A Francis Bacon painting has sold for nearly £18m at auction in London on Tuesday. Study for a Portrait 1953 exceeded expectation as Christie’s had valued the masterpiece at £11m. The oil canvas, which has not been up for auction before, was described as “an arresting and dark study in the degradation of power”. It was previously owned…
The Camargo Brooch, made in 1942, combines platinum, diamonds, rubies and emeralds for a classic Van Cleef & Arpels ballet design. The painting above of Marie Camargo, La Camargo Dancing, was created around 1730 by Nicolas Lancret (1690-1743) and can be seen in the Andrew W. Mellon Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC., and another…
A group of Italians want the Mona Lisa back in Florence in 2013 and plan to gather 100,000 signatures to back their campaign. The petition for the Louvre to loan the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece has been launched by the National Committee for Historical, Cultural and Environmental Heritage together with the Province of Florence. Organizers…
Part of the artist’s Water Lilies series, worth $25m (£15m), was left to the Corcoran Gallery by Huguette Clark, who died last month aged 104. The painting has been out of public view for 86 years. The Corcoran has a gallery which bears the name of her father Senator William A Clark, who died the same…
A rarely seen painting by Pablo Picasso has been sold for almost £13.5m at Christie’s auction house in London, exceeding expectations. Jeune Fille Endormie (1935), a portrait of the Spanish artist’s lover, had been estimated to sell for £9m-12m. The painting was donated to the University of Sydney, provided the establishment used money from the sale…
London‘s National Gallery is to limit visitor numbers to a major exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci works in an attempt to prevent large crowds detracting from the viewing experience. Admissions will be fixed at 180 every half hour – 50 fewer people than the gallery is legally allowed to let in. Advance booking opens even though the…
A Francis Bacon masterpiece painted at the height of the British artist’s impassioned affair with a former World War Two fighter pilot is expected to fetch up to 9 million pounds ($15 million) when it is auctioned for the first time in June at Sotheby’s. Bacon’s 1961 oil on canvas “Crouching Nude” is one of…
The Bishop’s Palace in Arezzo is celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) with an exhibit that unveils his intimate, spiritual side with works never before shown to the public. “Giorgio Vasari: Santo e’ bello” – which opened yesterday – focuses on the artist’s little-known commissions for the Brotherhood of Towns,…
Debra Craine in today’s Times comments on the new collaboration between the National Gallery and the Royal Ballet: The idea of artists and choreographers collaborating isn’t new. Pablo Picasso worked with Léonide Massine and Robert Rauschenberg inspired Trisha Brown; Jasper Johns advised Merce Cunningham; Isamu Noguchi joined forces with Martha Graham; David Hockney designed for…
After my plea for covers to help Gramophone Magazine’s quest, I was pleased to receive lots of suggestions, some of which were a little off-theme but funny nevertheless. Those I haven’t included…. So here are the best of the worst so far. Some are simply kitsch (the Westminster covers are quite witty if you look at them through…
The hunt is set to start for the tomb and possible remains of the model for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in an ex-convent in her home town, Florence. announces Italy’s news service ANSA. Giuseppe Pallanti, a researcher on the Tuscan countries from XV to XVIII centuries who’s written a book called ‘La vera identità della Gioconda’ Un…
Living in Covent Garden with London‘s National Gallery on my doorstep, I often used its galleries as a useful shortcut between Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square. As the gallery has free entrance you can visit as many times as you wish from 5 minutes to 5 hours – now that’s civilized! So dashing between the two…
The Italian capital is hosting an exhibition of masterpieces by 16th-century artist Lorenzo Lotto, whose distinctive paintings have enjoyed an upsurge in popularity over recent decades. The Scuderie del Quirinale in the heart of Rome is displaying 56 paintings by Lotto (1480-1556), under a special agreement signed with the regional government of Marche, where the…
On several paintings by artists of the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th Century a darkening of the original yellow areas, painted with the chrome yellow pigment (for the scientifically minded PbCrO4, PbCrO4·xPbSO4, or PbCrO4·xPbO) is observed. The most famous of these are the various Sunflowers paintings Vincent van Gogh made during his career. Van…
Arts organizations and public donations have raised enough money to keep one of Pieter Brueghel the Younger‘s finest paintings on public display in Britain, organizers of the campaign said on Thursday. A grant of around one million pounds ($1.5 million) from the National Heritage Memorial Fund raised the total to the 2.7 million pounds needed…
One of last year’s most striking installations in Milan was the Last Supper by Peter Greenaway. Originally intended to be projected on Da Vinci’s original work it was finally installed in the Palazzo Reale next to Milan’s Duomo where a white and transparent recreation of the fresco’s table, chairs, plates and bread rolls was seductively illuminated, and a 1:1 scale…
The end of November marked the start of a six-week program in New York that celebrates Italian design and culture. I Saloni Milano, or the Milan Furniture Fair — sponsored by Federlegno Arredo, an Italian federation of wood and cork furnishings manufacturers; Cosmit, the fair organizer; the Italian Trade Commission; and the Italian Ministry of…
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