Gold money clip. Morton Kuehnert image. HOUSTON – Morton Kuehnert Auctioneers & Appraisers launches its new Jewelry & Coin Auction on Sunday, Jan. 30, at 1 p.m. local time, with Internet live bidding through LiveAuctioneers.com. The auctions features 100 lots of items from fine family estates.
Four attention-grabbing men’s Rolex watches, including two Super Presidents, (Estimates: $22,000-$28,000 and $22,000-$26,000), a GMT-Master (Estimates: $19,000-$26,000) and a Submariner (Estimate: $19,000-$22,000) will be on the auction block. A highly collectible Franck Muller Conquistador 8005C stainless steel small men/ladies watch (Estimate: $4,500-$7,000) is also available.
Men’s bracelets and neckchains include an Italian Figarope neck chain with a $20 dollar gold piece with diamonds (Estimate: $5,000-$7,000), and sold in a separate lot a Figarope chain bracelet (Estimate: $1,300-$2,000); two lots of men’s 18K diamond “Rolex” diamond rings ($2,700-$3,200 and $1,300-$2,000), and a man’s white gold diamond star sapphire ring (Estimate: $1,300-2,000) are especially appealing to men who like bling.
Beautiful ladies jewelry, sure to be a hit on Valentine’s Day, is abundant on auction day. A sample includes an exquisite 18K white gold sapphire and diamond choker necklace with 40 sapphires and 200 diamonds (Estimate: $4,000-$8,000), a 14K princess-cut diamond necklace with 175 diamonds weighing in at 10 Ct ($2,500-$3,500) and a black star sapphire and diamond ring (Estimate: $700-$1,200). Three ladies President Rolex watches will also be auctioned. (Estimates: $9,000-$13,000; $6,000-$9,000; $6,000-$8,000). A pair of David Webb 18K gold earrings will be the perfect Valentine surprise, with an estimate of $400-$700.
Rare Peace Silver Dollars in complete Whitman and Dansco vooks (with estimates ranging from $1,100 to $1,600, per book) and rare Morgan Silver Dollars in complete Whitman and Harco books, (with estimates ranging from $1,800 per book to $6,500 per book) will appeal to the serious collector. Also available will be lots including 1985-2002 China Panda five coin sets, (Estimates $2,750-$3,250), 1987 99.9 California Gold Rarities Mint (Estimate: $2,750-$3,000), UK L5 Brilliant Uncirculated Gold Coins (Estimate $2,500-$2,750), a one-ounce Platinum Eagle (Estimate $2,250-$2,500), and miscellaneous replica coins in silver.
Unusual pieces include a vintage 9K gold cigarette case by Garrard & Co. (Estimate: $2,750-$4,000), a 14K gold cigar/cigarette case (Estimate $2,750-4,200), one lot of three sterling cigarette cases ($750-$900); a link neckchain featuring a Mezuzah, Star of David and Chai ($750-$900) and a 14K yellow gold pendant of Moses and the 10 Commandments tablets on a 19-inch chain (Estimate: $1,000-$1,200)
For more information on any lot in this sale, contact David Baker, at 713-827-7835 or email dbaker@mortonkuehnert.com.
Surrealist painter Enrico Donati once owned this Yup’ik Eskimo mask. Donald Ellis Gallery Ltd. sold it and another like it for a record $4.6 million at the Winter Antiques Show. Image courtesy of Winter Antiques Show. NEW YORK (AP) – The design for the ceremonial Eskimo mask comes from a shaman’s dream. Fantastical, with a wide grin of pointed teeth and a halo of feathers, it is a highly expressive piece of Native American art – and had been tucked away in a private collection, unseen by the public for a half-century. Until now.
The mask, and another like it, once belonged to Surrealist painter Enrico Donati, and were sold for a combined $4.6 million at the Winter Antiques Show this month. Donald Ellis, owner of the gallery that offered them for sale, said it was a record price for Native American art.
The two masks, more than a century old, were among the most important items on display at the show, one of the country’s premiere antiques events. Seventy-five dealers are at the annual bazaar, which runs through Jan. 30. Wealthy New Yorkers tend to be the main clientele, and museum curators peruse works both well-known and obscure.
The Donati masks were created by Yup’ik Eskimos in Alaska for use in winter ceremonies, based on ideas envisioned in dreams by their holy men.
Donati and his contemporaries felt the masks were more surreal than the Surrealists, Ellis said.
The Eskimo masks were created to appease the gods and prevent starvation. “They were functioning things, but these artists made them extraordinary, though they weren’t seen as art until later,” said Ellis, the dealer.
The masks were sold – likely for food – to a trader along the Kuskokwim River in Alaska at the turn of the 20th century. Donati bought them in 1945. They influenced his work so much that they will be part of an exhibit of works by Surrealists called The Colour of My Dreams: Surrealism and Revolution in Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery this spring.
Some pieces at this year’s show came from private collections in living rooms. Others were hidden in attics and some were covered in grime.
One, a painting of two boys in turn-of-the-century New York City, was the work of a well-known artist, misidentified.
The painting, titled The Dead-fall, is by Martin Johnson Heade, an artist known for landscapes and images of orchids and hummingbirds. It depicts two boys in a forest clearing setting a trap for an animal. The clearing was smack in downtown New York, in an area that later was torn up to make room for the World Trade Center.
But the painting wasn’t signed, and was thought to be the work of William Sidney Mount, a contemporary of Heade’s. It had not been shown publicly since 1844, adding to its mystery.
The Alexander Gallery bought the work when it came up for sale recently and started to wonder about its origin. Gallery representative Laurel Acevedo said they did extensive research – and it was the way a tree stump was painted that eventually tipped scholars off that the painting was Heade’s.
The gallery is offering the work for $2 million, and says it would be good for a museum.
“It’s thrilling, to go through the whole history and to figure out what you have,” Acevedo said.
Kim Hostler of Hostler Burrows gallery was offering for $48,000 a cabinet by Josef Frank, found in near-perfect condition complete with delightful images of herbs that Frank found in magazines and lacquered on.
“We feel a little like explorers and archeologists when we look for new pieces,” she said. “And we’re giddy when we find pieces in this shape.”
Other works need a little TLC, like a bust of sculptor Antonio Canova found by Daniel Katz Ltd. covered in grime. Only plasters of the sculpture were ever displayed; it turns out the real thing was kept by the artist himself, Antonio D’Este, a friend and studio assistant of Canova. The white marble bust stayed in his family for years.
While Canova’s self-portraits tend to make him resemble a Greek god, this bust shows him as a man, with furrowed brow and longish hair.
“It’s a much more honest image of the man himself,” said Stuart Lochhead of Daniel Katz, which is offering the bust for $510,000.
Dealers may wait decades for a booth at the Winter Antiques Show, which benefits the East Side House Settlement, a nonprofit that offers social services and educational programs in the South Bronx. They view it as a prime chance to show off their best and most fabulous pieces.
For first-time participant Carlton Rochell, that meant a massive sandstone carving of Buddha, his legs in a lotus position, that dates to the second century in India. The carving is among surviving images of Buddha depicted as a man, and is on sale for $4 million.
Portraits of willowy, pale women by Thomas Wilmer Dewing in their original frames had hung in a room dedicated to the artist at a fancy estate in Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie – and stayed there for years. Alice Levi Duncan of Gerald Peters Gallery came across them recently, and is selling them in New York as separates ranging in price from $1.8 million and down.
“Can you imagine, going into this room – perhaps it’s never even used – and there is this entire collection of paintings? It’s amazing,” Duncan said.
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WS-01-26-11 1301EST
ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
Surrealist painter Enrico Donati once owned this Yup’ik Eskimo mask. Donald Ellis Gallery Ltd. sold it and another like it for a record $4.6 million at the Winter Antiques Show. Image courtesy of Winter Antiques Show.For his first appearance at the Winter Antiques show Carlton Rochell brought this massive sandstone Buddha figure, India, Kushan Dynasty, circa first century. Image courtesy of Winter Antiques Show.Kim Hostler of Hostler Burrows gallery offered this circa 1940 Josef Frank flora cabinet made of mahogany with a birch interior. Image courtesy of Winter Antiques Show.
McLEAN, Va. (AP) – Colleagues of a historian accused of altering a presidential pardon signed by Abraham Lincoln to make it appear he had made a major discovery say he betrayed the trust that had been placed in him.
The accused historian – Thomas P. Lowry, 78, of Virginia – denied Tuesday that he actually tampered with the document despite a written confession he gave to the National Archives earlier this month.
The National Archives announced on Monday that Lowry used a fountain pen with special ink to change the date on a presidential pardon issued by Lincoln to a Union army deserter from April 14, 1864, to April 14, 1865. The date change made it look like the pardon was the last official act carried out by Lincoln before he was shot that night at Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth.
In a phone interview Tuesday, Lowry recanted his confession and said he offered repeated denials to Archives investigators over the course of a two-hour interview but eventually wore down when they refused to believe him.
“I foolishly signed a statement saying I had done it,” Lowry said. “Now they’re portraying me as a fool, a liar and a criminal. I screwed myself by signing it.”
But the inspector general’s office for the Archives says that not only did Lowry willingly confess, he offered up details about how he did it with a fountain pen and special ink.
“He voluntarily provided a statement, written in his own hand, in which he elaborated on his actions and provided specific details on how he committed this act,” said Ross Weiland, the Archives’ assistant inspector general for investigations. “He subsequently swore to the statement’s accuracy and signed the statement. No threats, rewards or promises of any kind were made to Mr. Lowry in return for his sworn statement.”
Archives officials say Lowry admitted he did it to boost his career. Lowry said Tuesday it doesn’t make sense that he would have altered the document to gain notoriety.
“I’m hardly famous and certainly not rich,” Lowry said.
But Archives officials say Lowry’s purported discovery did vault him into prominence in the world of Abraham Lincoln historians when he announced his findings back in 1998. The Archives itself praised Lowry’s work at the time as “a unique and substantial contribution to Lincoln research and to the study of the Civil War.”
Ted Savas, who published a 1999 book authored by Lowry called Don’t Shoot That Boy! Abraham Lincoln and Military Justice that referred to the falsified pardon, said Lowry was well-respected and he had no reason to believe that Lowry might be falsifying information.
“He was a really meticulous, careful researcher and a good writer,” Savas said. “But if you’re going to hand a publisher something you know is false – that’s a betrayal.”
Trevor Plante, the Archives employee who first became suspicious about the document because the altered ‘5’ appeared darker than the other writing, called it “very galling and upsetting to me as a trained historian that someone would change a document to make it more historically significant than it actually is.”
Savas said he can’t help but wonder now whether Lowry may have falsified other information in that book or in any of his dozen or so books, some of which were self-published. Many dealt with unusual topics including Civil War bawdy houses and sexual misconduct by Civil War soldiers.
Most recently, Lowry collaborated with Terry Reimer, research director of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Maryland, on a book published last week: Bad Doctors: Military Justice Proceedings Against 622 Civil War Surgeons.
Reimer said Tuesday that her collaboration with Lowry ended with that book and that Lowry has no official connection to the museum.
Reimer declined to comment on the allegation against Lowry, citing the continuing investigation.
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – The face in the painting is North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s, smiling beneath his trademark sunglasses and wall of black hair. But the body is Marilyn Monroe’s, pushing down her white dress in an updraft.
This striking image, part of an art exhibition by North Korean defector Song Byeok opening Wednesday in Seoul, would have been unthinkable at the artist’s old job making propaganda posters in the North with slogans like “Let us Exalt the Great Leader.”
Satirical paintings would have gotten everyone in his family “taken somewhere nobody knows about and forced to work until death,” Song said during an interview at his small workspace in an arcade on the outskirts of Seoul.
“Freedom of speech has nothing to do with North Korea,”Song said. “Here in South Korea, people can draw what they want. So every painting reflects the artist’s distinctive personality.”
While still in North Korea, Song saw his father swept away by a current during an abortive attempt to swim a river to China to get food. He said he was later beaten senseless by North Korean border guards and spent six months in labor camp. He defected soon after, in 2002.
Song said he got the idea to draw a satirical painting of Kim Jong Il when he saw Monroe’s iconic pose from the movie The Seven Year Itch. He said Monroe’s attempt to hide what’s below her dress reminded him of what Kim has done to conceal the truth of what’s happening in North Korea.
“It is time to reform and open North Korea, so that poor North Koreans can see what the real world is,” he said.
Song said the art he has made in his new homeland is meant to “show what is inside of North Korea.”
Life is often hard for North Korean defectors in the South. They report difficulty adjusting to their new lives in one of Asia’s richest countries and say they are discriminated against at their jobs and aren’t paid fairly.
Though he has won several awards for his art in South Korea, Song also has struggled. He said he often eats instant noodles to save cash and hasn’t paid rent for his workroom in five months. To afford material for his sculptures and paintings, Song has worked part-time washing dishes and for moving and construction companies.
But money isn’t the goal, he said. “It is much more meaningful to deliver my message through paintings than to earn money.”
The freedom to pursue his art is an important theme for Song, and, at the age of 42, he is still studying painting.
He tells of being shocked in 2003 when he saw a woman in a college class wearing ripped blue jeans, something he had been told by North Korean propaganda was an example of the South’s extreme poverty. The next day, he approached the woman and gave her a needle and thread to mend her pants, not knowing they were an intentional fashion statement.
Although he used to regard his work for Kim Jong Il’s propaganda machine as an “infinite honor,” meant to glorify the man he was taught to revere, he now refuses to label his propaganda posters as art. He merely reproduced pictures he was ordered to work on. “People in the paintings had to seem happy. If not, they would not be published publicly,” Song said.
In the North, he was always “aware of the possibility of danger.” Entire families would disappear if someone “touched on any negative aspects of the ruling party.”
One day in 2000, he and his father tried to swim across the Tumen River in to China to get rice to help feed their hungry family, Song said.
The river was swollen from heavy rain, and his father was swept away. Song ran to get help from the border guards, but they only shouted “Why didn’t you die with him?” before beating him unconscious. He spent six months in a forced labor camp, where he lost part of a finger from an infection and began thinking about defecting, inspired by stories about life in the South.
In Song’s exhibition brochure, the dean of Hongik University’s fine arts graduate school, Han Jin-Man, writes that Song has used his art “to become free from a nightmare that keeps repeating every night.”
“He is paying off an old score in his inner world by expressing” his life in North Korea through humor, Han writes. “He could not live without expressing the trouble of youth directly in his works.”
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
