Art Market Monitor

Josh Baer reports on his subscription-only email, The Baerfaxt, this evening that Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern specialist Emmanuel Di Donna is leaving the company:

Emmanuel Di Donna has left his position as vice chairman of I/M worldwide at Sotheby’s to pursue other opportunities.

Baerfaxt

The Corot portrait lost in a drunken stupor just got more convoluted according to Bloomberg which reports that co-owner Kristin Trudgeon has recognized her partner in the painting as convicted con man who sold a Degas that wasn’t his:

After filing the lawsuit on Aug. 30, her lawyer Max DiFabio showed her a mug shot yesterday of a Thomas Doyle, who’d pleaded guilty in 2007 in the theft of a Degas sculpture and was released from prison in December. Read the rest of this entry ›

The New York Observer ranks the top drawing exhibitions in New York’s Metropolitan museum’s history:

1. Treasures of Tutankhamun — 1,360,957 visitors from Dec. 20, 1978 to April 14, 1979.
2. The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci — 1,077,521 visitors from Feb. 7, 1963 to March 4, 1963.
3. The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art — 896,743 visitors from Feb. 26, 1983 to May 12, 1983.
4. Painters in Paris: 1895-1950 — 883,620 visitors from March 7, 2000 to Jan. 14, 2001.
5. Origins of Impressionism — 794,108 visitors from Sept. 27, 1994 to Jan. 8, 1995.
6. The Horses of San Marco — 742,221 visitors from Feb. 1, 1980 to Aug. 31, 1980.
7. Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art — 703,256 visitors from April. 19 to Aug. 15, 2010.

Institutional Memories: Met’s Picasso a Sixth Runner Up (NY Observer)

Richard Woodward in the Wall Street Journal reviews the Dennis Hopper show at LA MoCA finding the actor a superior artist to the painter, he also has a few choice words to say about guest curator, Julian Schnabel:

Nothing hanging on the walls compares in startling originality with the demented photojournalist he played in “Apocalyse Now.”

The guest curator is Julian Schnabel, who knows a lot about making art across various platforms. It is hard to know if this successful painter-sculptor- filmmaker was afraid to exercise veto power over his friend—dying of cancer as they organized the show, Hopper passed away in May, a few months before the opening—or whether the painfully inept works of art here also reflect Mr. Schnabel’s convictions. Given that a number of the paintings and sculptures suffer from being elephantine and bombastic—that is, like Mr. Schnabel’s work in these media—he likely approves. Read the rest of this entry ›

The BBC highlights one of the finalists for the Fourth Plinth competition which combines a working ATM with a pipe organ to sing a hymn to the global economy:

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla want to place a traditional pipe organ at the top of the plinth, with a working cash machine at the base. The pipes will play when numbers are pressed on the keypad. The artists, from the US and Cuba, say they are offering a humorous take on issues such as personal banking and global financial systems. Read the rest of this entry ›

Bonham’s October 26 & 27 sale of South African Art in London will feature four works by Irma Stern who traveled extensively in Africa during the war years. Taken together the works have a low estimate of £1.5m and a high of £2m.

Support for the Norsigian negatives being the work of Ansel Adams is rapidly waning this week. The Bay Citizen reported that one of Norsigian’s team of experts has backed off his claims of authenticity. He now says he made a mistake and the Los Angeles Times reports that Norsigian has disclaimer on the prints he is selling via the web:

Robert C. Moeller III, a former curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and one of the experts hired by Rick Norsigian, a California man, to evaluate his find, said that after further review he had decided that at least some of the images Mr. Norsigian purchased were taken by an unheralded photographer, Earl Brooks.

“I made a mistake,” said Mr. Moeller, a former curator of European decorative arts and sculpture at the Boston museum, who was part of the team that in July announced the discovery of what it called Adams’s “lost negatives.” [...] “The lowest level of quality of Ansel Adams is well above the lowest level of Norsigian’s images,” Mr. Moeller said. So why did he issue such a definitive statement that Adams was the photographer? “Maybe I kind of wanted them to be Ansel Adams,” he said. Read the rest of this entry ›

The Independent’s Arifa Akbar gives voice to the growing complaints that public sculpture in the UK has a case of gigantism. From Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North to Anish Kapoor’s forthcoming mirrored works to be installed in Kensington Gardens:

“Artists are more like architects, leading a team of people. They are the ones who will build these large sculptures. These sculptures, once they get to a certain scale, can’t be made by your own hand.”

Hunter believes that the trend towards large sculptures is a product of Tony Blair’s Britain, and that we might now see a reversal of the trend, given these recessionary times. Read the rest of this entry ›

Newsweek homes in on Pakistan’s prominent women artists and why women seem over-represented among artists in that country:

One reason for the unusually high ratio of female artists in Pakistan has to do with the fact that the art industry has not traditionally been viewed as a lucrative business by men, says South Asian art historian Savita Apte, who administers the internationally renowned Abraaj Capital Art Prize. Until very recently, creatively inclined males tended to focus on fields such as advertising or illustration, leaving the art field wide open for some very talented women.

And these women have been taking the art world by storm: Read the rest of this entry ›

The New York Daily News has the most comprehensive reporting on the funny, fascinating and, now cryptic case of the Imperial Jets executive who was trying to sell a Corot painting that he owned in partnership with others. The night the painting went missing–purportedly in a drunken haze–James Haggerty had tried to meet with another dealer who was spooked:

The artwork’s co-owner, Kristyn Trudgeon, isn’t buying James Haggerty’s tale. “I think he’s a complete fumbling idiot,” a visibly annoyed Trudgeon said outside her West Side apartment. “He’s just a complete a–hole.” Trudgeon and Tom Doyle, who co-own the painting, had hired Haggerty, an old pal, to assist with a possible sale of “Portrait of a Girl” to London gallery owner Offer Waterman. A July 28 afternoon appointment in Doyle’s Empire State Building office fell apart when the Brit wanted a closer look at the painting. Read the rest of this entry ›