Tiffany & Co. candlestick lamp. William Jenack image.
CHESTER, N.Y. – William Jenack Estate Appraisers and Auctioneers will conduct a Fine Art, Antique & Ethnographic auction on June 30 at their gallery, with Internet live bidding through LiveAuctioneers.com. The event will commence at 11 a.m.
The sale is set to include collection of gold jewelry, watches, pocket watches, silver flatware and accessories, Lladro figures, art glass, Chinese art and porcelain, antique carpets, rugs, 19/20th century artwork, 19th century furniture, bronzes, loose gemstones, vintage designer clothing.
The category of watches will include vintage Patek Phillippe 18K gold wristwatch, Cartier Paris 18K tank watch, vintage Hamilton 14K gold Duo-Dial doctor’s wristwatch, Hamilton 14K thin line wristwatch, Waltham 21 jewel railroad pocket watch, Hamilton 14K gold dress pocket watch, among others.
Heading the silver will be a service for 12 of Wallace Grande Baroque gilt sterling flatware and serving pieces, Sanchez Easterling sterling Revere bowl, Sheffield Plate tray and tea caddies, punch bowl. Gold lots include a collection of heavy weight bracelets, necklaces, pins and rings, a highlight will be 2 pairs of Michael Good 18K sculptural earrings, pair of 18K gold and gemstone mounted peacock form clip earrings.
Art glass will include a Tiffany & Co. Favrile glass candlestick lamp with the original Tiffany chimney, pair of Tiffany Studio’s pulled feather trumpet vase on bronze bases, signed set of 6 Quezal iridescent pulled feather sherbets, Legras cameo glass vase with oak leaf design, Daum Nancy cameo glass vase, Galle free blown cameo glass ewer.
Rounding out the sale will be a collection of 19th century furniture including a Anglo-Indian carved rosewood cabinet with sunburst doors, bench made burl wood table with natural trunk form legs, Hepplewhite style mahogany inlaid sideboard, Sheraton side chairs and much more.
Vintage ball and evening gowns by designers such as Hattie Carnegie, Balenciaga, Molly Parnis for Bonwit Teller, and Oscar De La Renta.
Andy Warhol, ‘Flowers, silkscreen. Kaminski’s image. BEVERLY, Mass. – The 20th Century Decorative Arts and Modern Design Auction held June 9 at Kaminski saw the successful sale of pieces from a number of well-known artists, including Nakashima, Margolies, Warhol and others.
The top-selling lot of the sale was a beautiful walnut coffee table from George Nakashima. The remarkable table was made as part of Nakashima’s Conoid Collection and features a solid walnut plank supported on an angular leg and board. The elegant and streamlined design emphasizes the natural and unique beauty of the wood – a concept central to the “free-edge” style Nakashima’s work popularized. Many expressed interest in the table, which sold for $10,000.
Furniture from designer and architect Henry Glass also performed well in the auction. Kaminski presented both a table and a hutch from the visionary designer, which reflected in their designs Glass’s interest in economy of space and material that is so relevant today. The hutch, estimated at $300 to $500, and the table, estimated at $500 to $700, both sold for $1,600.
Of the works of art presented in the sale, the most popular was Samuel L. Margolies’ etching and aquatint, “Man’s Canyons.” The image is one of the New York WPA artist’s better-known works, and has been reproduced in a number of publications and exhibitions. The masterful composition of angular shadows and rays of light commanded significant bidding competition, driving the price of the etching and aquatint to $9,000, far above the original $3,000 to $5,000.
Other notable artworks in the sale included a large-scale work by minimalist pioneer Tadaaki Kuwayama. The 60-inch by 52-inch work was comprised of six green oil0on canvas panels, and sold for $5,000. Two mixed-media works by 1960s artist Peter Max also finished in the money. Both “Liberty and Justice for All,” and “God Bless America III” sold for individual above-estimate prices of $3,000.
Both Warhol prints offered in the sale garnered much attention from bidders and visitors to the gallery. The two hand-colored silkscreen prints were part of the artist’s 1974 “Flowers” series and were hand signed by the artist. The first print, carrying a personally inscribed message from Warhol, sold for $3,750, while the second fetched $3,500.
The Twentieth Century sale also included a number of notable glass lots. The first lot of the sale, a Chihuly bowl from 1983, realized a $4,000 hammer price, exceeding its $2,000 to $3,000 estimate. A monumental Sven Palmquist for Orrefors bowl also sold above estimate, for $2,600.
Circa-1955 travel/ski poster touting the Dartmouth Winter Carnival in Hanover, New Hampshire. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and Poster Auctions International.
MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) – The state is teaming up with Manchester’s Currier Museum of Art for a poster competition that highlights what makes New Hampshire special.
The museum, the Division of Travel and Tourism and the Department of Cultural Resources are asking individuals to create posters using the “Live Free and …” tagline the state has been using in its marketing campaigns.
Posters can feature illustration, photography, typography, mixed media or other graphic design techniques. The competition is open to New Hampshire residents and will be judged in three categories: youth, adult amateur and adult professional.
The public will pick the top 30 posters through online voting, and a panel of artists and state officials will pick 15 semifinalists.
The entry deadline is July 8.Winners will be announced Aug. 1.
Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Circa-1955 travel/ski poster touting the Dartmouth Winter Carnival in Hanover, New Hampshire. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and Poster Auctions International.
Digital and color pencil re-creation of a Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai, a ceratopsian from the Late Cretaceous of North America, closely related to the new species called Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum. Drawing by Nobu Tamura, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
DALLAS (AP) – Paleontologists in North Texas say they’ve discovered the skull of a young dinosaur that was found near where an adult specimen was unearthed in 2006.
The Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas says the skull was found last year in Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle, but its discovery wasn’t announced until Thursday.
Paleontologists say the finding is significant because it reveals dinosaurs tens of millions of years ago were reproducing in a climate once considered too harsh for survival.
The discovery of the adult lead to the establishment of a new species called Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum, named in recognition of the family of H. Ross Perot for its financial support of the museum. Perot is the billionaire Texas businessman who founded Electronic Data Systems in 1962.
Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Digital and color pencil re-creation of a Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai, a ceratopsian from the Late Cretaceous of North America, closely related to the new species called Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum. Drawing by Nobu Tamura, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial will be situated at the base of Capitol Hill, across Independence Avenue from the National Air and Space Museum and north of the U.S. Department of Education. US Government image.
WASHINGTON – A federal commission charged with building a national memorial honoring President Dwight D. Eisenhower voted unanimously Wednesday to approve architect Frank Gehry’s design for a park near the National Mall, allowing the project to move forward over the objections of Eisenhower’s family.
Gehry, whose Los Angeles-based firm was selected for the project in 2009, presented some changes to the Eisenhower Memorial Commission before the vote. He plans to add stone or bronze carvings in bas reliefs depicting Eisenhower’s accomplishments as Army general and president. The carvings will accompany 9-foot-tall bronze statues of Eisenhower that Gehry added to the design last year.
The famous architect said the design evolved over time as he listened to ideas from Eisenhower’s family. He added imagery of the D-Day landing at Normandy in World War II as a backdrop for a statue depicting Eisenhower addressing his troops. To show Eisenhower as president, Gehry plans to add an image of Eisenhower signing the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to advance equal rights for African Americans.
“There are some significant changes,” he said. “We did listen.”
A sculpture of a young Eisenhower sits on a wall near the other statues, looking out at his future accomplishments. Gehry said he was “more humbled than ever” by Eisenhower’s legacy.
“He was born in a modest frame house, yet he became one of the most revered occupants of the White House,” Gehry said.
The Associated Press got an early look at the design changes ahead of the commission’s formal review and vote.
Gehry’s design calls for the memorial park to be framed with large metal tapestries showing Eisenhower’s boyhood home on the Kansas plains. But Eisenhower’s family objects to the tapestry concept, saying last year that the metal material won’t last forever and is “impractical and unnecessary.”
Adding more images of D-Day and from a key moment of Eisenhower’s presidency make the president’s story more complete, said Daniel Feil, the project’s executive architect.
“There’s more of a dynamic going on because you have two different points in time depicted within one sculptural composition,” Feil said of Gehry’s revisions. “He’s making it stronger. It’s more powerful.”
Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, a member of the memorial commission, read a letter from Eisenhower’s granddaughters Susan and Anne Eisenhower voicing continued objections. They wrote the family will not support Gehry’s current design. They have supported legislation in the House to scrap the design and start the process over.
Simpson said the family’s objections should be considered, but he ultimately voted to approve the design.
Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts said he and his staff had worked hard to be “honest brokers” to resolve differences with the family. Roberts said he had supported Gehry’s design from the beginning with modifications “because it brings Kansas to the National Mall” and reflects Eisenhower’s roots and values for all Americans.
“At the end of the day, there was just an impasse,” he said. “I’m sorry we have not been able to work things out … but I also know that we have to move forward.”
There is increased urgency to complete the memorial, Roberts said, because the World War II generation that Eisenhower led will soon be gone.
Commission Chairman Rocco Siciliano, who served in Eisenhower’s White House, said Eisenhower’s family has been involved in the project for more than a decade. The president’s grandson, David Eisenhower, was a member of the commission until he resigned in late 2011. Around the same time, Susan Eisenhower began voicing public objections to the scope and scale of the project on behalf of the family.
“The family deserves to be heard, but they do not deserve to be obeyed,” Siciliano said.
Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran called on the commission to vote to endorse Gehry’s design and allow him to move forward to seek further approvals from two federal panels that oversee public art and architecture in the nation’s capital.
Gehry has selected two sculptors to work with his design team. They are Russian sculptor Sergey Eylanbekov, who moved to the United States in 1989, and Penelope Jencks, who created a sculpture of Eleanor Roosevelt for New York City, among other figures, and has spent much time living and working in Italy.
During his presidency, Eisenhower took a lead in desegregating public schools in Little Rock, Ark., and in Washington, D.C. So the new imagery of him signing the Civil Rights Act, in particular, adds a new element of history to the memorial.
Above the presidential imagery, historians have proposed a quotation to be carved in stone to capture some of Eisenhower’s values.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” Eisenhower said in a 1953 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, speaking about the rising cost of Cold War-level military spending and the nation’s priorities.
For the imagery of Eisenhower as World War II hero, historians proposed an inscription with this quotation from D-Day: “The tide has turned,” Eisenhower said in an address to his troops. “The free men of the world are marching together to victory!”
The 12-member memorial commission kept Gehry’s metal tapestries concept as part of the design, despite objections from some critics who called it an “avant-garde approach” to memorial architecture. Others have praised Gehry’s concept for its innovation.
Retired Air Force Gen. Carl Reddel, the executive director of the memorial commission, said the combination of imagery from Eisenhower’s Kansas roots, his achievements as supreme Allied commander in Europe and his two-term presidency capture Ike’s unique role in history.
“What you have here is the Eisenhower story as the American story. It’s a great way to provide a narrative,” Reddel said. “Eisenhower was the last president born in the 19th century and the first one to look at reconnaissance photographs taken from satellites in space.”
Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial will be situated at the base of Capitol Hill, across Independence Avenue from the National Air and Space Museum and north of the U.S. Department of Education. US Government image.
INDEPENDENCE, Mo. (AP) – Police in Independence have arrested two people in connection with last weekend’s theft of a 6-foot bronze statue from outside the National Frontier Trails Museum.
The Examiner reports police announced the arrests Wednesday but gave no further details.
The statue, called “Pioneer Woman,” weighed more than 1,000 pounds and cost about $35,000 when it was dedicated in March 1990.
But the manager of a Kansas City recycling business who alerted police to the suspects told The Examiner that the metal would only have been worth about $578.
Heather Hobbs said two men came to the business on Saturday with some scrap bronze that had been beaten into pieces and was unrecognizable as a statue. Hobbs said the pair left without a sale after employees questioned them about the metal.
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Information from: The Examiner, http://www.examiner.net
Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Circa-1858 carte de visite photograph of abolitionist and Harper’s Ferry insurrection leader John Brown. Est. $400-500 in Heritage June 29, 2013 auction.
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) — The leg irons that restrained abolitionist John Brown after his failed 1859 raid on a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry are being sold Saturday in Texas, but two historical parks dedicated to his legacy can’t afford to bid on them.
Dallas-based Heritage Auctions estimates the shackles are worth at least $10,000, but some Brown memorabilia has fetched much more. In 2007, a rare daguerreotype sold for $97,750 at a Cincinnati auction.
John Boling of Buhl, Idaho, whose family has long owned them, said his family hopes that whoever buys the shackles will display them publicly. “We believe that history should be learned and understood,” said Boling, whose great-great-great-grandfather, Hezekiah Atwood Jr., apparently obtained them shortly after Brown’s execution on Dec. 2, 1859, in what is today West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle.
History long regarded Brown as a domestic terrorist, and some Southerners still do. Many scholars consider Brown and his raid to be flash points, hastening the start of the Civil War. But many now see him as a martyr, ahead of his time in trying to end slavery. The Connecticut native spent months plotting to seize 100,000 weapons from the arsenal and use them to launch a guerrilla war with the slaves he believed would join him.
Yet the first casualty in the Harpers Ferry raid was a free black man, a baggage handler who bled to death while Brown’s raiders grabbed hostages and holed up at a fire engine house. Within 48 hours, the rebellion was dead, along with at least four civilians, 10 raiders and a U.S. Marine.
Brown was tried for treason, murder and inciting a rebellion. He was hanged in Charles Town, and is buried on his former farmstead in North Elba, N.Y., now home to the John Brown Farm State Historic Site.
An official with New York’s parks system said the state has no plans to bid. “The raid didn’t happen here, and we don’t have the resources at this time,” said Brendan Mills, manager of the site near Lake Placid. “If they were donated, we would take them.”
Much of the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park is devoted to the story of John Brown, but Superintendent Rebecca Harriett said Monday that she was unaware of the auction. Funding would also be an issue, she said, “especially on such short notice.”
Don Ackerman, consignment director for the auction house, said historians had to sift through a lot of “murky family lore” to verify the shackles are authentic. Among the stampings are the initials ER, for a well-known Shepherdstown locksmith, Elijah Rickard.
Boling’s ancestor served with the First Maine Volunteers in the Civil War and was in Charles Town at some point, perhaps to put down the rebellion, Ackerman said. At least four newspaper articles published between 1889 and 1893 reported that Atwood obtained Brown’s leg irons from an elderly black woman, providing her a substitute pair that he bought for $8.
The shackles were briefly exhibited at the Portland Historical Society in Maine after Atwood returned home. When he died, his widow gave them to his brother, James N. Atwood. They later ended up at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., where the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher stomped on them during sermons about slavery. Beecher was the brother of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” author Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Hezekiah Atwood Sr. had been a Congregationalist minister.
“When you’re talking about historical objects like this … it’s not always possible to say with absolute certainty that it is what is,” Ackerman said. But “deductive reasoning” and the evidence he’s reviewed provide 99 percent certainty. Nor has there ever been a contradictory claim of ownership.
“I’m satisfied that everything matches and makes sense,” Ackerman said, starting with the fact that the same family has had the artifact for generations and that family was connected to Charles Town. The maker’s marks appear genuine, linked to a well-known family of local locksmiths the jail would likely have used — and the jail acknowledged the shackles had been “liberated” after Brown’s execution.
“All of those taken in totality,” he said, “it’s fairly convincing to me that these are the ones.”
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Associated Press writer Chris Carola contributed from Albany, N.Y.
Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
Circa-1858 carte de visite photograph of abolitionist and Harper’s Ferry insurrection leader John Brown. Est. $400-500 in Heritage June 29, 2013 auction.
Leg irons or shackles believed to have been used on John Brown during his incarceration at the Charleston, Va., jail following his arrest during the raid at Harper’s Ferry, Oct. 17, 1859. Est. $10,000-$15,000 in Heritage June 22, 2013 auction.
Maker’s stamp on leg irons. The initials ER stand for Elijah Rickard, a well-known locksmith who operated out of Shepherdstown, Virginia. Heritage Auctions image.
The Raphael Loggias at The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Photo by JSolomon, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.The Raphael Loggias at The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Photo by JSolomon, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
BERLIN (AFP) – Germany said that plans for Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin to jointly open a new exhibition Friday that includes war booty taken by the Red Army from Germany had been called off.
The cancellation of the exhibition’s inauguration at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, at which Merkel had been due to give an address, comes amid differences between Germany and Russia over art treasures seized during and after World War II.
Asked what Merkel would have said in her speech, deputy government spokesman Georg Streiter responded that she may have pointed to the “view supported by international law” that the art works should be handed back to Germany.
Nearly 70 years after the end of the war, disputes over war booty remain as Germany seeks the return of treasures looted by the victorious Red Army and talks between the two countries on the issue continue.
Merkel was in the Russian city Friday for an International Economic Forum as well as bilateral talks and a dinner with Putin, and the exhibition opening was slated for later in the day.
Streiter said there was “no clash” and the event was struck from the program “by mutual agreement” after Putin announced a scheduling problem.
“President Putin apparently time-wise had no opportunity for an opening event at which there are also speeches,” Streiter told a regular news briefing.
“This exhibition and its particular background would have required a presentation via an opening speech,” Streiter said, adding it would not have been “appropriate” for an inauguration that raced through the exhibition.
In Moscow Putin’s spokesman denied that he had ever planned to visit the exhibition at the Hermitage.
“The exhibit will indeed open but there have never been any precise plans to visit it,” Dmitry Peskov told AFP. “Putin will not go, no, he has never had any plans to.”
The “Bronze Age of Europe — Europe Without Borders” exhibition includes about 600 items brought after the war from Germany to Russia and has been organized through cooperation between German and Russian museums.
In the 1950s, after the death of Stalin, the Kremlin authorized the return to Germany of 1.5 million works of art, including the celebrated Pergamon Altar, built in the second century BC and now one of Berlin’s top tourist attractions.
But further negotiations have proven difficult.
Merkel and Putin clashed earlier in the year over a crackdown by Moscow on non-governmental organisations while the European Union and Russia have persistent differences over the slaughter in Syria.
