Category: visual

An Emily Carr painting is auctioned for $1 million in Vancouver – a record for the artist, and the most ever paid for a piece of art at auction in Western Canada. – CBC

The man who put the purported Diebenkorn painting for sale on eBay Monday (and received a final bid of $135,805) “acknowledged yesterday that he concocted part of the story he used to describe the work and said he would be willing to let the buyer out of the sale. Far from being a married homeowner who cleaned the painting out of his garage to please his wife, he is single and has sold a raft of paintings on eBay.” – New York Times

Christie’s 20^th-century art auction Tuesday night had one blockbuster: a 1932 Picasso portrait of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, that sold for $28.6 million. It took Picasso just two and a half hours to paint it. – New York Times

Tonight one of Emily Carr’s best paintings goes up for auction in Vancouver. It’s expected to bring the highest price for a painting ever paid in Western Canada. How much?  Between $300,000 and $500,000. “The current record for an Emily Carr painting sold at auction was “In the Circle,” which sold in Toronto in 1987 for $297,000. The current record in Western Canada for a painting sold at auction is $231,000. And the current national auction record is Lawren Harris’s “Lake Superior III,” which sold for $1.56-million.” – National Post (Canada)

In the time of Frank Gehry, one may begin to think an innovative new museum requires an innovative new structure to house it. But the new Tate Modern has found its home in a reused power station that has been transformed into a work of art unto its own. “With one neat sidestep Sir Nicholas Serota avoided all the controversy that would inevitably have raged had he commissioned a new building. He picked a site which makes the most of that much-underused London asset, the Thames, and has a stunningly powerful relationship with St Paul’s Cathedral.” – The Telegraph (UK)

DANGER – 650,000 VOLTS: That pretty much describes the impact the new Tate Modern has. “We are trying both to create a museum of modern art and rethink what a museum of modern art is.” – San Francisco Chronicle

OR THE LATEST BEHEMOTH? “What are people going to say in 100 years about all these new museums for modern art that we’re building, which seem to be getting almost as big as the Met?” – New York Times

The big bold Tate Modern “signals the importance of the art of our times, and its centrality in our culture.” – The Guardian

“Sinister, bleak and elitist? Or cool, beautiful and welcoming?” London’s new Tate Modern opens officially on Thursday, but three days of parties and lavish preview receptions – expected to draw 10,000 people – are already underway. And no one’s without an opinion on how the new gallery will or will not transform the city’s cultural life. – The Telegraph (UK)

A California man recently put a “‘great big wild abstract painting’ that he said was bought years ago at a garage sale in Berkeley and had a small hole inflicted by a son wielding a plastic tricycle” up for sale on eBay. Bidding started at 25 cents, and within minutes had soared to $135,805, due to speculation that it was actually a 1952 Diebenkorn. “A six-figure sale would not only be one of the highest prices paid online for art, it would also be a powerful testimony to the ability of the Internet to ignite a sales frenzy.” – New York Times

Melbourne antique dealer John Furphy was proud to announce that the Australian art market has experienced an unprecedented boom over the last three years – due in part to the growing popularity of Aboriginal “dot” paintings – with total sales doubling (to $69 million) between 1997 and 1999. – The Age (Melbourne)

A gallery owner in Auckland, New Zealand is using DNA testing of a few hairs trapped under the paint to verify if his painting is a genuine Gauguin. – CBC