PARIS (AP) – A red notebook of 33 pencil drawings by Pablo Picasso has been stolen from a specially locked glass case in the Paris museum that bears the painter’s name, authorities said Tuesday.
The book is believed to be worth 8 million euros ($11 million), a police official said.
The theft took place between Monday and Tuesday morning at the Picasso Museum, removed from a glass case that “can only be opened with a specific instrument,” the Culture Ministry said.
A museum employee discovered the notebook missing Tuesday morning from the second-floor display case, the police official said anonymously, as police are not authorized to discuss cases publicly. The museum is closed on Tuesdays.
There was no surveillance system in the room where the notebook was displayed, the police official said.
Booth from past edition of Pier Show. Courtesy Stella Shows.
NEW YORK – After a two-year hiatus, Americana & Antiques @ the Piers has returned to the calendar of events produced by Stella Show Mgmt. Co. Designed to coincide with Antiques Week in New York, the 2010 show is scheduled for January 23-24, 2010.
“We are very pleased to have this show again. It has been sorely missed by our exhibitors and our customers,” said Dorothy Stella, president of Stella Shows. “The piers were not available in January for several years. Now that dates have changed, we can have Pier 92 for Antiques Week in New York again.”
There is a wide variety of antiques events on the Stella Show Mgmt. Co. 2009/10 calendar. Coming soon is Antiques & Design in the Hamptons, a benefit for the Bridgehampton Historical Society, August 14-15-16. This stunning show is the summer outpost of Stella’s chic and cutting-edge NYC shows held at the Gramercy Park Armory. Fifty smart, trend-setting dealers who exhibit at the armory set up extravagant booths in elegant big white tents on the lawn of the Historical Society, and bring their best to their Hamptons customers who look forward to this show each year.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) Harmony in Pink and Grey: Portrait of Lady Meux, 1881–82. Oil on canvas 76 x 36 5/8 inches. The Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Michael Bodycomb.
NEW YORK (AP) – Some of the most charming views of Venice can be found this summer in New York at the Frick Collection.
The museum is displaying a set of 12 etchings and three pastels of that Italian city by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who was a contemporary of museum founder Henry Clay Frick and one of the industrialist’s favorite artists.
The 15 works on paper do not offer the typical, tourist’s eye view of Venetian landmarks. Instead, they depict quiet streets and backwaters, revealing the daily life of the city’s working classes.
“I have learned to know a Venice in Venice that others seem never to have perceived,” Whistler wrote to his patrons in London.
If this statement suggests that Whistler had an exalted opinion of himself, well, he did. The American-born artist who spent most of his life abroad was at the center of the intellectual debate raging at the time – the latter half of the 19th century – about the purpose of art.
Although he was influenced by earlier masters such as Rembrandt, van Dyck and Gainsborough, Whistler firmly embraced the avant-garde Aesthetic movement, sharing in its credo of “art for art’s sake.” There was no need for art to have a moral or educational purpose, he believed. All art had to be was beautiful.
Abraham Lincoln’s signature is on a memo written in 1862. How the document came to be in the state archives of Hawaii remains a mystery. Image courtesy Wikipedia Commons.
HONOLULU (AP) – Documents bearing signatures of U.S. presidents have turned up in a lot of unexpected places: attics, libraries, even thrift stores.
But how did an innocuous Civil War-era memo bearing Abraham Lincoln’s signature end up in the state archives of Hawaii, which was not part of the United States at the time? State researchers are trying to find out.
The memo dated Sept. 22, 1862, orders the secretary of state at the time to affix the U.S. seal to a separate piece of paper, a proclamation dated the same day.
That proclamation was the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s official warning to rebellious Southern states to return to the Union within three months or face military emancipation of their slaves.
Hawaii records indicate they’ve had the memo – but not the proclamation – for at least 74 years.
“We knew we had it,” said Luella Kurkjian, chief of the archives’ historical records branch. “Quite frankly, we didn’t know what it was. There was no documentation with it.”
Hawaii’s archives also contain one letter each from Lincoln to King Kamehameha IV and to his brother, King Kamehameha V, and a note from Lincoln appointing a new U.S. consul, Alfred Caldwell, to the Kingdom of Hawaii.
The Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown by mostly American residents in 1893 and annexed to the United States in 1898. It became America’s 50th state in 1959.
“Those three all make sense to be in the Hawaii State Archives,” said Daniel Stowell, director of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, a part of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill.
“This one is a fish out of water,” Stowell said of the 1862 memo. “I mean, it doesn’t fit. Why is it here?”
Officials are following a couple of clues. Back in the 1920s and ’30s, the archives received several donations from a collector named Bruce Cartwright Jr., grandson of Alexander Joy Cartwright, considered by sports historians to be the inventor of baseball. One of those donated items was the Lincoln-signed note announcing Caldwell’s appointment, Kurkjian said.
“It’s my guess that (Cartwright) is the donor” of the proclamation memo “and for whatever reason it wasn’t properly documented,” she said. “I can’t prove it. I’ve been trying.”
“Its an interesting mystery,” Stowell said.
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Hawaii State Archives: http://hawaii.gov/dags/archives
Lincoln Presidential Library: http://www.alplm.org/home.html
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