Roundup Newswires

Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network

Fantastique beasts: cult art from the Lalannes’ private collection to go on sale

Posted on July 20, 2019 by Admin

Surreal works from the home of François-Xavier Lalanne and his wife Claude expected to fetch up to £20m

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.

Art detective Arthur Brand: how I found a stolen Picasso

Posted on March 29, 2019 by Admin

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).