Take a tour of the original Barnes Foundation

The amazing collection of Impressionist and early modernist painting and sculpture making up the Barnes Foundation will be leaving its original home in Merion, PA and moving to its new home in Philadelphia next May.  After a long fought battle, the foundation managed to over-ride its original charter and bylaws established by the pharmaceutical tycoon Albert C. Barnes in the early 1920s which stated that none of the collection’s paintings or sculptures could be sold, lent or moved from the original gallery walls. To many, the quirky and idiosyncratic way in which Barnes displayed his collection — “antiquated-looking salon style that filled entire walls of its neo-Classical home with odd arrangements of paintings, organized to echo and rhyme their formal qualities and interspersed with decorative metalwork like ax heads and hinges” [New York Times] — made the Barnes Foundation such a fabulous and unusual institution. Happily for those of us who have never had the opportunity to visit the original galleries, the New York Times has produced a virtual tour of its many highlights. To read more about the tour and the Barnes Foundation, click here for the full article.

You can read more about the new building designed by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien here.

Jacques Seligmann & Co. records online

Jacques Seligmann & Co. was a leading dealer in the antiquities and decorative arts market in Paris during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The company played a critical role in the development of art collecting and consequently the growth of numerous major European and American galleries and museums. Seligmann’s clients are a who’s who of big collectors in Europe and the U.S.:  Baron Edmond de Rothschild of France, the Stronganoff family of Russia, William Randolph Hearst and J. P. Morgan of the United States, just to name a few.

This past April, the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institute announced the availability of the Jacques Seligmann & Co. archive online.  The records — over 200 linear square feet of material dating from 1904 to 1978 — include catalogs, photographs, receipts, publicity, and correspondence and amount to 330,749 available images/digital records.

271 Picasso works recently discovered

Succession Picasso

A retired electrician has come forward with a collection of 271 never-before-seen works by Pablo Picasso. Pierre Le Guennec, the former electrician who installed burglar alarms for Picasso, claims the trove — a trunk full of art which they stored in their garage — was a gift from Picasso and his second wife. In September, Le Buennec approached Picasso’s son to have the works appraised and authenticated but instead, Picasso’s son, the estate’s administrator, has filed a suit for illegal possession of the art works, accusing Le Guennec of stealing the pieces. The collection, which is estimated to be worth around $80 million, includes sketches, collages, prints and watercolors created between 1900 and 1932. [New York Times, Yahoo News]

Why you shouldn’t put off cleaning your attic…

In keeping with our Antiques Roadshow theme, and a $69.5 million reason to clean out your closets:
A brother and sister from a London suburb found a vase while clearing out their parent’s family home. In “a dusty attic”, they found several “Chinese knickknacks”, including a delicate vase. The vase turned out to be an 18th century porcelain dating from the Qianlong reign of the Qing dynasty. No one is really sure how the vase came to this modest London attic but the vase is believed to have come to Britain in the 19th century after British and French troops looted the Beijing Summer Palace at the end of the Second Opium War in 1860.  The vase was purchased by an undisclosed buyer and is now the most expensive Chinese artwork ever sold.  The other knickknacks, just for the record, fetched a paltry $65.

Ansel Adams meets the Antiques Roadshow

It all began ten years ago when Rick Norsigian bought 2 boxes of negatives at a Fresno garage sale for $45. Art, handwriting and weather experts concluded that within these boxes of negatives were 65 plates produced by Ansel Adams; in July, an art dealer valued the negatives at $200 million. A short while later, a relative of Earl Brooks — a contemporary of Ansel Adams — claimed that the images were taken by Brooks, not Adams. Add now we can add Arthur C. Pillsbury to the list of possible creators of the Norsigian negatives.  According to the New York Times, because Yosemite was such a popular spot for photographers at this time (80 years ago), this may not be the last of the plot twists. The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, the Center for Creative Photography and the University of Arizona archive, along with a number of art and forensic experts, dispute Norsigian’s claim to own authentic Adam’s negatives. The Adams trust and Norsigian meet in federal court this week over an alleged trademark violation resulting from Norsigian’s sale of prints of the negatives.

New videos in the VRF

This past year, we added a number of new, interesting videos to the VRF media collections. This isn’t a complete list of all recent DVD additions but here are a few highlights:
Pryings by Vito Acconci (Video Data Bank), The Blindness Series by T. Kim-Trang Tran (Video Data Bank), Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think (Artcore Film), Alice Neel (Arthouse Films), Marion Cajori’s Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Artist (Christian Blackwood), The Giant Buddhas by Christian Frei, Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio (Big Beard Films), Rural (Aspect — Chronicle of New Media, Volume 10), Cinemad: Almanac 2009 (Mike Plante, curator), Valie Export: 3 Experimental Short Films (ARGE Index), Chiara Clemente’s Our City Dreams (First Run Features), Herb and Dorothy by Megumi Sasaki (Arthouse Films), Beautiful Losers (Sidetrack Films) and the 2 volume set Treasures from American Film Archives: IV, Avant-Garde, 1947-1986 (National Film Preservation Foundation). Our complete video holdings can be found in our catalog (see the link to our Image Database in the menu on the right)