Picasso and Chagall Stolen

A Picasso and a Chagall have been stolen from a Palm Desert gallery. The Picasso, "Femme Regardant par la Fenetre," is a 1959 linoleum cut in shades of brown and black of a nude woman reclining and looking out a window, printed by the artist and worth about $53,000. The Chagall, a 1964 lithograph titled "The Tribe of Dan," is a multicolored religious work in blues, yellows and reds, also printed by the artist. It illustrates one of a series of 12 stained glass windows Chagall made for an Israeli university, and is worth about $35,000.
Irish Art

Hitler's Art On eBay

Original watercolour paintings by Adolf Hitler are selling for thousands of pounds on the Austrian page of the eBay auction website. A painting entitled München (Munich), bearing the signature of the Nazi dictator and described by the seller as a rarity, was put up for auction for £1,400. Another, Bad Gastein, sold for more than £3,000. Hitler had ambitions to become an artist but was turned down by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts before leading the Nazis.
Irish Art

Christie's Top In French Art

Christie's International, the auction house owned by French billionaire François Pinault, racked up more sales in France than any other house for the third year in a row, Bloomberg reports. Christie's had French sales of €115 million ($136.7 million) in 2005, up thirty-three percent from €86.4 million ($102.7 million) last year. It is now selling 2.6 times more art in France than Sotheby's Holdings Inc., the second-highest selling auction house. The gap highlights the opposed tactics of the two international rivals in France as well as Christie's pursuit of market share around the world.
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Irish Art

Tate Intrigue For Turner Art

The Tate went to remarkable lengths to gain the support of the government and the courts before paying out £3.1m to help recover two stolen Turner paintings, it has been revealed. The new details come in a dossier of documents, dated April 2000 and released this week, which relate the moves taken by Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota to regain the paintings. The documents show that the Metropolitan police and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport were both involved in the planning. More redolent of a thriller plot than the normally sedate world of museums, the process of finding the paintings involved secret bank accounts, code words, stashes of cash in briefcases and a German Dean Martin impersonator in whose garage one of the paintings was hidden.
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Irish Art

Rolf Paints The Queen

Television artist Rolf Harris has unveiled his portrait of the Queen at Buckingham Palace. The portrait, commissioned to mark the monarch's 80th birthday next year, is said to be an "impressionistic", rather than a "photographic", representation.

"I'm not making any claims that this is the greatest painting in the world," said Harris, who trained as an artist, "I've done the best I can."
Irish Art

Munch Raiders Captured

Six people have been indicted in the August 2004 theft of the still-missing Edvard Munch masterpieces The Scream and Madonna, a Norwegian national prosecutor said today. Masked gunmen grabbed The Scream and Madonna from the Munch Museum in Oslo on August 22, 2004, in front of stunned visitors. Despite an international search and promises of a reward the works have yet to be recovered. The paintings are among Munch’s best-known works. The four versions of The Scream have become 20th century icons of human anxiety.
Irish Art

2 Ton Moore Sculpture stolen

A Reclining Figure - a giant bronze statue worth £3 million by the late British sculptor Henry Moore has been stolen from the Henry Moore Foundation near London, possibly for scrap value. Two vehicles entered the courtyard of the museum and three men then loaded the sculpture, measuring more than 3 metres and weighing 2 tonnes, on to the back of a truck using a crane. The theft was captured on CCTV, police say, but revealed that, despite the sculpture's high value, the melted-down metal might only reach £5,000 on the open market. "The Foundation is offering a substantial reward for information leading to its recovery - fearful it is possibly going to be sold for scrap.
Irish Art