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The Art Institute of Chicago explores the great paradox of the 19th century’s greatest painter: from a scandalous youth of frank nudes to flowers, fruit bowls and fashionable women. In 1865, two years after they rejected his “Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” the gatekeepers of the Paris Salon accepted two paintings by Édouard Manet into Europe’s most prestigious exhibition. One was a slablike, Spanish-influenced religious scene of Christ mocked by Roman legionaries. But it was the other that eclipsed more than 3,500 other works in the Salon, and set off a scandal that makes the recent brouhaha at the Whitney Biennial look as stately as a Noh drama.
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William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s “La Jeunesse de Bacchus” (The Youth of Bacchus), a joyful scene of mythological frolic, measures a whopping 20 feet long and nearly 11 feet high, and it was the biggest canvas he ever painted. The 1884 work, with an estimate of $25 million to $35 million, will be a marquee offering at Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale on May 14, 2019 in New York. It will also rank as one of the largest pre-Modern works offered in the history of Sotheby’s, sure to garner attention just for that fact, but also because it’s by a beloved 19th-century French painter who has a sterling sales record and legions of fans among museumgoers.
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Canadian artist Calvin Nicholls creates amazingly beautiful sculptures using sheets of paper. "Calvin has been creating his paper sculptures since 1986 from his studio north of Toronto Ontario, Canada.This particular series is appropriately titled, "Paper Zoo." To make the art, he starts by observing real-life animals and their movements.
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According to claims filed afterwards, Merry-Joseph Blondel's 'La Circassienne au Bain' was the most expensive object to be lost when the Titanic sank in 1912. As the doomed Titanic began its final countdown before disappearing under the sea 107 years ago, there was a last gasp of activity on the deck. These scenes have become well known thanks to big-screen adaptations of the disaster: the rush to load the few remaining life boats with women and children, the brave musicians who took up their instruments for one last concert, the tilt of the deck as the ship began to tip into the ocean.
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On a snowy evening in New York City, David Hockney’s 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) sold at auction for a jaw-dropping $90.3 million, shattering the previous world record for a work sold at auction by a living artist—Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog, which went for $58.4 million back in 2013. It also far exceeded the estimated sale price of $80 million, which itself would have been a record. What do these kinds of prices say about the state of the art world, and of the world in general?
