Rong Zu-chun scenery painting. Four Seasons Auctioneers image. TORONTO – Four Seasons Auctioneers will be hosting their very first auction on Sunday, Oct. 21 at the Bank of China (Markham) Art Gallery for its modern Chinese ink paintings (1911-1949) and jade collections. LiveAuctioneers.com will provide Internet live bidding. The auction will begin at 2 p.m. EDT.
Beginning with the New Culture Movement, Chinese artists started to adopt using Western techniques. It also was during this time that oil painting was introduced to China.
In the early years of the People’s Republic of China, artists were encouraged to employ socialist realism. Some Soviet Union socialist realism was imported without modification, and painters were assigned subjects and expected to mass-produce paintings. This regimen was considerably relaxed in 1953, and after the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1956-57, traditional Chinese painting experienced a significant revival. Along with these developments in professional art circles, there was a proliferation of peasant art depicting everyday life in the rural areas on wall murals and in open-air painting exhibitions.
During the Cultural Revolution, art schools were closed, and publication of art journals and major art exhibitions ceased with major destructions done as part of the campaign to eliminate the Four Olds.
Following the Cultural Revolution, art schools and professional organizations were reinstated. Exchanges were set up with groups of foreign artists. Chinese artists began to experiment with new subjects and techniques in their attempt to bring Chinese painting to a new height.
Sale highlights include Ye Jianyu, Cheng Shifa comic, Liang Liusheng, Liang Dingfen, Huang Shaomei, Chen Zhongjiang, Tai Jingnong, Rong Zuchun, Hei Bailong, Huang Dufeng, Leng Can, Shen Danjia landscape painting, LiuXiaonan, Sha Menghai and Zheng Mukang fan painting.
To inquire about Four Seasons Auctioneers treasures, call Alice Wan, director of fine Asian arts at 416-928-4833 or 416-839-3362.
Pair of Chinese porcelain bowls from the estate of Ann Rutherford, Beverly Hills, 9 1/2 inches diameter; 1 3/4 inches high. Estimate: $10,000-$15,000. Abell Auction Co. image.
LOS ANGELES – On Sunday, Oct. 21, Abell Auction Co. will present an important fine art and antique sale offering over 550 lots of fine art and sculpture, antiques, fine jewelry, silver, Chinese porcelain and furniture, and appointments from estates throughout Southern California. LiveAuctioneers.com will provide Internet live bidding. The auction will begin at 10 a.m. PDT.
Highlighting this important sale are items from the estate of Hollywood actress Ann Rutherford. She was best known for her role as Carreen O’Hara, the sister of Scarlett O’Hara in the 1939 film classic Gone With the Wind. In addition Rutherford played Polly Benedict along side Mickey Rooney in the Andy Hardy comedy film series. Abell will be offering many fine appointments and pieces of furniture from the estate including a pair of late 19th century Chinese porcelain bowls (estimate of $8,000-$10,000), a Chinoiserie lacquered bonheur du jour, Georgian and Edwardian silver, a Sheraton mahogany dining suite, and paintings by Camille Bombois and Francois Gall.
The auction also will feature the second part of American and French art glass from the estate of John Saint of Anaheim, Calif. The sale will consist of fine Art Nouveau pieces manufactured by Gale, Datum, Tiffany, Le Verre Francais and others.
Artists represented in the auction include Jack Wilkinson Smith, John George Brown (two), and Sydney Lawrence, Millard Sheets (two), Emile Grippe, Robert Wood, Felix Ziem, Mariano Rodriguez, Jean Jansem and 19th century American and European portraits. Also featured will be a collection of contemporary sculpture including two Duraform reliefs by Robert Graham and works by Tony Bezant, John Frame, William Wiley, Fletcher Benton and Jay Phillips.
Other quality items to be offered include a 19th century French 18K gold and diamond portrait box ($7,000-$10,000); a set of four French terra- cotta wall panels ($10,000-$15,000), a Dirk van Erp hammered copper and mica shade table lamp ($7,000-$10,000) as well as hundreds of lots of antique furniture, Chinese porcelains ex the Collection of Herbert Hoover, sterling flatware and hollowware, and other quality appointments.
For details call Joe Baratta, Abell Auction Co., 800-404-2235.
Set of four French terra-cotta relief panels, depicting trophies of war and scenes from the life of Hercules, large panels measure 67 1/2 x 22 1/2 inches, the small ones approximately 23 x 24 inches. Estimate: $10,000-$15,000. Abell Auction Co. image.
Pair of French Renaissance-style gilt brass table lamps, 36 1/2 inches high. Estimate: $1,800-$2,500. Abell Auction Co. image.
Robert Graham, ‘Untitled,’ circa 2006, Duraform sculpture, purchased directly from Robert Graham Studio 36 x 36 inches. Estimate: $15,000-$20,000. Abell Auction Co. image.
Camille Bombois, ‘Les Pecheurs Dimanchiers,’ oil on canvas signed lower left, the estate of Ann Rutherford, Beverly Hills, 10 3/4 x 14 inches. Estimate: $2,500-$3,500. Abell Auction Co. image.
‘The Blue Room (La chambre bleue),’ 1923, Suzanne Valadon (French, 1865-1938), oil on canvas, 35.4 x 45.7 inches, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris.
SEATTLE (AP) – Inspired by the Pompidou Center in Paris, which for nearly two years removed all the men’s art from its modern galleries, the Seattle Art Museum is letting women take over its downtown building this fall.
Lovers of art by men can still get their fill in the museum’s Renaissance, Asian and Native art galleries, but those who want to explore art from this past century will be studying the contribution of women to photography, video, painting and sculpture.
The show is a subset of the Pompidou’s survey of about a thousand pieces, with more than 130 works of art made by 75 artists from 1907 to 2007. The original exhibit wasn’t designed to travel and Seattle is the first museum other than the Pompidou to show it.
Although the Pompidou exhibit was groundbreaking because of its breadth, the subject matter is not unique in the United States, where some recent shows have examined a subset of the art history spanned by this exhibit, including “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” a show from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles that traveled to New York, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia.
In addition to the Pompidou exhibit, the Seattle Art Museum is featuring another floor of art by women, mostly from its own collection, spanning the 1920s through today.
The museum’s collection is supplemented by loans from local collectors and private institutions throughout the region, including two loaned Georgia O’Keeffe paintings. The museums two other locations also have been infused with art by women this fall.
Come to the downtown Seattle museum prepared to be schooled about modern art and possibly a little surprised. The galleries of “Elles: Pompidou” – more thematically arranged than chronological – are provoking, to say the least.
Near one of Frida Kahlo’s most beautiful pieces, The Frame, are posters extolling the virtues of being a women artist, a somewhat erotic video of a woman playing with some soft and supple cloth tubes in her lap, and a reimagining of a classic Matisse Odalisque painting.
In The Blue Room painted in 1923 by Suzanne Valadon, the painter who had worked as an artists’ model illustrates a more realistic view of feminine relaxation: in comfortable pajamas, smoking a cigarette, leaning against a pillow in a casual – not erotic – pose. The modern viewer can almost imagine a television flickering across the room.
Wander deeper into the exhibit and the merely challenging leads to provocative, with pieces asking the viewer to reconsider their ideas about beauty, women and the human body.
Viewers are clearly warned before they enter galleries featuring the more controversial pieces, but the curators made a conscious decision not to isolate these pieces or cut them from the exhibit entirely.
“We wanted to insure we weren’t steering away from uncomfortable works of art because they were uncomfortable,” said Marisa Sanchez, SAM’s associate curator of modern and contemporary art, who co-curated “Elles: Pompidou” with Cecile Debray, curator of modern collections at the Pompidou.
One of Sanchez’s favorite pieces in the show is found in the “bodies” room: a video by Israeli artist Sigalit Landau called Barbed Hula. The performance piece shows a naked woman using a barbed wire hula hoop while standing on a beach. Sanchez says the piece makes her think about beauty and endurance and women in culture.
“It is OK that any art makes one uncomfortable because it allows for another conversation to open up about what is it about this work that is unsettling,” Sanchez said.
The curator hopes people won’t shy away from the exhibit even if they are concerned about feeling unsettled.
When asked what she thought about bringing children to see the exhibit, she said parents will have to make that decision themselves. Children may be shocked by some things in the show, Sanchez acknowledged, but mature adults may be as well.
She notes that the exhibit was designed to allow visitors to walk around the most mature pieces, but there is a tremendous amount of material that is less provocative.
Sanchez hopes some people will walk away from the museum wondering why society considers naked women in Renaissance paintings to be totally acceptable for all audiences but aren’t as comfortable with female bodies in photos and videos in modern art.
In addition to thinking about the art and how visitors will interact with it, Sanchez said the museum also got more in touch with the Seattle museum’s feminine side.
They found that about 6 percent of Seattle’s collection is credited to female artists, in contrast to the Pompidou’s 18 percent. Part of the explanation for that is the preponderance of Asian and native artworks in Seattle, many of which many have had women contributors but seldom had women credited.
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Follow Donna Blankinship on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/dgblankinship .
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If you go…
SEATTLE ART MUSEUM: http://seattleartmuseum.org , “Elles: Pompidou” Oct. 11, 2012-Jan. 13, 2013, Elles: SAM Oct. 11, 2012-Feb. 17, 2013 at 1300 First Ave., Seattle. Admission to the museum and the special exhibits, 10 a.m. To 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday and open until 9 p.m. on Thursday and Friday. $23 adults, $20 seniors and military, $12 students and teens, free for children 12 and under. Tickets are $3 less all day Thursday and after 5 p.m. Friday.
Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-10-15-12 0254GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
‘The Blue Room (La chambre bleue),’ 1923, Suzanne Valadon (French, 1865-1938), oil on canvas, 35.4 x 45.7 inches, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris.
PARIS (AFP) – The French government on Tuesday vowed to block a budget amendment introducing a wealth tax on artworks, following a storm of protest from top museums including the Louvre and the Pompidou Centre.
“The government’s position is quite clear. Artworks will not be included in the assets liable for wealth taxation,” Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told Europe 1 radio, after art world heavyweights sounded the alarm.
The French parliament’s finance committee last week adopted an amendment, tabled by a member of the ruling Socialist Party, that would expand the assets covered by the ISF wealth tax to include art worth 50,000 euros or more.
Artworks have been exempted from the ISF since it was created in 1982.
The measure is now to go before the full parliament as it Tuesday starts examining the 2013 budget, which aims to save 36.9 billion euros ($48 billion), much of it through massive cuts in public spending.
Faced with an uproar from art circles fearing a blow to the French market, Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti had voiced her strong opposition to the move, which even if voted in parliament needs government backing to become law.
But this was not enough to reassure the art world.
In a letter dated Oct. 12, the heads of seven of France’s top museums and cultural institutions wrote to Filippetti warning her the amendment was a threat to their prized collections.
Bruno Racine of the French National Library, Henri Loyrette of the Louvre, Catherine Pegard of the Chateau de Versailles, Alain Seban of the Pompidou Centre, Guy Cogeval of the Orsay Museum, Stephane Martin of the Quai Branly museum and Jean-Paul Cluzel of the Grand Palais) co-signed the letter.
“A new threat hangs over our duties, our ability to enrich our collections and to bring public and private artworks to the greatest number,” they wrote.
“There are reasons to fear that taxing artworks will dissuade their owners from loaning them them, for fear they will be identified.”
Taxing artworks, they warned, could also drive their owners to sell them abroad, leading to “the disappearance of historic collections, transmitted from generation to generation.”
“The French public would be the first to suffer,” they warned.
The row comes just days ahead of Paris’ FIAC contemporary art fair, which brings 182 international galleries together under the vaults of the Grand Palais from Oct. 18-21.
“If you want to nip in the bud France’s rebirth as a major art market, this is the best way to go about it,” FIAC director Jennifer Flay warned last week.
Top French art gallery owner Emmanuel Perrotin also told AFP the proposed tax would have “grave consequences.”
“Clients will do all they can to express their passion in a more favorable environment,” he said. “Paris would become seriously less attractive. And to the rest of the world, we’d look as if we were crazy.”
Jerome Clement, head of the Piasa auction house, called the measure “totally populist and inapplicable since there is no way to technically evaluate the worth of an artwork.”
“It will encourage fraud, and artworks will leave the country.”
The amendment was intended by its backers as a signal that wealthier citizens are shouldering their share of the burden, as France braces for the impact of the upcoming austerity budget.
The Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam opened in 1992. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
ROTTERDAM (AFP) – Seven masterpieces, including paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Monet and Gauguin, were stolen in a predawn heist Tuesday at Rotterdam’s Kunsthal museum, the biggest such theft in the Netherlands in two decades, police said.
Alerted by an alarm but arriving on the scene after the thief or thieves had fled, police said they had launched a major investigation that includes interviewing possible witnesses and examining closed-circuit television.
“On Tuesday morning seven artworks were stolen from the Kunsthal in Rotterdam,” police said in a statement, adding the burglary took place at around 3 a.m. (0100 GMT).
After having initially declined to name the stolen paintings, they said that after consulting with the owners, they can now release photographs of the works.
“A major investigation is under way and forensics are at the scene,” Rotterdam police spokeswoman Patricia Wessels told AFP. “We’re investigating how they got access, what time it happened and who did it.”
Dutch state television showed a police forensic team dusting one of the Kunsthal’s outer doors for fingerprints. The museum’s director is flying back from Turkey after hearing news of the theft, television said.
The NOS broadcaster said the haul was worth “millions and millions of euros,” but the paintings are so famous that it will be difficult to get anything like their real value on the black market.
It is the biggest art theft in The Netherlands since 20 paintings were stolen from Amsterdam’s Van Gogh museum in 1991.
The paintings are Pablo Picasso’s Tete d’Arlequin, Henri Matisse’s La Liseuse en Blanc et Jaune, Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, London and Charing Cross Bridge, London, Paul Gauguin’s Femme Devant une Fenetre Ouverte, dite La Fiancee, Meyer de Haan’s Autoportrait and Lucian Freud’s Woman with Eyes Closed.
“We’re a bit shocked that something like this happens here and at the same time we have some respect for thieves who got away with something likes this,” said student Ibo Bose, disappointed not to be able to visit the museum.
“Police are interviewing possible witnesses and examining closed-circuit video footage,” the police statement said. “An initial investigation suggests that the robbery was well prepared.”
The police spokeswoman said that police were alerted during the night when an alarm went off but the thief or thieves had made off by the time police arrived.
A statement on the museum’s website quoted director Willem van Hassel as saying that the museum would be closed to the public on Tuesday.
The museum is in Rotterdam’s museum park where few people go at night.
The works were among the 150-strong Triton Foundation’s collection, which was being shown in its entirety to the public for the first time to mark the museum’s 20th anniversary, the Kunsthal’s website said.
The collection “has developed into one with an international reputation and which comprises representative works by the most important and influential artists of the late 19th century to the present day,” it said.
The exhibition “comprises works from almost every significant art movement,” it added.
The Kunsthal, which means “art hall,” has no permanent collection of its own.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
The Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam opened in 1992. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
The arts streetscape project in Nashville is two blocks north of the historic Ryman Auditorium. Image by Ryan Kaldari, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – Nashville Mayor Karl Dean says a new arts streetscape in the city’s downtown will make dining outdoors and visiting art galleries on the street a more vibrant experience.
Dean, Metro Public Works and the Metro Arts Commission announced the Avenue of the Arts project on Friday.
It will encompass a block of Fifth Avenue between Church and Union streets.
The visual arts emphasis will improve connectivity between the activity on Broadway and other cultural institutions, such as the Tennessee Performing Arts Center and the Tennessee State Museum.
The project is expected to be completed in late summer, 2013.
Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This information may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-10-15-12 0905GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
The arts streetscape project in Nashville is two blocks north of the historic Ryman Auditorium. Image by Ryan Kaldari, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Clifford Berryman’s cartoon depicts President Theodore Roosevelt’s bear hunting trip to Mississippi in 1902. The cartoon gave the teddy bear its name. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
ONWARD, Miss. (AP) – The Onward Store is keeping alive the story of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous 1902 bear hunt as it has done for generations.
The store, first opened in 1913, was closed in the spring to undergo renovation, according to the Vicksburg Post. It reopened over the weekend.
A new addition is a back porch that overlooks cotton fields. A restaurant will open later.
The store features a variety of Mississippi-made crafts, antiques and art.
Its most famous product is the hand-sewn Teddy Roosevelt bears, which are dressed to resemble the president.
In 1902, Roosevelt traveled through the Mississippi Delta to the Smedes Plantation, which is near Onward, to hunt for black bear.
Roosevelt’s guide, Holt Collier, boasted he would find the president a bear. Collier found a bear and tied it to a tree for Roosevelt, an avid outdoorsman, to kill, but Roosevelt refused to shoot the defenseless bear.
Some reports after indicated Collier had tied up a cub.
Political cartoonist Clifford Berryman depicted Roosevelt’s humane act, and toy bears became known worldwide as teddy bears.
The teddy bear became Mississippi’s official state toy in 2002.
Replicas of the guns used by Collier and Roosevelt hang in the dining room of the restaurant.
Store manager Tiffany Lewallen said the dining room of the store has been refinished with wood from the iconic Red Barn in Rolling Fork that collapsed in 2011. The dining room also features artwork and photos depicting Roosevelt’s bear hunt.
The shelves of the store are stocked with basic necessities, as well as handmade relics and teddy bears. A full-service deli is inside and live gas pumps outside will offer gasoline at the store for the first time in decades, Lewallen said.
“It’s just a little bit of everything,” she said.
Onward is at the crossroads of Mississippi Highway 1 and U.S. Highway 61 North, about 31 miles north of Vicksburg.
Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This information may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-10-15-12 0806GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Clifford Berryman’s cartoon depicts President Theodore Roosevelt’s bear hunting trip to Mississippi in 1902. The cartoon gave the teddy bear its name. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
