Ian Katz says new show, Art Trouble, celebrates the channel’s tradition of ‘iconoclasm and irreverence’
Channel 4 has bought a painting by Adolf Hitler and will allow a studio audience to decide whether Jimmy Carr should burn it with a flamethrower.
As part of its latest season of programmes, the TV channel has bought artworks by a range of “problematic” artists, including Pablo Picasso, as well as convicted paedophile Rolf Harris and sexual abuser Eric Gill.
Continue reading...‘Deviant’ works by artists including Picasso and Warhol return to display at exhibition in Iranian capital
Some of the world’s most prized works of contemporary western art have been unveiled for the first time in decades in Tehran.
The Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric, rails against the influence of the west. Authorities have condemned “deviant” artists for “attacking Iran’s revolutionary culture”. And the Islamic Republic has plunged further into confrontation with the US and Europe as it rapidly accelerates its nuclear programme and diplomatic efforts stall.
Continue reading...Show claiming to feature works by Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso abruptly cancelled as police launch investigation
An exhibition in Slovenia claiming to feature works by Picasso, Van Gogh and Matisse was abruptly cancelled this week over fears some works were forged, prompting a police probe on Friday.
The National Museum of Slovenia planned to officially open the show on Wednesday this week, entitled “Travels” and featuring 160 paintings owned by the little-known Boljkovac family.
Continue reading...Auction houses are recording a boom in sales after a return to pre-pandemic levels of supplies of works
As a straight return on investment, it’s hard to beat “Untitled”, a 1982 work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, the African American street artist who became a global cultural icon, featuring a horned African mask on an abstract background across a canvas almost 5m wide.
In 2004, the painting sold for $4.5m. Back on the market 12 years later, it fetched $57.3m, then a record for a Basquiat. This week, it went under the hammer in New York for $85m (£68m), including fees, to a buyer from Asia.
Continue reading...Newly opened archive of art patron’s papers reveals a previously unseen sketch for the surrealist work
One of the world’s best-known pieces of furniture, Salvador Dalí’s Mae West lips sofa, started life as a sketch on the back of an envelope, research in the archive of a Sussex country house has revealed.
The sketch was unearthed at West Dean near Chichester, the former home of Dalí’s patron Edward James, and experts say it reveals the extent to which James was involved in the creation of the 1930s sofa. Alongside the lobster telephone, also the result of a collaboration between Dalí and James, it is one of the emblems of the surrealist movement.
Continue reading...Sotheby’s to sell 11 works in Bellagio hotel and casino, in one of most valuable Picasso auctions yet
Las Vegas: the city of sin, where you can gamble away your savings, get married on a whim, dine on an octuple bypass burger at the Heart Attack Grill – and soon, it has been announced, take part in one of the most valuable Picasso auctions ever staged.
Sotheby’s has announced it is to sell 11 Picasso works owned by MGM Resorts, which have a combined value of about $100m (£72m).
Continue reading...Agustín Ibarrola’s 1977 version was painted as part of campaign to get the original returned from New York
The grief-snapped mother is still there, cradling her dead child 84 years on, as is the fallen soldier with his stigmata and the horse with its silent screams.
However, the Guernica now on its way to a museum in the Basque country is not Pablo Picasso’s monochrome howl of anti-fascist fury but a retelling of the work intended to help bring the original to the market town whose agonies beneath waves of German and Italian bombers inspired its creation – and to denounce the subsequent horrors of the Franco dictatorship.
Continue reading...A Picasso painting stolen nine years ago from Greece's National Gallery and recovered by police has had yet another mishap after the valuable artwork slipped and fell from its display. Police were exhibiting the recovered painting - along with a Mondrian piece from 1905 - when it slipped from its display. It was hastily returned to its position by an official not wearing gloves. The paintings were stolen in 2012 and recovered after they were found hidden in bushland
Works by 20th-century masters found nearly a decade after audacious heist at Athens gallery
A Picasso gifted to the Greek people by the artist in honour of their resistance to Nazi rule has been found in a gorge after a builder admitted to stealing the masterpiece and two other artworks in an audacious heist from the National Gallery in Athens nearly a decade ago.
For nine years, Head of a Woman had lain hidden in the home of the self-described art lover alongside Stammer Windmill, a work by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, also stolen during the overnight raid on 9 January 2012.
Continue reading...A book of family memories paints the artist as doting dad, rather than the callous, ageing womaniser depicted by others
Pablo Picasso was still married to the former ballerina Olga Khokhlova when he became captivated by a 17-year-old girl outside the Galeries Lafayette in Paris in 1927.
He was 28 years her senior, but Marie-Thérèse Walter soon became his muse for voluptuous portraits and gave birth to his daughter before he moved on to the next of his many relationships, with Dora Maar, the surrealist photographer and painter.
Continue reading...€100 ticket scoops ‘incredible’ 1921 still life oil painting by Spanish master
An Italian accountant whose son bought her a raffle ticket as a Christmas present won a Pablo Picasso oil painting valued at €1m ($1.1m) in a charity draw on Wednesday.
Claudia Borgogno summed up her amazement in one word: incredible. “I have never won anything before,” said the 58-year-old told from Ventimiglia, in north-western Italy.
Continue reading...Timothy Sammons used works by Picasso and Chagall as collateral for personal loans
A prominent British art dealer who defrauded his clients out of millions by using a scheme that involved masterpieces by artists including Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall has been sentenced for up to 12 years in prison.
Timothy Sammons – a former Sotheby’s specialist who had offices in New York and London and who brokered multimillion-pound deals for the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – used art that did not belong to him as collateral to obtain personal loans between 2010 and 2015.
Continue reading...For years, a giant brass and Sèvres porcelain grasshopper that could, if needed, double as a wine-cooler sat outside the royal apartments at Windsor Castle; a gift from French president Georges Pompidou to the Duke of Edinburgh during a state visit to France in 1972.
Across the Channel, an hour from Paris, the home of its late creator François-Xavier Lalanne and his artist wife Claude is full of such wonderful and whimsical creatures: a huge rhinoceros that transforms into a desk; a bronze cabbage on chicken legs; a herd of sheep that can be sat on, tables of enormous ginkgo leaves.
Continue reading...The man dubbed ‘Indiana Jones of the art world’ says the paintings can ‘become a burden’
The ring at the door of the modest east Amsterdam apartment came late in the day on Thursday 14 March. On the doorstep stood two men “with contacts in the underworld”, Arthur Brand recalls, and with them a large, rectangular package.
Eagerly, Brand removed the covering and examined the contents: Buste de femme (Dora Maar), a portrait by Pablo Picasso of his mistress. Unsigned because it was never sold by the painter, it bore in its bottom-left corner the date he completed it, 26 April 1938, and was worth an estimated €25m (£21.5m).
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