Title: Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure from the Palaces of Europe
Location: NEW YORK - Metropolitan Museum
Description: This is the most comprehensive exhibition to date on the tradition of hardstone carving (pietre dure) that developed in Italy in the 16th century and subsequently spread through Europe.
Start Date: 2008-07-01
End Date: 2008-09-21

Last 8th July Christie’s auctioned among its Old Masters some recovered treasures, whose traces had gone lost. Besides the rediscovery of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s masterpiece “La surprise”, sold for 12,361,250 pounds, 3 drawings by Goya have re-emerged, after 131 years of not knowing anything about them.
At first, it was believed that the three recovered drawings by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) could have fetched a profit equal to 2 million pounds, then they were sold individually and totalled a much higher amount, the same that happened for Watteau’s painting.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, has announced the retirement Nan Rosenthal – the senior consultant for 15 years to the museum’s modern and contemporary art department. It was also announced that her replacement will be Marla Prather, who will take up the position in the fall of this year.

From 1st July to 21st September 2008, the Metropolitan Museum in New York is housing the works by great English artist Turner. It is the greatest retrospective organized on the painter in the USA, displaying 140 of his works between paintings and water-colours.
The production has been organized in both a chronological and a thematic sense, with the purpose of showing the artist’s entire stylistic course, from his immature and academic works to his affirmed and revolutionary pictorial writing, from the themes to the places he held dearest.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has bought 23 photographs by eight Chinese contemporary artists.
MoMA’s purchase includes some of the most influential artists to emerge in the 1990s, including Rong Rong, Huang Yan and Ai Weiwei. China’s rapid industrialization is one of their topics.
While prices for Chinese contemporary art have soared in the past five years, U.S. museums have been slow to add the works. Last year the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York purchased Hai Bo’s “Bicycle Riders From the Series The North” a 2005 group of eight wall-size images of men riding bicycles. (Bloomberg)

Since American artist Jeff Koons, during the late seventies, started exhibiting his first inflatable works, he has never left the footlights. Having reached very soon world celebrity, Koons has triggered countless debates within the contemporary art world and wherever he goes he is followed by a multitude of reporters, while his exhibitions are invaded by figures of the star system, billionaire collectors, art lovers and curious people attracted by this artist who has transformed his life into art creating an aureole of gossip around him.

A Claude Monet painting has fetched a record £40.9m ($80.5) for the artist’s work at an auction in London. Le Bassin Aux Nympheas had been expected to fetch £24m ($47.2m) at Christie’s. The identity of the bidder has not been made public. Painted in 1919 in Giverny in France it has been seen in public just once in the past 80 years. Monet’s 1873 Le Pont du chemin de fer a Argenteuil, which sold in May, had held the previous record of £20.9m ($41.1m).
Experts say the art market remains in a “robust” position. BBC arts correspondent David Sillito said that buyers from all over the world attended the sale.
The “hammer price” for the painting was £36.5m ($71.8m) but the overall price rose to over £40m ($78.8m) with taxes. “There’s never been such a picture sold at auction in Europe in the last 20 years,” Oliver Camu of Christie’s said.
Monet painted several smaller water lily pieces, sometimes referred to as his “water landscapes”, before he decided to embark upon a series of large-scale Nympheas in 1914.
These paintings would eventually lead to his Grandes Decorations, the celebrated frieze now in the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris.
Le Bassin Aux Nympheas is one of a tiny handful of paintings the artist relinquished during his lifetime as he viewed his water lilies as a large work in progress. Of its three fellow paintings one is in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, another was cut into two and the third is in a private collection. (Bbc News)

Article translated by Amritee Mahabir

Last April 8th, an exceptional auction dedicated entirely to Diane Arbus was meant to have been held. Twenty lots by the famous photographer should have been showcased by Phillips De Pury in New York, during the spring fair dedicated to photography. The belief is that just hours before the start of the auction, news arrived that the collection would be sold privately, and so the auction was cancelled. But let’s retrace the facts in the right order.