Art Market Monitor

Charles Demarais has a cautionary tale of what happens to private museums and art parks when the funding isn’t enough to maintain the founder’s ambitions. Yesterday, the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art announced it would scale back it’s 1600-work collection of contemporary art to end deficit spending from the center’s endowment.

The center, established to promote works by Northern California artists, sees 13,000 annual visitors. Demarais takes it from there:

Robert Sain, executive director of the center, said the annual budget of about $3 million is insufficient to maintain the collection di Rosa left behind, and the institution has been running at a deficit.

“The reality is the organization has just always been underfunded,” Sain said in a phone interview. “We’re doing all this to make sure we can … be viable and have a sustainable future.”

The center has a staff of 15 full-time and seven part-time employees. Sain has an estimable background in museum education, design and fundraising; curator Amy Owen has a solid curatorial background. A second curator, Kara Q. Smith, was quietly laid off last year.

Graham Beal, former director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, is advising Sain and the di Rosa board on collection matters. A onetime curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Beal knew and worked with Rene di Rosa on museum projects.

The Gazette Druout floats a new theory of the Judith and Holofernes sale that puts the Met’s Keith Christensen, a strong supporter of the attribution to Caravaggio, in the driver’s seat of the sale. With the French unconvinced the work is by the Italian master and the Met having lost the loan of the Wildenstein’s Lute Player in 2013, Christensen has a new project coming to fruition that could benefit greatly from a high profile work.

Here’s the Gazette’s report:

According to our sources, this lucky collector seems to be J. Tomilson Hill, who has close links with not only the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he sits on the Board of Trustees […] Now it seems likely that this Judith beheading Holofernes could be presented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new European Painting galleries, due to open in a few months’ time. This Old Master “skylights” project is one of the spearheads of Keith Christiansen’s policy. […] In January, theGazette published an interview that took place in June 2017, when he told us he had never had any doubts as to the Caravaggio attribution. His desire to exhibit the painting at the Metropolitan Museum one day was an open secret. It just needed a collector who shared the same vision… Tom Hill

Sotheby’s has announced the sale of a previously unknown work by Velazquez for its July 3rd Old Master sales in London. The painting is being offered with a £2-3m estimate.

On 3 July, Sotheby’s will bring to auction a newly-discovered painting of Olimpia Pamphilj by Spanish master, Diego Velázquez. Lost for almost three centuries, this captivating portrait once formed part of the illustrious collection of Don Gaspar Mendez de Haro y Guzman, 7^th Marques del Carpio – one of the greatest patrons and collectors of arts in 17^th-century Italy.  Last recorded in 1724, it subsequently disappeared without trace. The whereabouts of the painting remained completely unknown until one day, an unattributed work, sold in the 1980s as ‘anonymous Dutch school’, was brought into Sotheby’s Amsterdam office. An intriguing old cypher hidden on the back of the painting prompted Sotheby’s specialists to begin a process of research and discovery – all of which ultimately lead to the realisation that this striking portrait was the long-lost original by Velázquez: a painting much revered in its day and executed during the artist’s ‘golden period’.

The Velazquez is joined by another rediscovered work found by a Sotheby’s staffer going through works submitted to the auction house’s digital valuation tool:

Cristiana Romalli, Senior Director and Italian specialist in Sotheby’s Old Master Drawings Department, paused at an intriguingly accomplished sketch. It looked to her like an accomplished work by major Mannerist artist, Rosso Fiorentino, whose drawings are extremely rare. Cristiana retired home to read Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Lives of the Artists’, chronicling the lives of the leading Italian artists of the early 16th-century. And there she found a reference to this work, since then unrecorded – lost from the canon of art history.

Rosso Fiorentino’s The Visitation (est. £500,000 – 700,000) (Old Master & British Works on Paper Sale): This newly discovered 16th century work by the Italian Mannerist painter is an extremely rare example of a chalk drawing by Rosso Fiorentino, and the first compositional study by the artist to appear on the market for half a century. Long thought lost, it is an important and vital addition to the artist’s corpus of drawings.Delicately executed in black chalk, the ten-figure composition was created by Rosso on the request of Aretine painter Giovanni Antonio Lappoli, who had been granted in 1524 a commission for a private altarpiece for the family chapel of the wealthy Aretine citizen, Cipriano d’Anghiari.

The Old Master sale is one of Sotheby’s strongest with an overall estimate of £46-65.9m/ $59.5-83.7m

Thomas Gainsborough’s Going to Market, Early Morning (est. £7-9m): one of the finest masterpiece by the artist remaining in private hands and one of the finest British landscapes by any artist likely to ever come to market. Painted in 1773, the work is one of an important group of three landscapes from the same moment showing travellers going to or returning from market. The subject and composition of the picture demonstrate Gainsborough’s natural affinity with, and sympathy for, the rural poor and the landscape.

J.M.W. Turner’s Landscape with Walton Bridges, (est. £4-6m), a rarely-seen late work by the artist which foreshadows the advent of Impressionism just a few decades later. One of only a handful of late works by the artist left in private hands, this painting belonged first to Turner’s landlady and partner Sophia Booth. It was later bought by one of the greatest collector in American history, becoming one of the jewels in the crown of the celebrated Morgan Collection in New York.
 
A rare compositional study for John Constable’s celebrated The White Horse (est. £2 – 3m): the ‘six-footer’ masterpiece, now in the Frick in New York, that launched Constable’s career
 
Peter Paul Rubens, Head of a Young Warrior(est. £2.5-3.5m): Painted in the early 1610s, Head of a Young Warrior shows Rubens in complete control of his medium, his brush, and his subject. The characteristically vivacious and energetic study was most likely kept in the artist’s studio as a prop throughout his life for use in larger compositions, including his painting of Saint Ambrosius of Milan barring Emperor Theodosius from entering the Cathedral in Milan, painted circa 1615-1617, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Scottish auction house Lyon & Turnbull is mounting an exhibition at its London showrooms on Connaught Street starting Monday, June 24th that brings back to public attention three early female British artists. Bendor Grosvenor, an advisor to Lyon & Turnbull and the host of Britain’s Lost Masterpieces, organized the show.

Lyon & Turnbull’s new Head of British & European Art, Rohan McCulloch, has been working with Bendor Grosvenor to present “Bright Souls” The Forgotten Story of Britain’s First Female Artists, an exhibition presenting the lost art and forgotten story of Britain’s pioneering female painters.

For the first time ever, we will bring together the work of the 17th Century artists Joan Carlile, Mary Beale, and Anne Killigrew. Previously, their stories have faded from view in the broad sweep of British art history, with many of their works being attributed to male artists such as Sir Peter Lely. But all three artists were well known to contemporaries: Carlile as the first professional female British artist; Beale as the most successful; and Killigrew, dying of smallpox at the age of just 23 as the most tragic.

Killigrew’s death prompted the then Poet Laureate John Dryden to hope that her legacy would nevertheless live on, writing, “Still with a greater blaze she shone, And her bright soul broke out on ev’ry side.’” Our new exhibition will now not only reveal new light on the careers of Carlile, Beale and Killigrew, but will also unveil a number of hitherto lost works.