Category: visual

An important house in the California desert designed by Richard Neutra is for sale at auction. Now the homeowners who undertook a major restoration “hope Neutra’s masterpiece will play a role in a third movement: promoting architecture as a collectible art worthy of the same consideration as painting and sculpture.”

“The Prado has in the last several years hired a crew of gifted young curators under an ambitious young director with Byronic good looks named Miguel Zugaza. Now there’s a serious and world-class exhibition program, more than two million visitors annually (this year a record number is expected) — and, just opening, a 237,000-square-foot extension. It’s said to have cost several times more than was budgeted; but then, so did your kitchen. The final price tag was $219 million.”

“A year after his death, it has been revealed that Simon Sainsbury has made one of the most significant art bequests to the nation, a collection worth about £100 million. The Tate and National galleries have received 18 paintings, including works by Monet, Degas, Gauguin and Bacon, each one a masterpiece, from a benefactor who preferred anonymity during his lifetime.”

Artnews has a list. But “Jeff Koons, whose collectors include billionaire Eli Broad, and Damien Hirst, whose shark is owned by hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen, failed to draw a vote from museum curators nominating artists who’ll be famous in 105 years’ time for U.S. magazine ARTnews.”

“London is enjoying a rash of exhibitions by artists who draw their inspiration from popular street culture, and salerooms are planning to increase the exposure they get in major auctions. Described variously as street, urban or graffiti artists, few have had a traditional fine-art education and most have their roots in graphic design or are simply self-taught… But the artists and galleries that represent them are cocking a snook at the establishment because they have caught the imagination of the public, collectors and investors alike.”

There is a museum in Tehran with more than $5 billion worth of art by the masters of the Western world locked away in its vaults, away from public view. “Despite being widely judged as the most important and comprehensive western art collection in Asia, the treasures are squirreled away behind a high-security door that can be opened only using a safe combination number.” The museum claims that it has no responsibility to display the works, and decries what it claims is a Western insistence on its own cultural superiority.

“A collection of artworks, which is thought to be worth up to £100m ($206m), has been donated to the Tate and the National Gallery. British art collector Simon Sainsbury, who died last year, bequeathed 18 paintings from artists including Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin and Lucian Freud.”

“A painting by Winston Churchill, which President Harry Truman called one of his ‘most valued possessions’ after receiving it as a gift from the British prime minister in 1951, will be sold at Sotheby’s, the auction house said Saturday… In a note accompanying the gift, Churchill described the painting, now valued at up to $1.03 million, as ‘about as presentable as anything I can produce.'”

“An original work worth thousands of pounds by Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin or Sir Peter Blake could be yours for as little as £40. The catch, however, is that the artist’s identity will not be revealed until after the work has been bought.”

Martín Ramírez, a Mexican immigrant who lived in a California mental hospital for more than 30 years, was also one of the more visionary “outsider” artists of the last century. So when “a cache of some 140 of [Ramirez’s] drawings, all from the last three years of Ramírez’s life, many of them dated and most in great shape,” was discovered in a California garage recently, curators at the American Folk Art Museum were on the next plane.