the opening of Museum Brandhorst in Munich via Vernissage TV
Video: The Museum Brandhorst, home of the Udo and Anette Brandhorst Collection, opens in Munich [Vernissage TV]
A couple volunteers to move their house into Miami MOCA for a Fritz Haeg work [Tuscaloosa News via Art in America]
Sanyu’s ‘Cat and Birds’ via Christie’s set a record at auction for Chinese oils
Hong Kong auctions small but strong [Bloomberg]
and in related, ART HK 09 successful despite market jitters and swine flu fears [Artforum]
Takeshi Murakami’s ‘The Emergence of God at the Reversal of Fate’ via SLAMXHYPE
A piece from Murakami that is 5 years in the making will be unveiled in Venice on the eve of the Biennale’s opening [Slamxhype]
Warhol authentication battle moves closer to trial [Art Newspaper]
Rendering of Jean Nouvel’s Louvre Abu Dhabi via LA Times
Construction begins on Jean Nouvel’s Louvre Abu Dhabi, expected to be completed in 2012 or 2013 [LA Times]
Edouard Manet’s ‘The Bohemian’ at Louvre Abu Dhabi via NY Times
In related, Carol Vogel gives a preview of what is to be exhibited the Louvre Abu Dhabi [NY Times]
and in further related, some of the works in the collection were bought in this spring’s Yves St. Laurent auction at Christie’s [Financial Times]
Kehinde Wiley’s ‘Jerry Valdes, After Titian’s (Tiziano Vecellio)’ via WSJ
Kehinde Wiley releases his first book of photographs [WallSreetJournal]
Indicted old masters dealer Larry Salander takes a job at an upstate NY gallery, selling his own paintings for $100 [Bloomberg]
Richard Serra, out-of-the-round X (1999). Album cover for Sunn O))), Monoliths & Dimensions (2009) via Frieze
Richard Serra’s work used for cover of SunnO)))’s new album Monoliths & Dimensions [Frieze]
and in related, Serra receives an honorary degree from alma mater Yale [AP]
and in further related, Yale is involved in a lawsuit over Van Gogh’s ‘The Night Café,’ allegedly stolen by the Soviet government in the 1920s [Hartford Courant via Art Market Monitor]
James Turrell’s ‘Unseen Blue’ at the James Turrell Museum via WSJ
A look at the newly-opened James Turrell Museum in Colomé, Argentina [WSJ]
A look at outsized artworks at this year’s Art Basel, featuring Sigmar Polke, Nan Goldin, Banks Violette and others [Artdaily]
and related, Frieze Art Fair announces it program for this October [Frieze]
On Wednesday November 5th, Christie’s conducted its sale of the estates of two separate widows (the Alice Lawrence and Hillman family collections) bearing similar works of mostly late 19th and early to mid-20th century pieces, in an auction thus titled “The Modern Age.” These auctions included works by headliners such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Mark Rothko, Fernand Léger, Edouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio De Chirico and René Magritte. The event followed the latest Sotheby’s auction for Impressionist and Modern art on Monday (as covered by AO here) which disappointedly totaled $223.8 million against the $338 million low estimate. Additionally, the Modern Age sale corresponded to a particularly steep post-presidential race drop in the public equity markets in which the Dow plunged 486 points.
The auction results were no surprise considering the current tepid environment in the art market: The two collections listed 58 lots, of which 17 did not sell, for a total sale of $47 million, which was less than half of its $104 million low estimate. Christie’s said 51% of buyers were American and 29% European. Though Surrealist lots by Magritte (see image above) and De Chirico (see below) did well, of the lots that were brought in were the most expensive of the sale, notably, Manet’s “Fillette sur un banc/Girl on a Bench,” a 1880 portrait of a girl with a wide-brim hat estimated at $12-18 million (see image below), and Rothko’s “No. 43 (Mauve),” estimated at $20-30 million. Other works by Cézanne, Renoir, and de Kooning also failed to sell.
Bleak Night at Christie’s, in Both Sales and Prices [NY Times]
Art-Market Rout Persists: Rothko Snubbed at Auction [Bloomberg]
Buyers Cool to Private-Collection Art at Christies [Reuters]
Market Forces Bring Fire-Sale Prices for Christie’s “Modern Age” [Art Info]
The Modern Age: Property from the Hillman Family Collection [Art Daily]
Christie’s Wan and Woeful Night [CultureGrrl]
Christie’s Website
more auction results, quotes and images after the jump…
