A Painting Looted at Least Once, From Hitler, Is on the Block

Sep 4, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

Some experts believe this 17th-century work now up for sale was originally stolen by the Nazis, but no clues to its prewar owner have turned up in years of searching.

It has become a familiar scenario in the art world: the heirs of a Jewish collector spot a painting in an auction catalog that was stolen from their relative in the Nazi era. They contact the auction house and, if all goes well, reach a settlement with the seller that ensures they receive a share of the revenue from the sale.

But what happens when the rightful heirs to art probably looted by the Nazis cannot be identified, let alone located? A work by the Antwerp painter Frans Francken the Younger that the Munich auction house Neumeister is offering on Sept. 21 raises exactly that question.

Painted in the early 17th century, “Sermon on the Mount,” shows Christ, under cloudy skies, speaking to a huddle of people of all ages who are listening intently. The current owner brought it to Neumeister for sale nine years ago. It is known to have been stolen at least once — from Adolf Hitler, a known beneficiary of Nazi looting.

But after years of research, scholars have drawn a blank on the identity of the prewar owner.

“We are in a quandary,” said Katrin Stoll, the owner and manager of the auction house.

Provenance research, which tracks the ownership history of artworks, has developed apace over the past 20 years as online databases have proliferated, access to archives has improved and the number of scholars engaged in the field has grown. Restitutions of Nazi-looted art by museums have become routine. Companies such as Mondex Corporation have made a business out of tracing the heirs of looted art and offering to recover works in return for a share of the value.

Researchers have tried for years, with limited success, to identify the earlier owners of a painting willed to the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland by the son of a known dealer in Nazi-looted art.Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

But researchers can still reach an impasse in investigating the provenance of an artwork, Nikola Doll, a researcher at the Bern Kunstmuseum in Switzerland, said.

“It can be very difficult to trace heirs in the context of the Holocaust,” she said. “Sometimes the direct heirs did not survive, and the legal heirs are more distant relatives who are scattered around the world. They often have no knowledge of their forebears’ possessions. It can even be the case that no heirs can be found.”

And not all dealers are willing to share their records, Doll said. “We would wish for more cooperation from the art market,” she said. “Some dealers won’t open their archives for provenance researchers. Others charge money for access.”

Museums that hold artworks with unclarified ownership histories can continue to display them while conducting further research. The Kunstmuseum in Bern, where Doll works, received the tainted collection of Hildebrand Gurlitt, a known dealer in Nazi-looted art, as a bequest from his son, Cornelius Gurlitt, who died in 2014. German law enforcers seized more than 1200 works at the younger Gurlitt’s Munich apartment in 2012 and hundreds more were later found in his home in Salzburg, Austria.

A team of researchers has identified nine works in the collection as having been looted by the Nazis. A further 208 works have been cleared of all suspicion. The provenance of hundreds of others has so far not been fully clarified, even after 10 years of dedicated research, which is continuing.

“There are some sensible solutions if an artwork is in public hands,” Stoll said. “We have no instruments for dealing with artworks in private hands.”

In the case of “Sermon on the Mount,” the painting is known to have been purchased by Hildebrand Gurlitt in occupied France in 1943, via a middleman with whom he frequently did business. The identity of the seller is unknown.

But this painting did not end up in a Gurlitt home. It was instead selected as being worthy of display in the Führermuseum that Hitler hoped to build in Linz, Austria.

Toward the end of the war, the oil-on-wood painting was stored in Munich alongside some 1,500 artworks also destined for that museum. They were kept in the Führerbau, or Führer’s building, and the adjacent Nazi headquarters. Hundreds of them have since been discovered to have been stolen from Jewish collectors.

Hundreds of the works in Bern were found in the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, whose father dealt in Nazi-looted art. “Sermon on the Mount,” was not among them. That work, also handled by his father, ended up with Hitler.Lennart Preiss/Getty Images

But in the chaotic last days of the war, desperate Munich residents looted the Führerbau over two days in April 1945. Some 700 artworks were stolen. Many were recovered in the weeks after the plunder, but about 400 remained lost — among them, “Sermon on the Mount.”

“There are a number of compelling red flags in the provenance of this painting,” said Stephan Klingen, an art historian at the Central Institute for Art History in Munich who has been investigating this painting’s origins for years. “But we don’t know whether it was looted by the Nazis — it might have just been regular business for Gurlitt in France. The provenance research has so far been inconclusive, but of course more could emerge at a later stage from sources in France.”

The painting did not turn up again until 2009 when it appeared on German television’s equivalent of “Antiques Roadshow.” Klingen identified it as a work stolen from Hitler’s Linz collection. He alerted the police, who seized the painting.

As the legal successor to the Nazi regime, the German government tried to claim the work. But a court returned it to the last holders of the painting, the family of the caretaker of a German army barracks who had lived in Munich in 1945. The court ruled that the family did not know it had been stolen, had acquired it in good faith through inheritance, and was therefore entitled to possess it under German law. Family members said they didn’t know where the caretaker had gotten it.

Provenance expert Nikola Doll, who has been involved in researching the Gurlitt collection at Kunstmuseum Bern.Franziska Rothenbühler

The painting is now in possession of a relative of the caretaker who was willing, her lawyer said, to reach a settlement with the heirs of the prewar owner if it turned out the painting had been looted. The relative, an older woman, has lent “Sermon on the Mount” to two museum exhibitions dealing with Gurlitt’s legacy, in part in the hope that someone would claim it. She has also waited nine years while researchers investigated its provenance.

But she is not willing to wait indefinitely for a claim that may never materialize, said her lawyer, Patrick Rosenow.

“She is over 80, she has moved into a home for the elderly,” Rosenow said. “She doesn’t want this problem transferred to her sons — she wants it resolved.”

Provenance research can be expensive, with no guaranteed results. Few private art owners have the resources to pursue it indefinitely. Stoll at Neumeister said she had hoped the German government would step in to buy “Sermon on the Mount” and fund continued research.

“The political establishment has disappointed me,” she said.

“I see the government in Berlin as responsible, as the successor to the Nazi regime,” she said, adding that the auction house has “stored it, insured it and researched it. They cannot expect us to do all this privately.”

A representative of the German government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meike Hopp, a professor of provenance research at Berlin’s Technical University, said she thought there was no issue with a private holder of the work selling it after so many years of research. But, she said, it would be good if a state institution or art fund could buy it now.

“We have come a long way in this field,” she said, “and more progress will be made — it’s likely that another piece of the puzzle will be found, and it would be possible to restitute the painting at some point. But such pictures can disappear from view if they are sold to private buyers.”

Neumeister has also asked two museums to purchase the painting and continue researching its origins. “One said no, the other didn’t answer,” Stoll said.

The estimated value of the painting, whose wood has sustained a large crack across the lower half, is considerably lower than it would be if its provenance were clarified, according to the auction house. One concern for private buyers could be that a credible claim might emerge in years to come. Previous valuations have indicated that the painting could be worth as much as $130,000, but the high estimate for this sale is half that, Stoll said.

“We hope that someone at a public institution has the courage to take on the responsibility,” Stoll said. “We would like a museum to buy it in order to raise awareness and ensure that the painting and its history don’t disappear but remain accessible.”

Klingen agreed. “We are hoping,” he said, “for a sugar daddy.”

Seoul gets another art fair as Art Busan opens design-led outpost

Sep 4, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

Seoul is set to get a new fair in November focused on art and design, after the company organising Art Busan, a fair in the country’s south, secured funding to open an event in the capital. The inaugural DEFINE Seoul (1-5 November, titled after “design” and “fine art”), will feature around 35 exhibitors and take place in the Seongsu design district, centred around the Layer Studio cultural complex, but with events spilling out into design studios and other locations across the neighbourhood.

“We are witnessing increased attention on Korea’s art and cultural scene from abroad like never before,” says Seokho Jeong, Art Busan’s managing director. Indeed, since the launch of Frieze Seoul, the city has seemingly cemented itself as a key market hub, but Jeong says that Art Busan has been “carefully monitoring the market” since well before the advent of Frieze Seoul, and was “considering various possibilities to expand prior to Covid”. In 2020, Art Busan staged a separate design section at its Busan fair, as a trial run for a standalone event.

While Frieze Seoul caters more to Western tastes, the organisers of DEFINE say their fair will focus on an “eastern aesthetic and Korean heritage”. The interior designer Teo Yang, who has joined the fair as its artistic director, will organise the inaugural edition around the theme of “A look within matter”.

The Seoul fair represents a big step up for the Art Busan brand, which has staged an annual fair in Busan since 2012. Jeong says that Art Busan will continue to expand in 2024, both in offline and digital settings, but will remain a brand “focused on the art market”. Nonetheless, he says that “often, fun ideas pop up when we collaborate with or monitor what is happening in other industries”. The first funding round, which raised an undisclosed sum, was supported by Sanghun Kim, former chief executive of Naver; Kelvin Dongho Kim, chief executive of Korea Credit Data (KCD); Tony Lyu, venture partner at SoftBank Ventures Asia; and Simon Seojoon Kim, chief executive of Hashed. The next funding round will take place in autumn next year.

Matthew Wong Turned Loneliness Into a Landscape

Sep 4, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

The Art World

Matthew Wong Turned Loneliness Into a Landscape

“Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances,” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is the oddest of ducks, a superb exhibition in which half the paintings are clumsy. Even some of the superb ones are half clumsy. That’s Wong’s charm in a nutshell, though: he seems to have had little interest in producing tasteful, polished, well-made art, thank God. His limitations were obvious from the start; in the years leading up to his suicide, in 2019, at the age of thirty-five, he didn’t correct them so much as put them to work. Once he got going, his compositions stumbled their way into smart choreographies, and his colors could be so dog-whistle shrill as to land with an eerie hush. He was a terrifyingly fast learner, too—walking through this show is like watching one of those time-lapse videos of a plant exploding out of soil. In a fair world, there would be a forest by now.

Wong painted landscapes. Art history offers a few possible terms for his style: “naïve art,” “outsider art,” “art brut.” “Outsider art” seems to be the one that’s stuck (“Outside,” a 2016 group show in Amagansett, helped put him on the map), though the truth is grayer. He taught himself to paint, but only after he’d cooled on photography, the subject of his M.F.A. He spent little time in New York but years in Hong Kong, home to the third-biggest art market on the planet. Despite being tall, good-looking, and snappily dressed, he often felt uncomfortable around people, and struggled with depression and autism. He had powerful allies in the Manhattan gallery world, though most of them he met only near the end of his life.

How much of an outsider was he, really? It’s a silly question, but it matters. A Wong painting is about inside versus outside, in every sense: social, psychological, spatial, formal. He knew his blue-chip artists, and the wall text identifies bits lifted from Wu Guanzhong, Gustav Klimt, Yayoi Kusama, and Edvard Munch. (The show, organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and curated by Vivian Li, does a smart job of exploring Wong’s influences without overexplaining.) On the other end of the seesaw, you find visual ideas so basic that you’ve known about them since you were four: the sun is a yellow disk with lines poking out of it; a body is a blob with four sticks and a circle attached; a tree is a vertical line with squiggles on top. The childish comes face to face with the canonical, but there’s no dialogue between them, unless collision counts. Wong never tries to lighten the mood, either. His paintings are humorless to the bone, and their thick impasto surfaces, invisible in the Facebook photos that first got gallerists’ attention, add a bonus whiff of anxiety.

When images like these don’t work, they are crude and nothing else. When they do, they are crude and everything else: vulnerable, cunning, ecstatic, menacing. “The Kingdom” (2017) is a painting of a forest that a terrified kid might dream about. You wouldn’t be wrong to call it Wong’s homage to Klimt’s “Birch Forest” (1903), but it’s more like a point-by-point rebuttal: instead of cozy emptiness, he gives you a suffocating place that wasn’t meant for human beings; instead of Klimt’s misty outdoor cathedral, he hits you with a phalanx of pale, blue-spotted trees, the pigments all but pricking your eyeballs. He has a way of making the outdoors look like the interior of some cramped, windowless room. There is a small, crowned figure—possibly a reference to the Chinese character for Wong’s last name, which means “king”—but nobody else. What’s the point of ruling a place where you can barely breathe?

Most of the art in this show has been divided between two galleries: one, in the horribly abbreviated terms that Wong’s death imposes, for “early” work and the other for “late.” I suggest you walk briskly through “late,” take “early” at mid-tempo, and finish by giving “late” the second, longer look it deserves. There’s a fine line between chaos and incoherence, and Wong needed a few years to get on the right side of it. “Heaven and Earth” (2015), one of the oldest works on display, is both a fair sample of the abstract ink-on-paper painting that he favored at first and a prime example of garden-variety confusion: there’s no rhythm or momentum to the brush marks, which go from thin to thick to splattered with an abruptness that’s almost surly. The early triumphs tend to be bits and pieces rather than entire paintings—the tall, gray mountain in “Landscape of the Longing” (2016), which bears a freaky resemblance to a sleeping vulture; or the furious sun in “Landscape with Mother and Child” (2017), which looks like the kind they used to sacrifice people to.

By 2018, Wong had learned three important tricks: sowing his landscapes with small figures to provide a sense of scale; using snaky diagonal forms (rivers, roads) to separate near from far; tempering layers of warm colors with cool ones. Marvel at how far the trio takes him in the mini-epic desert scene “Once Upon a Time in the West” (2018). The brushwork hasn’t changed too much, but now a magnetic current runs through everything: your gaze shoots from the dozing woman and the little beast in the foreground to the dark mountains in the distance, and when you get tired of the bright oranges and pinks in the lower half you can rest your eyes on the deep blues above. The painting’s title comes from Sergio Leone—Wong was a cinephile, too—but its light reminds me of a line from David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”: “It’s not day or night. It’s kinda half-night, you know?”

The paintings that Wong completed in 2018 and 2019, the last two years of his life, tend to have this half-night illumination, a glow that is also a burn. It was around this time that he discovered how much drama he could wring from the color blue. Mix one breakthrough with the other and you get “Tracks in the Blue Forest” (2018), something like the long, weary sigh to “The Kingdom” ’s panic attack. When you study it closely, you begin to see how savvy Wong was at turning his formal weaknesses upside down: he was never great at conveying weight, but that’s half the reason the painting works. The lower edge is an almost indecipherable bluish white, and the trees don’t widen with roots as they approach the ground—they just stop, as though dangling from the sky. The more you stare, the less solid it all looks, until the only thing left holding you steady is the set of footprints running up the middle of the canvas, at once comforting and tormenting.

“Tracks in the Blue Forest” is, unmistakably, a painting about loneliness, the curse of outsiders who want to come in. It was Wong’s great theme, and at his best he handled it with amazingly little mawkishness. That isn’t to say that “Tracks” is un-mawkish: like a number of the later, gentler paintings on display, it flatters loneliness with beauty, and seems to long for an old-fashioned, Munchian version of the feeling, all grand introspection and dazzling vistas. By contrast, there isn’t a single sentimental brushstroke in “Old Town” (2017), let alone a nostalgic one. More than any image I can think of, it looks the way twenty-first-century digital isolation feels: bright and draining, without the alibi of physical distance. It’s another claustrophobic landscape—even the sky is just one more gawky structure—but this time nothing is obviously wrong, which means that nothing can be repaired. Tiny figures seem too far away for conversation but not far enough to long for one another. Their pain is deafening. Normally it makes sense to praise a work of art by saying that you could look at it forever, but in the case of “Old Town,” one of the most haunting paintings of the past few years, I almost wish I could forget. ♦

But is it a Bernini? A Tale of Contested Identity in the Art World

Sep 4, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

The permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto contains a bronze sculpture entitled The Crucified Christ (Corpus) and attributed to the seventeenth-century Roman artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The piece was donated to the art gallery by the late Murray Frum in 2006. What isn’t well known is that the bronze was lost to history for centuries, and even after decades on the art market, the campaign to attribute the work to Bernini only began about twenty years ago. Visitors to the Toronto gallery are given no reason to think that the attribution is controversial. But there is good evidence to suspect that the $50 million bronze is not what it is claimed to be.

Gianlorenzo Bernini, The Crucified Christ (Corpus), c. 1650, Gift of the Murray Frum Family, 2006. Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Source: Wikimedia

I stumbled upon this controversy during a recent exchange with Professor Franco Mormando—a world-class Bernini scholar and the author of the 2011 biography Bernini: His Life and His Rome. In a discussion about Bernini’s politics, Mormando let slip that “there is a great debate among Bernini scholars about the attribution of the AGO bronze crucifix.” I was shocked to hear this at first. I had casually followed the story of the Frum donation in the local newspapers, and I visit the AGO several times a year, but I had never caught even a whiff of the controversy. I imagine most of the public are unaware of this.

How the bronze crucifix in the Art Gallery of Ontario got from seventeenth-century Rome to twenty-first century Toronto is an intriguing tale, but it is a narrative filled with gaps. Fortunately, there is a lot that we do know. Bernini was first commissioned to produce a bronze crucifix for the king of Spain in 1653–54. That work, still extant, looks very much like the AGO bronze, especially to the untrained eye.

Gianlorenzo Bernini, Cristo Crocifisso Escorial (Spanish) bronze, 1654-57, Madrid. Source: Wikimedia

A year or so later, a second crucifix was commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Barberini for his Parisian residence and donated to King Louis XIV after the Cardinal’s death. It is recorded in the 1684 royal inventory but seems to have gone missing just before the French Revolution. Was it melted down in an anti-clerical frenzy, or did it manage to survive the Terror, having been smuggled away to somewhere safe? We don’t know. In addition, yet another bronze is mentioned in the historical record. According to an early biographer, this was a sculpture that Bernini initially “made for himself” and which the sculptor then gave to Cardinal Francesco Maria Sforza Pallavicino when Bernini visited Paris in 1665. Unfortunately, the historical trail goes cold here, until the early twentieth century.

In 1908, in Venice, a Parisian art dealer sold a large, bronze crucifix to an American financier. At this point, there was no suggestion that the work could be a Bernini. A few decades later, the bronze was sold to Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge, in whose private collection it remained until 1975, when it was part of an estate sale at Sotheby’s. At the auction, the bronze, which was described as “French late 17^th century,” failed to fetch its meagre $200 asking price. Eventually, the work was purchased by an antique dealer in London, after which it bounced between private collectors in Spain and Monte Carlo.

This is when the attributions to Bernini began. In 2002, the Italian art critic Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco declared that the bronze was, in fact, the sculpture that had passed from Cardinal Barberini to Louis XIV centuries earlier. Then, in 2005, another highly regarded Italian art historian, Tomaso Montanari, argued that the bronze was in fact the other missing sculpture—the one Bernini gifted to Cardinal Pallavicino back in 1665. Art historian and dealer Andrew Butterfield also endorsed the Bernini attribution on behalf of the (now defunct) Salander–O’Reilly gallery in New York, run by disgraced gallerist Larry Salander. In a breathless 2016 profile of Butterfield for the Financial Times, Dalya Alberge claims that the art dealer “was able to prove … that a bronze statue of the crucifixion that had failed to sell at auction in 1975 for $200 was in fact a lost Bernini now worth a staggering $50 million.” The major American art museums did not seem to share this conviction. None of them agreed to purchase the supposed Bernini.

Enter Murray Frum. Frum was a public-spirited Toronto businessman and art collector who, to his credit, believed that the apparently long-lost Bernini should be enjoyed by everyone. Frum purchased the bronze for $25 million and donated it to the AGO. Its appraised value quickly swelled to double the purchasing price.

As noted, there are critics who are sceptical that the piece is a genuine Bernini. Art historian and specialist in the Baroque period Charles Scribner III is among those who have challenged the claim. Scribner does not contend that the AGO bronze is a forgery or fake. Instead, he believes that the sculpture is a pastiche: the result of a “joint project” by Bernini himself and other sculptors (“non-Bernini,” as he puts it). According to Scribner, it is neither the bronze commissioned by Cardinal Barberini (as Fagiolo dell’Arco claimed) nor the one that Bernini supposedly “made for himself,” before gifting it to Cardinal Pallavicino (as Montanari believes). Scribner thinks that some parts of the AGO bronze were probably made from Bernini’s original moulds, but other parts were cast from moulds made by other people. There are compelling reasons to believe that Bernini himself was not involved in the completion of the work.

So, what is so “non-Bernini” about the AGO bronze? For Scribner, the most compelling piece of evidence is the lack of a “side wound.” The gospels relate that, when Christ died, a Roman centurion (a man named Longinus according to later, extra-Biblical texts) “pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood [invoking the Eucharist] and water [Baptism].” Tradition has it that, as a result of witnessing this miraculous event, Longinus converted from paganism to Christianity. The side wound is clearly present on the Spanish bronze—and on every single sculpture of the dead Christ that we can confidently attribute to Bernini. Dozens of these smaller works populate the Vatican. The first reason to be sceptical, then, is this evident inconsistency.

Of course, oversights happen. Perhaps Bernini was on a tight deadline and, in his hurry, omitted a detail that would have been added late in the “construction” process—at the stage of final chasing. But if the AGO bronze was originally designed for Bernini himself, for his own private devotions (and he was devout), then the omission seems inexplicable. If Montanari is correct, this was not a commissioned work that Bernini was desperate to get out the door quickly. It seems odd that Bernini would have omitted this theologically crucial detail—especially since, in 1638, he had spent months in the Vatican carving a massive sculpture of the centurion in question.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Saint Longinus, 1638. St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City. Source: Wikimedia

Bernini had spent significant time and energy, then, toiling away at a sculpture of Longinus—a work whose creation would have required both physical exertion and intellectual focus—trying to depict the complex psychology of his subject and the religious significance of his actions. It is hard to imagine that he would have deliberately omitted include the side wound in a subsequent work made purely for himself.

For Scribner, the second problem is the drapery. If we look carefully, we can see that the drapery of the earlier, Spanish bronze is flatter and more compact and lacks what the AGO curators describe as “the dynamic movement of the loincloth.” This constraint is appropriate, given that this is a depiction of the dead Christ. It invites the viewer to focus on the lifeless body on the cross. By contrast, the drapery on the AGO bronze looks as if it has been captured mid-movement. It seems to be almost whooshing upwards—a dynamism more appropriate for depictions of a still-living Christ. Montanari explains this inconsistency by speculating that the AGO bronze is neither a true Cristo morto nor a Cristo vivo, but depicts a comatose Jesus, caught in the moment between life and death. The loincloth’s upward flourish thus prefigures Christ’s ascension to heaven. But it seems unlikely that Bernini—artist and impresario of the Counter-Reformation—would have taken such liberties with representational tradition or theological orthodoxy. It seems much more likely that the drapery was cast by someone other than Bernini and without his oversight.

In fact, as Scribner argues, the levitating drapery on the AGO bronze is more stylistically akin to the drapery cast by Bernini’s Roman rival, Alessandro Algardi. If we accept Montanari’s thesis that the AGO bronze was a work Bernini made for his own personal use, why would he have copied the signature flourish that characterised Algardi’s depiction of Christ’s loincloth?

Alessandro Algardi, Crucifix, 1646. Alyce and Edwin DeCosta and Walter E. Heller Foundation Endowment; Mrs. J. Ward Thorne Fund; purchased with funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. Fred Krehbiel, Mr. and Mrs. John Jeffry Louis, III, and Harry A. Root, Art Institute of Chicago.

Of course, this similarity does not definitively prove the sceptics’ case, but art attribution is often a matter of interpreting subtle clues and patiently accumulating evidence.

When we look at the two bronzes side by side, we can spot other differences, too. While the heads and upper bodies are very similar (and possibly cast from the same mould), the legs and feet are clearly not the same. The AGO’s Christ has thinner, almost sinewy legs, and his feet are longer. His lean lower body contrasts strikingly with his muscular arms and torso—a tension that is absent from the Spanish bronze. As a result, AGO’s Christ is not as harmonious a composition as the earlier work, upon which it was modelled.

When the two bronzes were displayed side by side at a Bernini exhibition at Rome’s Borghese Gallery in 2017–18, Bernini scholar Anna Coliva, former director of the Borghese, found their discrepancies striking:

The placement of the marvellous gilded bronze crucifix from the Escorial [the Spanish bronze] executed by Bernini between 1654 and 56, next to the bronze crucifix acquired by the Toronto Museum in 2006, revealed that a direct execution by Bernini [of the latter] was untenable … The details, observable so close together, revealed the relative lack of skill in the casting technique of the Toronto version compared to the very high level of the one in the Escorial; just as the compactness of the proportions of the latter reveals the incongruous attenuation of the limbs which give the Canadian crucifix a “slithery” shape. [All translations from the Italian are by Charles Scribner III.]

In his 1955 book Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque, Rudolf Wittkower includes a comprehensive list of all the works then known to be by Bernini. Obviously, this “catalogue raisonnée”—which was considered the authoritative source of Bernini attributions for generations—did not include the AGO bronze, which, as noted above, was still being described as a “late French 17^th century” work at auction twenty years later. Recently, however, Maria Grazia Bernardini has published a massive, updated catalogue that meticulously documents both Bernini’s certified works and those with contested attributions. In her entry on the AGO bronze she writes:

In juxtaposition, the two [the Escorial bronze and the AGO bronze] appear similar yet with profound differences: they derive from the same prototype but with substantial differences in details that render Montanari’s hypothesis untenable that the AGO version came from the model, even if revisited, for the Escorial [Spanish] corpus … the legs are longer and thinner … the prominent abdomen is completely altered in its connection with the upper torso … Pending further findings by critics, the Toronto bronze must therefore be assigned to an artist in the circle of Bernini, based on a prototype by Bernini, but without his intervention.

Some art historians do support the attribution to Bernini, however. Evonne Levy, a world-class Bernini scholar from the University of Toronto, assured me that the AGO bronze is “100% based on Bernini’s models.” But some scholars clearly remain sceptical. Given the lack of scholarly consensus, why is a Toronto art museum claiming to possess a Bernini? Perhaps because of the incentive structures that operate throughout the art world. Rescuing a long-lost work from obscurity and restoring it to its rightful place in the canon is surely the dream of many art historians. Commercial galleries and auction houses are likewise motivated to upgrade works, as owning and displaying famous works brings them money and prestige. Wealthy donors and philanthropists want to purchase and donate big-name works in order to increase their social capital and burnish their legacies. Prestigious museums and galleries aggressively pursue works by canonical figures, as they attract visitors and enhance their institutional reputations. Local academics, who need to work closely with those museums and galleries, also have a vested interest in flattering museum directors by ignoring potential attribution controversies. Government agencies are more likely to dole out grants to people working on projects featuring well-known artists. And the thousands of visitors who pour through the doors of galleries like the AGO are clamouring to see works fashioned by those luminaries whose names they remember from their art history survey courses and their high school textbooks.

So, how should the AGO handle this? I think they should let the public know about the controversy. The curators could mount a photograph of the Spanish bronze next to the supposed Bernini and invite viewers to spot the differences. They might include a brief summary of its attribution history in the label next to their sculpture. There’s a compelling story here, and AGO visitors are surely mature enough to understand that it is not always possible to be certain about the provenance and authorship of a centuries-old artwork. We could all learn something important from this—but only if the museum curators and gallery directors are willing to engage with the sceptics.

Paint fest transforms Swindon by painting new murals

Sep 3, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

By Clara Bullock

BBC News

A town’s second annual paint festival has seen local street artists paint large murals to transform its streets.

Swindon Paint Fest was founded in 2022 and aims to revive the area’s street art scene.

Over 50 artists and six headliner artists travelled from the US, Spain and Ireland to be part of the festival.

Alongside the seven large murals, the paint fest also included live painting, an art market, exhibitions, workshops, and street dancers.

Back in the 1980s, Swindon became the murals capital of the UK as the town boasted over 40 murals.

Only Ken White’s 1976 Golden Lion Bridge and Sarah Faulkner’s 1985 Arkells Brewery are left from that time and the fest hopes to revive the street art scene in Swindon.

Co-organiser Caryn Koh said: “We want to enhance the town and to provide a platform for artists.”

Follow BBC West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: bristol@bbc.co.uk

Gallery, pop-up market and art space opens

Sep 3, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

An artist from Italy has opened a gallery, pop-up shop and art space in Old Market.

L’étoile Studio on West Street will play host to creative courses, a monthly arts and crafts market and an exhibition space, aiming to give a voice to underrepresented artists in our city.

The space is the brainchild of Marta Isabella Reina (@mireinart), a visual artist and art tutor whose work is inspired by folklore, mythology, religion and magic.

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Reina, who grew up near Milan and now lives in St Paul’s, said she wanted to offer “a space that combines art and crafts with spirituality and wellbeing”.

Reina’s studio has hosted art classes earlier in 2023 but in September the space will officially open to the public with an exhibition towards the end of the month

“I could have thought about having the space for myself only or turning it into a shop or a gallery, but I love to connect people and want to share the studio with people and artists, to give them a platform,” the former graphic designer, researcher, associate lecturer and teaching assistant told Bristol24/7.

“There are a lot of arts and crafts shops in Bristol but I always see the same items.

“I’m not criticising this, but there are so many people who don’t have a space to sell their wares so I hope L’toile will help this.”

Reina arrived in Bristol six years ago and became inspired to pursue her creativity.

She said: “I noticed Bristol has a kind of creative artistic vibe which really motivated me me. I was in a good career as a researcher, but I was suffering as I couldn’t express my creativity much.”

“The idea now is to dedicate myself completely to the art as a tutor and manager of the space.”

It was during the pandemic that Reina’s art began focussing on folklore, mythology, religion and magic

The name of the studio, L’étoile, translates to star from French and comes from Reina’s passion for tarot.

Reina explained: “A lot of the iconography of the tarot can been seen in Italy in churches, buildings and frescos – everywhere – so I was pulled by the symbolism of the cards.”

“L’étoile can be seen on one of the cards which shows a woman who is throwing water into water: the archetype of the giver.”

“Like the card, I wanted L’étoile Studio to make people feel good and free.

“The idea is also to create a constellation so people who come together here work as a connected force in harmony.”

The studio is found at 18 West Street

Courses planned for autumn include creativity Creative Flow Club by Elly Hopkins, Tarot Reading Course and Vintage Still Life Drawing by Reina and Make a Macramé Landscape Tapestry by Aggy.

The next market dates for L’étoile’s pop-up shop are September 9 to 10, October 14 to 15 and November 11 to 12.

In the gallery, Reina is organising an illustration exhibition by local artists on the last weekend of September. An application form for artists who would like to exhibit their work can be found here.

The venue’s first solo-exhibition will take place from the November 23 to 26 and is called Black Paintings: Post-Pandemic Collage and Mixed Media by Ergo Phizmiz.

For a full list of events taking place at L’étoile Studio, visit www.letoilestudio.com

All photos: Betty Woolerton

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Sotheby’s to sell €11m collection from the Hydra home of Pauline Karpidas

Sep 3, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

“There is little required from you other than an engagement with art and guests, sunbathe, gossip and swim.” So read the itinerary sent to guests attending the annual summer meetings at the Hydra home of the British collector and patron Pauline Karpidas, who hosted the gatherings one weekend every July from 1996 until 2017.

The so-called workshops were, according to Sotheby’s European chairman Oliver Barker, a “who’s who of the contemporary art world at any given time”. Or, as Tate’s Gregoir Muir once put it, “a form of Annual General Meeting”.

Over the years, curators and museum directors such as Maria Balshaw, Nicholas Cullinan, Beatrix Ruff and Tim Marlow have attended, but, at the heart of the meetings were the artists whom Karpidas had collected and whose works adorned the family’s Hydra getaway, renovated under the eye of the French designer Jacques Grange. They included Jeff Koons, John Currin, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Richard Prince, Urs Fischer and Nate Lowman.

The art world great and the good would visit the Karpidas family Hydra home every summer for a weekend of workshops and gossip. The house was sold earlier this year

Hydra became “this melting pot between great collectors and the young avant-garde”, says Barker, who was among those present at the last meeting in 2017. “It felt very edgy at the time. And I think the fact that it was not happening in a cultural hotspot, like London or New York also added frisson to it. Other art world luminaries with homes on the island include the American artist Brice Marden and the Austrian dealer Thaddaeus Ropac.

Now Sotheby’s is selling around 300 pieces from Karpidas’s Hydra collection, estimated to fetch more than €11m across two sales in Paris on 30 and 31 October. Her entire collection is thought to be worth several hundred million.

Karpidas grew up in a working-class family in Manchester. She initially went to secretarial college, but ended up setting up a small clothes shop in Athens in the 1970s. It was there she met her late husband, the Greek construction magnate Constantinos Karpidas, whose collection was more traditional and included a small group of Renoirs. With the help of the late Greek-American dealer Alexander Iolas, who is credited with discovering Andy Warhol, Karpidas began to acquire contemporary art in the early 1990s, having collected and studied Impressionist, Modern and particularly Surrealist artists. “Iolas pretty much came out of retirement to help Pauline build the collection,” Barker says.

Iolas also introduced Karpidas to the LeLannes, whom Karpidas and her husband regularly visited at their Ury home and studio, outside of Paris. “Pauline was there at the very beginning when the LeLannes didn’t have patrons, they weren’t even perceived to be artists,” Barker says. He notes a revival in today’s market for design pieces—“there’s much less distinction between contemporary art and contemporary design; design is no longer this quietly nerdy collector category”, he adds. In total, Sotheby’s is offering nine works by the LeLannes in its evening sale, with the most expensive, by Claude Lelanne—Très Grand Choupatte (2008) expected to fetch between €1m and €1.5m.

Barker acknowledges that Brexit has had an impact on business, though the decision to sell the collection in Paris and not London was chiefly down to the LeLannes’ market being unequivocally located in the French capital. “These days it’s almost immaterial where we sell; it’s no secret that these works are coming from Greece and they are going to another EU country, so, yes, it’s fairly easy logistically.” Though, with only donkeys for transport on Hydra, moving the works to Paris has been no mean feat—“ironically probably harder than Brexit”, Barker quips.

When it comes to the contemporary art in Karpidas’s collection, Sadie Coles has been pivotal. The London dealer has supported the collector’s acquisition of younger artists; as Coles puts it: though buying artists at the start of their careers is “more high risk than blue-chip options […] it gives her pleasure and stimulation, and she is extremely savvy about the choices she makes”.

Indeed, Karpidas was often the first to acquire works by many of the artists she collects. As Barker says: “She would be the first to admit that she didn’t necessarily have the financial means to buy Koons when he was a $10m artist but she could when he was a $1m or $2m dollar artist.”

Karpidas was an early champion of the YBAs. In 1997, for her second ever Hydra gathering, she hosted a mini-YBA show. Barker notes how Karpidas and one or two others including Janet de Botton “had ringside seats to what was going on in London in the early 1990s”. He adds: “Many of the artists really sought her out; Damian [Hirst] probably spearheaded this. They knew the principal collectors at the time and made a beeline for them to come and see their shows.”

Among the works being sold at Sotheby’s evening sale are Damien Hirst’s Wretched War (2004; est. €100,000-€150,000); while a work on paper by Tracey Emin (approximate est. $4,000-$6,000) and four photographic works by Sarah Lucas (approximate estimates range from $5,000 to $9,000) are in the day sale.

Annual Emeryville Art Exhibition Returning to Public Market – The E’ville Eye Community News

Sep 3, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

Emeryville’s celebrated Art Exhibit will return to The Public Market for their 37th annual exhibit. For the second year in a row, the Public Market’s owners have generously offered the vacant brick warehouse space that was most recently Urban Outfitters.

The juried show featuring nearly 200 artworks created by 126 Emeryville artists and open to artists of all media and includes paintings, sculpture, photographs, prints, ceramics, textiles, and furniture.

“In this year’s enormous show, there are over 40 artists new to the exhibition which translates to an infusion of new artwork in addition to the work of artists who have made Emeryville their home for decades,” said Sharon Wilchar, exhibition coordinator. “We look forward to getting to know these new names and talents as our arts’ community extends a welcome.”

Blue Sky Milk Way, 17”x11”, paint and paper, 2022
by Sansu (Sungyeon) Joh

Dedication to Tree Frogs, 12˝x12˝, mixed media paper mounted on board, 2023
by Juliet Mevi

Iron, 30″x24″, digital pigment print, 2020 by Richard Greenstone

Viking | Predella, 45˝x36˝, oil on canvas, 2023 by Steve Senter

The 2023 guest jurors are Emilee Enders, curator of exhibitions and programs at Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek and Jan Watten, founder and curator, at Gray Loft Gallery, Oakland.

“I had a wonderful experience meeting the artists who applied to this year’s Exhibition.” said juror Emilee Enders. “The process reminded me of the incredible community of artists we have in the Bay Area – specifically Emeryville, and left me inspired and grateful.”

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The opening night reception on Friday, October 6 at 6.p.m. offers the opportunity to meet the artists and get the first look at the artwork on display, with music by The doRiaN Mode: Vintage Jazz & Blues; no-host bar raises funds for the Emeryville Youth Art Program.

The exhibition will also include contributions of poetry and dance including Nancy Karp and former Emeryville Poet Laureate Sarah Kobrinsky.

The Annual Emeryville Art Exhibition is sponsored by Emeryville Celebration of the Arts, Inc. Admission to the reception and exhibition is free. All works in the 37th Annual Art Exhibition are for sale.

Dates: October 7 – 29
Times: Wed- Sun from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Address: 5905 Shellmound Street, Emeryville, CA 94608

For schedule, details and Emery-go-round stop information, go to emeryarts.org or call (510) 652-6122.

Feature Image: Mylene Stolpe Charismatic Photography