German billionaire pays over $70 million for Holbein painting, outbids Staedel Museum in Frankfurt [AO Newslink]

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van Gogh’s “Ernte in der Provence” (1888), at Kunstmuseum Basel.

The Kunstmuseum Basel is currently showing works by the master painter Vincent van Gogh.  Seventy paintings, both better- and lesser-known, are featured in this first large-scale showing of exclusively landscape works by the artist.  The van Gogh paintings will be accompanied by a biographical video on the artist as well as forty landscape pieces by his contemporaries.  The intended result gives patrons a look at van Gogh’s contribution to the evolution of technique and concept in landscape work. The show closes on September 27.

Related links:
Kunstmuseum Basel
Switzerland’s art blockbuster of the year: Van Gogh landscapes [GenevaLunch]

Vernissage has video of the exhibition.

More images and story after the jump…

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Wolfgang Tillmans, ‘Anders Pulling Splinter from his Foot.’ 2004. Via Design Boom.

Currently on exhibit at Schaulager in Basel are approximately 200 paintings and sculptures dating from the 15oo’s to the present, taken from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel.   Alongside the works are thirty pieces from the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation and several works from private collections. Schaulager is meant to function as a kind of new form of art institution, “one that is neither museum nor traditional repository,”  but a “viewing warehouse,” with optimal climatic conditions where art can be simultaneously stored, preserved and viewed all at once.  Curated by Theodora Vischer, the current exhibit juxtaposes old and new artworks and was carefully selected and arranged.  The installation was “not produced based on the model of a classical museum hanging.  Rather, the result was a different, new narrative, or better: an essay of pictures.  It evolved, image by image, by means of diverse and unexpected relationships and numerous dialogues that ensued between the works, until finally the essay ‘Holbein to Tillmans’ took shape.”

Rodney Graham’s, ‘Allegory of Folly: Study for an Equestrian Monument in the Form of a Wind Vane,’ from 2005 alludes to an earlier work; ‘Praise of Folly,’ by Erasmus of Rotterdam, which was illustrated by Hans Holbein the Younger, a German artist from the 16th Century. Via DesignBoom.

Related Links:
Holbien to Tillmans [Schaulager]
Video of Holbein to Tillmans Exhibition. [Schaulager]
Holbein to Tillmans at Schaulager, Basel [Vernissage TV]
Holbein to Tillmans Exhibition at Schaulager [Design Boom]
Holbein to Tillmans- Prominentt Guests from the Kunstmuseum Basel [The ArtNetwork]

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Erasmus portrait purported to be by Holbein the Younger, via The Art News

Experts speculate that new portrait of Erasmus is by Holbein the Younger [ArtInfo]
Art auction houses have always been touted as the most transparent transactions in the system, but they are  far more complex and secretive, and in recent years, much more is at stake [Financial Times]
Review of critic Michael Fried’s latest book: Why Photography Matters… [Artforum]

Shepard Fairey’s ‘Hope’ portrait of Barack Obama, via AP

Smithsonian acquires Shepard Fairey’s ‘Hope’ portrait of Obama [ArtInfo]
White Cube’s Jay Jopling’s rise to power and the current pressure from a failing market, gossip tabloids [The Times UK]

Brad Pitt portrait in daguerreotype by Chuck Close, via W Magazine

Chuck Close’s daguerreotype portrait of Brad Pitt is W Magazine’s new cover [W Magazine]
The Vatican aims to exhibit art in a ‘national pavilion’ during the Venice Biennale as a counbterpoint to “blasphemous” modern art [Times UK]

Black on Maroon (1959) by Mark Rothko, part of the Seagram mural series, via Tate Modern; studies for the Seagram series are owned by Ezra Merkin, who lost billions to Bernie Madoff ‘s investment scheme.

Assailed Madoff victim has 12 Rothkos; collectors salivate [Bloomberg]
The Art Newspaper explores the changing emerging art markets of China, and Russia here, and India here [Art Newspaper]