2011 Pittsburgh Biennial Presents Nine Contemporary Artists with Strong Ties to City

PITTSBURGH, PA.- Carnegie Museum of Art’s contribution to the multi-venue 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial presents nine contemporary artists with strong ties to Pittsburgh addressing a broad range of subjects that touch on the idea of “work.” The exhibition runs from June 17 to September 18, 2011, in the museum’s Heinz Galleries and is organized by associate curator of contemporary art Dan Byers. The Pittsburgh Biennial at Carnegie Museum of Art feature both established and emerging artists who work in a variety of [...]

Sotheby’s Breaks Auction Record for a Work by Stanley Spencer Twice in Same Sale

LONDON (REUTERS).- The auction record for a work by British artist Stanley Spencer fell twice in one sale at Sotheby’s on Wednesday, while a Lucian Freud picture on paper also set a new high. Seven works by Spencer, described by the auctioneer as one of the 20th century’s most important British painters, were on offer at the first section of a three-part sale of the Evill/Frost Collection. They made a total of 23.0 million pounds ($37.6 million), including a record 4.7 [...]

Phillips Collection Features Works by Pioneering Abstract Artist Wassily Kandinsky

WASHINGTON, DC.- After a visit to his native Moscow in 1912, Wassily Kandinsky (1866−1944) sought to record the “extremely powerful impressions” that lingered in his memory. Working tirelessly through numerous drawings, watercolors, and oil studies over a five-month period, Kandinsky eventually arrived at his 1913 masterpiece, Painting with White Border. This exhibition, co-organized with The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, reunites Painting with White Border with 11 preparatory studies in oil, watercolor, ink, and pencil from international collections. By examining this [...]

Mark Cohen’s Work from the 1970s and ’80s Exhibited at Bruce Silverstein Gallery

NEW YORK, NY.- Bruce Silverstein Gallery announces representation and a new exhibition of the work of Mark Cohen. The exhibition, Lost/Found, features Cohen’s work from the 1970s and ‘80s that focuses on the artist’s extensive fascination with minute, cast-off elements of human effects—garbage or other small details—which Cohen makes monumental through his stimulating compositions possessing emotional weight and ineffable meaning. Renowned for his images of cropped figures shot at close range and strobe lit, previous exhibitions have portrayed Cohen as [...]

Hood Museum of Art Presents Embracing Elegance: American Art from the Huber Family Collection

HANOVER, NH.- America at the turn of the twentieth century was characterized by dramatic social, cultural, and artistic change. The works in Embracing Elegance, 1885–1920: American Art from the Huber Family Collection represent a diversity of reactions to that change while generally featuring intimate, informal subjects captured in a personally expressive manner influenced variously by the Aesthetic movement, impressionism, urban realism, and postimpressionism. The exhibition features over thirty pastels, drawings, watercolors, and paintings by such leading artists of the period [...]

Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center Gives Two 19th-Century Paintings to the Crocker Art Museum

STANFORD, CA.- The Cantor Arts Center has deaccessioned two 19th-century American paintings from its collection: Charles Christian Nahl’s Saturday Night in the Mines, 1856, and Crossing the Plains,1856. Both works are oil on canvas. Ownership of the paintings has been transferred to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. The Association of Art Museum Directors defines deaccessioning as “the process by which a work of art or other object . . . wholly or in part, is permanently removed from a [...]

Phillips de Pury & Company Announces the Highlights from June Contemporary Art Auctions

LONDON.- Phillips de Pury & Company, announces highlights from the upcoming June Contemporary Art Evening and Day auctions. Highlights of the Contemporary Evening sale are on show now at Phillips de Pury & Compay’s new space, 45-47 Brook Street at Claridge’s London. The sales will feature important modern and contemporary works across multiple genres. The Contemporary Art Evening auction comprises 32 lots with a pre-sale estimate of £10,250,000/$16,400,000 to £14,820,000/ $23,712,000.The Contemporary Art Day auction comprises 269 lots with a [...]

Kunsthaus Zürich Presents “Enter the Orbit” with New Works by Roman Ondak

ZURICH.- From 10 June to 28 August 2011 the Kunsthaus Zürich presents a solo show of works by Slovakian artist Roman Ondák – the first such exhibition at a museum in Switzerland. Ondák, one of the leading proponents of a new conceptual art, has been invited to contribute to both the 2011 Venice Biennale and documenta 2012. His two new works about the first satellite in orbit, Sputnik 1, were created especially for the Kunsthaus and are shown exclusively in Zurich. [...]

Tutto Fellini, a Fellini Season in Switzerland Opens with Exhibition at Musée de l’Elysée

LAUSANNE.- Tutto Fellini, a Fellini season in Switzerland with the Fellini, la Grande parade exhibition at Musée de l’Elysée, a complete retrospective of Federico Fellini’s films at the Cinémathèque Suisse and an exhibition dedicated to the colour photographs of the film 8 ½ launch the Fellini Foundation for film’s new exhibition space, in Sion. While La Dolce Vita has just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, the Fellini, la Grande Parade exhibition is the perfect opportunity to interrogate the relevance of the [...]

Museum-Wide Exhibition Celebrates Clay Through the Ages and From Around the World

DENVER, CO.- The Denver Art Museum (DAM) takes a closer look at the medium of clay in its summer exhibition Marvelous Mud: Clay Around the World. Celebrating the prolific and diverse material, Marvelous Mud reveals how clay has shaped culture, creativity, science and industry over time and around the globe. The museumwide exhibition explores one major medium and illustrates its diversity and history through fascinating stories that span time and geographic location. Marvelous Mud is on view June 11 through [...]

Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris Opens at the de Young

SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The de Young Museum presents a major exhibition by the seminal artist of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso. The exhibition Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris, opens on Saturday, June 11, in the Herbst Special Exhibition Galleries and runs through October 9, 2011. This exhibition of 150 important paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings created by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) is drawn from the permanent collection of the Musée National Picasso, Paris, the largest and most significant [...]

Unseen Pictures by U.S. Photographer Mike Mitchell Captured Outbreak of Beatlemania

LONDON (REUTERS).- They have been gathering dust in a basement for more than 40 years, but now U.S. photographer Mike Mitchell has decided to auction a group of pictures which capture the moment the Beatles became a worldwide phenomenon. Mitchell, now in his mid-60s, was given a press pass to the Fab Four’s first U.S. concert at the Washington Coliseum in 1964, just two days after their breakthrough television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. He was back later that [...]

Drawing by Yosuke Goda

Amazing room drawing by Japanese artist Yosuke Goda.  

Czech Republic Racing to Reclaim Valuable Artworks It Loaned for Fear of Seizure

PRAGUE (AP).- The Czech Republic is racing to reclaim valuable artworks it loaned to museums across Europe before they can be seized in a battle over a $500 million judgment to a businessman who says the government slandered him. The government has refused to abide by a 2008 Czech arbitration court ruling that it owed Josef Stava 8.3 billion koruna ($500 million) as compensation for claiming in 1992 that his blood plasma company was suspected of illegal activities, resulting in [...]

Sotheby’s to Offer a Newly Discovered Work By Sir Anthony Van Dyck at London Sale

LONDON.- Sotheby’s today announces that it will sell a newly discovered portrait by the great 17th Century Flemish painter Sir Anthony Van Dyck in its 6th July 2011 sale of Old Master and British Paintings in London. The intense and psychologically penetrating portrait of a young Carmelite monk is a hitherto unknown work, which Sotheby’s has discovered to have been painted by the youthful Van Dyck during the years he worked in Rubens’ studio. The painting is estimated to sell [...]