Bonhams to sell collection of Australia’s leading aboriginal artist, Paddy Bedford

SYDNEY.- This unique auction milestone offered by Bonhams in Sydney, Australia on November 21, will be the first time a single-artist Aboriginal art sale has been held anywhere. The carefully selected 26 works, hand-picked by the specialist team from Bonhams in consultation with the Estate have also never been offered on the secondary market before. Bedford, who died in 2007, is one of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary artists and undoubtedly one of the most celebrated and successful Aboriginal artist of the last decade. [...]

New international centre for the visual arts designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects opens in Colchester

COLCHESTER.- firstsite, a major new centre for the visual arts, designed by internationally acclaimed Rafael Viñoly Architects, opened in Colchester on Sunday 25 September 2011. firstsite is home for the work of the long established visual arts organisation of the same name. Spread over 3,200 square metres on a landmark site bounded by the original Roman wall of Colchester, and set in extensive grounds, the new building includes purpose-built gallery spaces for major international exhibitions. It also features a display space [...]

Indian Highway: A 360° portrait of the sub-continent and its “miracle” at Maxxi

ROME.- Maxxi is hosting Indian Highway, the major touring group show coproduced with the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, organized in Rome by Maxxi Art and curated by Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gunnar B. Kvaran and Giulia Ferracci (Maxxi Art). Indian Highway – as the emblematic title/metaphor for the country and its dizzying race towards the future suggests – describes the economic boom, the technological development, the social transformations, the conflicts and the cohabitation of [...]

Exceptional British art selection highlights Sotheby’s contemporary art evening auction

LONDON.- Sotheby’s forthcoming Contemporary Art Evening Auction on Thursday, October 13, 2011, which coincides with London’s Frieze Art Fair, will be led by an exceptionally strong section of British Art that is highlighted by Lucian Freud’s Boy’s Head of 1952. The British Art section also includes important pieces by Peter Doig, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Marc Quinn and Glenn Brown. The auction will also feature works by established greats such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Miquel Barceló and Sigmar Polke as well [...]

Metropolitan Museum launches expanded and redesigned website with more than 340,000 works of art

NEW YORK, NY.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art has relaunched its website, www.metmuseum.org, it was announced today by Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Museum. Key features of the expanded and redesigned site include comprehensive access to more than 340,000 works of art in the Museum’s encyclopedic collections; extensive information and multimedia features on exhibitions, programs, and galleries; a completely new and streamlined design for greater ease of viewing the vast array of images, resources, and other material now online; and [...]

Sotheby’s New York to hold its first evening sale of Contemporary prints in October

NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s New York will hold its first-ever evening sale of prints on 27 October 2011. Important Contemporary Prints from an American Private Collection will offer a stunning selection of 37 works by artists including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg, which are notable for their wonderful condition. The Collection is also remarkable for the number of comprehensive sets that it contains, led by six complete Warhol portfolios that were purchased directly from his Factory and had [...]

Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Museum shows N.C. Wyeth’s Treasure Island paintings

CHADDS FORD, PA. (AP).- A century after N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations of the pirates and scalawags of “Treasure Island” first appeared, the iconic images considered the definitive version of the classic tale are reunited for the first time since their completion. The Brandywine Museum has reassembled them in a new exhibit marking the 100th anniversary of Wyeth’s “Treasure Island” and the 40th anniversary of the museum, not far from an old carriage house where Wyeth created the 17 large oils on canvas for publishing [...]

New York’s revered Salmagundi Club announces details of October art auction fundraisers

NEW YORK, NY.- New York City’s revered Salmagundi Club – an artists’ organization founded in 1871 – is planning a major fundraiser during the month of October that comprises three auctions of juried artworks submitted by its artist-members. The auctions will be held at the Salmagundi Club on Friday, Oct. 14 at 8 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 23 at 2 p.m. (following a brunch in the dining room), and Friday Oct. 28 at 8 p.m. As a special incentive, no buyer’s premium will be [...]

High presents exhibition showcasing the distinguished Huber Family collection of American art

ATLANTA, GA.- The High Museum of Art is hosting “Embracing Elegance, 1885–1920: American Art from the Huber Family Collection,” an important exhibition showcasing the collection of turn-of-the-century American art collected by Atlantans Russell and Jack Huber over the last 25 years. With 35 paintings, pastels and drawings, the exhibition features work by artists Cecilia Beaux, Frank W. Benson, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Robert Henri, Lilla Cabot Perry, John Singer Sargent, Everett Shinn, John Sloan, John Henry Twachtman and J. Alden Weir. “Embracing Elegance, 1885–1920” [...]

New media and depictions of financial turmoil big focus at Moscow’s Fourth Biennale

MOSCOW (REUTERS).- New media and depictions of financial turmoil were on display atMoscow’s fourth Biennale, which kicked off on the weekend across the capital giving a much-needed boost to Russia’s modern art scene. Called “Rewriting Worlds,” many of the 64 featured artists, from 33 countries, are exhibiting for the first time at Russia’s largest art show, in a plush department store and trendy galleries dotted across Moscow. “We wanted a digital piece of art to show how we are both fueled [...]

Retrospective of photographer W. Eugene Smith’s work on view at Martin-Gropius-Bau

BERLIN.- W. Eugene Smith, who was born in 1918 in Wichita, Kansas, and died in 1978 in Tucson, Arizona, first made a name for himself as a politically and socially committed photojournalist in the USA in the 1940s. Many of his photographic reports appeared in Life, the leading picture magazine that had been launched in New York in 1936. Smith saw in photography more than just an illustration to a text and had often asked editors for a greater say in [...]

The Denver Art Museum is first venue for “Robert Adams: The Place We Live” exhibition

DENVER, CO.- The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is the first U.S. venue for Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs. The exhibition features more than 200 black-and-white photos spanning Adams’s 45-year career, showcasing the artistic legacy of the American photographer and his longstanding engagement with the contemporary Western landscape. Adams lived and worked in Colorado for nearly 30 years. Many of his most acclaimed images were taken in the Rocky Mountain region and will strike a familiar chord with [...]

Rijksmuseum is largest loaning institution to exhibition at Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna

AMSTERDAM.- Providing a total of 17 paintings, the Rijksmuseum is making the largest contribution of loaning institutions to the exhibition Winter Tales: Depictions of Winter in European Art from Bruegel to Beuys, which was organised by former Rijksmuseum Director in Chief Ronald de Leeuw on behalf of Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. More than 180 objects, ranging from paintings to a sleigh, tell the story of European winters from 1450 to the present. Hendrick Avercamp, Winterlandschap bij een stad, 1620 For centuries, artists have [...]

80 outstanding 19th century French drawings from the Louvre go on view at the Morgan Library

NEW YORK, NY.- This fall The Morgan Library & Museum hosts an exhibition of eighty of the Musée du Louvre’s finest drawings by artists working in France from the onset of the Revolution in 1789 through the establishment of the Second Empire in 1852. David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France: Drawings from the Louvre, which runs through December 31, 2011, offers an unprecedented opportunity to experience the mastery of Corot, David, Delacroix, Géricault, Ingres, Prud’hon, and other celebrated artists of the era. The Louvre [...]

With over one hundred loans “Picasso 1905 in Paris” exhibition at Kunsthalle Bielefeld

BIELEFELD.- 1905 was a key year for Picasso. After his melancholy Blue Period, he began creating the brighter paintings of acrobats and circus artistes of his Pink Period at his studio in Montmartre. Picasso had, in the meantime, settled in the metropolis of Paris. He was now more fascinated by the antique-oriented paintings by French artist Puvis de Chavannes than by the work of Henri Toulouse-Lautrecs, his role model at the time of his first trip to Paris. Archaic-looking lads, monumental [...]