An exquisitely beautiful study of the young Saint John kneeling in prayer before the Madonna and the infant Christ by Sandro Botticelli is to be offered for sale by the leading international art dealers Dickinson for a price in the region of US$15 million (€11.1 million) at TEFAF Maastricht. Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John, sometimes known as the Rockefeller Madonna because it was once in the collection of the Rockefeller family, will be one of the highlights of the 23rd edition of the world’s most influential art and antiques fair at the MECC (Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Centre) in the southern Netherlands from 12-21 March 2010.


Background information on the painting
Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John was painted by Alessandro Felipepi di Mariano di Vanni, called Sandro Botticelli, about 1493-95. It depicts an adoring Saint John kneeling with his hands joined in prayer before Christ, and wearing, as is usual, a tunic of animal skins and holding his distinctive reed cross. The subject of the painting was popular in Renaissance Florence despite there being no scriptural basis for John having met the infant Christ before the latter’s baptism.

The stylised rocky landscape is typical of Botticelli as are some of the distinctive details including the transparent veil which falls over the Virgin’s red headdress, the meticulous gold patterning of her mantle and the echoing of these colours in the clothing of Saint John. Ronald Lightbown, author of Sandro Botticelli, points out that the relief behind the figures “is one of the few direct quotations from the antique in Botticelli’s work, and its vigorous rendering of the densely moving forms of ancient relief shows that Botticelli was as sensitive as any of his contemporaries to the character and style of classical sculpture”. 

Provenance
The painting is known to have been exhibited by Lord Duveen, one of the greatest art dealers of the 20th century, in New York in 1925 and by 1931 was in the collection of John D. Rockefeller Jnr. It remained with the wealthy Rockefeller dynasty for half a century, which is why it is sometimes referred to as the Rockefeller Madonna. In more recent years it has been part of a private collection in New York.

Maastricht is preparing its self for the TEFAF, lovers of the fine and decorative arts are in great anticipation what this year will bring us and the tight-fisted Dutch are on the look-out for freebees or a quick buck if the demand is high enough.

On ‘Marktplaats.nl’ the equivalent of eBay, which was actually taken over by eBay for € 225 million in 2004, the number of people seeking an invitation against a lower price than the standard entrance fee, is growing. Once the TEFAF hits the news here in the Low Lands, you can be sure that the demand will increase even more.

The demand is not limited to people alone who are only prepared to pay less than the standard entrance fee. No there are also a few who want to rub shoulders with the rich and famous during the grand opening on the 11th. They are willing to pay between € 80 and € 100 per head.

Considering the demand, the number of people who want to cash on their invitation is limited to just one, up to now at least. Only recently an invitee of Bernard Shapero Rare Books in the Dutch town of Leiderdorp sold his invitation for € 40 and at present an invitee of Galerie Rhea has his invitation up for auction.

A change in luxury spending habits caused by the recession has helped the international art and antiques market weather the global economic storm. This is revealed by a new report commissioned by The European Fine Art Foundation which organises The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) to be held in the Dutch city of Maastricht in the MECC (Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Centre) from 12-21 March 2010. The report The International Art Market 2007-2009, Trends in the Art Trade during Global Recession has been prepared by Dr Clare McAndrew, a cultural economist specialising in the fine and decorative art market and founder of Arts Economics.


Wealthy buyers have been switching away from expensive cars, yachts and jets in favour of assets with long-term tangible value such as art and antiques. These ‘investments of passion’ have meant that, although the world market in art and antiques has suffered during the economic downturn, it has performed far better than expected.

“As economically recessive conditions in many countries have led to a reduction in incomes, demand for and consumption of many luxury goods has also contracted,” says the report, the latest in a series of important annual studies commissioned by TEFAF. It adds that the world financial crisis produced a drop in the number of High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) – people with investable assets of at least US$1 million. Nevertheless the share of art in HNWIs-‘investments of passion’ actually rose from 20% in 2006 to 25% in 2008, as investors looked to find assets that had a more enduring value.

“The geographical distribution of wealth has also worked in favour of the art market. While most of the older Western economies are currently in recession, many of the new art markets are still showing positive growth, with China and India at rates of 9% and 6% respectively in 2009.”


Among the key findings of the report (p. 15-17) are:

• In 2008, total sales in the global market for fine and decorative art reached just over €42.2 billion, down over 12% from its peak in 2007 of €48.1 billion. In 2009, sales are estimated to have slipped further, dropping by about 26% to €31.3 billion. However sales in 2009 are still well above any year of the arts market’s history before 2006.
  
  
• Just under 50% of the value of all transactions in the global market took place in the EU in 2008, which then achieved a total market turnover of €20.7 billion.
  
  
• The US and UK continued to dominate the global art and antiques market in 2008, with a share of respectively 35% and 34% of the value of all transactions.
  
  
• China has continued to gain share in the global market. Since 2007, it achieved the third largest sales worldwide. The Chinese art market bucked the trend in the rest of the world and increased aggregate sales in 2009 by 12%, boosting its share of the global art market to 14% (US 30%, UK 29%).
  
  
• The auction market for Contemporary art grew from €92 million in 2002 to €915 million in 2008. Just as it had been a leader in the expansive phase of the art market, the Contemporary sector has also fared worse than other sectors, dropping by 60% to €378 million.
  
  
• More traditional categories have performed well throughout the last few years. Old Master paintings, for example, are now regarded as a strong sector in which to collect and invest.
  

Following the Museum Website Ranking, over 3700 websites of art and antique dealers were analysed. The Top 100 ranking is dominated by dealers based in the United States and the United Kingdom, followed by the French and the Dutch.

Compared to the activities the museum deploy, the fine art and antique trade, on the whole, seem less active in matters concerned with search engine optimisation and associated activities.

Besides the world Top 100 ranking, Kunstpedia has also indexed the websites by country.

Top 100 >>
Europe >>
Americas >>
Africa & Asia >>
Oceania >>

'Museums enable people to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment. They are institutions that collect, safeguard and make accessible artefacts and specimens, which they hold in trust for society.' ~ The Museums Association

Learning and access are supposed to be central to the purpose of all museums, but I'm not entirely sure that all museum staff are aware of this. Consistently high numbers of school children trudging around museums throughout the land in groups of thirty at a time suggest that they are welcoming places for those who want to learn, and I thoroughly enjoyed every visit I went on when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Some museums host regular 'handling days', activities for the young and the such like, and with the governmental pressure that's put on them these days to become 'attractions', rather than institutions responsible for safeguarding our heritage, the number of 'social' activities available has risen... with lights, shows and widgets to boot in some cases. But what about those of us whose interests lie beyond these social events and demonstrations of this ceremony or that whilst being offered lumps of stale cheese on a stick? What if your desire to study an object or collection goes beyond the normal couple of hours trundling around after a tour guide or teacher, and your request for access involves a curator giving up time to find an object that isn't on display in order to make it available to you?

I've met some wonderful museum staff. They've been so helpful and have given up a huge amount of their time despite being rushed off their feet. I feel very fortunate to have met them and have the greatest respect for them. At the same time, I've encountered some of the most pretentious, self-important... well, not wanting to mince words... plonkers you could ever wish to meet; individuals who weren't just unhelpful, they were deliberately obstructive. The idea that a member of the general public should be permitted access to the collections not on display, the 'inner sanctum' if you like, and that they should be required to actually take part in such sacrilege, was downright offensive to them.

Obviously, the primary concern of a museum is to safeguard the objects themselves. That must always come first. The second concern, surely, is to make those objects available for the purpose of education, research and enjoyment... or else, what is the point of them being in a museum in the first place? They may as well be in the safe of that type of private collector who takes them out twice every decade in dim light before whisking them back in again.

One of those plonkers I referred to felt obliged, though I don't know why (I suppose it may have been the amount of wine he'd consumed), to explain his reasoning when it came to keeping priceless artefacts away from the rabble. Collections, he explained at a gathering of like-minded stuffed shirts (myself excluded from that description), should be made available to those who can understand their significance and advance scholarship... not bus drivers and secretaries. How exactly are we to advance scholarship and understanding, or even inspire a desire in future generations to do so, if we restrict access? And what about the Museums Association's definition of what museums do... they 'safeguard and make accessible' objects which they 'hold in trust for society'. I see 'accessible' and 'society' in there. The former word does not mean 'lock up for all time' and I think the latter includes bus drivers and secretaries.

I've even heard it suggested that the display cases and walls of museums should be filled with replicas, so that the originals can be locked away. Whilst I can very much see the sense in that when it comes to fragile objects that may be irreparably damaged due to being on public display (I'm thinking of poor old King Tut's tomb here), what on earth would be the point in going to the Louvre to see a copy of the Mona Lisa? Or to the Orsay to see a copy of Manet's Olympia? Turn the Marmottan into a showcase for fake water lillies, and fill the British museum with painted resin 'antiquities', and then twenty academics can study the genuine articles while the rest of us fiddle with interactive displays and gawp at genuine 21st century original Neolithic pottery.

The objects housed in museums can be enjoyed by anyone... any old Tom, Dick or Harry can find himself swept away by a Tissot or a Renoir. It's true, you don't need a masters degree to like art - who knew? And it's that initial feeling of being swept away that can lead to a much deeper interest, a quest for knowledge, and eventually a request for special access to view the rest of a collection. That's how it all started for me with Japanese prints. One minute I was a teenager worrying about my homework, the next I was obsessed and inflicting myself on various museums for hours at a time.

When someone asks me what they should do to learn more about Japanese prints, I tell them to read everything they can get their hands on and then to go and find museums with collections and ask to see them, so they can get a feel for them. I've been surprised by the number of people who've come back to me and said they were made to feel like a nuisance by the staff they contacted. If not for people with a genuine and deep interest and a great desire to learn, who on earth are these collections being preserved for? If not to promote a wider understanding and greater level of appreciation, why do museums exist at all?

So, what do you think? Are museum resources so limited that staff should not waste their time providing access to items not on display to anyone who doesn't have the right credentials (naturally, this excludes bus drivers and secretaries)? Is the move towards widget-infested interactive doo-dahs a good thing? Who doesn't like pressing buttons to make things move/flash after all? Can objects that never see the light of day really be said to have been preserved for 'society'? Do you feel that the atmosphere in museums is generally welcoming? Exclusive? Inspiring? Uncomfortable?

One of Paul Gauguin’s last major works is to be offered for sale by the leading international art dealer Dickinson for a price in the region of €18 million (US$26 million) at TEFAF Maastricht. Gauguin created this painting during a final burst of creativity following his retreat to a remote Pacific island as far away from civilisation as possible.


The rare late Tahitian Gauguin will be one of the highlights of The European Fine Art Fair reinforcing its reputation for offering the very best works of art for sale. The picture was painted in 1902, a year before Gauguin’s death, while he was living on Hiva Oa in the remote Marquesas Islands 740 miles from Tahiti.  Unhappy with what he saw as the increasingly European colonial atmosphere on the main Tahitian islands, he landed at Atuona, the capital of Hiva Oa, in September 1901.

Gauguin praised the Marquesas in a letter to his friend Daniel de Monfried. ‘I assure you from the point of view of painting it’s admirable,’ he told him. ‘Poetry emerges here of its own accord, and it can be evoked simply by allowing oneself to dream while painting. I ask for just two years of good health and not too many money worries, which now have excessive hold over my nervous temperament, in order to reach a certain maturity in my art.’

Unfortunately his wish for good health was not to be granted. His illness was probably partially responsible for the increasingly dream-like nature of his art and his late paintings from the Marquesas, such as Deux Femmes, are more self-referential. They are a composite of motifs drawn from Western art, Gauguin’s collection of photographs and memories and symbols sourced from his own life and work.

The symbolism of Deux Femmes is obscure, and rests on an arcane vocabulary developed by Gauguin. However the mysterious nature of the painting, accentuated by the lush, intoxicating richness of the colours, brilliantly portrays the exotic primitivism at the root of Gauguin’s fascination with the inhabitants of the Pacific islands. The two female figures relate to the Biblical character of Eve, a key figure in Gauguin’s personal mythology, while the fox sitting outside the house has a long history in his oeuvre as a symbol of perversity.  In the last months of 1902 and early 1903 Gauguin’s health declined and on the island of Hiva Oa on 8 May 1902 he died.

Deux Femmes is first recorded in the collection of Marie Paul Voûte (1882-1955), a member of a family of successful Dutch merchants. It is thought to have been the first Tahitian Gauguin to enter a Dutch collection and Voute is known to have also owned two paintings by Van Gogh.

Deux Femmes is being offered for sale through Dickinson by a leading British private collector who bought it at auction four years ago. James Roundell, a director of Dickinson, said: ‘The owner has decided to focus on pictures from later in the 20th century and is rationalizing his collection. Although the owner is still enthusiastic about the picture, the Gauguin does not fit in with the new focus and is the odd one out in the collection.’ Dickinson, based in London and New York, is a leading international dealer in Old Master and Impressionist paintings and Modern and Contemporary Art.

Gauguin exhibition - Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
During TEFAF there will be an exhibition on Gauguin’s zincographs at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. In 1889, during the Paris World’s Fair, Gauguin exhibited a series of prints he had made at the instigation of Theo van Gogh, which was to become known as the Volpini Suite. The exhibition is the first to examine in depth this series of lithographs, which played a crucial role in Gauguin’s development into a modern artist. A total of 60 works of art will be shown.

TEFAF Maastricht will have a record number of 263 exhibitors from 17 countries when it opens at the MECC (Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Centre) in the southern Netherlands from 12-21 March 2010. Exhibitors will show some 30,000 works of art and antiques, including paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, furniture, classical antiquities, illuminated manuscripts, jewellery, textiles, porcelain, glass, silver, design and other works of art all of which will be rigorously vetted by teams of experts. It will expand by introducing TEFAF on Paper, a new section devoted entirely to works on paper. The latest in a series of groundbreaking reports specially prepared for TEFAF will examine how the international art market has fared during the economic recession.

The 23rd edition of the world’s most influential art and antiques fair will take place from 12-21 March 2010.

Over 680 websites of art museums have been analysed and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York proved to be the most popular, followed by Metropolitan Museum of Art and Musée du Louvre.

The Netherlands, USA and Germany  have the highest website density, of which on average US museums have the most favourable score.

Disappointing was to conclude that a number of well established museums, amongst others, scored very poorly on the number reference links from third parties.

Over 300 museums are not indexed in the Museum Ranking 2009, as they either have no website or the website is hosted on a sub domain with exact the same ranking data asthe main domain name. Consequently no realistic comparison could be made with other art museum websites.

View Listing >> Museum Ranking 2009

Top 10 Most Popular Art Museum Websites

1     Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
2     Metropolitan Museum of Art
3     Musée du Louvre
4     National Gallery of Art
5     Victoria and Albert Museum
6     J. Paul Getty Museum
7     Deutsches Historisches Museum
8     Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
9     State Hermitage Museum
10   Brooklyn Museum of Art

The famous painting Natività con i Santi Lorenzo e Francesco di Assisi (Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco), which was stolen over 30 years ago and had an estimated value of € 30 million, no longer exists. That is at least what Gaspare Spatuzza, former hitman turned pentito (informer), stated in his testimony, as reported by the Italian newspaper  la Repubblica. The painting was handed for safe keeping to the Pullara family, part of the Santa Maria di Gesu clan in Palermo, who hid it in a farm outbuilding. "There it was eaten by rats and pigs, and so was burnt," so Spatuzza said. Caravaggio (1571-1610) painted Natività in 1609 in Palermo, Sicily. The painting was stolen in the evening  of 17 and 18 October 1969 from oratory of San Lorenzo (Oratorio di San Lorenzo).

Francesco Marino Mannoia, a convicted heroin dealer whose mother, sister and aunt were murdered by the Mafia after he turned state's evidence, admitted taking part in the theft of the painting on a stormy night in October 1969. He said it had been damaged when it was ripped from the frame but had never revealed its location to police despite appeals from art foundations.

The motive for the theft has never been clear, although police believe that as the painting could not be sold on the open market it was stolen for a private collector to raise cash. Mannoia, testifying in 1996 at the trial of Giulio Andreotti, the former prime minister, on charges of links to the Mafia, claimed there had been a private buyer who wept at the sight of the damaged painting.

(Het Parool & Museum Security Network)

BBC News 4 January 2010

A simple method to distinguish artistic fakes and imitations has been demonstrated by researchers.

The approach, known as "sparse coding", builds a virtual library of an artist's works and breaks them down into the simplest possible visual elements.

Verifiable works by that artist can be rebuilt using varying proportions of those simple elements, while imitators' works cannot.

The work is reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The mathematical analysis of artworks is a relatively new discipline, which gained worldwide attention when it emerged in 1999 that Jackson Pollock's "drip paintings" could be cast in the mathematics of fractals - patterns that repeat at ever-smaller scales.

However, the claim that a fractal analysis could be used to identify Pollock-like paintings of unknown provenance remains a subject of some controversy.

Sparse richness
Since that time, a number of approaches to identify the origins of artworks have been attempted, yielding varying degrees of certainty in the results.

Now, Daniel Rockmore of Dartmouth College in the US and his colleagues have shown a straightforward method known as sparse coding that, so far, appears to be significantly more accurate than previous attempts.
   
The method works by dividing digital versions of all of an artist's confirmed works into 144 squares - 12 columns of 12 rows each.

Then a set of "basis functions" is constructed - initially a set of random shapes and forms in black and white.

A computer then modifies them until, for any given cut-down piece of the artist's work, some subset of the basis functions can be combined in some proportion to recreate the piece.

The basis functions are refined further to ensure that the smallest possible number of them is required to generate any given piece - they are the "sparsest" set of functions that reproduces the artist's work.

The team tried the approach on the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a 16th century Flemish painter whose original works are well-known and who had a number of imitators.

Upon using the sparse coding approach on the artist's known works, the Dartmouth team showed that the optimised basis functions were unable to reproduce the imitations.

However, Professor Rockmore said that although authentication of works was an application that would appeal to many people, sparse coding could lend its analysis to a number of problems in the study of art.

"Our hope is that it becomes more of what people call technical art history," he told BBC News.

"Instead of asking 'was this painting done 40 years after these drawings?', one might instead ask 'how are these statistics evolving over time and what does that say about the working style?'.

"For many people those are more central questions, and probably more substantial questions."

       SPARSE CODING ANALYSIS
      

• Visual elements in "sparse coding" technique
• Each of an artist's works is cut into 144 pieces (12 rows and 12 columns)
• A set of 144 random elements the size of each piece is generated
• Each element is altered by a computer until some combination of them can recreate each piece from the original artwork
• The elements (shown above) are refined until the fewest are required to recreate each piece
• Those refined pieces will be unable to reproduce the work of an imitator or a fake

MARSEILLE, France (Reuters) - Thieves have stolen about 30 paintings, including a work by Spanish master Pablo Picasso, from a private villa in the south of France, police said on Saturday.

The haul, which also included a painting by post-impressionist Henri Rousseau, was worth about 1 million euros ($1.43 million), a judicial source said.

The theft was discovered on Thursday by a caretaker at the house in the Provencal village of La Cadiere d'Azur. The owner was on holiday in Sweden at the time and has since returned to France to help the investigation, police said.

It was the second major art theft in southern France in recent days, although there was no indication the two crimes were linked.

A drawing by French impressionist Edgar Degas was stolen from a museum on Wednesday night in the Mediterranean city of Marseille. Police said the pastel work, "The Chorus," was worth an estimated 800,000 euros.

(Reporting by Francois Revilla; Writing by Crispian Balmer; Editing by Andrew Dobbie)