Official police mugshot of O.J. Simpson, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department
LAS VEGAS (AP) – A memorabilia dealer who blames his heart attacks on the stress of being robbed at gunpoint by O.J. Simpson is suing the former football star and five other men who were in the room during the heist, seeking unspecified civil damages.
A lawyer for Bruce Fromong said Monday he intends to show a Nevada jury that his 55-year-old client’s four heart attacks were caused by the emotional stress of the September 2007 robbery in a Las Vegas casino hotel room and its aftermath.
“We think we can prove the causal connection,” said Fromong’s attorney, Elliot Blut.
Simpson claimed he didn’t know anyone had guns and that he was only trying to retrieve items that had been stolen after his acquittal in the 1994 slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, in Los Angeles.
Simpson, 62, is serving nine to 33 years at Lovelock Correctional Center, northeast of Reno, for his conviction on charges including armed robbery and kidnapping.
Fromong, of North Las Vegas, said he is still seeing doctors for physical maladies he blames on the encounter. He said he and his wife, Lynette Fromong, have suffered financially, mentally and physically.
“This has affected our entire life,” Fromong said.
Simpson’s lawyer, Yale Galanter, called the lawsuit frivolous.
“I’m going to fight this guy tooth and nail,” Galanter said from Miami. “Initially, Fromong said his heart attacks were caused by the news media. Now he’s switching his story and saying O.J. caused it.”
Clark County District Court Judge Jessie Walsh did not immediately set a hearing on the lawsuit filed Friday in Las Vegas.
It names Simpson and convicted co-defendant Clarence “C.J.” Stewart as defendants, along with four former co-defendants who were initially charged with Simpson and Stewart but took plea deals and testified for the prosecution. Walter Alexander, Charles Cashmore, Charles Ehrlich and Michael McClinton each pleaded guilty to lesser felonies and received probation.
The lawsuit also names Thomas Riccio – the go-between who arranged the ill-fated meeting with Fromong and was never charged with a crime.
Riccio said Fromong told him of a possible lawsuit in May when they saw each other at a memorabilia show in San Francisco.
“‘My lawyers want to sue everybody and see what sticks,'” Riccio said Fromong told him.
“He’s trying to make his money the wrong way,” Riccio told The Associated Press on Monday night.
Riccio said a representative for Fromong recently tried to get memorabilia from him in exchange for letting the matter go.
Alexander’s previous lawyer in the Simpson case, Robert Dennis Rentzer, said he no longer represents Alexander. Lawyers for Cashmore, Ehrlich and McClinton did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
The other memorabilia peddler who was robbed, Alfred Beardsley, is not named as a defendant.
“I wasn’t going to sue another victim,” Fromong said.
Stewart’s lawyer, Brent Bryson, said Fromong testified at trial that he wasn’t scared by Stewart and that Fromong recalled someone he thought was Stewart patting him down for weapons during the Sept. 13, 2007, confrontation at the Palace Station casino-hotel.
“He said it was the men with the guns he was afraid of,” Bryson said. Stewart, 55, is serving 7 1/2 to 27 years at Northern Nevada Correctional Center in Carson City.
Both men are appealing their convictions. ___
Associated Press writer Oskar Garcia contributed to this report.
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Ellsworth Kelly, Blue Relief, 2007, oil on canvas, two joined panels, 80 x 80 x 2¾ inches. Courtesy of Ellsworth Kelly and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
NEW YORK – The Guggenheim Museum has received an extraordinary gift – a major oil-on-canvas artwork by Ellsworth Kelly titled Blue Relief – that will be auctioned in New York at The Guggenheim International Gala on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2009. Those who cannot attend the event in person can bid absentee or by phone until noon tomorrow (Wednesday).
The 2007 painting, which comes with provenance from the artist, is valued at $1.2 million. The work consists of two joined panels measuring 80 inches by 80 inches by 2¾ inches (depth).
Blue Relief was displayed from Oct. 11, 2007 through Feb. 28, 2008 at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain as part of the exhibition “Art in America: Three Hundred Years of Innovation.” Subsequently the painting was exhibited at Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
In the late 1940s, Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923, Newburgh, N.Y.) formulated a reductive visual language that he has continued to refine and elaborate upon throughout his career. Although relentlessly abstract, his forms are anchored to the legible details of architecture and landscape, as Kelly, using his keen eye for contour, extracts fragments from the surrounding world-the sweeping curve of a Romanesque church’s nave, a crescent moon, or an opened window-and condenses them into elemental colors and shapes.
The foreground panel of Blue Relief is a sapphire quadrilateral reminiscent of a shadow cast from an unseen building. In a lyrical gesture, this vividly colored form is set askew on top of an underlying matte-white panel. This work’s chromatic splendor and the visual imbalance created by the layered canvases exemplify Kelly’s experimentation with composition and his ongoing engagement with the sculptural possibilities of painting.
For additional information about Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Relief or to bid on the artwork, call 212-423-3584 or e-mail Ben Whine at bwhine@guggenheim.org.
About the Guggenheim International Gala:
The fifth annual Guggenheim International Gala fundraiser celebrating the Museum’s 50th anniversary will take place on Sept. 16, 2009, within the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed landmark on Fifth Avenue, where guests will enjoy a preview of the full-scale Kandinsky retrospective that opens to the public on Sept. 18. In addition, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s new performance installation, “Levels of Nothingness,” commissioned and produced by Works & Process at the Guggenheim, will premiere with two 25-minute performances at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. The evening will begin with cocktails at 7 p.m. in the rotunda and in the newly opened Cafe 3 space overlooking Central Park.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) – Once the legal dust settles from the nation’s biggest bust of Southwestern artifact looting, federal officials face another daunting task: deciding what to do with the ancient sandals, pipes, pendants and thousands of other items associated with the investigation.
It could take years to sort through the ancient Native American relics – seven truckloads have been collected already this summer – and determine where each should go, said Emily Palus, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s national curator in Washington, D.C.
Most of the items from those found guilty will likely end up in hand-picked public museums in the Four Corners region or with an American Indian tribe.
“Ultimately the people will benefit. Collections will be curated and made available to the public for research and exhibitions,” Palus said.
Federal officials have done this kind of work before – violations of national archaeological laws aren’t rare – but Palus can’t remember facing the prospect of finding homes for so many objects related to criminal cases.
For now, the items taken by government agents remain boxed in a secure, climate-controlled building in Salt Lake City. Most are carefully wrapped in acid-free paper and surrounded by special foam or other protective material, Palus said.
They range from the very fragile, like ancient sandals woven from reeds, to more robust items like boulders used for processing corn.
Federal agents spent more than two years on the investigation, building criminal cases based largely on recorded deals between an artifacts dealer secretly working for the government and a variety of buyers, sellers and collectors.
So far, 26 people from Utah, Colorado and New Mexico have been indicted for illegally taking or trafficking in artifacts from public or tribal lands. Two have committed suicide, two pleaded guilty this summer and the rest have pleaded not guilty.
The fate of the artifacts collected by the government will first be determined by the outcome of the legal cases. Those found not guilty will get their items back. Artifacts from those found guilty will begin a long process of disposition.
Work on the first batch may begin soon.
Jeanne Redd and her daughter Jerrica are scheduled to be sentenced in Salt Lake City on Wednesday. They pleaded guilty to several felony charges in July. As part of the plea deal, they relinquished their entire artifact collections, which required two moving trucks to haul away.
Last month, federal agents used five moving trucks to loaded thousands of artifacts from the Durango, Colo., home of antiquities dealer Vern Crites, who surrendered his collection after being named in federal charges earlier this summer.
Still other items were seized in a series of arrests in June in southern Utah.
If sacred or ceremonial objects are returned to the Navajo Nation, officials there will look for a tribal member who can use them in ceremonies, said Alan Downer, manager of the Navajo Nation’s historic preservation department.
“We don’t want to see them go unused,” Downer said.
Archaeological objects will be dealt with individually. Downer said displaying certain artifacts may not be consistent with Navajo traditions.
Still, they’d be happy to get back any items illegally taken from tribal land.
“The sense around here is that this is a good thing,” Downer said.
Human remains, burial and sacred objects from federal land will be dealt with under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which requires that items affiliated with native people be returned to tribes.
Other items from public land will be categorized, researched and placed with museums and other institutions that meet federal guidelines to make sure they are treated well, safely protected and made available to the public or researchers.
There are about 10 museums in the region that might qualify for artifacts from the Four Corners cases, Palus said.
“We’d certainly be interested,” said Duncan Metcalfe, chief curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah.
Although the much of the scientific value has been lost because the items were apparently removed from the ground without careful archaeological study, there’s still a benefit for researchers, he said.
“The arsenal of techniques we have for examining individual items has increased dramatically over the last 10 years,” Metcalfe said.
Museums, though, will have to temper their enthusiasm for the artifacts with the reality of a commitment to make sure they’re stored properly, safeguarded from the elements and handled according to the government’s requirements, he said.
That all requires money and space, which is often in short supply at museums.
Palus said the federal government would likely provide some kind of initial payment for institutions to take care of the objects.
Some of the items could end up back at the epicenter of this summer’s artifacts raids: Blanding, Utah, the hometown of 17 of those charged. The city’s Edge of the Cedars Museum has taken items from criminal cases in the past and meets federal requirements, said director Teri Paul.
The museum, like others, has limited amounts of exhibit space. But Paul said they try to rotate most items through their exhibits at least once a year.
Providing public access to the objects taken from public land is one upside to cracking artifact trafficking cases, Palus said.
“Otherwise, they would remain in living room, basements and garages,” she said.
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
LONDON – Bloomsbury Auctions and Dreweatts have announced a far-reaching and strategic alliance. Initially the two companies will offer each other’s services to their growing client bases in the UK and internationally. Bloomsbury will expand its popular monthly ‘Bibliophile’ sales which will now be held in Dreweatts’ Godalming salerooms, the first being on Wednesday, Nov. 18. Dreweatts, on the other hand, have a number of collections in the pipeline to be offered for sale including wine. These sales will take place in Bloomsbury’s London and Rome rooms.
The two auction houses expect to have sales approaching $66.7 million in 2009; last year the two together offered 90,000 individual lots for sale, making them the second largest fine art auctioneers in Britain by number of lots sold.
Bloomsbury Auctions has grown rapidly in the past five years since moving its London premises to Mayfair’s Maddox Street and opening salerooms in both New York and Rome. Today Bloomsbury sells more books and works on paper (including manuscripts, prints, posters, watercolours and photographs) than any other auction house in the world; in 2008 it achieved a hammer turnover of $38.4 million including buyers’ premiums.
Bloomsbury holds the world record prices for items as diverse as Albert Einstein’s letters and Modern First Editions by Ian Fleming and J.K. Rowling.
Dreweatts is the trading name of the Fine Art Auction Group, which has been actively acquiring and consolidating a number of U.K. regional multidisciplinary auction businesses. It trades from flagship ‘country house’ premises at Donnington Priory, Newbury and also Bristol, Godalming and Tunbridge Wells. It has become one of Britain’s leading regional art and antiques auctioneers, reporting a turnover in 2008 of $26.7 million including buyers’ premiums. Particularly noteworthy amongst its successes was the private treaty sale of a collection of ‘First Fleet’ watercolors to the National Library of Australia for an undisclosed seven-figure sum, and the auction of a pair of portraits by Jean-Baptiste Greuze belonging to David Cameron’s family, which realized over $1.67 million.
“Bloomsbury’s business complements ours perfectly. Their world renowned expertise in books and manuscripts fits well with our wide range of disciplines in Britain,” said Stephan Ludwig, chairman of Dreweatts. “The London and international dimensions to this strategic alliance will greatly benefit our clients. I cannot imagine a more fitting development to celebrate our firm’s 250th anniversary this year.”
Rupert Powell, the managing director of Bloomsbury Auctions, said “We have, for some time, been looking to diversify what we can offer in New York and London, as seen by our $1.4 million inaugural sale of wine in New York earlier this year. Dreweatts’ depth and breadth of knowledge across the mainstream antiques and decorative arts market, is of a quality that enhances our position as an increasingly significant London West End saleroom.”
The alliance will see Rupert Powell joining Dreweatts’ board. Stephan Ludwig, by the same token, will be appointed to the board of Bloomsbury’s holding company.
LOS ANGELES – CNN is reporting that art thieves have made off with a collection of Andy Warhol paintings from a private residence in Los Angeles. An employee is said to have discovered the theft.
The multimillion-dollar collection, which belongs to businessman Richard Weisman, includes distinctive pop-art-style Warhol portraits of professional athletes Chris Evert, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tom Seaver and Pelé.
A $1 million reward has been offered for information leading to the recovery of the artworks.
At 4.5 billion years old, this anorthosite from the moon’s surface is approximately the same age as the moon itself. Made mostly of plagioclase feldspar, it is thought to be a sample of the Moon’s early feldspar crust. Collected by Apollo 16 near the Descartes Crater and currently on display at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
AMSTERDAM (AP) – Attention, countries of the world: Do you know where your moon rocks are?
The discovery of a fake moon rock in the Netherlands’ national museum should be a wake-up call for more than 130 countries that received gifts of lunar rubble from both the Apollo 11 flight in 1969 and Apollo 17 three years later.
Nearly 270 rocks scooped up by U.S. astronauts were given to foreign countries by the Nixon administration. But according to experts and research by The Associated Press, the whereabouts of some of the small rocks are unknown.
“There is no doubt in my mind that many moon rocks are lost or stolen and now sitting in private collections,” said Joseph Gutheinz, a University of Arizona instructor and former U.S. government investigator who has made a project of tracking down the lunar treasures.
The Rijksmuseum, more noted as a repository for 17th century Dutch paintings, announced last month it had had its plum-sized “moon” rock tested, only to discover it was a piece of petrified wood, possibly from Arizona. The museum said it inherited the rock from the estate of a former prime minister.
The real Dutch moon rocks are in a natural history museum. But the misidentification raised questions about how well countries have safeguarded their presents from Washington.
Genuine moon rocks, while worthless in mineral terms, can fetch six-figure sums from black-market collectors.
Of 135 rocks from the Apollo 17 mission given away to nations or their leaders, only about 25 have been located by CollectSpace.com, a Web site for space history buffs that has long attempted to compile a list.
That should not be taken to mean the others are lost – just that the records kept at the time are far from complete.
The AP reviewed declassified correspondence between the State Department and U.S. embassies in 1973 and was able to locate ten additional Apollo 17 rocks – in Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Barbados, France, Poland, Norway, Costa Rica, Egypt and Nepal.
But the correspondence yielded a meager 30 leads, such as the name of the person who received them or the museum where they were to be initially displayed. Ecuador and Cyprus are among several that said they had never heard of the rocks. Five were handed to African dictators long since dead or deposed.
The outlook for tracking the estimated 134 Apollo 11 rocks is even bleaker. The locations of fewer than a dozen are known.
“NASA turned over the samples to the State Department to distribute,” said Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, a NASA historian, in an e-mailed response to questions. “We don’t have any records about when and to whom the rocks were given.”
“The Office of the Historian does not keep records of what became of the moon rocks, and to my knowledge, there is no one entity that does so,” e-mailed Tiffany Hamelin, the State Department historian.
That may seem surprising now, but in the early 1970s, few expected Apollo 17 would be the last mission to the moon. With the passage of time, the rocks’ value has skyrocketed.
NASA keeps most of the 382 kilograms (842 lbs) gathered by the Apollo missions locked away, giving small samples to researchers and lending a set of larger rocks for exhibitions.
Apollo 11 gift rocks typically weigh just 0.05 grams, scarcely more than a grain of rice. The Apollo 17 gift rocks weigh about 1.1 grams. Both are encased in plastic globes to protect them and ease viewing.
Each U.S. state got both sets of rocks, and Gutheinz said he and his students have accounted for nearly all the Apollo 17 rocks, though some are in storage and inaccessible. They have only just begun researching Apollo 11 rocks in the states. In one known legal sale of moon samples, in 1993, moon soil weighing 0.2 grams from an unmanned Russian probe was auctioned at Sotheby’s for $442,500.
Gutheinz, the former U.S. investigator, says ignorance about the rocks is an invitation to thieves, and he should know. In 1998, he was working for the NASA Office of the Inspector General in a sting operation to uncover fake rocks when he was offered the real Apollo 17 rock – the one given to Honduras – for $5 million.
The rock was recovered and eventually returned to Honduras, but not before a fight in Florida District Court that went down in legal annals as “United States vs. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch By Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaque.”
The case is not unique.
Malta’s Apollo 17 rock was stolen in 2004. In Spain, the newspaper El Mundo this summer reported that the Apollo 17 rock given to the country’s former dictator, Francisco Franco, is missing.
Franco died in 1975. The paper quoted his grandson as denying the rock had been sold. He said his mother had lost it, but claimed it was the family’s personal possession, to sell if it wished.
Gutheinz says Romania’s Apollo 17 rock disappeared after the fall and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989. According to Gutheinz and other reports, Pakistan’s Apollo 17 rock is missing; so is Nicaragua’s, since the Sandinistas came to power in 1979. Afghanistan’s Apollo 17 rock sat in Kabul’s national museum until it was ransacked in 1996.
In fact, the Netherlands is one of the few countries where the location of both the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 gift rocks is known. Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand are others – though none has rocks from both missions on permanent public display and some have been kept in storage for decades.
The Amsterdam case appears to be not fraud but the result of poor vetting by the Rijksmuseum.
Spokeswoman Xandra van Gelder said the museum checked with NASA after receiving the rock in 1992 from the estate of the late Prime Minister Willem Drees. NASA told the museum, without seeing it, that it was “possible” it was a moon rock. But it weighed a whopping 89 grams (3.1 ounces). In addition, its gold-colored cardboard plaque does not describe it as a moon rock.
The U.S. ambassador gave Drees the rock during an Oct. 9, 1969 visit by the Apollo 11 astronauts to the Netherlands.
Drees’s grandson, also named Willem, told the AP his grandfather had been out of office for more than a decade and was nearly deaf and blind in 1969, though his mind was still sharp.
“My guess is that he did not hear well what was said,” said the grandson. “He may have formed his own idea about what it was.”
The family never thought to question the story before donating the rock, to which it had not attached great importance or monetary value. ___
AP researcher Randy Herschaft contributed to this story from New York. Reporters Menelaos Hadjicostis in Cyprus, Marianela Jimenez in Costa Rica, Monika Scislowska in Poland, Gonzalo Solano in Ecuador, Andrew Whalen in Peru, Doug Mellgren in Norway, Paul Schemm in Egypt, and Binaj Gurubacharya in Nepal also contributed.
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
CARTERSVILLE, Ga. (AP) – North Georgia’s Tellus Science Museum on Saturday announced its affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution, a partnership that will give Tellus greater access to an extensive network of collections and educational resources.
“We are proud to be a member of the program,” said Jose Santamaria, executive director of Tellus. “We look forward to working with the Smithsonian to expand the museum-going experience for our visitors.”
The museum in Cartersville opened its doors in January and will now have greater access to the 47 museums, libraries and research centers in the Smithsonian network.
The partnership is part of the Smithsonian Affiliations Program, which was established in 1996 and has built partnerships with 165 museums, educational and cultural organizations in 40 states, Panama and Puerto Rico. Affiliate organizations are chosen for their high quality of exhibitions, scholarship and museum educational programs.
“Joining the Smithsonian Affiliations Program is validation that Tellus is a world-class museum,” Santamaria said. “Becoming an affiliate of the Smithsonian involves a rigorous process for qualification as they only accept museums who have the highest standards and who are capable of caring for projects as they would.”
___
On the Net:
https://www.tellusmuseum.org
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (Spanish, 1599-1660) Portrait of a Man, ol on canvas, 27 x 21-3/4 in. (68.6 x 55.2 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Jules Bache Collection, 1949. 49.7.42NEW YORK – Thomas P. Campbell, Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, has announced that a technical examination and cleaning of one of its paintings, formerly ascribed to the workshop of Velázquez, has revealed an autograph work by the great 17th-century Spanish master himself. Velázquez is among the most admired Old Master painters, and his work rarely enters the market. The rehabilitation of this picture thus represents a major “new” acquisition for the Museum, which possesses the finest collection of works by the master in America.
“This reattribution to Velázquez of a work that has been in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection for decades is the result of the fine collaborative work of two of the Museum’s renowned experts: Keith Christiansen, the newly named John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of European Paintings, and Michael Gallagher, the Sherman Fairchild Conservator in Charge of Paintings Conservation. It highlights the depth of the Museum’s collection as well as the acumen of its superb curatorial and conservation staff.”
The painting shows a man in his mid-thirties, bust length, wearing a black doublet with a stiff white collar, posed in three-quarter view. It is a study from life rather than a finished work. Many areas are in a simple, sketched-in state, with passages left abbreviated in terms of form and finish. The shadowed side of the torso is indicated with long free strokes of black paint that have an intentionally “broken” quality where they have been dragged over the canvas weave. Although the picture has suffered from abrasion, its quality of directness and immediacy is undiminished.
The picture entered the collection in 1949 as part of the bequest of Jules Bache, who headed one of the most successful brokerage firms in the country before the Second World War, and who was an art collector of great distinction as well as one of the major benefactors of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Acquired sometime before 1811 by Johann Ludwig Reichsgraf von Wallmoden-Gimborn (the illegitimate son of George II of Great Britain) and later in the collection of George V, King of Hannover, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, Duke of Cumberland (1857-d. 1878), the picture was acquired by Bache from the famous dealer Duveen in 1926. At the time, it was considered by a leading specialist as a self-portrait of Velázquez, and as such it entered the Museum. However, more recent scholarship has had a less favorable view of the picture. In the standard 1963 monograph on the artist by José López-Rey, it is described as a “school piece rather close to Velázquez’s manner.” In 1979, the Museum demoted the attribution to the workshop of Velázquez. What was not realized was the degree to which unnecessarily heavy retouching and a thick, discolored varnish obfuscated the qualities of the picture, making a proper evaluation impossible.
In conjunction with an ongoing project to catalogue the Spanish paintings in the collection, this summer the picture was examined closely. A test cleaning suggested that beneath the yellowed varnish was a work painted in a pale, light-filled palette. Complete removal of the varnish and of the extensive retouching done in a previous restoration revealed a work of astonishing freshness, with all of the hallmarks of Velázquez’s sure touch of the brush.
Jonathan Brown, the author of the authoritative monograph in English on the artist and a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, was asked to examine the newly cleaned picture. He concurred that the work was, indeed, by the artist – most likely an informal, rapidly painted study, with the head more highly finished than the costume and background, which is a thinly painted gray over a warm pinkish-buff ground. Professor Brown will write an article on the picture, re-introducing it to the scholarly literature.
Scholars have long remarked on the resemblance of the sitter in the Metropolitan Museum’s painting to a bystander who appears at the far right of Velázquez’s great masterpiece, The Surrender of Breda, painted in 1634-35 to commemorate the Spanish victory over the Dutch (Museo del Prado, Madrid). Because of its placement at the edge of the composition, looking out at the viewer, that figure has sometimes been thought to be a self-portrait, whence the idea that the Metropolitan’s painting is also a self-portrait – a study for inclusion in that picture and therefore dating from the same moment, when the artist would have been 35. The matter remains highly speculative. There is no consensus who the figure in the Surrender of Breda actually shows; other depictions of Velázquez – most famously his inclusion of himself in his most celebrated masterpiece, Las Meninas – are all much later in date (Velázquez was 57 when he painted La Meninas). The identification of the sitter will doubtless be much discussed by scholars, but the attribution of the Metropolitan’s painting to Velázquez seems now beyond question.
The Museum plans to display the picture together with information relating to its provenance, attribution history, and cleaning.
2009 Basketball Hall of Fame inductees C. Vivian Stringer and Michael Jordan share a laugh at the Grey Flannel Auctions reception. Copyrighted photo by Chuck Miller. Courtesy Grey Flannel Auctions.
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (ACNI) – Grey Flannel Auctions, the Westhampton Beach, N.Y.-based company that produces an auction annually in conjunction with the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, hosted a star-studded banquet last night as the opening event for this year’s induction weekend.
The invitation-only reception and dinner, which took place on center court at the Hall of Fame, honored both returning Hall of Famers and the Class of 2009, which will be officially inducted in a ceremony tonight, Sept. 11th. The inductees include (in alphabetical order): Michael Jordan, David Robinson, Jerry Sloan, C. Vivian Stringer and John Stockton.
Jordan’s appearance at the Grey Flannel event created a media frenzy, and photographers jockeyed for position when the five inductees lined up onstage for a brief photo op. Auction Central News contributor Chuck Miller was there to document the evening on behalf of Grey Flannel Auctions, who graciously agreed to share a few snaps with our readers.
Grey Flannel’s Hall of Fame Induction Auction, which takes place tomorrow, Sept. 12, 2009, will include Internet live bidding through LiveAuctioneers.com. Key lots to be auctioned include the rookie jersey experts believe to be the first one issued to Michael Jordan after he joined the Chicago Bulls, and the actual backboard and rim into which Jordan shot the last-second winning goal for the Bulls in the 1998 NBA Championship Finals.
View the fully illustrated catalog and sign up to bid absentee, or live via the Internet as the sale is taking place, at www.LiveAuctioneers.com.
Copyright 2009 Auction Central News International. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
The Grey Flannel Auctions banquet took place on center court of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. Copyrighted photo by Chuck Miller. Courtesy Grey Flannel Auctions. This year’s Hall of Fame inductees posed briefly for a group shot. From left to right: Michael Jordan, David Robinson, Jerry Sloan, John Stockton, C. Vivian Stringer. Copyrighted photo by Chuck Miller. Courtesy Grey Flannel Auctions. Some of the staff of Grey Flannel take a break from auction preparations to enjoy the pre-banquet reception. Copyrighted photo by Chuck Miller. Courtesy Grey Flannel Auctions. Basketball Hall of Famer and president of the Miami Heat Pat Riley (right) accepts the Mannie Jackson Basketball Human Spirit Award on behalf of former Miami Heat player Alonzo Mourning, who was unable to attend the awards ceremony following Grey Flannel’s Hall of Fame banquet. The award was presented to Riley by Hall of Famer Mannie Jackson (left), chairman and owner of the Harlem Globetrotters. Copyrighted photo by Chuck Miller. Courtesy Grey Flannel Auctions.
Unique edition of Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus as it was in the 1600s. The book is a box made by Pompeo Leoni to collect and secure all of the pages. 2007 photo by Mario Taddei. Licensed under Creative Commons Sharealike 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.
MILAN (AP) – The entirety of Leonardo da Vinci’s 1,119-page Atlantic Codex is going on public display for the first time.
The Atlantic Codex is considered an encyclopedia of technical knowledge from the Renaissance, representing not only Leonardo’s own creations but technology as it existed.
The entire collection will be shown in a series of 24 exhibitions spanning six years.
The first exhibition featuring 45 drawings and called “Fortresses, Bastions and Cannons” opened yesterdaty at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana and the Santa Maria delle Grazie church, which also holds Leonardo’s fresco The Last Supper.
Each drawing will be shown inside a double-chamber Plexiglas case that maintains a constant temperature and humidity.
An exhibition featuring sketches for Leonardo’s sculptural work opens at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art next month.
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
-receives-Mann.gif "Basketball Hall of Famer and president of the Miami Heat Pat Riley (right) accepts the Mannie Jackson Basketball Human Spirit Award on behalf of former Miami Heat player Alonzo Mourning, who was unable to attend the awards ceremony following Grey Flannel’s Hall of Fame banquet. The award was presented to Riley by Hall of Famer Mannie Jackson (left), chairman and owner of the Harlem Globetrotters. Copyrighted photo by Chuck Miller. Courtesy Grey Flannel Auctions.")
