January 31, 2012 - Auction Central News

Largest-ever Warhol touring exhibition to visit Asia

Self-Portrait, Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987), © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

HONG KONG, 31 January 2012 – BNY Mellon is bringing the largest touring collection of Andy Warhol’s work to Asia in 2012/14 to mark the 25th anniversary of the death of the acclaimed American painter, printmaker and filmmaker.

Andrew Warhola (Aug. 6, 1928 – Feb. 22, 1987), known as Andy Warhol, was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as Pop Art. 15 Minutes Eternal will be the largest retrospective exhibition of the artist in Asia to date. It will feature over 300 paintings, photographs, screen prints, drawings, 3-D installations and sculptures to provide a fascinating insight into one of the most provocative and influential artists of the 20th century. Iconic works in the exhibition include Jackie (1964), Marilyn Monroe (1967), Mao (1972), Campbell’s Soup (1961), Silver Liz (1963), The Last Supper (1986), and Self-Portrait (1986).

The exhibition is curated by The Andy Warhol Museum in Warhol’s home town of Pittsburgh. It chronicles the breadth of the artist’s career and demonstrates the extraordinary scope of his interests. It will travel to five Asian cities over 27 months starting at ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, where it will run from March 17, 2012 until Aug. 12, 2012. It will then tour to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing throughout 2013 and end in Tokyo in 2014. Further details on these locations will be confirmed in due course.

“Fascinated by the glitterati, Warhol remains a complex and often misunderstood persona, whose artwork depicting consumer objects such as Heinz ketchup boxes, and paintings of Marilyn Monroe and Mao Tse-Tung have been imprinted into our collective consciousness,” said Eric Shiner, director, The Andy Warhol Museum.

Shiner added: “We are thrilled that BNY Mellon is bringing the life, work and creative genius of Andy Warhol to cities across Asia. This remarkable and extensive collection celebrates anew someone whose life and work define the concept: fame is fleeting, art is eternal.”

“BNY Mellon’s global commitment to the arts is designed to facilitate access and deeper exploration of art through the communities in which we live and work. We are very proud to be supporting The Andy Warhol Museum and bringing this remarkable body of work to Asia,” said Steve Lackey, chairman of Asia-Pacific, BNY Mellon.

Additional corporate supporting sponsors of the Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal exhibition include Christie’s, The Economist and Bloomberg.

An exhibition catalog, Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal, will be available for purchase at all exhibition venues.

A comprehensive series of education programs will accompany the exhibition and feature silk-screening workshops for local schools.

Visitors with smartphones can preview a selection of the exhibition in advance. The Warhol Art app is available for the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Android mobile devices via the iTunes App Store and Android Marketplace. The Warhol Art app allows users to examine works of art and related ephemera in The Warhol’s collection with an in-depth view of archival materials, letters, source images, film and video clips, and audio. The Warhol Art app features a behind-the-scenes glimpse of over 50 art works spanning Warhol’s career from the 1930s to late 1980s.

The Warhol D.I.Y. Pop app is also available for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad mobile devices and can be downloaded via the iTunes app store. This app allows the user to learn about Warhol’s silkscreen process and create a digital silkscreen print by utilizing the built-in camera or a photo from the device’s library as source material. The user employs Warhol’s famed process step by step to create a personal work of art. The hands-on process includes cropping, exposing, painting, and even pulling the virtual screen. Once completed, the user can then share this newly created art via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter. The Warhol D.I.Y app also includes information about The Warhol, a curator’s video perspective, a video demonstration of the actual silkscreen process and more.

About The Andy Warhol Museum:

Located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the place of Andy Warhol’s birth, The Warhol is one of the most comprehensive single-artist museums in the world. The Andy Warhol Museum is one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. The Warhol has an extensive traveling exhibitions program, loaning Warhol’s artwork to museums around the world. Since 1996, exhibitions organized or co-organized by The Warhol have been seen by over 9 million people in 36 countries. Visit the museum online at www.warhol.org.

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Illinois researchers to digitize insect collection

Rare mounted specimens, female (left) and male (right), of Heteropterex dilata. Origin: Perak, Malaysia. Circa 1920. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and Bloomsbury Auctions.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) – Scientists based in Champaign with the Illinois Natural History Survey are part of an effort to digitize photographs of millions of insects.

The State Journal-Register reports the scientists are sharing $2.6 million in grants from the National Science Foundation. They will photograph specimens and create a digital collection. The survey is part of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois.

Much of the money will go to InvertNet. Under the project more than a dozen institutions across the upper Midwest will create a virtual museum. The museum will feature 56 million species.

The fragile insects specimens are kept in drawers. They will be photographed from many angles so they can be seen from several different points of view.

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Information from: The State Journal-Register, http://www.sj-r.com

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Chicago’s Art Institute partners with India

Swami Vivekananda in a photo taken in Chicago in September, 1893. During his visit, the chief disciple of the 19th-century saint Ramkrishna Parmahansa and founder of the Ramakrishna Mission spoke at the Chicago Art Institute during the World's Columbian Exposition. This photo is in the public domain in the USA.

CHICAGO (AP) – The government of India is forming a professional partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Art Institute will host an Indian delegation on Saturday to sign an agreement for the Vivekananda Memorial Program for Museum Excellence. The $500,000 grant honors Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda, who spoke in 1893 at the Art Institute during the World’s Columbian Exposition. The Art Institute says it’s the first U.S. museum to receive a grant from India.

The goal of the four-year program is to foster a professional partnership between the Art Institute and museums in India. During the four years the Art Institute will send staff members to India for workshops, seminars, lectures and courses. The Art Institute also will host fellowships in Chicago for Indian museum professionals.

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Online: www.artic.edu

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Chattanooga to host spring arts festival

View of downtown Chattanooga, Tenn., licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

CHATTANOOGA – Several organizations in Chattanooga have banded together to produce a 10-day arts and culture festival that will begin this spring.

The festival will be called HATCH 2012 and will happen April 13-22 in a 10-mile area of Chattanooga, according to Hunter Museum of American Art director Dan Stetson.

HATCH stands for History Art Technology Culture Happenings and it will include several events — some new and some that already exist.

Among the participants will be local art galleries, studios, visual artists, musicians and performance artists.

Stetson told the Chattanooga Times Free Press that the art festival will be similar in scope to RiverRocks, an event centered around the area’s outdoor and adventure activities.

The festival will kick off with the Four Bridges Arts Festival, which will include a performance by the Chattanooga Symphony & Opera, the Chattanooga Theatre Centre’s Biennial Festival of New Plays and the Mid-South Sculpture Alliance Conference.

An 18-month sculpture exhibition at the Riverpark will begin with the event.

Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield said the city’s art scene is a big part of what makes it so appealing to visitors.

“I make no apologies for the money we have put into the arts, though we are often criticized,” the mayor said when the festival was announced earlier this month.

“The arts bring people to our city and it encourages people to invest their families and their lives here.”

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Eclectic US museum to be emptied by auction

1947 Whizzer Motorbike. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com and RM.

BOCA RATON, Fla. (AP) — Say goodbye to the twirling carousel, the rows of perfectly shined classic cars, the player pianos and jukeboxes. They’re selling all the neon signs, the slot machines, the antique guns, the Tiffany lamps, the hulking chandeliers. There will be no more rare organs or vintage gas pumps or the Army airplane gliding overhead, none of this out-of-this-world collection that took a lifetime to amass.

After Feb. 24-25, it will all be gone soon, before most people ever knew it existed.

Two Florida brothers, Bob and Paul Milhous, are liquidating their one-of-a-kind private museum after spending decades scouring the world to find its gems. The Milhous Collection, as the items have become known, are expected to fetch around $40 million at auction.

“Our time’s kind of up with them,” said Bob Milhous, who at 75 is the elder brother. “It’s time to move on.”

The men first started picking up collectible cars and rare automated musical instruments a half-century ago, but they never knew it would grow into this. They bought so furiously their collections outgrew their homes, then spilled into a succession of three increasingly larger spaces, until they built a new museum, within a suburban corporate park, in a nondescript building that gives no hint of its holdings.

“Our wives say, ‘Most people go to the museum and buy a postcard,'” recalled Paul Milhous, 73, “‘You go to the museum and buy the museum.'”

What they have built is part carnival, part sparkling car showroom. It has both Vegas glitz and the refrained elegance of a Prohibition-era speakeasy. You find yourself in a room of thick red drapes, a massive crystal chandelier and a variety of musical instruments that line the walls then, moments later, in the glow of neon, surrounded by the chrome and steel of collector cars.

“People come here and they leave amazed, and then they try to explain it to somebody what they saw and it just doesn’t work,” Paul Milhous said.

The brothers are distant cousins of President Richard Milhous Nixon. They made their fortune in the printing business, making circulars and comic strip inserts for newspapers. They sold that business in the 1990s and have liquidated other businesses in their holdings as they plan their estates. Giving up all their prized collectibles is part of it.

“‘Don’t leave this burden to us,” Paul Milhous recalled his and his brother’s wives saying.

And, so, on Feb. 24 and 25, it will all be sold. Two auction houses, RM Auctions and Sotheby’s, have divided it into more than 550 lots, each to be sold to the highest bidder. LiveAuctioneers.com will provide the Internet live bidding.

There is the whimsical: Dozens of vintage toy cars, giant toy soldiers that once stood at FAO Schwarz in New York, funhouse mirrors and carnival sideshow banners. There is artwork, fine furniture and the contents of a turn-of-the-20th century barbershop.

But the real highlights are in the Milhouse collections of classic cars, the mechanical musical instruments and the carousel that is the centerpiece of their museum.

There are 29 cars, 5 motorcycles, 2 tractors, a motorbike, a popcorn and peanut wagon and a PT-22 airplane. Among the cars is the only known surviving 1912 Oldsmobile Limited, which is estimated to bring bids around $1.5 million.

The instruments include music boxes, player pianos, band organs and orchestrions, which are made to simulate the sound of an orchestra all in one piece. There are dozens of theater, fair and dance organs. At least eight of the instruments have price estimates that exceed $1 million each. Many are elaborately decorated with oil paintings, stained glass, gold leaf and moving figurines.

Still, nothing in this eclectic palace draws the eye more than the carousel. The brothers searched for years for precisely what they wanted. When nothing turned up, they had one built, with 42 animals hand-carved from basswood and a Wurlitzer band organ. Its estimated price is $1 million to $1.5 million.

The museum has been kept so private over the years the idea of opening it to the public for an auction makes the brothers a bit uneasy. It has played host to many charity events, but whenever they’ve opened it up, it has been to limited audiences, with off-duty police officers hired to stand guard over their prized possessions. Now, anyone who buys a $120 auction catalog will be able to come to the preview.

For now, they’re preparing to bid farewell to it all, and enjoying their final moments with it. On a recent tour, they recalled their first purchases and remembered all the places they’ve driven their many cars. And as they walk into a dimly lit second-floor room of the museum, its walls lined with all types of instruments, only one question comes from Paul Milhous’ lips.

“What do we want to play?” he asks.

View the fully illustrated catalog and sign up to bid absentee or live via the Internet at www.LiveAuctioneers.com. Click below to view a video about the Gaudin 125-key dance organ.

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View the fully illustrated catalog and register to bid absentee or live via the Internet as the sale is taking place by logging on to www.LiveAuctioneers.com.

VIDEO:

ADDITIONAL LOTS OF NOTE

Black, Starr & Frost Hall Clock. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com and RM.

c. 1931 Mills 'War Bird' Nickel Slot Machine. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com and RM. — c. 1931 Mills ‘War Bird’ Nickel Slot Machine. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com and RM.

Marlin Ballards Patent Rifle 1861. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com and RM.

Five Assorted Guns. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com and RM.

Russian Neoclassical Style Center Table. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com and RM.

Gaudin 125-Key Dance Organ. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com and RM.

Hofbauer Harmonipan Crank Organ. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com and RM.

Nelson-Wiggen Pian-O-Grand, Style 3. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com and RM.

Assorted Petroliana. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com and RM.

Great Southern estates contribute to Neal auction Feb. 4-5

American Chippendale carved walnut chest-on-chest, circa 1760, probably Delaware Valley, height 95 1/2 inches, width 45 3/4 inches, depth 24 5/8 inches. Estimate: $40,000-$60,000. Image courtesy of Neal Auction Co.

NEW ORLEANS – Neal Auction Co.’s Winter Estates Auction on Feb. 4-5 will consist of more than 1,100 lots of antiques and fine art. Saturday’s auction will be conducted at 4038 Magazine St. beginning at 10 a.m. Central. Sunday’s session will be at 3923 Carondelet St. beginning at 11 a.m. LiveAuctioneers.com will provide Internet live bidding both days.

The auction will include 18th- and 19th-century furniture, paintings, mirrors, carpets, jewelry, sculpture and garden statuary from estates, institutions, collectors, museums and private collectors.

Furniture will be highlighted by an American Chippendale carved walnut chest-on-chest, circa 1760, and probably from the Delaware Valley. Standing 95 1/2 inches high with its molded broken arch crest, the chest on chest is estimated at $40,000-$60,000.

Another fine American Chippendale piece is a tall-case clock from Baltimore, also circa 1760. At 104 1/4 inches high, the case is inlaid and carved mahogany with a broken arch fretwork crest centered by an eagle medallion and inlaid rosettes. It carries a $25,000-$35,000 estimate.

Paintings are led by a William Henry Buck (American/New Orleans, 1840-1880) landscape titled School House by the Shore, Louisiana Bayou, an oil on canvas measuring 14 inches by 20 inches. In a period giltwood frame, it has an $80,000-$120,000 estimate.

A rare piece of George Ohr art pottery is a conventional teapot, circa 1883-1898, in mustard glaze with mottled green, berry and cobalt slip. Stamped “G.E. Ohr, Biloxi, Miss.” on the base, the teapot is 8 1/2 inches wide by 4 1/2 inches high. Its estimate is $15,000-$25,000.

An example of the jewelry that will be available is a Chinese jadeite cabochon, diamond and 18-karat white gold ring. The brilliant-cut diamonds that border the apple-green cabochon total about 1.15 carats. The ring is estimated at $25,000-$35,000.

Made in New Orleans, a fine Confederate staff officer’s sword in “as found” condition is certain to rouse enthusiasm. The blade is marked “Dufilho / N. Orleans” and the quillion with “C.S.” and a pelican insignia. Bidding is expected to rally to $8,000-$12,000.

For details on these and additional contact Neal Auction Co. at 800-467-5329.

View the fully illustrated catalog and register to bid absentee or live via the Internet as the sale is taking place by logging on to www.LiveAuctioneers.com.

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