Latest news with #artcollection
Bloomberg
3 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Ron Perelman's Fight Over $410 Million in Art Insurance Goes to Trial
Nearly seven years after a fire ripped through Ron Perelman's Hamptons home, he is asking a New York state judge to force insurers to pay him more than $400 million for five paintings he says were damaged in the blaze. A trial kicked off today in lower Manhattan over a lawsuit Perelman filed two years after the fire. In the suit, he claims that affiliates of Lloyd's of London Ltd., Chubb Ltd. and American International Group Inc. issued policies that 'protected one of the largest private modern art collections in the world from any damage, no matter how slight' — but balked when he sought compensation for the most expensive pieces in the residence. Those included works by Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly.
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
The incredible ceramics collection with a very surprising owner
Among the students of Oxford University, Sylvanus Sydney Denton was a name to be conjured with. For many years, he made his money selling bicycles to students, while simultaneously developing a passion for modern and contemporary ceramic art. He amassed a collection of over 220 examples which he kept in a specially built kitchen extension. Denton died last year at the age of 90 and his collection has gone on view at Sotheby's this week prior to being sold at the end of the month. It is estimated to fetch as much as £1.7 million. It is not known exactly when Denton caught the ceramic bug, but it was probably not until his late forties. Having done his National Service in Kenya he found work back home in Oxford fixing bikes and refurbishing caravans before investing in a bike and toy shop. By 1982 he had four shops and was displaying his ingenuity buying vintage 19th century bikes on which he posed for the local press. Sotheby's believes his journey to ceramics began with Modern British art (Henry Moore, LS Lowry and Barbara Hepworth) before he discovered more affordable ceramics by the likes of 1930s refugees from Nazi Germany, Hans Coper and Lucy Rie whose pots were beginning to be seen as fine art and superior to craft. According to the sale catalogue, one of Denton's earliest acquisitions was a work by Coper which he bought in 1988 at the trailblazing Oxford Gallery, which presented contemporary ceramics with avant-garde modern art by the likes of Terry Frost and Patrick Heron. Two works he bought there in the 1990s were by Edmund de Waal, the ceramicist and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, long before he was swept up by the upmarket Gagosian contemporary art gallery. Denton also shopped at auction and in 1997 bought a Black Cycladic Form Arrow pot by Coper at Bonhams for about £9,000. To give an idea how Coper's prices have moved, another Cycladic Form Arrow pot bought by a different collector in the 1970s for £250 sold in 2018 for £381,000. Denton's example at Sotheby's is a comparatively tame £100,000 (check). Sotheby's describes Denton's collection as 'one of the finest collections of studio and contemporary ceramics in private hands'. Apart from Coper there are several delicate works by Rie in the £25,000-50,000 range, and a standout work by Elizabeth Fritsch, who is currently enjoying a high-profile exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield museum near Leeds. Denton bought Fritsch's 20-inch, vividly coloured 'Spout' Pot (1998) for a double estimate record £10,160 at Bonhams in 2004, since when her record has risen to £51,400 last year. The estimate for Spout Pot has now doubled to £12,000-18,000. Another auction buy was a playfully twisted 'Monumental Body Pot', by Joanna Constantinidis which Denton bought for a record £1,600 at Bonhams in 2002, two years after she died. Posthumously, her prices have crept up to £15,000 for another Body Pot in 2021 so Denton's example, now estimated at £4,000-£6,000 should make more. His favoured method of acquisition, however, was to buy directly from the artists themselves; he was very popular with potters. One was Dame Magdalene Odundo, the British Nigerian who was the subject of an impressive exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2019. Three burnished terracotta pots by her in the sale all date from 1990/91, before she was famous. There is no record of their cost, but by this point art dealers were charging £5,000, compared to £250 in the 1970s. Since then, her prices have been multiplying. At auction in around 2010 they were selling for £10,000-£15,000, but after The Hepworth Wakefield show was announced and she was signed up by leading contemporary art dealer Thomas Dane, wealthy collectors like fashion designer Jonathan Anderson (who has been announced as the new head designer at Dior) began buying her work and at auction they soared to a record £533,400 for one of her pots in 2023. The estimate on that work was £100,000, a record for Odundo at the time. Now Sotheby's has gone a step further with two from Denton's collection estimated at £150,000 each. This is, though, a collection of value extremes. While most of the value is concentrated in just a handful of artists, the majority of lots are estimated at under £3,000 each, some with no reserve minimum price. Other artists include Janet and David Leach, the wife and son of the influential potter Bernard Leach, and Richard Batterham, a student of Leach who died in 2021 the same year that a pair of his pots hit a record £20,000 at auction. So, for fledgling ceramic collectors it's time to get on your bikes and bid. How the art market is coping with sanctions on Russia The sanctions that were imposed on Russian businesses after Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 put an end to the regular art sales, worth millions of pounds, which London used to stage mainly for the benefit of Russian buyers. Russian art auctions in London went from being worth over £100 million a year to nothing. But last year, Sotheby's held a sale – unnoticed by the press – entitled Fabergé, Imperial & Revolutionary Works of Art, which included Russian paintings, and it exceeded its £2.9 million estimate to make £3.9 million. And this November they are planning a repeat. So what is going on? According to analysis conducted by advisory group Overstone Art Services, Russian art continues to appear, but in different sale categories – from Old Master and 19th century to Modern. Russian art can be bought and sold, so long as the client is not a Russian passport holder or on a sanctions list. This April, for instance, Sotheby's included two paintings by the 19th century artist Richard Zommer, who worked in Central Asia and would previously have been sold in a Russian art sale, in its sale of Orientalist art together with a variety of European artists. One of his paintings, a depiction of a chaikhana (or meeting place for travellers) on the Silk Road, was estimated at £20,000 and sold for a record £114,300. Trade sources believe the Russian art market is buoyant within Russia, better than property, and that Russian buyers are still active in the West but operate under a dual nationality, as Ukrainian, say, or Belarusian. In a statement released to the Telegraph last week, Sotheby's said: 'Today there is a significant diaspora of Russians who collect. As ever, we have worked to ensure that we are complying with sanctions and other restrictions placed on Russian clients and property of Russian origin. Where appropriate, we have also been offering Russian paintings in international sales across various selling locations. While the international auction market for Russian art remains significantly smaller than it was, we have seen areas of positive momentum.' The statement echoes Overstone's observation that while sale totals are down, average hammer prices for Russian artists have increased, indicating that 'growth is already beginning to occur. If this trend continues, it seems likely that the accessibility of the Russian paintings market will increase, thus allowing for the market to grow again when the situation is more settled.'
Bloomberg
3 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Perelman Fight Over $410 Million in Art Insurance Spurs NY Trial
Nearly seven years after a fire ripped through Ron Perelman's Hamptons home, he is asking a New York state judge to force insurers to pay him more than $400 million for five paintings he says were damaged in the blaze. A trial is under way today in lower Manhattan over a lawsuit Perelman filed two years after the fire. In the suit, he claims that affiliates of Lloyd's of London Ltd., Chubb Ltd. and American International Group Inc. agreed to issue policies that 'protected one of the largest private modern art collections in the world from any damage, no matter how slight,' but balked when he sought compensation for the most expensive pieces in the residence. Those included works by Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
The Jewish dealer who bought art hated by the Nazis – and created one of the greatest collections ever seen
When Heinz Berggruen left Germany for America in 1936, he was not allowed more than 10 marks in his pocket. As a young journalist in Berlin, Berggruen had been forced to publish under the pseudonym 'h.b.' in order to hide his Jewish heritage and evade the Nazi party's antisemitism. In the decades that would follow, he became an art dealer, regularly rubbing shoulders with the most important artists of the 20th century, and amassing one of the most impressive private collections of modern art ever to exist. On the day he left Berlin for Berkeley, however, such a future would have seemed impossible. A year after Berggruen departed Germany, the Nazi party escalated its assault on culture by staging the infamous exhibition titled Entartete Kunst ('degenerate art'). Based on the belief that modern art represented a cultural decay and assault on German values, the regime confiscated more than 16,000 artworks and presented a number of them in an exhibition intended for public ridicule. This invisible history is embedded in the artworks in the National Gallery of Australia's new exhibition, Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen/Neue Nationalgalerie, which is mostly drawn from Berggruen's collection and showcases many of the artists that the Nazis repudiated. The first artwork that Berggruen ever purchased was a watercolour drawing by Paul Klee. The work, which he bought for US$100 in 1940 from another émigré in Chicago, immediately held personal significance. Berggruen described the artwork as his 'talisman' and likely saw his own history reflected in the biography of Klee – a Swiss German artist, who had taught at the Bauhaus before being designated as 'degenerate' and leaving Germany in 1933, the same year Adolf Hitler became chancellor. Berggruen would carry Klee's watercolour drawing everywhere, even taking it with him when he was called up to serve in the US military. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning '[The drawing] was probably a reminder of a world and home he had to leave behind, and a Germany that didn't exist any more,' explains Natalie Zimmer, curator at Museum Berggruen, which is part of Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie. 'Works by Klee really represented a cultural cosmos he was longing for … a reminder of everything that was good for Heinz, and very much the opposite to the Nazi regime.' Artistic style can sometimes seem like an inward-facing conceit. Its importance is lauded by a subset of the art world – and yet, the greater distance one has from the context of its creation, the more ambivalent we as viewers can become to it. Similarly, the work of assembling a private art collection can be of critical importance to some – historians, institutions, the collector's immediate family – and be of little to no interest to most gallery visitors. But the Berggruen collection bucks both trends. Here, the modernist style is not just some idle indulgence, but a critical artistic counterpoint to the sanctioned aesthetics of the Nazis. Collecting such repudiated art was an act of resistance. Klee's abstracted watercolour drawings, Alberto Giacometti's elongated sculptures, Pablo Picasso's dissonant Cubism: all despised by the Nazis and all now present at the NGA. The story that the NGA is telling is primarily focused on the spread of modernist art styles across Europe and its eventual arrival in Australia. Here, the spread begins with the work of Paul Cézanne – a key precursor to the avant-garde movements of the 20th century, whom Picasso purportedly referred to as 'the father of us all' – before moving on to trace his immediate impact on the artistic styles of Cubism and Fauvism, and its persisting influence on the generations of artists that followed. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion This influence is present even when it is not immediately apparent. 'Giacometti is well known for his incredibly tall skinny sculpted works – but what on earth does that have to do with Cézanne?' asks David Greenhalgh, curator at the NGA. 'Well, a lot. Giacometti had a painterly way of sculpting. He built his works up particle by particle – like the constructive brushstrokes of Cézanne.' The basic lines of this narrative follow the conventional history of western art. Yet within the exhibition, this genealogy is extended out to encompass pockets of less-aired histories. Of particular note are the works by Dora Maar, whose Portrait of Pablo Picasso (1938) resists the well-rehearsed and reductive portrayals of her as merely Picasso's muse by dramatically inverting the positions of artist and model. In the painting, Picasso is abstracted and unnerving, staring directly back with orange-yellow eyes and blank, black irises. Maar's collection of black and white street photography further redefines her as an observer of life, rather than just the object of observation. Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack's artworks are particularly arresting. The artist studied at the Bauhaus before being forced to flee Germany for England in 1936 due to his Jewish heritage. He was subsequently classified as an illegal alien and deported to Australia, where he was interned in camps in Hay, Orange and Tatura. The works that he made during this period import the lessons of the European avant-garde into country Australia to dramatic effect, aching with feeling and visually diarising the conditions of exile, as we witness in his woodblock print, Desolation: Internment Camp, Orange, NSW (1941). In 2000, Berggruen sold his collection to the German state, seven years before his death at the age of 93. 'It was a huge act of reconciliation by someone who was driven out of the city some 60 years before and still chose to give his works to Berlin, rather than Geneva or London,' reflects Gabriel Montua, director of the Museum Berggruen. With this gesture, Berggruen helped to fill the historical gaps created by the Nazis' violent confiscations – and left behind a collection that testifies to the power of art in moments of true peril. Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen/Neue Nationalgalerie is on at the National Gallery of Australia until 21 September 2025.
The Guardian
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Fancy a masterpiece? Just pop one in your basket! V&A's new open-access outpost will thrill art-lovers
On a table in a study room at the new V&A East Storehouse, a silk-embroidered Alexander McQueen dress decorated with Hieronymus Bosch paintings has been laid out for me to see intimately. Creatures from The Garden of Earthly Delights cavort and gurn in my face, including a bird monster perched on a high stool that defecates out sinners. Ah, the privileges of a critic – except it isn't my special experience at all. This opportunity for a personal encounter with an exquisite object is available to everyone and anyone, free of charge, as part of this unprecedented reinvention of the Victoria & Albert Museum that is V&A East Storehouse. It isn't even difficult to arrange. All you do is look up the collection online and, if an object is in the Storehouse, you add it to your cart of up to five treasures, place an order, and in a fortnight they will be available for your private delight. You can choose anything from theatre posters to Renaissance paintings to shoes. If they're movable they will be brought to the study room, if not you go to them. I recommend the Ajanta paintings in the ground floor storage facility where I found one towering over me, its damaged parts covered with what looked like sticking plasters, adding to the mystery of this great mass of red and green out of which emerge sharply portrayed people. It's a full-size copy of one of the Ajanta cave paintings in India – one of 300 made for the V&A in the late 19th century by a team from Bombay School of Art. By the time I found this tremendous document of world art, I was already floating. Curators traditionally decide how to contextualise and arrange a museum's objects and most invidiously how much of a public collection is on view and how much hidden in stores. Here everything is on view, at the time and in the arrangement of your choosing. If you can't be bothered with the Order an Object service, you can simply wander this cabinet of curiosities for the people, exploring the nation's Victorian attic. After you enter through heavy protective doors, lungs full of tar fumes from the roadworks along the perimeter of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the artworks start coming immediately in a walkway stuffed with sculptures including a bust of Dante – which is ominous given his Inferno has a gate inscribed 'Abandon hope all you who enter here'. But this Dante leads to enchantment. You stand nervously on a glass floor looking down on a massive yet elegant colonnade built in the 1630s for the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (creator of the Taj Mahal) for his personal hammam in the Red Fort at Agra. What a rare, sensual treasure. The wonder of the Storehouse is the way it makes you feel close to art, as if you owned it – which is as it should be with a national collection. There is abundance everywhere you look – Andalusian column capitals, a statue of Buddha, a giant Georgian doll's house – mixed as randomly yet lovingly as objects in someone's home. Their beauty is unleashed, free of captions, asking only to be enjoyed. That goes plus size for The Biggest Picasso in the World. Two colossal women are running on a beach, their powerful limbs thick and fleshy, hand-in-hand, hair flying. In Picasso's small original 1922 painting Two Women Running on the Beach, they are heroic, but here they are actually giants. It was copied for the 1924 Ballets Russes production Le Train Bleu in just 24 hours. Picasso was so impressed he signed it as an authentic Picasso – his signature, too, is colossal. What does it all mean? I suppose it would be possible to dismiss this as a brainless treasury, the reduction of great art to blissful entertainment. But when you open up the entire contents of a museum collection and show them as a single aesthetic marvel, the museum itself becomes the object of scrutiny. Seeing Bodhisattva, Donatello's Virgin Mary and, in my private study selection, an Islamic astrolabe (an ancient astronomical instrument) all in the same place, you can't help wondering how they all got here. The V&A East Youth Collective Community wondered too. In a side aisle, their selection of apparently random global treasures are connected by one thing: 'An enslaver we choose not to name,' says the text, who spent an ill-gotten fortune on these things. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion From one point of view everything here can be seen this way – this enslaver's collection is a microcosm of the sins of a colonial museum. By opening itself up so completely, V&A East Storehouse offers critique as well as celebration. Is that propagandist? Only if you can show how a global collection formed by Victorian Britain when we ruled the waves somehow doesn't have anything to do with the British empire. Still, it would be better history to name the enslaver. This is what the museum of the future looks like – an old idea that's now been turned inside out, upside down, disgorging its secrets, good and bad, in an avalanche of beautiful questions, created with curiosity, generous imagination and love. The V&A East Storehouse, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London, opens 31 May
