A rare 16th century gold sundial and compass ring, possibly German, circa 1570. The hinged oval bezel designed as a seal and engraved with a coat of arms, opening to reveal a sundial and compass, on a plain gold hoop. . . .
News
“New York’s Four Seasons Restaurant Sued over Plan to move Picasso Painting”
This actually could be quite the issue. On the one hand, the question arises as to the circumstances surrounding the Four Season’s acquiring the painting. What was the contractual agreement–that they would maintain the painting, that it would stay in the same spot indefinitely, that it had to always be available to the public. Did they not make any provisions for this type of situation? I’m guessing that the case is going to hinge upon how significant the damage to the wall is, how much more damage would postponing the repair cause, and can they move the painting safely out and back. Maybe they could just cut the wall out with the painting, rebuild behind it, shore it up, then just replacing it in some artsy way? Or carefully slide boards behind it and lay it down to remove it? Either way, it’s important to give the owner his rights, but landowner rights are vital too. Plus, if the wall damage causes harm to someone later, who is liable for the injury? ** DB
“New York’s Four Seasons Restaurant Sued over Plan to move Picasso Painting”
Via FoxNews
“NEW YORK – New York’s storied Four Seasons restaurant has for decades harbored one of the city’s more unusual artworks: the largest Pablo Picasso painting in the United States. But a plan to move it has touched off a spat as sharply drawn as the bullfight crowd the canvas depicts.
Pitting a prominent preservation group against an art-loving real estate magnate, the dispute has unleashed an outcry from culture commentators and a lawsuit featuring dueling squads of art experts.
The building’s owner says Picasso’s “Le Tricorne,” a 19-by-20-foot painted stage curtain, has to be moved from the restaurant to make way for repairs to the wall behind it.
But the Landmarks Conservancy, a nonprofit that owns the curtain, is suing to stop the move. The group says the wall damage isn’t dire and taking down the brittle curtain could destroy it — and, with it, an integral aspect of the Four Seasons’ landmarked interior.
“We’re just trying to do our duty and trying to keep a lovely interior landmark intact,” says Peg Breen, president of the conservancy.
The landlord, RFR Holding Corp., a company co-founded by state Council on the Arts Chairman Aby Rosen, says a structural necessity is being spun into an art crusade.
“This case is not about Picasso,” RFR lawyer Andrew Kratenstein said in court papers. Rather, he wrote, it is about whether an art owner can insist that a private landlord hang a work indefinitely, the building’s needs be damned. “The answer to that question is plainly no.” . . . .”
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Archaeologists Unearth New Areas Of Ancient Roman City
“Archaeologists Unearth New Areas Of Ancient Roman City”
by Emily Thomas via “Huffington Post“
“Archaeologists in Rome have unearthed a massive section of the ancient port city of Ostia, shedding new light on the city’s historical significance.
Researchers for the Portus Project — an archaeology initiative led by Britain’s Southampton University and Cambridge University — working in collaboration with the British School at Rome and top Roman archaeologists discovered a new boundary wall that greatly extends the Ostia city limits. In the new geophysical survey, archaeologists also found massive warehouses the size of footballs fields which most likely held imported goods before they were sent on to Rome.
”Our results are of major importance for our understanding of Roman Ostia and the discoveries will lead to a major rethink of the topography of one of the iconic Roman cities in the Mediterranean,” Professor Simon Keay, director of the Portus Project, told The Telegraph.
The new findings counter a previously held belief that the Tiber River, which flows into the Mediterranean Sea, was Ostia’s northern border. The recent excavation, however, shows that Ostia’s land continued on the other side of the river. This new area was referred to in antiquity as Isola Sacra, or Sacred Island. . . . . ”
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“‘It’s a Form of Addiction'”
On the weird off-chance that you have’t heard, Tony Podesta and his wife, Heather Miller, are currently filing for divorce. A large issue at stake is the treatment of their massive art collection. She says she collected it on her own, he says he began to build it long before he married her. Who gets it? My guess- Podesta gets what he brought into the marriage, and they split the rest of the baby 50/50. **DB
“‘It’s a Form of Addiction'”
John Hooper via “The Guardian“
“We’ve all heard about artists who suffer for their work. Tony Podesta and his wife, Heather Miller, suffer for other people’s. When they bought a 2,000lb Louise Bourgeois sculpture for their home in Washington, for instance, it required substantial renovations to the building. “We had to get a structural engineer in to sort out what sort of support it needed,” says Podesta. “And we not only had to build support underneath where it was going but temporary support from the point at which it entered the house to the point at which it was placed. I don’t think it’ll ever leave.”
Then there is the travel involved. The couple have unusually demanding jobs. He is one of Washington’s top lobbyists, renowned as the man who first built bridges between Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She has joined the lobbying business after a career as a top-flight lawyer in Congress and the Senate. Most people in their positions would spend their leisure time unwinding. Instead, they make what Miller calls “Herculean” trips to Europe and further afield to buy art. It is perfectly normal for them to leave Washington on Friday evening and return the following Monday morning, having visited more than one European capital in the meantime.
Their travelling, and the knowledge of the global art scene they have acquired, has turned them into two of America’s best-known collectors. They were meant to be in Rome on vacation when I caught up with them. But the day before they had been out ferreting in Trastevere, where they found a couple of Wolfgang Tillmans photographs, which they unwrapped with engaging enthusiasm.
They are known for purchasing “awkward” works, such as video installations, that many other private collectors will not consider. “It’s easy to store them, but difficult to display them,” says Podesta. To get round the problem, he and his wife have excavated a huge subterranean vault beneath their house outside Washington – a white space 5m square and 4m high in which it will be possible to show “very complicated video pieces” on all four walls.
Miller, the daughter of academics, still marvels at her involvement in a world and way of life she got to know only after meeting her husband. She recalls one of their first visits to a gallery and how the owner told Podesta he had a work by a particular photographer “going cheap”. It turned out he wanted $40,000. “So I’m standing there in front of this photograph and I’m thinking to myself, like, ‘This is cheap?’ ”
Her husband, who looks less like an aesthete than a character from the Sopranos, became involved with collecting no less accidentally. He was helping Ted Kennedy in his failed bid to challenge Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination. When he ran short of cash, Kennedy laid off three-quarters of his staff.
“Those of us who remained were paid in donated art. Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were all supporters,” he recalls. “I ended up leaving the campaign with a treasure trove.” Collecting became a “form of addiction”.
Today, he reckons, he and his wife have the world’s biggest collection of Anna Gaskell (“maybe second to Anna Gaskell”). Other contemporary favourites include Gillian Wearing, Marina Abramovic, Sam Taylor-Wood and Olafur Eliasson, whose work Podesta discovered 10 years ago, when the artist was still at the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen.
They are always looking out for little-known artists. Asked to come up with a handful of names that are in the second rank now, but that will one day be in the first, they offer a list that ranges across the world: Britain’s Darren Almond, Janaina Tschape from Brazil, Mads Gamdrup from Denmark, the Italian artist Loris Cecchini and Patricia Piccinini, a Podesta protegee who is to represent Australia at the Venice biennial.
It is tempting to see Podesta as a US equivalent of Charles Saatchi – another entrepreneur who has also operated with great success on the margins of politics. Specialising in photographs and video, Podesta is more focused, though he says that his most admired possession is a sculpture, another of Bourgeois’s works, “a gloriously beautiful carved marble”.
But, for pure investment reasons, did he and his wife ever buy works they didn’t like? “We don’t buy anything we don’t love,” he says. “Some people collect one of lots of different people. Our style is to collect a smaller number of artists – probably 50 – in some depth. We’ll have 20 of this person and 40 of that person.”
His take on the role that he and his wife play is modest. “Frequently, work that we’ve had in our home has been the first work that museum curators have seen and then decided to put in museum shows. Dealers do not become wealthy in the course of dealing with young artists, so it’s a pleasure to support the dealers and the young artists and then help the work find its way into museums.”
·Taylor-Wood says
Tony Podesta is someone who has intrigued me for a long time, partly because he is a very passionate and brave collector of art, partly because he’s constantly travelling. I wanted to read about him because I admire his spirit – not to mention his resilience to jetlag’ . . . .”
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Hong Kong Police Search Landfill for $3.7 Mln Painting
Wonder how the contract read. . . When did title transfer over? Is the artist responsible for the cost if it cannot be found. **DB
“Hong Kong Police Search Landfill for $3.7 Mln Painting”
by AFP
“Hong Kong (AFP) – Hong Kong police on Wednesday searched for a valuable painting mistakenly dumped in a landfill after it sold for $3.7 million at auction, reports said.
“Snowy Mountain” by Chinese artist Cui Ruzhuo, which was a main feature of the spring auction by Beijing-based Poly Culture this week, was dumped by cleaners at the luxury hotel hosting the sale, the South China Morning Post said.
Grand Hyatt hotel cleaners were suspected of dumping the painting, which sold on Monday for more than HK$28.75 million ($3.71 million), along with rubbish that was taken to a landfill, the paper said, citing an unnamed police source.
Poly Culture did not comment immediately when contacted by AFP.
Police suspected the painting was thrown out by cleaners after viewing security camera images but would not rule out the possibility of it having been stolen, media reported.
Police told AFP a theft case was reported on Tuesday by an auction house staff member regarding a painting, without giving further details.
A Grant Hyatt spokeswoman would not confirm if the painting had been dumped as trash but said hotel staff did not handle items sold at the auction because they were too expensive.
She said in an emailed statement to AFP that organisers would hire their own security and contractors for such events involving “high-value” items.
The spring sale was the first major auction organised by Poly Culture in Hong Kong following its stock debut in March.
Poly Culture Group, the world’s third largest auction house by revenue behind Sotheby’s and Christie’s, is a subsidiary of state-run conglomerate Poly Group. . . .
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The Cultured Muse 