Those who follow auctions are well aware of the prices fine wines can achieve, but Dave Broom, author of the soon to be released reference The World Atlas of Whisky, says we’re “in the midst of a whisky boom.”
As the foreword to Broom’s book states, “More and more people across the globe are beginning to realize the quality, individuality, and value of whisky. Even with the recent increase in whisky prices, whisky’s value – especially bourbon – can’t be beaten by any other distilled spirit.”
Sounds like something we’d like to know more about, and it’s a good-enough reason to explore Broom’s new hardcover book, which comes out in late October (Mitchell Beazley/Octopus Books USA, $34.99).
A world-renowned whisky authority and award-winning spirits journalist, Broom has penned the definitive guide to everything the connoisseur or novice will ever need to know about the life, love, history, and sancta of whisky. With all its myriad variations and interpretations, and its global production – from Scotland and Ireland to the USA, Canada, India, and Japan – this spirit remains one of the most beloved and versatile of all drinks.
Big, beautiful, and richly illustrated, The World Atlas of Whisky offers a comprehensive and in-depth exploration of whisky’s many expressions: delicate and bold, blends and single malts, bourbons and rye. Featuring distillery profiles, extensive discussion of production methods, the impact of terroir, and an examination of tastes and aromas, the book also includes:
24 detailed maps of the key whisky-producing regions
Tasting notes on 350 selections
150 label reproductions
200 full color-photographs
“Flavor Camps” – a five part matrix grouping whiskies by palate preference, flavor, and aroma
If you’re a fan of “liquid gold” or just curious about the origins of and differences between whiskies, the full-color 320-page tome The World Atlas of Whisky is just what the doctor ordered – neat or on the rocks.
About the Author:
Award-winning author and whisky expert Dave Broom has been writing about whisky for 20 years as a journalist and author. He has written eight books, two of which – Drink! and Rum – won the Glenfiddich Award for Drinks Book of the Year. He has also won the Glenfiddich Award for Drinks Writer of the Year twice.
Dave is editor of the Scotch WhiskyReview, editor-in-chief of Whisky Magazine: Japan, consultant editor to Whisky Magazine (UK, USA, France, Spain), and a regular contributor to a host of national and international titles including, The Spectator, Daily Telegraph, Mixology, and Imbibe (Europe). He is a regular broadcaster on TV and radio.
Over his two decades in the field, Dave has built a considerable international following, with regular training/educational visits to the USA, France, Holland, Germany, and Japan. He is also involved in whisky education, acting as a consultant to major distillers on tasting techniques as well as teaching professionals and the public.
Signed ‘Oliver Hardy’ and ‘Stan Laurel,’ a photo postcard of the comedy team is considered rare. The 3-inch by 5-inch French sepia-tone print carries a $600-$800 estimate. Image courtesy of Mid-Hudson Auction Galleries. NEW WINDSOR, N.Y. – Mid-Hudson Auction Galleries will raise the curtain on Part VII of the Gene Andrewski Collection of Cinema and Rare Books on Sunday, Sept. 26, at 2 p.m. Eastern, The auction will include movie posters, lobby cards, autographs and photographs by the Hollywood celebrity photographers including Hurrell, Clarence Sinclair Bull, Otto Dyar, Willinger and Anita Harriet Louise. LiveAuctioneers will provide Internet live bidding.
Featured in the sale is an original MGM Wizard of Oz dialogue script ($800-$1000) and a four-page handwritten love letter from Judy Garland to Frank Sinatra on Garland embossed stationery, circa 1949 ($1,000-$2,000).
A collection of rare books from the Andrewski library will be auctioned first at 2 p.m.
Gene Andrewski was introduced to classic literature at age 7 by his mother. He would become the first managing editor of The Paris Review working alongside George Plimpton and others. A first edition of Dashiell Hammett’s Thin Man, New York, 1934, with dust jacket will be one of the highlights. It has a $200-$300 estimate.
Preview will be the day of the sale from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the auction site, 179 Temple Hill Road, New Windsor, N.Y., Suite 100B.
For details visit www.midhudsongalleries.com or call 914 882 7356.
‘Think about me because I shall be thinking of you always,’ wrote Judy Garland in this love letter sent to Frank Sinatra. The handwritten four-page letter on Garland’s personal stationery has a $1,000-$2,000 estimate. Image courtesy of Mid-Hudson Auction Galleries.A shooting script of the 1939 MGM film ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is nearly complete at 107 pages. It has an $800-$1,200 estimate. Image courtesy of Mid-Hudson Auction Galleries.Director William Wyler signed this title card for his 1955 film ‘The Seven Year Itch’ starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell. It has a $100-$200 estimate. Image courtesy of Mid-Hudson Auction Galleries.A Joan Crawford autograph accompanies this George Hurrell glamour portrait of the Oscar-winning actress. The photograph measures 10 inches by 13 inches. The estimate is $300-$400. Image courtesy of Mid-Hudson Auction Galleries.A first edition in dust jacket of Dashiell Hammett’s detective novel ‘The Thin Man’ has a $200-$300 estimate. Image courtesy of Mid-Hudson Auction Galleries.
New Century Detroit Caille upright slot machine in excellent working order, est. $20,000. Image courtesy Showtime.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Two major lifetime collections comprising about 1,800 lots in a dizzying array of categories will be sold the weekend of Oct. 1-3 by Showtime Auction Services at the Washtenaw Farm Council Grounds in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Internet live bidding will be available through LiveAuctioneers.com.
Headlining the event will be the collections of Charles and Marianne Sebastian, who amassed hundreds of items over the course of a lifetime before Mr. Sebastian’s passing in 2007. Also offered will be candy and gum collectibles from the estate of Alan Bitterman, whose father founded the Bitterman Candy Company distribution firm in Kansas City, Kan., in the 1920s.
The collections include music boxes, player pianos, juke boxes, country store, advertising, fire fighting, tobacciana, coin-op, saloon, barber shop, soda fountain, petroliana, vintage toys, breweriana, Western, brothel relics, automobilia, gambling, arcade, Coca-Cola items, showcases, store fixtures, Wave Crest glass and more.
Two lots are expected to fetch $50,000 or more. One is an 1880s Daniel Pabst symphonion music machine, one of only two known, in excellent condition. The piece is signed in three places by Pabst. The other is a gold badge, watch fob, watch and chain in the original box for the president of the Cheyenne Club in Cheyenne, Wyo., with his circa-1900 photo.
Other expected top achievers include a Mills Novelty Company (Chicago, Ill.) Virtuoso Violano (circa 1910), in excellent working condition (est. $35,000); a 1947 Harley Davidson Knucklehead motorcycle in excellent condition and with just 9,000 miles on the odometer (est. $30,000); and a nice Wurlitzer Model 71 juke box in excellent playing condition (est. $12,000).
Four lots are expected to realize $10,000 or more. These include a cast-iron Mutoscope with rare American Indian décor; an extremely rare slave trade tin sign for Hudson Rye in the original frame and shadow box; a Holcomb & Hoke popcorn machine with the original peanut roaster; and a jockey’s scale.
A Frank Polk slot machine with cowboy figure, one of two in the auction, should fetch $15,000; a Lucky Strike cigarette bubbler sign, the only one known in excellent working order, is expected to garner $7,500; a 1924 American National Paige, in all-original as-found condition, is estimated to hit $5,000; and a circa 1930 Capital Fairy Lamp/Phonograph should also hit $5,000.
Three desirable lots have all been assigned estimates of $3,000. They are a Lionel standard gauge pay-as-you-enter trolley car, very rare and in very good original condition; a very rare Carter’s Mucilage embossed tin sign, with wonderful color and graphics and in excellent condition; and a spectacular Sparrow’s Chocolates embossed tin sign in near-mint condition.
Other expected top lots include a Somerset Candy chalk figure of an Indian in a canoe, with the original hard-to-find base (est. $3,500); an Alfred J. Brown Seed Co. sign with superb color and graphics (est. $2,000); a salesman’s sample Wonder Washing Machine, in all-original working condition (est. $2,500); a Texatone Beer tin serving tray with rare image of a cowgirl on a horse (est. $2,500); and a Carette toy limousine, made in Germany and in as-found condition (est. $1,500).
The first day of the auction, Oct. 1, will be conducted for a live audience only. The next two days will be open to live bidding, phone and absentee bidding, and Internet bidding via LiveAuctioneers.com. Internet bidding should also be brisk, with 1,200-1,500 registered bidders anticipated.
The auction will be the last major event of the year for Showtime Auction Services, but the company already a full slate of sales is planned for the first half of 2011.
A Spring Auction is planned for April 1-3, and it’s already shaping up as one of Showtime’s biggest sales ever. Hundreds of rare and high-quality items will cross the block, including country store, advertising, Western, Gold Rush, coin-op, gambling, barber shop, soda fountain, toys, banks, cabinets, showcases, store displays and much more.
For information on any item in the Oct. 1-3 auction, call Michael Eckles at 951-453-2415 or e-mail mikeckles@aol.com. Visit Showtime online at www.showtimeauctions.com.
Daniel Pabst 1880 symphonion, one of only two known, signed, excellent, est. $50,000. Image courtesy Showtime.Very rare Mills Novelty Company Electric Shock Treatment, coin-operated, est. $20,000. Image courtesy Showtime.Salesman’s sample of a riverboat steam engine, made by Hambarnes, Memphis, est. $10,000. Image courtesy Showtime.Rare ‘Mammy and Child’ mechanical bank, in excellent condition, est. $7,500. Image courtesy Showtime.Sparrow’s Chocolates embossed tin sign in near-mint condition, est. $3,000. Image courtesy Showtime.Gamewell Indicator firehouse gong bell, made in New York in the 1880s, est. $10,000. Image courtesy Showtime.William Penn Motor Oil porcelain two-sided sign in excellent condition, est. $3,000. Image courtesy Showtime.
Illustration by Sergiodiarosa, 2009, of what a Cuvieronius might look like in the flesh. Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
LAS CRUCES, N.M. (AP) – The skull of a mastodon-like animal has been unearthed in a mining pit in southern New Mexico.
It crumbled after researchers tried to excavate it from the site near Mesquite, and it will now have to be painstakingly reassembled.
“We have a big job of putting it together again,” said New Mexico State University biologist and Paleozoic museum curator Peter Houde.
The fossil belonged to a spiral-tusked animal, a member of the genus Cuvieronius, that resembled an elephant. It’s believed to be between 1 million and 2 million years old. Before crumbling, the fossil spanned 8 feet.
Workers at the mining pit, owned by Las Cruces developer Eddie Binns, excavated much the fossil before Houde reached the specimen.
While Cuvieronius skulls might seem to be sturdy, they’re actually peppered with air cavities. Without these spaces, Houde said, the animal’s head would have been too heavy for it to move. He said the air spaces make such specimens delicate, not to mention the fossil is made up of much of the original calcium phosphate that helped make up the bone.
When Houde first visited the fossil, much of the dirt that had surrounded the specimen, especially toward the back of the head, had already been removed by the workers. Houde and his helpers tried to stabilize it with a glue-like substance.
To apply the stabilizer, the bone had to dry out, which was difficult because it was reburied each night to prevent vandalism and theft.
It would have been ideal had the discoverers left the specimen alone so it could be excavated within the surrounding dirt. Still, Houde said, the department is grateful to get it because the specimen did belong to Binns, who wasn’t obligated to turn it over to New Mexico State University.
“He’s an alum of NMSU; he has a real commitment to the community and wanted to see it stay here,” Houde said.
Houde said most large-scale fossil finds locally occur on state or federal land, the repository for which is in Albuquerque.
“That’s what makes this in many ways significant to us _ almost anything else found goes off to distant places,” he said.
Undergraduate biology student Drew Gentry, 25, helped Houde with the work about once or twice a week for the past month. He, too, said the fossil was delicate.
“New Mexico State doesn’t have the active program in paleontology other schools in the area do. We were working with our own resources and our own labor,” said Gentry. “With more resources, time and people, things would have turned out differently. We didn’t have a lot of things we needed.”
Houde said Cuvieronius was a stocky animal with teeth adapted to eating grass. Specimens are found in the fossil record from various locales around the world and date back as early as 25 million years ago, Houde said. It was believed to have gone extinct in North America earlier than in South America, where it’s known to have been hunted by people. Most specimens are from South America.
The recent specimen, known as the Binns Cuvieronius, roamed the ancient Rio Grande, Houde said. After it died, it was likely carried by the river and caught on a sandbar.
Houde hopes to eventually hang the skull in an atrium of the biology department. It will be useful to encourage public interest in fossils and could be used by researchers, he said.
Gentry said restoring the skull will likely be a multiyear process.
“I gained that patience is the most valuable resource in paleontology,” he said of his work in the recent dig. “Patience is the key word in any situation. Never rush anything. It’s the greatest resource you can use.”
___
Information from: Las Cruces Sun-News, http://www.lcsun-news.com
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926), Rue Montorgueil, Paris, Festival of June 30, 1878, oil on canvas. Musee d’Orsay, Paris.
PARIS (AP) – Beloved by Americans, Impressionist master Claude Monet has long been a victim of a sort of Gallic snobbishness in his native France.
A new exhibition at Paris’ Galleries Nationales attempts to right this historic wrong by bringing together nearly 200 pieces by the painter – from blockbuster chefs d’oeuvre reproduced in books, magazines and postcards worldwide to little-known, privately held pieces you’d never guess were Monets.
Curator Guy Cogeval said “Claude Monet (1840-1926)” – the most complete Monet exhibit in France since 1980, with paintings on loan from dozens of museums and collections from Cleveland, Ohio, to Canberra, Australia – is a bid to “repatriate one of the great geniuses of French art.”
“We (the French) have always said, ‘Monet’s for an exhibit in Japan, an exhibit in the United States, but not for one in France.’ But why? He’s one of our greatest painters,” Cogeval told The Associated Press.
He chalked this reticence up to “snobbishness,” saying the French largely dismissed Impressionism as “something for tourists” and preferred other 19th century movements like Realism or Symbolism.
This Gallic apathy “has had disastrous consequences” on the French public’s appreciation of Monet, Cogeval said, adding that the lion’s share of recent scholarship on the painter was done by academics in the U.S. and Britain.
“I think the French public will be very surprised” by the show, said Cogeval – who also heads Paris’ Musee d’Orsay, a museum dedicated largely to the Impressionists.
Organized thematically, the exhibition – which opens Wednesday and runs through Jan. 24 – showcases the subjects that obsessed Monet throughout his long life, from the rocky coastline of Normandy to the haystacks and poplars he revisited under every conceivable meteorological condition, to the Japanese bridge and water lily-filled pond at his home in Giverny.
It highlights his evolution from a gifted but slightly conventional landscape painter – churning out in the mid-1860s seascapes so realistic they could almost be mistaken for photographs – to a painter whose feathery brushstrokes that captured shifting light, atmosphere and movement helped launch the Impressionist movement.
Grays, slate blues and forest greens dominate the early work, but Monet’s palette slowly broadens out, first to include pastels like buttery yellows and salmon pinks and then to the bold mauves, teals and crimsons of his final years, when his eyesight was clouded by cataracts.
Point de la Heve at Low Tide, an 1865 depiction of a foreboding, rocky beach in the northwestern Normandy region where he grew up – one of Monet’s early critical successes – shows his lifelong preoccupation with weather and atmosphere: The skies churn with foreboding black clouds and the whitecap-dotted sea roils.
Even as a young man of 25, Monet had already begun his lifelong pattern of returning over and over to the same subjects. The first paintings in the show, both from 1865, are two different takes on the same subject, a clearing in the forest of Fontainebleau, outside of Paris.
That kind repetition runs through the show, as its five curators scoured private museums and collections in at least 14 countries to procure multiple reinterpretations of the same scenes.
A series of five paintings from 1890-91 looks at the same mammoth haystacks at different times of day and throughout the year, capturing the mushroom-shaped objects under the golden sun of a sweltering midsummer’s day or shrouded beneath a glinting covering of frost or snow.
The facade of the cathedral of Rouen appears as many times in the exhibit, its Gothic facade tinged canary yellow, mauve, apricot or dusty gray, depending on the changing light.
Still, the show manages a fine balance between such Monet hallmarks as the haystacks and the cathedral and little-known pieces painted in styles one wouldn’t normally associate with the Impressionist master.
“Hunting trophies,” a realistic 1862 still life of dead fowl, looks like it was left over from some completely unrelated exhibition.
And at first glance, Luncheon on the Grass – a monumental 1865 work – appears surely to have been painted by Edouard Manet, whose 1863 canvas of the same name was a critical hit at the time and has blossomed into an enduring masterpiece.
But it’s definitely a Monet: Determined to surpass Manet, the fiercely competitive Monet tried his hand at an even larger, more complicated composition of the same genre. But the project proved too ambitious for the young painter, who abandoned it and stashed it away for decades before eventually gifting it to the French government, curators said.
A 1866 portrait of his first wife, Camille, wearing what curators said was likely a rented dress of sumptuous green silk, conjures up the stately portraits of American painter John Singer Sargent.
Of course no Monet retrospective would be complete without his iconic Water Lilies, which have launched a thousand Impressionist calendars the world over. The monumental series of murals couldn’t be moved from the Orangerie Museum across town, but curators culled more than a dozen paintings of the aquatic plants – which Monet himself had planted in a specially dug pond in his garden in Giverny.
From the beginning of his career through the end of his life and beyond, Monet’s admirers in the U.S. were largely behind his enduring success, the curators said.
“Americans were really the people who got Monet’s career moving,” said Richard Thomson, another of the show’s curators. “By the 1880s, Monet’s paintings were selling extremely well in America … perhaps because the American taste was less rigid than in France.”
Cogeval said he expects the exhibition will attract some 700,000 visitors – many of them French people, but also many of Monet’s enduring American fans.
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-ES-09-20-10 0958EDT
ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926), Poppies Blooming, 1873, oil on canvas. Musee d’Orsay, Paris.Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926), Women in a Garden, 1866-7, oil on canvas. Musee d’Orsay, Paris.
John George Brown (American, 1831-1913), oil on canvas, titled ‘The Monopolist,’ signed lower right, 24 inches by 36 inches, $35,000-$55,000. Image courtesy of Pook & Pook Inc.
DOWNINGTOWN, Pa. – On Oct. 2, Pook & Pook will host the second day of its fall catalog auction. The auction will encompass a myriad of objects to include fine art, American and Continental furniture, carpets, jewelry, American Indian artifacts and decorative accessories. Items from five educational institutions together with estates including H. Richard Dietrich Jr. of Chester Springs, Pa., Naomi David of York, Pa., Anna Deisher of Bowers, Pa., The Stottlemyer Homestead of Frederick, Md., and others will be sold. LiveAuctioneers will provide Internet live bidding.
The sale will begin at 9 a.m. Eastern on Saturday with 50 lots of fine art. On the cover of the catalog is a scene of three waifs by artist John George Brown (American 1831-1913). The painting, titled The Monopolist, depicts the boy seated in the middle with a cookie and pastry, the other two looking longingly on. It has a $35,000-$55,000 estimate. Four oil on canvas paintings by Yarnall Abbott (American 1870-1938) are from the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan. All are scenes from the New England shore, one titled Dry Dock Rockport and another Stone Cutting Halibut Point. From the Stottlemeyer Homestead comes a grouping of Impressionist landscapes and cityscapes by Edgar Hewitt Nye (District of Columbia, 1879-1943). A preliminary pencil sketch for work done at East Point Lighthouse, New Jersey, by Andrew Newell Wyeth is estimated at $5,000-$10,000. Several other examples of American art include an oil on board by William Aiken Walker, a coastal scene by Arthur Quartley, an interior scene depicting a Revolutionary War soldier bidding farewell to his wife by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe and a scene titled Little Nell and her Grandfather by Eugene Meeks. An oil and mixed media on board by Guatemalan artist Elmar Rojas (est. $4,000-$6,000) will attract attention. Other works include a landscape depicting Emperor Franz Joseph by Wilhelm Gause, an oil on panel of children playing by Giovanni Constantini, a still life by Hugo Charlemont and an interior scene attributed to Enoch Wood Petry.
Two 18th-century chairs will draw the attention of collectors, museums and dealers. An important Chester County, Pa., walnut wainscot armchair descended in the Lewis family and has a provenance of Titus Geesey, who purchased it in 1932. This chair has a boldly scroll-cut crest rail, arched panel back, exquisitely shaped and incised arms and turned front legs. Two similar chairs are in the collection at Winterthur and pictured in Forman’s American Seating Furniture 1630-1730. The chair in the Pook & Pook Inc. auction is expected to bring $75,000-$150,000). The other outstanding chair is a rare Chippendale carved mahogany hairy paw foot easy chair attributed to Charlestown, S.C., circa 1755. The front legs have extensive foliate c-scroll and bellflower carving with boldly carved hairy paw feet (est. $150,000-$350,000). Both of these chairs are considered important pieces of American furniture.
Thirteen tall-case clocks will cross the block during the session. A Philadelphia Federal mahogany example inscribed “Johnston & Lewis” has a broken arch bonnet and ebonized columns. A Chippendale walnut clock with a scalloped door and ogee bracket feet by John Michael of Hanover, Pa., and a Fredericktown, Md., clock inscribed “John Fesler” with a moon phase and French feet are two of the other examples.
Other interesting furniture items include a Philadelphia Federal mahogany canopy bed (est. $8,000-$12,000), a salmon grained Pennsylvania semi-tall chest (est. $6,000-$9,000), a Connecticut Queen Anne cherry highboy, circa 1765 (est. $5,000-$10,000), a pair of satinwood card tables (est. $4,000-$8,000) and a rare Baltimore Hepplewhite mahogany hunt board with paterae inlays (est. $4,000-$8,000).
Included in the sale are many fine objects from the estate of Aline B. Klussman of York, Pa. One of the highlights is a Lancaster County, Pa., dower chest dated 1794 attributed to the Compass Artist. The lid and façade are decorated with ivory tombstone panels featuring pinwheels and tulips on a red ground. This chest represents one of five known by this artist and is presently the only red example. It originally came from the collection of George E. von Nieda of Womelsdorf, Pa.
Much of the jewelry in the sale also comes from this estate. Sure to bring out the bidders is a platinum, diamond and emerald bracelet (est. $6,000-$8,000), a platinum and diamond engagement ring, Cartier rings and brooch, and several heavy gold charm bracelets. Other items from the Klussman estate are a pair of Isphahan carpets with wild animals and central sun medallions, a set of four China trade gouache on paper scenes of porcelain manufacturing, a Federal walnut tall chest and a Pennsylvania walnut slant-front desk.
A large group of American Indian artifacts from a Pennsylvania educational institution will be offered. This is the second collection of this material that Pook & Pook Inc. is selling, the first being a successful offering in June. These items include flint spades and spearheads, banner stones, ax heads, discoidals, plummets, pendants, catlinite pipes, slate bird stones and chert blades.
Contributions from nine estates represent a wide variety of goods. A group of silver from the estate of Diana Lucas, New England furniture and accessories from the estate of Gail Knapp, Dentzel carousel figures from the estate of Naomi David, wrought iron from the Dietrich American Foundation and furniture and accessories from the estate of H. Richard Dietrich Jr. are in the lineup.
Outstanding pen wipes from the well-known collection of Edwa Wise are worth noting. These ornate, whimsical pieces of folk art vary from a large pig to a mother and her pups to heart in hands and peacocks. A Hickory Dickory Dock mouse leather and felt wipe and a large turtle with penholder are great examples, together with an elaborate pen wipe with five birds perched atop heart petals.
A California textile collector is offering her fine group of chintz, Mennonite and appliqué quilts, and a Maine collector is offering a group of Worcester porcelain.
The accessory category is loaded with an assortment of diverse lots including Georgian knife boxes, painted folk art boxes, mirrors, Chinese export, Gaudy Dutch, weather vanes, Oriental rugs, redware, miniature stoneware and weaponry.
For details on this second catalog sale go to www.pookandpook.com or call (610) 269-4040.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, photo taken by Alex Feldstein, Aug. 2006, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.
BOSTON (AP) – The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is getting a $10 million gift from Bank of America.
The gift is split evenly between cash and several works of art, including a piece by contemporary artist Ellsworth Kelly, a 22-foot-long, five-panel work titled Blue Green Yellow Orange Red.
In recognition of the gift, the museum’s Huntington Avenue entrance plaza will be called the “Bank of America Plaza on the Avenue of the Arts.” An unveiling is planned for Friday with MFA director Malcolm Rogers and Anne Finucane, the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank’s global strategy and marketing officer.
The bank’s Massachusetts president, Robert Gallery, tells The Boston Globe the gift aligns with the bank’s efforts to make the museum more accessible, which in the past has included free admission programs for its account holders.
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Public domain image of Georgia O’Keeffe during her time at the University of Virginia, where she was a teaching assistant. Photo was taken on July 19, 1915 by Rufus W. Holsinger (1866?-1930). Courtesy Wikipedia.
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) _ Beneath layers of paint, wrapped in bundles of brushes, hidden in sketch books and packed away among boxes of paints and pencils are clues that shed light on how Georgia O’Keeffe went about creating her colorful landscapes and iconic flower paintings.
Like forensic investigators, curators at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe have spent months combing through their collection and now they’re ready to share the many bits of evidence they have collected as part of the exhibition “O’Keeffiana: Art and Art Materials,” which opens Friday and runs through next May.
The collection of O’Keeffe’s never-before-displayed art materials, preparatory drawings, Polaroids and a pair of unfinished paintings is designed to give visitors a better understanding of how the late American modernist transferred her ideas about the world around her onto canvas.
“We have a kaleidoscope of material – from the art to the materials she used to make it and the houses that she lived in – and it’s the first time we’ve been able to draw on them to clarify in people’s minds what her objectives were as a painter and how she used materials to create things,” said museum curator Barbara Buhler Lynes.
The O’Keeffe Museum has a wealth of materials from the artist’s estate. At the time of her death in 1986, O’Keeffe’s two homes in northern New Mexico and most everything in them were set aside for preservation. That included her brushes, paint chips with notes jotted on the back, sketch books, canvases and hundreds of rocks and bleached animal bones she gathered over decades of exploring the high desert.
It was the job of associate curator Carolyn Kastner to search the museum’s climate-controlled vaults for clues that would help explain the foundation of O’Keeffe’s very deliberate style.
“I opened all the closets and pulled out all of the drawers. It’s been fascinating,” Kastner said.
Aside from the drawings O’Keeffe had organized in file folders by name, Kastner came across books filled with photographs O’Keeffe had taken of the same subjects from the same vantage points, just in different light and shadow. There was an album of cottonwood trees where O’Keeffe was clearly studying their texture and another of an area near her home in Abiquiu that she called the Black Place.
A series of her Polaroids is part of the show, along with the large painted canvases that were inspired by her study of the V-shapes in Glen Canyon.
“By putting these things together – the drawings, the photographs, the bones, the stones – we can recreate a kind of look at her practice. We can’t see her practice, but we can see the evidence from one object to another,” Kastner said.
Aside from revealing details about how she worked, the way O’Keeffe trimmed her brushes and stored her tools and art materials also provides some insight into her personality.
Over and over, Kastner and Lynes use the words precise and meticulous.
“Hundreds of brushes shaped and reshaped,” Kastner said. “It’s all about that finish that we know so well in her paintings, getting a precise line or a precise contour to come up, feathering over to make the surface as smooth and clear as it is. It follows through to everything.”
Kastner recalls that as she was laying out the exhibition, a rigid order began to emerge from the displays of O’Keeffe’s art materials. She wanted something “messy” to break up the orderly squares so she headed downstairs to the collection room.
“There was nothing,” she said. “What I’ve learned in looking at all of these materials, and particularly her art materials, is how meticulous she was. It comes out even in the way she stored materials.”
Visitors will see several galleries that include O’Keeffe’s tools, her line sketches and her more elaborate paintings. Infrared studies of some of her canvases also help to show how her drawings provided the foundation for her works of art.
Those works, Lynes said, have a certain look about them.
“It all reflects her aesthetic: very simplified, elegant forms that relate to one another, either abstractly or realistically. She uses them when she’s painting recognizable forms and she also uses them when she’s painting abstract forms,” she said. “They always come together in similar sorts of arrangement, and because of that, you always know you’re looking at an O’Keeffe.”
The curators acknowledge that many of the works in “O’Keeffiana” would not be part of a traditional exhibition, but this show is more about discovering the painter’s process than celebrating what has become a worldwide fascination with her monumental flowers and sweeping vistas.
O’Keeffe worked differently from many other artists, Lynes said. For example, Renaissance painters would often stray from their original under drawings, repositioning elements of their paintings as they went along.
“O’Keeffe usually doesn’t do that,” she said. “It’s interesting. It tells you she knew exactly what she wanted to do.”
Part of the inspiration for the exhibition comes of another exhibit Kastner put together while working in San Francisco. That show highlighted the work of a photographer who captured artists working in their studios. He had become friends with them and often stayed long enough that they forgot that he was there.
“I thought they were beautiful photographs, but people thought they were windows into a studio. People were fascinated to see artists in their studios, and I began to realize this is a place most people don’t get to see,” Kastner said.
There are very few photographs of O’Keeffe working in her studio or out in the wilds of New Mexico. However, the museum does have images of her studio, and on the window sills were an ever-changing cast of rocks and bones she used as subjects.
“There’s a quote about her infinite interest in natural color and shape and how it represents the wideness and wonder of the world she lives in. I think she was a student of that her entire life,” Kastner said.
Both Kastner and Lynes consider the exhibition an invaluable look at the artistic practices of one of America’s most important painters – practices that were consistent throughout O’Keeffe’s career, from her early work in 1916 to her last abstractions in the late 1970s.
“We can’t conjure a whole person out of this exhibition,” Kastner said, “but we can see the trace of her action on paper and canvas.”
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
BAGHDAD (AP) – More than 600 ancient artifacts that were smuggled out of Iraq, recovered and lost again have been found misplaced among kitchen supplies in storage at the prime minister’s office, the antiquities minister said Monday.
The 638 items include pieces of jewelry, bronze figurines and cylindrical seals from the world’s most ancient civilizations that were looted from the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. After their recovery, the U.S. military delivered them last year to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office, where they were misplaced and forgotten about.
The artifacts, packed in sealed boxes, were misplaced because of poor coordination between the Iraqi government ministries in charge of recovering and handling archaeological treasures, said Tourism and Antiquities Minister Qahtan al-Jabouri.
He blamed “inappropriate handover procedures” but did not go into detail.
Iraqi and world culture officials have for years struggled to retrieve looted treasures but with little success.
Thieves carted off thousands of artifacts from Iraqi museums and archaeological sites in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion and in earlier years of war and upheaval. Many items ended up abroad. Collections that were stolen or destroyed at the National Museum chronicled some 7,000 years of civilization in Mesopotamia, including the ancient Babylonians, Sumerians and Assyrians.
Only a fraction of the items have been recovered.
Authorities only realized the items misplaced at the prime minister’s office were missing when they began putting together a public display of recently recovered artifacts in Baghdad on Sept. 7.
The prime minister’s office investigated, located the items and handed them over to the Antiquities Ministry on Sunday, al-Jabouri said.
“Sealed boxes were located in a storage among kitchen supplies,” al-Jabouri said at a news conference. “They were opened and artifacts were found inside.”
So far, 5,000 items stolen since 2003 have been recovered. More than 15,000 pieces from the National Museum are still missing.
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
