Back in November, I posted about some recently rediscovered Renaissance altarpiece panels. Here’s the followup:
Word was, a modest Oxford librarian named Miss Jean Preston had hung the tiny gold-leaf panels on the back of her guest room door. She thought them “quite nice.”
Last Thursday, having been discovered to be lost masterpieces by Renaissance master […]
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Sotheby’s Hong Kong
Xu Beihong, Put Down Your Whip, 1939
April 7
Estimate: Not published
Price Fetched: $9.2 million
China has been invaded.
Not only by Western collectors swooping in frantically to buy contemporary art, but by the Western art aesthetic that has driven the market in the last few years. Prices for Chinese oil painting from the earlier part […]
It’s good to be king.
The numbers are pretty staggering. Artprice.com has compiled a list of the top-selling artists of last year. To give you an idea of just how torrentially money rained into the art market in 2006, the total for the top ten artists alone was $1.2 billion, up from $576 million just two […]
Where the money flows, fakes will follow.
The Times of London has reported that Christie’s had to pull a work from an upcoming modern and contemporary sale that its experts had attributed to the cross-dressing, Turner Prize-winning Brit artist Grayson Perry.
Seems the artist couldn’t verify its authenticity.
Declaring that forgery is the sincerest form of flattery, […]
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Shy Boy, She Devil, and Isis: The Art of Conceptual Craft. Selections from the Wornick Collection
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
September 10, 2007 - January 6, 2008
So just after I get my craft rant off my chest (two posts down), I get a press notice for this upcoming exhibition at the Boston MFA:
Shy Boy, She Devil, […]
The Abstract Expressionist painters were a moody lot. Jackson Pollock had a penchant for belting back prodigious amounts of liquor and then brawling. Willem de Kooning, no slouch himself in the juice department, womanized and shared gutters with Bowery bums. Arshile Gorky was a stormy, temperamental loner. And Mark Rothko? He had a rep for […]
Craft in America
A three-part PBS documentary (in HD) airing May 30,2007
Includes companion book and traveling national exhibition
How many times have I heard a glass, wood, ceramic, metal or fiber artist lamenting that their work is too often only relegated to the ghetto of craft?
Too many.
Take a look at the prices at high-end studio […]
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Swann Galleries
African-American Fine Art Sale
Feb 6, 2007
Above: Romare Bearden color screenprint Martin Luther King, Jr.—Mountain Top, 1968
I don’t know why no one thought of it before. The market for African-American art has been on a quiet, steady rise for the last decade or so. But not until last month did any auction house think to […]
Back in May of this year, Shannon’s Fine Art Auctioneers sold a lovely flower picture by French realist Henri Fantin-Latour for an impressive price of more than $1 million. Now, however, authorities have announced that the work, titled Bouquet d’Hiver, was stolen property.
Before coming to Shannon’s, the painting was reportedly sold to […]
Big artist, big painting, big bucks. Allegedly, Hollywood entertainment mogul David Geffen has sold a 4 x 8 foot drip painting by Jackson Pollock for the record-breaking price of $140 million. The previous “highest price ever paid” record was set back in June when Ronald S. Lauder purchased Gustav Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” […]
