Category: visual

Restituted art stolen by Nazis has become big business. But “sometimes we are dealing with a business in which many secondary players, lawyers, art dealers, are trying to get their piece of the pie. These are often the driving forces and are driving up prices.”

“Experts in Italian renaissance art have recently discovered two works by the Florentine painter Fra Angelico “hanging behind a door in the spare room of an elderly woman’s two-up, two-down in Oxford. The paintings will go on sale next year and are expected to fetch more than £1 million.”

Art dealers are angry that Sotheby’s and Christie’s have bought their way into the Maastricht Fair. “Art fairs are supposedly the trade’s answer to auctions, a way of creating a glamorous event to attract buyers, so the presence of an auction house in a fair—let alone such a prestigious one—was seen as a Trojan horse.”

Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia is selling its prized 1875 painting by Thomas Eakins “for $68 million to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, founded by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton and under construction in Bentonville, Ark. That sum is a record for an artwork created in the United States before World War II.”

London’s National Portrait Gallery has bought a picture of Lady Jane Grey for £100,000. But critics are deriding the purchase. “It’s an appallingly bad picture and there’s absolutely no reason to suppose it’s got anything to do with Lady Jane Grey. But if the National Portrait Gallery has public money to burn, then so be it.”

“The succession of fires that has destroyed three Adler & Sullivan buildings in Chicago this year, casting a pall over the 150th anniversary of Sullivan’s birth, presents a daunting challenge to city officials: How to prevent fire from sending more of Chicago’s architectural treasures to the graveyard?”

A Swedish gym teacher has returned a piece of the Acropolis to Greece. “Birgit Wiger-Angner’s family held the marble for 110 years, but she decided to return it to Athens after hearing about Greece’s Elgin marbles campaign. The small fragment comes from the Acropolis’s Erechtheion temple.”

Former Getty curator Marion True, on trial in Italy for thefts of antiquities, days the antiquities market is probably the “most corrupt” of art markets. “The museum had to accept the premise that the majority of antiquities available on the market had, in all probability, been exported from the countries of origin illegally,” True, 58, wrote, explaining why the Getty adopted policies that restricted artifacts it could buy.

Art is totally hot right now, and we’re not just talking about the big masterpieces that sell for millions at snooty auction houses in New York and London. “In an increasingly overheated world-wide art market, the demands of a voracious — and growing — community of buyers is putting pressure on artists to produce more work, faster, than ever before.”

Until he sold off three paintings for a combined $283 million this fall, many outside the art world were probably unaware of Hollywood mogul David Geffen’s status as a major collector. But “insiders have [long] acknowledged Geffen’s inventory as one of the largely unseen wonders of the contemporary art world… To those who have watched Geffen quietly amass paintings by Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning, these sales make a lot of sense.”