Best of Monet's 'Water Lilies' to be auctioned, could fetch $50m

From ASSOCIATED PRESS Posted: 2:21 PM, October 10, 2012 An auctioneer predicts a work from Claude Monet's "Water Lilies" series could go for $30 million to $50 million when it's put up for sale next month in New York City. The money will benefit the Hackley School in suburban Tarrytown, N.Y. The work dates from 1905. That's the year Monet began a feverish phase of paintings depicting his garden's lily pond in Giverny, France. The work that's being offered is considered among the best. The painting is from the estate of Ethel Strong Allen, widow of Wall Street executive Herbert Allen Sr. She bequeathed the Monet to the school, along with two Impressionist landscapes by Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley. All three works will be offered during Christie's Nov. 7 sale of Impressionist and modern art.

Renoir Painting Found at W.Va Flea Market

By BRETT ZONGKER Associated Press WASHINGTON September 12, 2012 (AP) A woman who paid $7 for a box of trinkets at a West Virginia flea market apparently acquired an original painting by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the purchase. Anne Norton Craner, fine arts director for the Potomack Co. auction house in Alexandria, Va., says the woman made an appointment in July to see if it might be real. She says the woman is from Virginia but stopped at the flea market two years ago in the neighboring state. Craner says the painting was verified through a close look at the colors and brushwork along with the help of the French publisher of a catalog of Renoir's work. Craner said the painting is "Paysage Bords de Seine." It's set for auction Sept. 29. Craner says it's worth at least $75,000.

Dali painting snatched off wall at E. Side gallery

A slick art thief snatched a Salvador Dali painting right off the wall of an Upper East Side gallery, dropped it in a shopping bag and calmly strolled unnoticed out the front door, law-enforcement sources said. Famed art dealer and radio baron Adam Lindemann told cops the crook snatched “Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio” from his new Venus Over Manhattan gallery on Madison Avenue at around 4 p.m. Wednesday, the sources said. “During regular business hours, with a security guard,” Lindemann told The Post today. The small watercolor-and-ink painting — a Dali original completed in 1949 — is worth $150,000, insurance adjusters told cops. “We’re cooperating fully with the police and have no further comment,” added Lindemann, a polo-playing socialite who founded a chain of 20 Spanish-language radio stations. Surveillance video shows the crook walking into the darkened, third-floor gallery carrying a heavyweight paper shopping bag, sources said. The thief told a security guard who was keeping an eye on him, “I want to take a picture of this painting,” meaning the Dali, according to a source. The guard told him he could take a photo but could not use a flash. But, distracted by another visitor, the rent-a-cop left. When he returned, it was too late. The surveillance video footage shows the thief slipping out of the gallery with the purloined painting’s frame protruding from his bag. The guard notified Lindemann, who reported the theft to the NYPD today morning. He didn’t recognize the thief from the video. Sources described the crook as a white male, about 5-foot-6, 160 pounds and 35 to 42 years old. He wore dark jeans and shoes and a black-and-white checkered dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Lindemann is an art lover who opened the gallery on May 9 with the kinky exhibition “À Rebours,” which included a few dozen works from the 19th century to the present. He is married to the art dealer Amalia Dayan, granddaughter of former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. In 2006, Lindemann published a collection of interviews with art-world bigs in the 2006 book “Collecting Contemporary.” Art lovers were saddened they couldn’t see the Dali work today. “We went inside to see the show, and we were wondering where the Salvador Dali painting was,” said Jacquie Tellalian, 58. “It’s a small painting, but how did he just put in his bag and walk out like that? I hope somebody finds it.”

Caravaggio claims spark Italian art world dispute

ROME – Caravaggio was notorious for his brawling, so it might be fitting that a claim by two Italian art historians that they discovered as many as 100 drawings by the painter in his boyhood has sparked an art world uproar. The researchers say they found dozens of early drawings by Caravaggio in the collection of master Milanese artist Simone Peterzano, the painter's teacher from 1584 to 1588. Many experts have responded with skepticism to the startling claim: Over the centuries, art historians have never definitively attributed any drawings to Caravaggio, who shook up 16th-century art by using models from the lower walks of life for religious scenes and dramatically counterpointing light and dark. On Friday, the curator of the drawings collection at Milan's Sforzesco Castle, where the collection of 1,500 painting generally attributed to Peterzano is kept, challenged the seriousness of the researchers' methods and contended that the pair had never set foot in the room to scrutinize the works. "We would be happy to have a Caravaggio," Francesco Rossi said, cautioning that it's difficult to be sure of the works' provenance. Making it especially difficult to pin works on Caravaggio was the artist's habit of not signing his own work. Attempts at fakes and uncertain claims of authenticity have been frequent. He dismissed the historians' methods as naive. "What surprised us about this thing is the fact that these experts never came here in the drawings department to see the works," Rossi told The Associated Press. "They evaluated (the drawings) using black and white photographs." The researchers defended their claim, which they made public on Thursday in an interview with the Italian news agency ANSA. Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli, told the AP in a phone interview that some of their research team studied the drawings firsthand. When pressed to identify the other researchers, she said she wasn't authorized to reveal their names and passed the phone to the other art historian, Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz. "I saw the originals," Bernadelli Curuz said. The art historian said he was able to visit the collection `'after hours," thanks to his contacts with a high-level city official who was authorized to enter the drawings department. He declined to identify the city official. But he insisted that he and Conconi Fedrigolli worked `'in a very scientific way" using photos of the drawings and comparing details to those in well-known Caravaggio works. He said it was not logical that among the Peterzano collection drawings there wouldn't be any by Caravaggio, a star pupil then known as Michelangelo Merisi. The artist is better known by the name of the Italian town where he was born. He contended they were able to distinguish drawings by Peterzano from those of his pupils, including Caravaggio. Among the prominent skeptics was Antonio Paolucci, the director of the Vatican Museums and one of Italy's most esteemed art historians and restoration experts, who pointed out that many experts have seen the drawing and "not one of those experts had come up with the name of Caravaggio." Paolucci described the claim as "pure inductive optimism" in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano on Friday, though he acknowledged it was always possible that "researchers with lesser credentials but with an especially gifted eye, sensitivity and also luck" had pinpointed something new. Paolucci has experienced first-hand the perils of attributing works to great artists, particularly Caravaggio. Two summers ago, the Vatican Museums director wrote an article under the headline "A New Caravaggio? Not really," a week after the Vatican newspaper first suggested that a painting depicting St. Lawrence could be that of Caravaggio -- but then backtracked. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/07/06/caravaggio-claims-spark-italian-art-world-dispute/#ixzz1zzROzXb0

Lost Mozart Piece Discovered

A PIANO work experts believe Mozart composed as a child has been performed for the first time since it was found last year after apparently being left in an attic for centuries.

The lively 84-bar passage - marked "allegro molto," or "very quick" - was played on the composer's piano in a room of his Salzburg home by virtuoso Florian Birsak on Friday.

The Mozarteum Salzburg Foundation, which staged the event, said the manuscript was found last summer as part of a 160-page book of handwritten piano music as the musty attic of a house in Tyrol was being cleared from centuries of detritus.

Part of a collection of notes from a village music teacher, the book was dated 1780 - 24 years after Mozart was born - and the manuscript played on Friday bore the name "Del Signore Giovane Wolfgango Mozart," Italian for "Mr Wolfgang Mozart Jr".

Musicologist Hildegard Hermann-Schneider, who traced the composition to Mozart, said the fact that other pieces in the book were known works by Mozart's father, Leopold, strengthened the case that the work was genuine. As well, Leopold Mozart often used "Wolfgango" when labelling works written by his young son, she said.

From the style of the composition, Hermann-Schneider attributed it to Mozart at around the age of 11.

The piece exhibits "a series of components that are found repeatedly in other Mozart piano works," said the Mozarteum in a statement.

"Judging by the current level of knowledge, it thus has to be a genuine sonata phrase from Mozart."

Da Vinci's Lost Work

Art sleuths said on Monday they believe they have found traces of a Leonardo Da Vinci masterpiece on a hidden wall in a palace in Florence that has not been seen in over four centuries.

The traces were collected using tiny probes introduced into a wall covering the original surface in a lavish hall in the Palazzo Vecchio and contained a black pigment also used in the "Mona Lisa", historians and officials said.

The research is the result of a decades-long quest using cutting-edge technology by University of California San Diego professor Maurizio Seracini, who was featured in Dan Brown's bestselling novel "The Da Vinci Code".

"The composition of manganese and iron found in the black pigment has been identified exclusively on Leonardo's paintings," Seracini, whose methods have sometimes stirred art world controversy, told reporters in the Italian city.

Seracini also said that Leonardo had painted the "Mona Lisa" at around the same time as the long-lost "Battle of Anghiari" in the 16th century but said more research was needed to unlock one of art history's greatest mysteries.

The probes also discovered red lacquer and brown pigment on the hidden wall, which researchers said indicated the wall had had a fresco painted on it.

The experts pointed to documentary evidence from the period showing that only Leonardo could have been the author of any work on the older wall.

The probes found an air gap of around three centimetres (1.2 inches) in some places between the old wall and the new wall built in front of it.

Da Vinci (1452-1519) began his painting of the 1440 battle between Milanese and Florentine forces in a vast hall in Florence's traditional seat of government in 1505 but never finished it because the colours began to run.

The fresco was nevertheless praised by Da Vinci's contemporaries for what art historian and fellow painter Giorgio Vasari called its "graceful beauty" and Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens drew a famous copy of it.

Renaissance master Benvenuto Cellini said it was "the school of the world."

The Rubens sketch shows a bloody scene of horsemen battling with swords drawn and trampling over infantry men -- their faces contorted with rage and their muscled horses entwined with eyes bulging out with fear.

Da Vinci was a Renaissance polymath and the author of what has become the most famous painting in the world, the "Mona Lisa". But very few of his works survive and there are frequent attempts to find traces of his documented work.

Some historians believe Vasari built a wall in front of the fresco so as to preserve Da Vinci's efforts out of respect for the renowned master and then painted his own work, "The Battle of Marciano", on the new wall in 1563.

Seracini said Vasari himself left a tantalising clue on his painting about the hidden Leonardo with an inscription on a banner held up by one of the soldiers in the battle that reads "Cerca Trova" ("Seek and You Shall Find").

The research has been partly funded by National Geographic and the US group's vice president Terry Garcia said: "I am convinced that it is there."

Florence mayor Matteo Renzi said: "This is very exciting, very emotional and very important for the future of our city.

"This is not a crusade by some crazy guy in love with some mystery but a crucial issue for cultural policy in our country," he said.

Renzi said he had also asked the Italian government for permission to carry out further probes through the Vasari painting in over a dozen areas where the original paint no longer exists and has been touched up over the centuries.

Asked whether public funding would be needed for further research, he said: "We're talking about Leonardo here. The money will come from around the world."

The research in Florence has been controversial however and has been even investigated by art police because the researchers had to bore six small holes into Vasari's work out of the 14 they had requested to reach the hidden wall.

International art scholars and the Italian heritage group "Italia Nostra" last year signed a petition complaining that the search was nothing more than a "Dan-Brown style" publicity stunt which risked damaging Vasari's fresco.

Art historian Tomaso Montanari, who teaches at the University of Naples, said in his blog that the search for the "Battle of Anghiari" was "tragi-comic" adding: "It will not be found but what counts is the mediatic effect."

Seracini said the criticism had "slowed down" and "damaged" the project.

Restored Da Vinci painting reveals hidden details

LONDON – A restoration project for Leonardo da Vinci's "Virgin of the Rocks" has revealed new details and suggest the Renaissance artist may have painted all the picture himself, instead of with his assistants as previously thought, a British gallery said Wednesday.

The 18-month conservation project involved removing much of some badly degraded varnish that was applied to the painting in the late 1940s, enabling experts to take a much closer look at the picture's brush strokes and styles, the National Gallery said.

The cleaning revealed the painting's full tonal range, especially in the darker areas, and resulted in a clearer sense of how the artist intended for space to recede through the rocky landscape, the gallery said.

It also affirmed that Leonardo likely painted the entire picture himself and intended for it to be unfinished.

The restored painting showed a range of completion from the barely sketched hand of the angel to the fully realized heads of the main figures — consistent with many of Leonardo's works. The Italian artist, said to be the "eternal perfectionist," is thought to have left his pictures unfinished because he wished to return to them later, gallery spokesman Thomas Almeroth-Williams said.

In the past, scholars believed the different levels of finish in "Virgin of the Rocks" showed that Leonardo was helped by assistants.

The painting dates from about 1491 to 1508 and is a later version of one on display in the Louvre in Paris.

The latest cleaning project followed years of scrutiny of the masterpiece.

In 2005, experts using infrared technology found two drawings hidden beneath the surface of the picture — one design was never painted, and the second one revealed Leonardo changed his mind about the subject several times.

The painting goes back on display in the National Gallery on Wednesday.

Mickey Mouse with Nazi symbol ignites Polish anger

By VANESSA GERA, Associated Press Writer
WARSAW, Poland – A huge outdoor art poster that blends Mickey Mouse's image with that of a swastika and a nude woman's body is causing a stir in Poland, where memories of the suffering inflicted by Nazi Germany remain strong.

The poster, which went up in June in the western city of Poznan just steps from a synagogue, is an Italian artist's take on what he calls the "horrors" of the American lifestyle and is one piece of artwork in a contemporary art exhibition opening in the fall.

But the reaction shows that there is little appetite in Poland for satirical or artistic uses of images linked to Nazi Germany, which invaded Poland in 1939 and built ghettoes and death camps across the country in which millions were murdered.

"This art provocation is a form of violence against the sensitivity of many people," said Norbert Napieraj, a city council member who asked prosecutors to ban the poster.

Prosecutors, however, determined that the poster is art and does not violate the country's laws against glorifying Nazism....