‘General Custer’ is sure to be a leader at Wittlin & Serfer Auctioneers’ Spring Fine Art Sale. Image courtesy Wittlin & Serfer Auctioneers.FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – A General Custer screenprint is one of several works by Andy Warhol in Wittlin & Serfer Auctioneers’ Spring Fine Art Sale on Sunday, May 17. The 626-lot sale of modern and contemporary art will begin at 11:30 a.m. Eastern. LiveAuctioneers.com will provide Internet live bidding.
The General Custer screenprint is from Warhol’s Cowboys & Indians Portfolio. It is 36 by 36 inches and pencil signed and numbered from an edition of 250. This 1986 work is in excellent condition and has a $20,000-$25,000 estimate.
Also by Warhol is a Pete Rose screenprint from 1985. From an edition of 50, the print is pencil signed by the artist. It measures 39 1/2 by 31 1/2 inches and carries a $20,000-$25,000 estimate.
A new “editioned canvas” entitled Monogramouflage Denim, a collaboration between Takashi Murakami and Louis Vuitton, is 16 by 16 inches and carries a $15,000-$18,000. It comes with a certificate of authenticity by Murakami and Louis Vuitton and in the original Louis Vuitton box.
For information phone Wittlin & Serfer Auctioneers at 954-767-2178. The auction will be conducted at Wittlin & Serfer Auctioneers, 924 NE 20th Ave. in Fort Lauderdale.
View the fully illustrated catalog and register to bid absentee or live via the Internet by logging on to www.LiveAuctioneers.com.
Warhol’s screenprint ‘Pete Rose’ should be a heavy hitter at Sunday’s auction. Image courtesy Wittlin & Serfer Auctioneers.An untitled lithograph print from 1982 by Sam Francis measures 47 3/8 by 34 1/8 inches and has a $5,000-$7,000 estimate. Image courtesy Wittlin & Serfer Auctioneers.
The Smackdown, 2006, from Tommy Graves Customs, Jeffersonville, Vt. On loan from Tommy and Julie Graves to the Full Throttle: Vintage Motorcycles, Custom Choppers and Racing Machines exhibition at the Shelburne Museum, May 17 through Oct. 25, 2009. Image courtesy Shelburne Museum.SHELBURNE, Vt. (AP) – Classic motorcycles will be on display May 17-Oct. 25, 2009 at the Shelburne Museum.
The museum is exhibiting 40 motorcycles for the show called Full Throttle: Vintage Motorcycles, Custom Choppers and Racing Machines.
Associate Curator Kory Rogers tells the Burlington Free Press the idea for the exhibition came from members of the museum’s board of directors.
On Monday, the museum took delivery of seven motorcycles ranging from race-tested motocross bikes to a futuristic bike called ‘The Smackdown.’ Continue reading
A 12-inch vase, purchased by the consignor at a yard sale seven years ago, hammered $1,236,250, making it Brunk’s first million-dollar lot. Photo courtesy LiveAuctioneers Archive/Brunk Auctions.ASHEVILLE, N.C. – Asheville residents headed straight for their cupboards after a Chinese porcelain vase thought to be a modern copy ended up selling for $1.2 million at Brunk’s May 9-10 auction. The 12-inch vase, which had been purchased at a yard sale, was expected to bring no more than $800. In the end, it hammered a breathtaking $1,236,250 – a substantial contribution to the two-day auction total of $2,598,781 (all prices quoted inclusive of 15% buyer’s premium).
The woman who consigned the top-selling famille rose vase on pale yellow ground had acquired the attractive vessel at a yard sale in Florida about seven years ago. It appeared to be a 20th-century copy of a Qianlong dynasty (1736-1795) ceramic.
“It is probably Imperial porcelain,” said Ruby McCall, Brunk Auctions’ specialist on Asian art, after the sale. “That means it was made in the Imperial kilns where court commissioned pieces were fired. Anything not meeting Imperial standards was destroyed. It is a very high-quality piece.” Continue reading
Placement of Rodin’s bust ‘La France’ at remote Crown Point, N.Y., was reported in the New York Times in 1912. Image courtesy National Education Network.CROWN POINT, N.Y. (AP) – More than 10,000 campgrounds dot the American landscape. But only at the state-run campground in this remote Lake Champlain town can you find a Rodin sculpture on public display just steps away from campers pitching tents and grilling burgers.
A bronze plaque created by Auguste Rodin a century ago will soon be returned to its place on the Champlain Memorial Lighthouse, slated to reopen this spring after a more than $2 million restoration project that included conserving the French sculptor’s La France.
The 25 1/4-inch-by-21 1/2-inch bas-relief bust depicting a woman – reputed to be Rodin’s model and mistress, Camille Claudel – was donated by the French government when the memorial was completed in 1912. The plaque was removed from the 72-foot-tall granite monument last year when crews began cleaning the memorial to French explorer Samuel de Champlain.
Crown Point, on a shoreline bluff 95 miles north of Albany, was home to a French settlement and fort from 1731-1759.
While similar versions of the Rodin bust exist, it’s safe to say no other campground in the United States can lay claim to artwork created by a sculptor considered one of the greatest of the modern era, said Charles Vandrei, historic preservation officer for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which operates the campground.
Rodin, who died in 1917, is best known for The Thinker and The Kiss.
The Rodin’s presence at Crown Point (pop. 2,000), wasn’t widely known outside this lakeside community, where locals consider it good luck to touch the sculptor’s signature – “A Rodin” – in the plaque’s lower left corner, Vandrei said.
Even within the art world, news of Crown Point’s Rodin can surprise some aficionados. the Rodin Museum in Paris wasn’t aware of it until a Vermont college professor’s inquiry several years ago, Vandrei said.
Officials at the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, which claims to contain the largest Rodin collection outside Paris, were incredulous when told one of the sculptor’s works was displayed on a monument at a public campground in upstate New York.
“It’s one of those things that fell off everyone’s radar,” said Jennifer Thompson, an 18th- and 19th-century painting and sculpture expert at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which administers the Rodin Museum.
While the rustic locale of the Rodin sculpture caught museum curators off guard, its presence on U.S. soil isn’t surprising, she said.
“Rodin was incredibly popular in America,” Thompson said. “Very early on, there were many American artists and American collectors who were going to France for Rodins.”
Francois Gauthier, France’s consulate general in Boston, said he learned three years ago that a Rodin was on public display at Crown Point, home to a French settlement and fort from 1731-1759. Gauthier helped raise the $3,000 cost of conserving the Rodin plaque.
“There are not many statues that are offered to the public like the statue at the Crown Point monument,” Gauthier said. “It’s a symbol of the French-American friendship.”
No special security measures had been in place to safeguard the Rodin bust, but that will change when the sculpture is remounted in its perch about 8 feet off the ground in the heavily patrolled campground. A surveillance camera and alarm system linked to a DEC office staffed around the clock will be installed, plus other measures Vandrei wouldn’t discuss in detail.
While he said the plaque has never been appraised, other Rodin works have sold for millions of dollars.
The DEC and other state agencies debated whether to return the Rodin to the monument or display it elsewhere in a more secure, less remote venue, Vandrei said. But since it was a gift from France to the American people, officials decided to keep it in Crown Point.
“We thought if we put it somewhere else we would somehow be denigrating that gift, that trust,” Vandrei said.
DEC officials hope to have the Rodin reinstalled by the Memorial Day weekend, he said.
The Champlain Memorial renovation is part of the state’s commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Champlain’s exploration of the region. A rededication ceremony is planned for Sept. 19.
The monument was constructed around an 1858 lighthouse built on the site of a windmill that was blown up by the French as the British army approached in 1759, during the French and Indian War.
The French also blew up their nearby Fort St. Frederic, which the British renamed Fort Crown Point. The redcoats constructed a fortified outpost at the windmill site. Remnants of the Grenadier Redoubt, named for the British unit that built it, can still be seen beside the Champlain monument.
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On the Net:
Crown Point Campground: http://www.dec-campgrounds.com
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AMSTERDAM (AP) – Thieves pried open the emergency door of a small Dutch museum with an iron bar and made off with six 17th- and 19th-century landscape paintings – the second major art heist in 10 days in the Netherlands.
The break-in at 3 a.m. Monday set off an alarm that summoned police within minutes, but the burglars already had fled, leaving behind two paintings that they dropped in their haste and damaged, Mark de Kok, a spokesman for the city of IJsselstein, said Tuesday.
The paintings included three by Jan van Goyen, a prolific contemporary of Rembrandt who died in 1656. The others were a 17th-century painting by Pieter de Neyn and 19th-century pieces by Willem Roelofs and Adrianus van Everdingen. The damaged works were by Salomon van Ruysdael and Salomon Rombouts.
The paintings, on loan from the Dutch government, were mostly river scenes set in the flat countryside typical of northern Holland, a specialty of the IJsselstein City Museum. The town is a suburb of Utrecht.
Police seized security cameras that may have captured the burglary on video, de Kok said. The museum will remain closed until Thursday while the investigation continues.
De Kok declined to put a value on the paintings, saying that could invite ransom demands from the burglars. But a Van Goyen was sold by Christie’s’ in London six months ago for more than $126,000 (93,000 euro).
The theft occurred 10 days after an armed robbery of two paintings by Salvador Dali and Tamara de Lempicka from the Scheringa Museum for Realism in Spanbroek, a small town in northwest Holland.
Security expert Ton Cremers said the two thefts were carried out differently, indicating no reason to connect them. The last major museum heist in the Netherlands was six years ago, he said.
“It’s just embarrassing,” said Cremers, of Museum Security Network, a private company that advises museums on security.
He said the thefts reflected poor security at smaller institutions, where alarm systems usually are inside display rooms rather than outside the building where thieves would first make contact.
The Netherlands, with 16 million people, has more than 1,000 museums visited by about 30 million people a year. Even small museums have high quality works from the abundant collection of Dutch masters owned by the government, which loans them out.
Larger museums are usually well protected, but even they are vulnerable. In 2002, two paintings by Vincent van Gogh were stolen from the Amsterdam museum named for the 19th century Dutch artist. The thieves were later caught but the paintings were never recovered.
The largest theft in the country took place in 1988 when three Van Goghs, with an estimated value of up to $90 million, were stolen from the Kroeller-Mueller Museum in a park in the eastern Netherlands. Police later recovered all three paintings.
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
