Posted on: October 11, 2017 by Hélène Deslauriers
A storm has been brewing since the summer in the quiet town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The town’s Berkshire Museum announced in July that it intended to put up 40 works of art for sale at Sotheby’s over a period ranging from November 2017 to March 2018. The Museum justified its decision by its dire financial […]
Posted on: July 28, 2017 by Hélène Deslauriers
The International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) has recently published a Provenance Guide. As set out in the Introduction to the Guide, provenance had historically concerned the attribution and authenticity of a work. The recent wave of claims by Nazi Holocaust survivors, or their heirs, as well as the threat of illegal exports from foreign source […]
Posted on: May 4, 2017 by Hélène Deslauriers
In March, Jeff Koons and the Pompidou Centre in Paris were held jointly liable for copyright infringement. The work at issue was a porcelain sculpture of about 40 inches representing two naked children. The sculpture was part of Koons’s ‘Banality’ series and was scheduled to be part of a Koons retrospective at the Pompidou Centre […]
Posted on: May 29, 2014 by Hélène Deslauriers
The City of Detroit is bankrupt. It owes $18 billion, including $3.5 billion in pension obligations. But the City of Detroit also owns the Detroit Institute of Arts (the ‘DIA’), which houses one of America’s richest art collection, the sixth largest in the USA. It boasts works by Degas, Van Gogh, Matisse, Brueghel the Elder and the […]
Posted on: May 9, 2014 by Hélène Deslauriers
In Manhattan, Justice Matthew Cooper of the New York State Supreme Court ruled recently to prevent the owners of the Seagram Building from removing, at least for the time being, a stage curtain painted by Picasso stating there is ‘clearly a danger of irreprable injury’. The painting, known as Le Tricorne was executed by Picasso […]
Posted on: May 3, 2014 by Hélène Deslauriers
For decades, the Vienna Philharmonic, a 172-year-old institution, held in its storage facility a painting by French artist Paul Signac paintend in 1883. The painting, taken by a German official in 1940 from a French Resistance fighter, was given as a gift to the Viennese orchestra for performances given to German soldiers in France in […]