A 19th century oil painting depicting the 1863 Battle of Galveston Island. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com archive and Austin Auction Gallery. TEXAS CITY, Texas (AP) – A Civil War cannon from the 1863 sinking of the USS Westfield will be part of a Southeast Texas museum just miles from where the ship went down.
Preservation experts at Texas A&M University in College Station on Tuesday unveiled the restored 12-foot cannon. The more than 4-ton cannon was hauled by truck Wednesday to the Texas City Museum.
The gunboat was scuttled by its Union crew during the 1863 Battle of Galveston. The cannon and other artifacts were recovered in 2009 during expansion of the Texas City Ship Channel.
The museum is about 6 miles from where the vessel sank.
A&M project manager Justin Parkoff says the cannon is part of the first phase of the museum display, with more restored pieces to follow.
The mansion at the Bletchley Park code-breaking center, 50 miles northwest of London. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. LONDON (AP) – The Duchess of Cambridge has tried her hand at code-breaking as she opened a museum at Bletchley Park, Britain’s famed World War II deciphering center.
Kate sat at a desk and succeeded in decoding a Morse code message as she toured the center, which has been restored with an 8 million-pound ($13.6 million) lottery fund.
The royal has a family link to the park: Her paternal grandmother, Valerie Glassborow, was a civilian staff member there during the war.
Code-breakers at Bletchley Park were credited with shortening the war by breaking German cypher systems – code-named Enigma and Lorenz.
The site fell into disrepair after the war, but a yearlong project has restored its wartime appearance and added exhibitions and visitor facilities.
Copyright 2014 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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The mansion at the Bletchley Park code-breaking center, 50 miles northwest of London. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Jeff Koons’ (American, b. 1955-) ‘Banality’ series culminated in 1988 with ‘Michael Jackson and Bubbles,’ a series of three life-size gold-leaf-planted porcelain statues of the singer cuddling his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles. One of the three is included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s ‘Jeff Koons: A Retrospective,’ which opens on June 27, 2014. Image courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art.
NEW YORK – The exhibition titled “Jeff Koons: A Retrospective” will open on June 27 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan.
Comprising nearly 150 objects dating from 1978 to the present, the exhibition will be the most comprehensive ever devoted to the artist’s groundbreaking career. The exhibition will fill, nearly to its entirety, the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building. The Whitney is the only U.S. venue for the retrospective, which will be the final exhibition to take place before the museum opens its new building in New York’s Meatpacking District in spring 2015.
The Jeff Koons retrospective will run through October 29, 2014.
Born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania, Jeff Koons is widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, popular, and controversial artists of the postwar era. Throughout his career, he has pioneered new approaches to the readymade, tested the boundaries between advanced art and mass culture, challenged the limits of industrial fabrication, and transformed the relationship of artists to the cult of celebrity and the global market. Yet despite these achievements, Koons has never before been the subject of a retrospective surveying the full scope of his career.
Jeff Koons: A Retrospective is organized by Scott Rothkopf, Nancy Crown, and Steve Crown, family curator and associate director of programs.
The exhibition will travel to the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris (November 26, 2014–April 27, 2015) and to the Guggenheim Bilbao (June 5–September 27, 2015).
Also currently on view at the Whitney is an exhibition titled “From Calder to O’Keeffe,” which features masterworks by iconic artists including Edward Hopper, Roy Lichtenstein, and William Eggleston. It will conclude on June 29.
The Whitney Museum of American Art is located at 945 Madison Ave., at 75th Street, New York, NY 10021. Tel. 212-570-3600.
Jeff Koons’ (American, b. 1955-) ‘Banality’ series culminated in 1988 with ‘Michael Jackson and Bubbles,’ a series of three life-size gold-leaf-planted porcelain statues of the singer cuddling his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles. One of the three is included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s ‘Jeff Koons: A Retrospective,’ which opens on June 27, 2014. Image courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art.
Despite the global embargo on elephant ivory that has been in place since 1990, the rate of elephant slaughter for tusks is at the highest point in a decade. In this picture, three female African bush elephants travel as a small herd in Tanzania. Photo by Ikiwaner, taken July 29, 2010, licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.
NEW YORK (AP) – The U.S. government is stepping up its crackdown on the illegal trafficking of wild animal products across the nation’s borders, saying some may be linked to terrorists, federal officials said Monday.
“Poaching in Africa is funding terrorist groups,” U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman told a news conference at Kennedy International Airport.
He said such illegal trade is a threat to global security because it’s driven by criminal elements, including terrorists using profits from items such as rhinoceros horns and elephant tusks to finance their activities.
On display in an airport cargo warehouse operated by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection was a collection of wildlife products seized at Kennedy – from ivory disguised to look like a wooden statue and the stuffed heads of a lion and leopard to handicrafts, artworks and musical instruments hiding animal parts.
The single priciest item was a rhino horn. It fetches $30,000 per pound – or about 30 percent more than its weight in gold.
Paul Chapelle, the agent in charge of New York for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said one horn case resulted in 16 arrests, including that of a mobster from Ireland now serving 13 months behind bars.
A dead elephant is worth about $18,000 – mostly from the tusk. Also seized was a small rhino horn libation cup worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Kennedy handles the largest cargo volume of any U.S. airport, about $100 billion a year, said Patrick Foye, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport.
And the wildlife element plays an especially powerful role in national security, said Froman, the chief U.S. trade negotiator and adviser to President Barack Obama.
More than 20,000 elephants were killed last year along with about 1,000 rhinos, meeting a rising world demand resulting in declining populations across Africa, according to officials with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
This treaty was signed by more than 170 countries to protect animals that end up as contraband including live pets, hunting trophies, fashion accessories, cultural artifacts and medicinal ingredients.
U.S. trade officials believe that groups benefiting from the poaching include the militant Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and South Sudan, the Janjaweed comprised of Sudanese Arab tribes, and al-Shabab, a jihadist group based in Somalia.
In February, Obama approved a new strategy for fighting trafficking through enforcement, as well as partnerships with other countries, communities and private industry. For the first time, U.S. officials are asking trading partners to agree to conservation measures for wildlife and the environment in return for signing agreements.
Kennedy customs officials are reaching out to local businesses, plus auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s and even Carnegie Hall to alert them to illegally traded valuables that may come their way.
Copyright 2014 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Despite the global embargo on elephant ivory that has been in place since 1990, the rate of elephant slaughter for tusks is at the highest point in a decade. In this picture, three female African bush elephants travel as a small herd in Tanzania. Photo by Ikiwaner, taken July 29, 2010, licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.
John William Waterhouse, ‘The crystal ball,’ 1902. Copyright the Collection Perez Simon, Mexico. MADRID – This summer, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting “Alma-Tadema and Victorian Painting in the Pérez Simón Collection,” an exhibition that will include paintings by some of the leading names in 19th-century English painting.
The works of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Frederic Leighton, Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Albert. J. Moore and John William Waterhouse express the values that these painters had partly inherited from the Pre-Raphaelites, presenting a strong contrast with the predominantly moralizing attitude of the day. Instead, they focused on classical antiquity, the cult of female beauty and a quest for visual harmony, all located in sumptuous settings and with a frequent use of medieval, Greek and Roman themes.
Commissioned by Véronique Gerard-Powell, honorary professor at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, the exhibition is composed of 50 works from the private Pérez Simón Collection, one of the most important holdings of Victorian painting in the world.
This exhibition has been shown in Paris and Rome before reaching Madrid, after which it will travel to London. The display of the works is organized into six thematic sections: The Eclecticism of an Era; Ideal Beauty, Classical Beauty; Alma-Tadema: Between Historical Reconstruction and Fantasy; The Face, Mirror of Beauty; From the Pre-Raphaelites to Symbolism; and Between Tradition and Modernity.
‘Remember some of the greatest geniuses in any field have broken all the rules to achieve their vision. But breaking rules isn’t what made them geniuses.’ – Helen Beling. Gray’s Auctioneers LLC image. CLEVELAND – The artist Helen Beling (New York, 1914-2001) was once prolific on the art scene, working with sculptors such as Jacques Lipchitz, exhibiting at the Metropolitan and Whitney museums in New York, and finding home for her works in some of the most established collections in the country. She worked in a variety of media including clay, stone, bronze, stainless steel and a material she called Belplast, revolutionizing the medium with her forms and process.
“Remember some of the greatest geniuses in any field have broken all the rules to achieve their vision. But breaking rules isn’t what made them geniuses.” – Helen Beling
However, after her death, her works went into storage and without a champion to her name, her fame faded and her works all disappeared into the collections of private owners.
This past year has seen a resurgence in the Beling name, with the recent “rediscovery” of her works by The Gallery at Gray’s. The gallery, which is now working closely with the Beling family, represents the estate of the artist and is working vigorously to introduce her works to the 21st century art collector.
This year works by Beling were featured in the 17th edition of the ArtPalmBeach fair in West Palm Beach where there were several successful private sales. She also made her first appearance at auction in two years this past month. Beling’s Business is Bad, a bronze from her early career, sold for $6,000 (including’s buyer’s premium) at Gray’s Auctioneers in Cleveland.
Gray’s Auctioneers will host the next auction of Beling’s work this fall, featuring a group of large to life-size works that were recently found by the Beling family in the artist’s storage unit in upstate New York.
For more information on the artist, sales and upcoming auctions, contact Kate Stamm, gallery director, The Gallery at Gray’s, by email: kate@galleryatgrays.com or by phone: 216-226-3300.
ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
‘Remember some of the greatest geniuses in any field have broken all the rules to achieve their vision. But breaking rules isn’t what made them geniuses.’ – Helen Beling. Gray’s Auctioneers LLC image.‘Enigma,’ bronze and wood, edition of 20, 10.5 inches x 8 inches x 5 inches. Gray’s Auctioneers LLC image.‘Seated Man,’ bronze, edition of 20, 11 inches x 7 inches x 6 inches. Gray’s Auctioneers LLC image.
A rare English cameo floral and leaf pattern art glass miniature lamp sold for $11,500 at Jeffrey S. Evans’ auction of Part II of Marjorie Hulsebus’ miniature lighting collection. This was the top seller of the day. Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates image. MT. CRAWFORD, Va. – A rare English cameo floral and leaf pattern art glass miniature lamp, white to citron yellow, with a satin finish, white floral leaf and butterfly décor, and period burner, sold for the top price at Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates’ second auction of the Marjorie Hulsebus estate collection of miniature lighting on May 31. Dating to the end of the 19th century, the lamp sold for $11,500, nearly twice the presale estimate.
LiveAuctioneers.com provided Internet live bidding.
This and the other items offered in the auction came from Hulsebus’ personal collection, and many had been published in her reference works on miniature lighting.
An equally rare cameo fuchsia glory and leaf pattern art glass miniature lamp, white to midnight blue, with a satin finish, decorated with vine and butterfly to the squatty base, attributed to Thomas Webb and Sons, sold within the $6,000-$9,000 estimate for $8,625.
Another highly sought-after rarity, a hanging cast-iron miniature triple-arm chandelier lamp, the frame being only 10 1/4 inches high, fitted with three colorless glass tapered fonts, each embossed “FIRE FLY” and with the correct opaque glass chimney-shade, also sold for $8,625. A rare figural Santa Claus lamp brought the fourth-highest price of the sale, $6,900. It was of white glass, with a fired yellow and brown body. Produced circa 1892 by the Consolidated Lamp & Glass Co., the lamp appealed to collectors partly because of its unusual coloration.
The Hulsebus Collection auction of 317 lots was 100 percent sold, realizing over $219,000, with registered bidders from over 30 countries. The third and last installment of this legendary collection will be sold by Jeffrey S. Evans on Oct. 18, followed by two collections of early kerosene and Victorian period lighting.
For further information call 540-534-3939, or email info@jeffreysevans.com.
A rare English cameo floral and leaf pattern art glass miniature lamp sold for $11,500 at Jeffrey S. Evans’ auction of Part II of Marjorie Hulsebus’ miniature lighting collection. This was the top seller of the day. Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates image.
Estimated at $6,000-$9,000, the rare cameo Fuchsia Glory and Leaf pattern art glass miniature lamp sold for $8,625. Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates image.
Just over 10 inches tall, this rare hanging cast-iron miniature triple-arm chandelier lamp, with the correct opaque glass chimney-shades, sold for $8,625. Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates image.
The Santa figural miniature lamp, having a rare yellow and brown coloration, sold for $6,900, easily topping the $3,000-$5,000 estimate. Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates image.
Richard Tuttle, ‘Walking on Air, C3’ (2009), copyright the artist, courtesy Stuart Shave Modern Art, London and Pace Gallery, New York. LONDON – The UK’s largest ever survey of the renowned American sculptor and poet Richard Tuttle will take place in London this October. It will comprise a major exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery surveying five decades of his career, a large-scale sculptural commission in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and a new publication. Titled “I Don’t Know, Or The Weave of Textile Language,” this unique project has been specially devised by the artist and focuses on the particular importance of textiles in his work.
Richard Tuttle came to prominence in the 1960s, combining sculpture, painting, poetry and drawing. He has become revered for his delicate and playful approach, often using such humble, everyday materials as cloth, paper, rope and plywood. For this project, Tuttle has taken as his starting point one of the unsung heroes of everyday life: textiles.
Textiles are commonly associated with craft and fashion, yet woven canvas lies behind many of the world’s most acclaimed works of art and textiles are of increasing interest to artists today. “I Don’t Know, Or The Weave of Textile Language” investigates the importance of this material throughout history, across Tuttle’s remarkable body of work and into the latest developments in his practice.
The exhibition will run Oct. 14 through Dec. 14.
The Whitechapel Gallery presents a major exhibition surveying Richard Tuttle’s career from the 1960s to today. He is renowned for being one of the first artists to make the radical gesture of taking the canvas off the stretcher and hanging it directly on the wall in works such as Purple Octagonal, 1967, as well as making provocative sculptures such as Third Rope Piece, 1974, the intimate scale of which directly responds to traditional ideas of monumental art.
Showcasing works selected in close dialogue with the artist the exhibition centers on his use of fiber, thread and textile and offers a fascinating introduction to Tuttle’s influential body of work. The exhibition will include Looking for the Map 8, 2013-14, a new work shown in the UK for the first time on display alongside works made in situ by the artist such as the remaking of the key sculpture Ten Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself, 1972 as well as international loans from museums and private collections.
Rather than displaying the works chronologically, the artist will instead position works in a formal relationship to each other and in direct response to the architectural framework of Whitechapel Gallery’s historic exhibition spaces. A concern with color, line and movement runs through Tuttle’s intuitive presentation which will occupy both ground and first floor galleries, featuring works ranging in scale from the intricate series of Section, Extension wall pieces to the 3-meter-long floor-based sculpture Systems VI, 2011.
Alongside this exhibition, Tate Modern will present a newly commissioned sculpture in its iconic Turbine Hall from Oct. 14 to April 6. Principally constructed of fabric, it will be the largest work ever created by the artist, measuring over 12 meters in height. It will bring together a group of specially made fabrics, each of which combines natural and man-made fibers to create different textures in bright colors. These will be suspended from the ceiling as a sculptural form, contrasting with the solid industrial architecture of the Turbine Hall, to create a huge volume of joyous color and fluidity.
A new book will be published as part of this project, drawing on Tuttle’s knowledge as a longstanding collector of textiles from around the world. It will include contributions by the artist and new essays by Magnus af Petersen, chief curator, Whitechapel Gallery and Achim Borchardt-Hume, head of exhibitions, Tate Modern. The publication will bring together photographs of Tuttle’s personal collection of textiles, images of works from the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition, and documentation of the sculpture at Tate Modern.
Richard Tuttle was born in New Jersey in 1941 and now lives and works between Maine, New Mexico and New York. His work is held in major private and public collections around the world and recent retrospectives have been held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Richard Tuttle, ‘Walking on Air, C3’ (2009), copyright the artist, courtesy Stuart Shave Modern Art, London and Pace Gallery, New York.
The 170-year-old Abram W. Pike House in Grand Rapids, Mich. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) – A piece of West Michigan art history was uncovered recently as workers renovated the 170-year-old Pike House.
A sign from its former days as the “Grand Rapids Art Museum” was found underneath the boards across the entry to the Greek Revival building, according to The Grand Rapids Press.
Not much was made of the discovery until Anita Gilleo stopped by to tell the new owners the sign was painted by her grandfather, Mathias Alten, the landscape and portrait painter who is considered Grand Rapids’s most famous artist.
The carved and gilded sign, which originally identified the building as the “Grand Rapids Art Gallery,” was painted by her grandfather, a founding member of the museum, near the turn of the 20th century, said Gilleo, who lives in the house her grandfather built near Aquinas College.
“When he first arrived here at age 17 or 18, he was a sign painter,” said Gilleo of her grandfather, who died in 1938 at age 66.
Alten was a prolific painter whose impressionist works are loved and valued by collectors throughout the art world.
Gilleo said the sign was changed from “Grand Rapids Art Gallery” to “Grand Rapids Art Museum” sometime in the 1950s as the meaning of the original name took on a more commercial tone in the art world.
Todd Almassian, whose law firm is renovating the building, said he cannot keep the sign on the exterior of the building because he believes it would confuse out-of-town visitors seeking the current Grand Rapids Art Museum.
“At the minimum, we want to put it inside the Pike House and display it prominently in the interior,” said Almassian. “But it’s been so fun to leave it up for a few days.”
Keller & Almassian bought the 18,000-square-foot office building from Design Plus, an architectural firm that had owned it since 2007.
The Pike House was originally built in 1844 for Abram W. Pike, a fur trader who moved to Grand Rapids from Port Sheldon on Lake Michigan, at the mouth of the Pigeon River.
The building’s distinctive white columns were hauled to the site by Pike after the Ottawa House Hotel was abandoned by its developers, who had hoped Port Sheldon would become a thriving seaport.
A Paracas necropolis mantle, circa 200 B.C.-A.D. 200. LACMA collections, Los Angeles, Calif, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. LIMA, Peru (AP) – A rare and fragile pre-Incan funeral shroud was displayed to reporters Monday, part of the first batch of ancient Paracas textiles that Sweden is returning to Peru 80 years after they were smuggled out by a diplomat.
The intricately colored shroud, measuring 41 inches by 21 inches (104 centimeters by 53 centimeters), and 88 other textiles were donated to a museum in Gothenburg in the early 1930s by Swedish consul Sven Karell. He had secreted them out of Peru after they were discovered in the Paracas Peninsula, a desert south of Lima where the extremely dry climate helped protect the Alpaca wool fibers.
Despite being some 2,000 years old, “it is perfectly preserved,” said Krzysztof Makowski, a University of Warsaw archaeologist who has studied the shroud as a professor at the Catholic University of Peru. “Across the world, the discoveries of textiles of this age are much rarer than any precious metal.”
“If you wanted to find a Roman textile, you won’t find anything because nothing was preserved,” Makowski said. “Textiles are very fragile. There are very few countries in the world that have conserved fabrics. Peru is one of them.”
The so-called Shroud of Gothenburg is uniquely complex. It includes some 80 different color tones and subtones such as blue, green, yellow, red and orange. It is divided into 32 frames decorated with items resembling condors, frogs, cats, corn, cassava and human-like figures. Some researchers believe the shroud may be a sort of calendar related to the tracking of farming seasons, said Jahl Dulanto, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne who leads the Paracas investigation team at the Catholic University of Peru.
Dulanto said experts still do not fully understand how the shroud’s creators achieved the combination of sewing techniques and pigments.
The shroud and three other pieces were flown to Peru last week, fulfilling a friendly agreement reached with the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg in 2013. The rest of the Paracas textiles will return to Peru over the next seven years.
Peruvian officials have been working to reclaim its cultural antiquities from other countries. In June, it recovered more than 3,800 pre-Incan items held in Argentina. In 2011, Yale University returned 366 pieces from the Incan city of Machu Picchu that it had held for more than a century.
Copyright 2014 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
A Paracas necropolis mantle, circa 200 B.C.-A.D. 200. LACMA collections, Los Angeles, Calif, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
