The ‘Podium’ jacket worn by Orson Welles in his Oscar nominated role as ‘Charles Foster Kane.’ Profiles in History image. LOS ANGELES – The signature “Podium” jacket worn by Orson Welles in his Oscar nominated role as “Charles Kane” from the legendary 1941 Citizen Kane film will be included in Profiles in History’s Oct. 17-20 “Hollywood Auction.” Designed by academy award-winning costume designer, Edward Stevenson, the jacket was worn by Welles in one of the most prominent scenes of the film featured in the backdrop of himself “Kane” as he delivers his gubernatorial campaign speech. Profiles in History has set the estimate at $60,000-$80,000.
LiveAuctioneers.com will provide Internet live bidding.
The dark blue wool suit jacket with pale grey pinstripes features two buttons, flap pockets, shawl collar and is lined in black. The Western Costume Co. internal bias handwritten label is included and notes “Orson Wells 41 1/2” and stamped “25351.”
“Citizen Kane is considered a national treasure,” said Joe Maddalena, president and CEO of Profiles in History. “’Charles Foster Kane’ is probably one of most notorious film characters in the world personified by Orson Welles, which eventually evolved to an enormous amount of notoriety for both. The jacket worn by Welles, or shall we say ‘Kane,’ represents a significant piece of film history.”
Citizen Kane is the renowned 1941 American drama film directed, co-written, produced by, and starring Orson Welles. The picture was Welles’ first feature film. The film was nominated for Academy Awards in nine categories; it won an Academy Award for Best Writing (original screenplay) by Herman Mankiewicz and Welles. It is to this day, considered by many critics, filmmakers, and fans to be the greatest film ever made.
For auction details phone Profiles in History: 310-859-7701
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 .
ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
The ‘Podium’ jacket worn by Orson Welles in his Oscar nominated role as ‘Charles Foster Kane.’ Profiles in History image.The label indicating the jacket was made for Orson Welles is included. Profiles in History image.Movie still from ‘Citizen Kane’ showing Welles wearing the jacket. Profiles in History image.
Ruth Asawa (American/Japanese, 1926-2013), hanging sculpture, c. 1954, iron and brass wire, 103 inches high. Price realized: $329,000. Keno Auctions image.
NEW YORK – Leigh Keno’s Oct. 1 sale confirmed the strength of the modern and contemporary art market with sales totaling $1.2 million, exceeding the high end of the presale estimate of $650,000-$1.140 million. LiveAuctioneers.com provided Internet live bidding.
“With only 48 lots offered, the sell-rate was a healthy 80 per cent,” reported Leigh Keno. Telephone bidders and two determined bidders in the room battled it out for the top lot of the sale: a Ruth Asawa sculpture that drove the bidding up to $329,000 (est. $100,000-$200,000). Keno noted that the consignor, John W. Freeman, purchased the piece in 1954 at Asawa’s first solo exhibition at the Peridot Gallery.
The second highest priced lot of the day was a Cindy Sherman photograph, Untitled Film Still #39 that sold for $191,000 (est. $80,000-$120,000). This work had been given to Herkimer College in upstate New York in 1979 and was being sold to benefit the school’s scholarship fund. “We are grateful to Cindy Sherman for recently kindly signing and dating the work for us, assigning an edition number of ‘1/10,'” said Keno.
A Marc Chagall glazed ceramic dish created in 1953 achieved $97,500, against a presale estimate of $25,000-50,000. “I was not surprised at the interest because it was a unique work by Chagall and not from a series,” said Keno. Ceramic works from the Madoura pottery by Pablo Picasso also did well, the best being a glazed terra-cotta plaque, Visage de Femme Pomone, 1968, which brought $20,000 (est. $7,000-$10,000).
A pair of Alexander Calder Spiral silver cufflinks brought $30,000 (est. $4,000-$8,000) in spirited bidding. Leigh said he understood the enthusiasm for them. “These were a personal gift to the consigner, John Freeman, from Calder, who came to his 27th birthday party at Wave Hill in the Bronx, in June, 1955,” said Keno. “Provenance doesn’t get any better than this. We were also able to publish in the catalog several photographs of Calder taken by Mr. Freeman which had been tucked away in a drawer for decades.”
Not surprising for Keno Auctions sale, there were a number of mid-20th century furniture in the auction, including a rare Gio Ponti lounge chair with original upholstery that came in over estimate at $43,750 (est. $15,000-$30,000) and two Ponti sideboards that sold for $16,250 and $13,750, against estimates of $3,000-$6,000.
Rounding out the sale was a number of modern and contemporary paintings including: a Sam Francis monotype, which achieved $27,500 (est. $12,000-$18,000); a James Brooks abstract from 1951 sold for $28,750 (est. $7,000-$10,000); and a Gerhard Richter oil on canvas Vermalung, estimated at $10,000-$20,000, was finally hammered down at $48,750.
Leigh Keno said he was very happy with the overall results. “We recently redesigned and renovated our gallery space and lighting system, and I love the way the pieces looked in a clean modern space. The results exceeded the high estimate and we had the opportunity to work with some great objects and of course most importantly, some great people.”
Ruth Asawa (American/Japanese, 1926-2013), hanging sculpture, c. 1954, iron and brass wire, 103 inches high. Price realized: $329,000. Keno Auctions image.
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954), ‘Untitled Film Still #39,’ 1979, gelatin silver print, signed, dated and numbered by artist in pencil on reverse, signature, ‘1979’ and ‘1/10.’ Price realized: $191,000. Keno Auctions image.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – A West Hollywood collection of Coptic, Indian and pre-Columbian artifacts will be highlighted in I.M. Chait Gallery / Auctioneers’s sale on Sunday, Oct. 12. Asian arts and antiques, I.M. Chait’s traditional specialty, will also cross the auction block in the 550-lot sale.
Internet live bidding will be provided by LiveAuctioneers.com.
Included in the auction will be:
– A group of Antique Chinese ceramics from a Las Vegas collection;
– Early Chinese ceramics from a German collection;
– Yellow gold and jade jewelry together with coral, lapis, malachite and agate necklaces;
– Japanese woodblock prints from a Los Angeles collection
– Antique Chinese paintings from a Long Beach, Calif., collection together with Chinese scrolls from a Southern California collector.
For details phone I.M. Chait Gallery / Auctioneers at 310-285-0182 or email chait@chait.com.
Gua Tewet, the tree of life hand prints, Borneo, Indonesia. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
PARIS (AFP) – The silhouette of a hand on a cave wall in Indonesia is 40,000 years old, showing that Europe was not the birthplace of art as long believed, researchers said on Wednesday.
Created by spraying reddish paint around an open hand pressed against rock, the stencil was made about the same time—and possibly before—early humans were leaving artwork on cave walls around Europe that was long thought to be the first in the world.
In the same cave on the Indonesian island of, a painting of a pig was dated to about 35,000 years ago, the Indonesian and Australian team reported in the journal Nature.
The discovery, they said, throws up two theories, both of which challenge the conventional wisdom around the history of human artistic expression.
Art either arose independently but simultaneously in different parts of the world—or was brought by Homo sapiens when he left Africa for a worldwide odyssey.
“Europeans can’t exclusively claim to be the first to develop an abstract mind anymore,” Anthony Dosseto of Australia’s University of Wollongong said in a statement.
“They need to share this, at least, with the early inhabitants of Indonesia.”
Anthropologists consider rock art to be an indicator of the onset of abstract thinking—the ability to reflect on ideas and events.
Dosseto and a team dated 12 hand stencils and two animal likenesses found at seven cave sites on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
The ancient images were discovered more than 50 years ago, but had never been accurately dated.
It had been widely assumed that anything older than 10,000 years would have eroded away in the tropical climate.
The team measured the radioactive decay of trace amounts of uranium found in small stalactite-like calcite growths called “cave popcorn” that had formed a layer less than 10 millimetres (0.38 inches) thick over the art.
The method produced minimum estimates for the works’ ages, and the pieces could in fact be much older, said the team.
The stencil is now officially the oldest known specimen of the hand silhouette art form, they reported.
And the depiction of a fat-bellied babirusa “pig deer,” its four legs, head, tail and lines of hair still clearly visible, is one of the earliest known depictions of an animal, “if not the earliest.”
“It can now be demonstrated that humans were producing rock art about 40,000 years ago at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world,” the team wrote.
The previous oldest cave art was from El Castillo cave in northern Spain, including a hand stencil dated 37,300 years ago, according to Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University, who wrote a comment on the study.
The oldest known animal painting was of a charcoal rhino in the Chauvet Cave in France, dated to 35,300-38,827 years ago. Traces of red paint about 36,000-41,000 years old were found in Fumane, Italy.
Chris Stringer, a palaeontologist at Britain’s Natural History Museum, said the new data suggested that early humans were already artists when they spread out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago.
“I think some of the art in Australia will also eventually be dated to this very early time,” he said in a video distributed by Nature.
The findings “stress the great relevance of Asia, and especially southeast Asia, for the study of human evolution,” added Roebroeks.
“Compared with Europe, Asia has seen little fieldwork, and new finds will keep on challenging what we think we know about human evolution.”
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Gua Tewet, the tree of life hand prints, Borneo, Indonesia. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
The Belgian Comic Strip Center in Brussels. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. BRUSSELS (AFP) – Comics are serious business in the land of Tintin and The Smurfs, and nowhere more so than in Europe’s biggest and oldest museum dedicated to the art form as the venue celebrates its 25th birthday.
Enter the Belgium Comic Strip Center and you pass a giant model of the red and white moon rocket used by the ginger-quiffed boy detective, along with other life-size replicas from other famed comics.
Located in a stunning Art Nouveau warehouse in central Brussels, it’s clear that here comics, graphic novels, bandes desinees, call them what you will, are more high art than popular culture.
But if anything, the challenge for the museum over the past quarter century is to make sure that things don’t get too serious, and that the element of wonder that has drawn children to Tintin, Snowy and friends is not lost.
“In 2014 we’re trying to support what comics have become. We don’t want to get tied up in the idea that a museum has to be an art gallery,” museum director Jean Auquier said at an event to mark the 25th anniversary.
A party to celebrate the big day drew a huge crowd of well-heeled members of Brussels high society, including a few surviving contemporaries of Tintin’s legendary creator, Herge, who died in 1983.
Beneath the glass ceiling of the former textile warehouse, designed by Art Nouveau master Victor Horta, they sipped champagne and looked at exhibitions marking the impact of comics on Belgian society, while the sounds of a live jazz band echoed off the high ceiling.
Comics as a national symbol
But the museum is a major draw for tourists too—for many of whom comic strips are as much of a national symbol of Belgium as beer or chocolate—and is the country’s seventh most visited monument.
It attracts 200,000 visitors a year, more than double the number who visit a new, dedicated Tintin museum in the leafy new university town of Louvain-la-Neuve, some 20 kilometres (12 miles) outside Brussels.
Most come from France (40 percent), Belgium (17.5 percent), Germany (5 percent) and Spain (4 percent)—but 3 percent of them come from as far afield as China.
The museum is designed for all ages too, with a new section dedicated to the artist Pierre Culliford, who under the pen name Peyo created the Smurfs in the late 1950s. It features a giant mushroom of the kind that makes the home for the small blue creatures.
In the comics library, visitors can read their favorite strips all day long for 50 euro cents (62 US cents).
The top floor—overlooking the hall which is dominated by a huge model of the red bellboy’s cap worn by Belgian comic favorite Spirou—is given over to temporary exhibitions. For the 25th anniversary the main show features original illustrations featuring different Brussels sights such as the Atomium, the huge atom-shaped metal structure built for the 1958 World Fair.
The exhibition also features work by the comic designer and screenwriter Jean-Claude Servais, who is better known for his fantasy works capturing the mystery of the forest but who set himself the task of drawing the historic heart of Brussels.
“That wasn’t easy,” Servais told AFP.
Neither was encapsulating 25 years of comic history, officials at the museum say. In 1989 only 500 books were published in French every year, in a world where computer art was almost nonexistent and Japanese manga was still little known in Europe.
But today 5,000 are published a year in Belgium, with manga styles representing 20 percent of those on sale, and a growing focus on more adult-themed graphic novels, or on luxury editions. Computer and technology-driven graphics are meanwhile increasingly common, replacing the hand drawn art of the golden era.
The museum welcomes it all, says Auquier, the museum director.
“Many visitors don’t pretend to like the fantasy stuff, the graphic novels, the autobiographical stuff. They’re just here with their memories of Lucky Luke,” he said, referring to a classic French comic about a cowboy.
“And they will learn, here, that there is more to the world of comics.”
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
The Belgian Comic Strip Center in Brussels. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
‘City on a Rock,’ long attributed to Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) is now thought to have been painted by the 19th century forger Eugenic Lucas. Elements of the painting appear to have been copied from autographed works by Goya. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. GENEVA (AFP) – Dressed in an immaculate white lab coat, Sandra Mottaz stares intently through a stereo microscope at a bold-colored painting purportedly by French master Fernand Leger, searching for signs of forgery.
“Here, we can make out vertical lines in what could be a grid,” Mottaz says, looking up from the shiny white instrument providing a three-dimensional view of the painting.
That could signal the painting is a fake, but artists themselves also use the technique to copy their own work onto different formats, so more tests are needed, she says.
Mottaz and her colleagues at the Fine Arts Expert Institute (FAEI) use cutting-edge scientific methods like radiocarbon dating and infrared reflectography to determine the authenticity of artworks, and sometimes to uncover unknown masterpieces.
“When you buy an apartment, you always get an appraisal first. But in the art world, until recently, you could buy works for 10 million euros without sufficient documentation,” says FAEI chief Yann Walther.
But that is changing amid soaring prices in an art market where works worth an estimated $60 billion change hands each year.
The ballooning amounts up for grabs have also hiked the incentive for art forgers, and scientists like Walther and Mottaz are increasingly being called upon to supplement efforts by traditional art experts and conservationists to authenticate works.
Estimated half of artwork in circulation fake
The art world has in recent years been rocked by forgery scandals, revealing fake works attributed to a long line of masters, including Paul Gauguin, Marc Chagall, Jackson Pollock and Leger.
Experts estimate a full half of all artworks in circulation today are fake—a number that is difficult to verify but that Walther says is, if anything, an underestimate.
Between 70 and 90 percent of works that pass through FAEI turn out to be fake, he says.
His institute sits inside the Geneva Freeports, a heavily-guarded toll- and customs-free zone where collectors from around the world store more than a million artworks, including Picassos, Van Goghs, Monets and apparently a Leonardo da Vinci.
It can be tricky spotting fakes with the naked eye, but top-notch lab equipment helps.
Mottaz carefully carries the Leger to another room where her colleague Valeria Ciocan uses infrared reflectography to confirm the grid underneath the working man’s face, supposedly painted in 1954.
Lab chief Kilian Anheuser then moves the piece to the nearby x-ray room, where he determines that the pigments used are different from the ones Leger usually turned to in the 1950s.
This is still not hard proof of a forgery, says Anheuser, who wants to go on to radiocarbon date the paper, allowing him to determine if it is from trees felled before or after nuclear tests carried out in the 1950s.
If the paper can be dated to after 1955, when Leger died, the answer will be obvious, he says, adding though that he needs the go-ahead from the ownerbefore moving forward with pricier tests.
Depending on what tests they run, scientific labs can charge clients up to 15,000 euros ($19,000) per painting, which might sound steep until you consider the value of many of the paintings they study.
Analysis adds value
Another piece provides a starker example of what can be found lurking under the surface of paintings that look fine at first glance.
A reclining nude attributed to French artist Albert Marquet and dated 1912 looks authentic until Ciocan uses reflectography to expose a tractor painted in great detail underneath.
The tractor’s tires, revealingly, are of a make that did not hit the market until the 1930s.
The research sometimes also reveals that a work is of greater value than first thought.
Walther recalls one of the first pieces to pass through the lab: a painting titled Winter Scene by 17th century Dutch great Adam Van Breen.
The piece, owned by a Geneva collector, was believed to be a copy the artist or his atelier had made of what was thought to be the original, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris.
But the scientists found sketching underneath indicating the artist’s own research, hinting that the Geneva collector’s piece was in fact the original.
Even without such startling findings, “scientific analysis adds value to artworks,” Walther says, pointing out that his institute’s research helps “tell a story,” revealing the artist’s creative process and the techniquesused.
Art historian and restorer Andrea Hoffmann of Atelier Arte in Geneva agrees that scientific methods can be useful in some cases.
But these methods are no substitute for traditional experts like herself, who draw on familiarity with an artist’s style and historical context to spot problems.
“Ninety percent of what can be seen in a painting can be seen with your eyes,” she says, stressing: “That is where experience comes in.”
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
‘City on a Rock,’ long attributed to Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) is now thought to have been painted by the 19th century forger Eugenic Lucas. Elements of the painting appear to have been copied from autographed works by Goya. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The Carolina Theater in Charlotte was designed in the Beaux-Arts style by the Washington, D.C. architectural firm of Milburn & Heister and completed in 1926. Image by Caroline Culler. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) – The Foundation for the Carolinas is getting an $8 million gift from members of the Belk family for renovation of Carolina Theatre.
The Charlotte Observer reported the foundation announced the gift Monday.
Foundation officials said developers want to build a $60 million boutique hotel on top of a new lobby for the theatre and join the theatre and the foundation’s headquarters next door.
The new complex will be named Belk Place, in honor of the gift from the families of Claudia Belk and the late John M. Belk, Charlotte’s former mayor, and Katherine Belk and the late Thomas M. Belk.
The foundation plans to reopen the long-closed theater as part of a $35 million project.
Foundation CEO Michael Marsicano said the refurbished theater will be a civic meeting space.
Copyright 2014 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-10-07-14 1138GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
The Carolina Theater in Charlotte was designed in the Beaux-Arts style by the Washington, D.C. architectural firm of Milburn & Heister and completed in 1926. Image by Caroline Culler. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
Doris Duke’s Shangri La house and gardens outside Honolulu. Image by Daderot. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. HONOLULU (AP) – American tobacco heiress Doris Duke fell in love with Islamic art and culture during her honeymoon through the Middle East and Asia in 1935.
So much so that she commissioned a bedroom and bathroom inspired by the Taj Mahal, the mausoleum in India built by a 17th century emperor for his favorite wife.
The marble- and mirror-lined private living quarters will be opened to the public for the first time this weekend in Hawaii after years of extensive repairs and restoration.
Duke, who died in 1993, never explained what prompted her to build a house with architectural elements of Syria and India in the oceanfront home she built in Honolulu or to collect items such as 13th century Persian tiles.
Deborah Pope, executive director of the home that’s been functioning as a museum of Islamic art since 2002, said Duke was drawn to cultures different from the elite East Coast society of her youth. She also loved things of beauty.
“I think she’s an aesthete,” Pope said, sitting on a red settee in Duke’s bedroom.
The bedroom is located at the end of an open-air passageway extending from the main courtyard of the home that Duke called Shangri La. A perforated marble door, or jali, made by artisans in India opens to a tiled room. Light pours from more jali doors facing the ocean and garden.
The highlight, however, might be the bathroom lined with marble that’s been inlaid with precious stones in the shape of tulips, anemone and other flowers.
Most of the rest of the 14,000-square-foot house, including the grand foyer and living room, have been open to the public and scholars for more than a decade. But the bedroom and bathroom—called the Mughal Suite after the period when Islamic emperors ruled what is today India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh—was closed while the roof was repaired.
Sugata Ray, a University of California, Berkeley professor, said the bath is important for scholars studying an early 20th century revival in Mughal arts and craft techniques.
The 18th century earrings and necklaces on display in the suite are unique because few of Duke’s contemporaries bought and preserved such things.
“It gives a sense of the diversity of Islamic art,” said Ray, who specializes in the study of South Asia and Islamic art. “It’s not just about masterworks but about everyday objects of the Mughal elite: jewelry, textiles and things that were really not fashionable in the 1930s as a collector’s item.”
Ray noted Duke later began buying masterpieces—such as a 13th century Persian tile piece called a mihrab—as she began to see her home as a center for the study of Islamic art.
Duke commissioned the Mughal Suite while in India during her 10-month honeymoon. She initially envisioned it as a section of her mother-in-law’s estate in Palm Beach, Florida, but decided to build her own place in Hawaii after stopping in the islands on the way home.
Pope said she wanted the room to capture the moment when Duke, as a 22-year-old, has a profound experience in India while traveling outside the U.S. and Europe for the first time. The Shangri La team of curators and conservationists consulted 1930s photographs to restore the rooms to what they looked like when the home was first built.
“I thought there was something valid in showing what makes this young woman fall in love with the Islamic world at such an early age and undertake a project of this scale,” Pope said.
Duke died at the age of 80 in Los Angeles. She established the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art in her will and stipulated that her home be open to the public and scholars.
Copyright 2014 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-10-06-14 2141GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Doris Duke’s Shangri La house and gardens outside Honolulu. Image by Daderot. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
Wedgwood Fairyland Lustre ‘Ghostly Wood’ Malfrey vase and cover, designed by Daisy Makeig-Jones (1881-1945). Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com archive and Sworders Fine Art Auctioneers. LONDON – Seven thousand private donations have helped save a historic collection of Wedgwood pottery in Britain by raising £2.74 million (3.50 million euros, $4.38 million), with a third of the money coming from the celebrated company’s home region.
The Wedgwood Collection, which includes 80,000 works of art, ceramics and photographs spanning more than 250 years, was under threat after Waterford Wedgwood Potteries collapsed in 2009 at the height of the global financial crisis.
The company’s £134 million pension debt threatened the future of the museum where the collection was kept and an appeal was launched that also raised £13 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund and private foundations.
Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund, which helped run the campaign, hailed the “amazing show of public support” ranging from £10 gifts via text message to six-figure checks.
“Britain united to save this collection,” he said.
Around 30 percent of the money came from the Midlands area of central England where the collection is displayed at the Wedgwood factory site near the city of Stoke-on-Trent.
The company traces its history back to 1759 when Josiah Wedgwood started work as a potter, eventually transforming the business into an international industry.
Its early success was attributed to innovative designs imported from ancient cultures being rediscovered as Britain built its empire, and its imitation of Chinese porcelain.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Wedgwood Fairyland Lustre ‘Ghostly Wood’ Malfrey vase and cover, designed by Daisy Makeig-Jones (1881-1945). Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com archive and Sworders Fine Art Auctioneers.
