Auction houses love to make us dream by creating stories about the objects on sale and the personalities who owned them. You might say it has become their core marketing strategy. The forthcoming auction of the contents of Robert de Balkany’s private hotel particulier...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28PyEKAgxmo “You’ll see how we’re going to reboot the Biennale! My job it to put it back to the level where it should be. After all, we’re in the City of Light. This isn’t taking place in Maastricht. This event needs to...
Long before Andy Warhol dreamed of being an art-making machine and more or less managed it with his silkscreens on canvas, Antwerp’s Pierre Paul Rubens (1577-1640), a legend in a different art genre, designed his own great machine for pumping out paintings. On 6th and...
For a very long time they were stowed out of sight in a box under a bed somewhere in England. This is the story of 50 etchings with an estimated value of £1.4 million by one of the most important masters in the history of art, a giant of the Dutch golden age,...
It's a story that has got the entire old master world talking. And it begins like the best art market myths: in 2014 a family in Toulouse, in the south-west of France, while doing work on their house, discovered a canvas in the attic which appeared to be from the...
Though he’s a towering figure in the history of French art, it’s the Prado in Madrid that is currently exhibiting almost his entire catalogue of works. Georges de La Tour (1593-1652) was a painter from the Lorraine region whose work was highly regarded in his time....
Who would possibly make a comparison between Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) also called Le Douanier Rousseau, the retired Paris customs officer considered by the critics of his days as a harmless weekend painter, and Paolo Uccello (1397-1475), one of the foremost figures...
270 galleries, from antiques to contemporary art, land in the Dutch city for nine days It is by no means the most expensive work on show at the 2016 edition of Tefaf Maastricht but it’s one of the most affecting. The Parisian gallery Kevorkian, which specializes in...
In the Dutch city of Delft there are no paintings by Vermeer of Delft while in Den Bosch (S’- Hertogenbosch) you won’t find a single Hieronymus Bosch. The Netherlands’ loss is the rest of the world’s gain. Yet the city associated with this towering 15th century...
The art market doesn’t do art justice. In other words, on one side of the ring are modes of art consumption centered on contemporary art, and on the other is art history, filtered by centuries of well-informed eyes. It’s become abundantly clear nowadays that...
Once upon a time there was a man who spent every one of his nights sleeping under the benevolent gaze of two exceptional human beings. Mr. and Ms. Soolmans were born in 1634 under the brush of one of art history’s most celebrated painters, Rembrandt. And so every...