Thursday, 20th November 2008
4:11pm
The death of Jan Krugier on 15 November (aged 80) marked the passing of one of the art world’s notorious figures. As an art dealer and collector, his international reputation derived not simply from his discerning eye but also from his advisory relationship to members of the Picasso family that began shortly after Pablo Picasso’s death in 1973.
Krugier had originally hoped to be an artist himself, a plan he relinquished after discouragement from his friends Matisse and Giacometti, the latter suggesting he consider becoming a dealer instead. He went into business with his second wife, Marie-Anne Poniatowska, managing to...
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Friday, 14th November 2008
6:06pm
British artists lobby government to help save Titian paintings
Tracey Emin delivered a petition to No. 10 Dowing Street this week as part of the campaign to save Titian's Diana and Actaeon for the nation. Lucian Freud, Damien Hirst and David Hockney were among the artists who signed the petition. The deadline for the fundraising campaign is 31 December by which time the National Galleries in London and Edinburgh need confirm their ability to raise £50 million in order to secure the painting from the Duke of Sutherland who has offered the work to the nation, and its pendant...
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Thursday, 13th November 2008
3:04pm
In May, newspaper headlines were made by the sale to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovitch of Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping and Francis Bacon’s Triptych for a combined £60m. The results of the spring season sales generally reassured the industry that it did not appear to be experiencing the ill-effects of global financial woes.
Almost six months later and it is recent sales (or not) of works by Bacon and Freud that are prompting fears of a gloomier outlook. In London, on 29 October, a Freud portrait – of his friend Francis Bacon, in fact – sold for £5.4m but...
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Friday, 31st October 2008
2:45pm
Léger painting returned to France
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has returned a $2.8m painting by Fernand Léger to a family in France after detective work concluded that it was looted by the Nazis in the 1940s. Smoke over the Rooftops (above), painted in 1911, has been given back to the French heirs of a Jewish collector who died in 1948. In 1997, the museum received a letter claiming that the painting had been taken from Alphonse Kann, a legendary French collector. Much of Kann's art was returned to him after World War II, but the Léger painting was...
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Tuesday, 28th October 2008
2:15pm
Whenever I was taken to the local library as a small child I would always take out the same picture book that was so densely illustrated I found something new each time I opened it. I hadn’t thought about this book for decades until I experienced something of a Proustian recollection earlier this week when I saw advertisements for the latest exhibition at the Design Museum, ‘The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes’, a retrospective of illustrator and graphic designer Alan Aldridge.
The book of my childhood was Aldridge’s The Butterfly Ball and The Grasshopper’s Feast (1975), illustrations from which are...
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A recent exhibition in Nottingham showcases contemporary artists' exploration of the Communist-era space race.
As part of a metal salvage drive for munitions in World War II, many of the UK’s parks and squares lost their iron railings. With the National Gallery now victim to a constant stream of commercial events in its environs, isn’t it time we got them back?
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