Two Paintings For $100 Million

Hedge-fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen recently purchased two major works of art from Las Vegas casion owner Stephen Wynn. The paintings are van Gogh's 'Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat' (1890) and Gauguin's 'Bathers' (1902), and they once hung in the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas, which was founded by Mr. Wynn, and were included in a 1999 catalog of the gallery's art holdings.

The estimated purchase price for the two art works was well over $100 million.
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Irish Art

Saatchi In Toilet Rage

Art collector and gallery owner Charles Saatchi used "distortion, intimidation and evasion" tactics during a dispute over the use of communal spaces in County Hall, central London, a court heard yesterday. Mr Saatchi was said to have gone into a "deep rage" and demonstrated how he would grab a company director by the throat in a row over the use of a disabled toilet. The claims were made on the opening day of a high court trial between the owners and landlord of County Hall and the Saatchi Gallery. The landlord allege the gallery consistently encroached on communal areas not within its leased area.
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Irish Art

British Council Art Online

The British Council is making its entire art collection available to view on the internet - all 8,000 works can be seen together for the first time. The UK's worldwide cultural body boasts one of the largest modern British art collections, including works by Hockney and Hirst. Henry Moore gave more than 250 works to the collection in 1984 to mark the Council's 50th anniversary. Council visual arts director Andrea Rose said there was an ever-growing demand to see the works - 80% of which are normally on show around the world. The collection has never been exhibited in its entirety because so many of the pictures are being shown overseas at any one time.
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Irish Art

Collector Sues Mystery Company

In 1978 thieves stole seven paintings from American Michael Bakwin. The art surfaced last spring in London, in the possession of the Erie International Trading Co., an obscure organization with a Panamanian address. When Bakwin learned that the company had plans to auction the art, he asked the Art Loss Register, a firm that tracks stolen art, to intervene. They want to know who the owners of Erie International Trading are, how they got the paintings, and what they may know about the theft. One of the paintings - a Cezanne worth $30 million - was recovered but "under duress". The others including two portraits by Soutine and two others by French painters Maurice de Vlaminck and Maurice Utrillo look like heading for a court decision.
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Irish Art

Vettriano The Clumsy Painter?

The figures in Jack Vettriano's famous painting The Singing Butler bear an uncannily close resemblance to photographs from a popular manual for illustrators. Anyone who has spent time looking at the painter's work up close, rather than in reproduction, will have easily identified that he is a technically poor and often manually clumsy painter whose real skills lie in composition and cleverly-calculated subject matter, rather than figurative painting. Copying from existing material is of course no crime and was once an essential part of any painter's training. What counts, though, is the product rather than the process, and in Vettriano's case the painted product has often been indifferent or badly executed.
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Irish Art
 

Morbid Art Shocks Paris

An incomprehensible screed of words carved by a grief-stricken schizophrenic French farmer into his bedroom floor has become Paris's most controversial new art exhibit. Since the Plancher de Jeannot (Jeannot's Floorboards) went on display last week, it has created an unprecedented stir. The carving - 80 lines of text, in capital letters with no punctuation - contains references to Hitler, to Popes and to an infernal machine that controls humans. The journey to artistic fame of the 24ft by 9ft oak floor is as strange as its message. In 1966, Jeannot opened fire on his neighbours' dining room, after voices had told him to kill them. When a doctor committed Jeannot to a mental institution in 1967, a team of 30 gendarmes could not get him out of the house. In December 1971, a local vet found his mother dead in her armchair. Jeannot insisted she should be buried under the kitchen stairs, with a ball of wool, knitting needles and a bottle of wine. Seven months after his mother was buried under the stairs, Jeannot starved to death.
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Irish Art

From Russia With Money

Russia and its nascent art market is the new Eldorado for art dealers. Moscow accounts for at least 85% of the country’s wealth and soaring oil prices are further boosting revenues. The city is plastered with billboards advertising luxury brands, new buildings are being hastily erected everywhere and out in the Western suburbs, a $60 million shopping mall is rising amid the birch forests: it is surrounded by $20 million homes. Art Dealers and decorators are scrambling to furnish these empty homes, as well as properties in the South of France and London, both obligatory for Russia’s super-rich.
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Irish Art

Royal Ulster Academy

At the Belfast RUA exhibition, three well-known and three not so well known artists stole the show. Neil Shawcross’s sensitive and witty portrait of the late Ted Hickey and his cocky gunslinger posed portrait of Graham Shingles were simply outstanding. Colin Davidson’s work over the last couple of years has reinforced his position as the best young painter in Ireland – and his new work here didn’t disappoint. Carol Graham was also well back in form with ‘Seaway’. Joanna Mules's superb pastel portrait study “Renaissance” was Not For Sale – if it was - I would have bought it myself. Stephen Dillon won the Conor Prize for his ceramic figures – I first saw his work in the studio of the artist Jonny McEwen who raved about his work. How right McEwen was. Sam Mateer – master of pastel - as always presented the highest standard of work. The Royal Ulster Academy is losing its exhibiting space next year and until 2008 during the Ulster Museum refurbishment. For this year, worth the visit.
Ulster Museum to 9th Oct - Botanic Gardens Belfast BT9 5AB 07725 316 583

Patrick Caulfield Dies

Lucian Freud is usually cited as Britain's greatest living painter, though some might fight for David Hockney or Frank Auerbach. But the death of Patrick Caulfield, one of the most important artists of the British Pop Art generation, at 69 prompted his friend and fellow artist Howard Hodgkin to claim that it will be Caulfield who will be remembered in the future. "In spite of great success, I think he's been under-rated," he said. "I thought he was the most important living painter in this country."
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Irish Art