Sunday, May 31, 2009
Hockney painting sells for record $7.9 million
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NEW YORK - David Hockney's painting "Beverly Hills Housewife" sold for a record $7.9 million after fierce bidding Wednesday, a sign that collectors are eager to buy rare and high-quality works despite the recession, the Christie's auction house said.A Claes Oldenburg sculpture "Typewriter Eraser," from 1976, also set a record, selling for $2.2 million at the auction of post-war and contemporary art.
The previous record for a Hockney painting was $5.4 million for "The Splash" sold in 2006 at Sotheby's.
The 12-foot-long, 6-foot-high painting had been estimated to fetch from $7 million to $10 million.
The 20 contemporary artworks from the estate of Los Angeles arts patron Betty Freeman, who died in January at age 87, were the highlight of the auction.
Hockney painted "Beverly Hills Housewife" from 1966 to 1967. The painting by one of Britain's most popular artists shows Freeman in a pink dress standing on the patio of her California home.
Christie's said 18 of the 20 artworks from the Freeman estate sold for a total of $31.6 million, in range with an earlier estimate of $24 million to $37 million. Bidding failed to reach the reserve price for two of the works.
The uncertain economic climate has softened parts of the art auction market. But Christie's said that 30 of the 54 lots offered Wednesday evening sold for more than $1 million.
The strong sales are "a clear and resounding vote of confidence in the market from a deep pool of collectors around the world, competing for almost every lot in the sale," said Marc Porter, president of Christie's Americas.
"The results show there is continued readiness to compete for rare and high-quality works, especially from estates, museums and private collections."
Christie's didn't reveal the identities of the buyers at Wednesday's sale, whose final prices included commissions paid to the auction house.
By VIRGINIA BYRNE, Associated Press Writer
Labels: Beverly Hills Housewife, buying paintings, David Hockney, The Splash
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Friday, May 29, 2009
Russian heir fights Yale over van Gogh painting
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NEW HAVEN, Connecticut (AFP) - A painting Vincent van Gogh dismissed as one of his "ugliest" is today the subject of a high-stakes ownership battle between Yale University and a heir to a Russian art collector.The French Impressionist artist painted "Night Cafe" to pay his landlord, calling it "one of the ugliest I have done" in a letter to his brother Theo in 1888.
Today, van Gogh works fetch fortunes at auction and "Night Cafe," which depicts a cafe bathed in yellow-green light, is not only world famous, but the subject of an international legal tussle.
Parisian Pierre Konowaloff, great-grandson of Russian industrialist and art collector Ivan Morozov, is challenging in a US federal court widely accepted norms that recognize the results of Soviet-era nationalization, at least when it comes to cultural items.
Morozov's real estate, textile factory and art collection were seized by Lenin in 1918. Although the Bolsheviks are long gone, their confiscation of priceless art -- part of far wider repression against private property owners -- still stands.
In contrast, successful challenges have been made to ownership of treasures looted by the Nazis during World War II and passed on to other owners since.
Allan Gerson, an attorney known for pushing the boundaries of international law, wants to change that, saying that "Night Cafe" was acquired illegally and describing Lenin's "looting" as no different than that of the Nazis'.
"They (Yale) have to tell the difference. What is the difference? I contend there is no difference," Gerson told AFP.
In court papers filed last week, he said the "confiscation of cultural property was prohibited under prevailing customary and conventional international law."
Yale acquired the painting in 1961 as a posthumous gift from the American art collector and Yale graduate Stephen Clark.
Clark bought the painting around 1933 with the help of the Knoedler Gallery in New York City and the Matthiesen Gallery in Berlin from a sale by Stalin of Soviet-owned art.
Yale filed court papers in March asking a judge to declare it the owner of the painting in response to Konowaloff's challenge.
"The university believes it is the rightful owner and that the outcome of its filing will confirm that," Yale spokesman Tom Conroy said.
The Soviet nationalization of property, though "sharply at odds" with American values, was legal, Yale attorney Jonathan Freiman wrote in his petition to the court.
"Paintings that were nationalized by the Soviet government figure prominently in the collections of premier institutions throughout the world, including leading museums in Russia and the United States," Freiman wrote.
"It was accepted at the time, as it is now, that the sales by the Soviet government were valid, as were later acquisitions of the paintings. Yale had no reason to question the legitimacy" of the bequest, the court documents said.
In an interview with AFP, Freiman said the challenge was "not a viable legal claim" and that its success would set a dangerous precedent.
"There are many people who bought art from Russia in the 1930s, both individuals and museums," he said. A successful suit would "completely unsettle museums and private collections."
Patty Gerstenblith, a law professor and director of DePaul College of Law's program in Cultural Heritage Law, said the challenge faces an uphill battle.
"Property nationalized during the Soviet Bolshevik revolution generally has been viewed as belonging to the Soviet Union," she said.
"Cases that seem to fit the fact pattern here have not succeeded in the past."
But both Konowaloff and Gerson are likely to prove determined fighters.
A former senior lawyer with the State Department and Justice Department, Gerson has advocated private lawsuits against governments regardless of the impact on foreign policy.
He was involved in suing Libya for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland that killed 270 people in 1988 and was settled by Libya for 2.7 billion dollars in 2003 in a deal linked to lifting trade sanctions against the country.
He currently represents relatives of 9/11 victims in federal court in New York who are suing Saudi Arabia for allegedly funding terrorism.
Konowaloff did not respond to email and telephone requests for an interview.
He is well known for an attempt two years ago to recover other artworks that belonged to his great-grandfather as they were being sent to a major exhibition in London.
The show was delayed at the request of Moscow until Britain passed legislation protecting Russia's ownership of the works.
by Jane Mills
Labels: buying paintings, Ivan Morozov, Night Cafe, Pierre Konowaloff, Vincent van Gogh
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Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Web frenzy over T-shirt
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Something strange happened this week in Amazon.com's apparel section.For a day or two, a black T-shirt featuring an image of three wolves baying at a full moon claimed the top slot at the online store's clothing bestseller list,, beating out the usual, unremarkable mix of Levi's 505 regular-fit jeans, Crocs clogs and Adidas running shoes.
Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, Available in Various Sizes
And really, why wouldn't you buy the shirt, which is priced from $7.65 to $17.93, depending on your size? Just read the long and growing list of customer testimonials promising earth-shattering experiences or psychedelic vision quests upon purchase.
"I bought this shirt and instantly old girlfriends started calling me again," wrote one reviewer."My doctor says the cancer has gone into remission," wrote another. "
Thanks for changing my life!"The shirt's page at Amazon.com had quietly existed for years without much comment, but after a snarky link from CollegeHumor.com, the "Three Wolf Moon" shirt suddenly sprouted hundreds of five-star ratings.
Reviewers have dreamed up epics about its powers, weaving fantasies involving everything from the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland to the pop group Duran Duran.
As the joke caught on and got passed around the Web, Photoshopped spoofs of the shirt started appearing online -- featuring corgi puppies, spiders or haddock instead of the now-famous wolves.
CollegeHumor.com, a comedy site started in 1999 by a couple of high school friends who grew up together in Timonium, Md., also claimed victory this week for rigging an online poll run by the state of Nebraska to select a new license-plate design.
The site urged its readers to vote for what it deemed the most boring design available to Nebraska drivers. That gray-and-white plate won.Officials in Nebraska said they monitored Web traffic to screen out visitors coming directly from the humor site, but CollegeHumor.com was still, credibly, claiming the joke a success this week.
"Together we pranked the entire automobile-owning population of Nebraska," wrote a CollegeHumor.com editor, in a Wednesday posting. "Congratulations."
This type of online rabble-rousing appears to be catching on more than ever over the past year, said Tim Hwang, the organizer of ROFLCon, a convention dedicated to celebrating Internet memes.
After all, another Web-based prank crossed over into the real world just last month when a 21-year-old college student, known by the online moniker "m00t," sailed to the top of Time's "most influential person" list in an online poll, beating out the likes of President Obama and Oprah Winfrey.
Gathering nearly 17 million votes, the world's "most influential" person is the founder of another jokey Web culture site, 4chan.org, whose proprietor is known offline by the name Christopher Poole. If you don't get why the shirt, and its reviews, are so funny, don't worry.
CollegeHumor.com co-founder Josh Abramson said it's a case where the shirt is so uncool that it's cool."A lot of things that become popular on the Web are based around just being ironic and being an inside joke," Abramson said.
"This resonates with a geeky, hip crowd that is very Web-savvy. When something resonates with that circle, crazy things can happen."Abramson said his team had considered licensing the wolf shirt for sale.
CollegeHumor.com, which had 7 million unique Web visitors last month, also has an online store that sells T-shirts with ironic catchphrases and designs, called BustedTees.com. But it appears that the site may have been a bit slow to catch on to its own meme.
"We're kicking ourselves that we didn't," he said.The New Hampshire company that makes the "Three Wolf Moon" shirt said that it doesn't generally mind being the butt of this joke."You have to be able to laugh at yourself," said Michael McGloin, a partner and art director at the Mountain, who added that he finds some of the reviews to be "freaking hilarious."
The company certainly doesn't mind the shirt's recent uptick in sales: "Three Wolf Moon" is sold out, and the Mountain has started printing up a fresh batch.
It seems that the wolf theme was growing in popularity even before the Internet hipsters descended, McGloin said."Wolf shirts are super hot right now," he said. "It's the year of the wolf, I guess."
Click now to Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, Available in Various Sizes
By Mike Musgrove, Washington Post Staff Writer
Labels: buying paintings, ironic tshirt, the mountain, three wolf moon, tshirt, wolf moon, wolf shirt, wolf t-shirt
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