mothernaturenetwork:

Meet Piper, the one-eyed bulldog with a passion for painting

This English bulldog was once known for her grumpy disposition, but these days she’s famous for her paintings, which benefit the dog rescue she once called home.

guardian:

Fundraising manager Lauren Vincent with four out of the seventy Gromit sculptures which have been painted by celebrity artists, left to right, Paul Smith, Cath Kidston, Richard Williams and Simon Tofield, before they are placed around Bristol for public view as part of a charity initiative arts trail. After being displayed the sculptures will be auctioned off to raise funds for the Bristol Children’s Hospital charity.

Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

A private collection of 57 Italian Baroque paintings once belonging to banking heir Denis Mahon and valued at more than 100 million pounds ($154 million) has been formally handed over to six museums and galleries in Britain.

The paintings had already been on long-term loan to the respective museums for many years on condition that they did not charge admission or sell works from their collections.

Those terms are seen as particularly important at a time when government funding cuts have hit art establishments across the country hard and some local councils are seeking to reduce their debts by offering public artworks for sale.

In the most famous case, the London borough of Tower Hamlets plans to sell a Henry Moore sculpture worth up to 20 million pounds despite the late artist’s wishes that it be kept on public display in the capital.

Mahon, a renowned art collector and historian, died in 2011 at the age of 100 and left his collection to the Art Fund charity with instructions it should be placed on display in specific venues in perpetuity.

Under the terms of the transfer of that collection into public ownership, announced this week, the Art Fund’s trustees reserved the right to withdraw works from museums which breached the terms of the agreement at any point.

“Sir Denis Mahon was a life-long supporter of the Art Fund and shared our fundamental commitment to widening free public access to art,” said Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund.

“His vision as an art collector was extraordinary, as was his determination that his collection should ultimately be on public display.”

Mahon spent much of his life forming one of the most important private collections of 17th century Italian Baroque art, including works by Guercino, Guido Reni, Domenichino, Ludovico Carracci and Luca Giordano.

Of the total of 57, 25 works go to the National Gallery in London, 12 to the Ashmolean in Oxford, eight to the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, six to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, five to Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery and one to Temple Newsam House, Leeds.

France is returning seven paintings taken from their Jewish owners during World War II, part of an ongoing effort to give back hundreds of looted artworks that still hang in the Louvre and other museums.

The works were stolen or sold under duress up to seven decades ago as their Jewish owners fled Nazi-occupied Europe. All seven were destined for display in the art gallery Adolf Hitler wanted to build in Linz, Austria, according to a catalog for the planned museum.

At the end of the war, with Hitler dead and European cities rebuilding, artworks were left “unclaimed” and many thousands that were thought to have been French-owned found their ways into the country’s top museums.

The move to return the seven paintings ends years of struggle for the two families, whose claims were validated by the French government last year after years of researching the fates of the works.

“This is incredibly rare. It’s the largest number of paintings we’ve been able to back to Jewish families in over a decade,” said Bruno Saunier of the National Museums Agency.

Many of the 100,000 possessions looted, stolen or appropriated between 1940-44 in France have been returned to Jewish families, but Saunier said the country has increased its efforts in the past five years to locate the rightful owners of what the French government says are some 2,000 artworks still in state institutions.

Archiving errors and the challenge of identifying the paintings have made it slow going.

As anti-Semitism gripped Europe, many Jewish families sold their belongings or simply fled, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of empty homes and valuables up for grabs for individuals or the state.

Six of the paintings — among them works by Alessandro Longhi, Sebastiano Ricci and Gaspare Diziani — were owned by Richard Neumann, an Austrian Jew whose ticket out of France was his art collection, which he sold off at a fraction of its value.

It is not clear to whom Neumann sold them, and the route they took to show up in French museums is unclear. They found places at the Louvre, the Museum of Modern Art of Saint-Etienne, the Agen Fine Arts Museum and the Tours Fine Art Museum.

Neumann’s grandson, Tom Selldorff, was a young boy in 1930s Vienna when he last saw his grandfather’s collection. At 82, the U.S. resident is going to get them back and wants to pass a piece of his Austrian grandfather’s heritage down to his children.

“Tom is 82 years old… So time is important; they need to act quickly,” said Muriel de Bastier, Art Chief of the Spoliation Victim’s Compensation Commission, a French government body that helps families all over the world get back their stolen work.

The other painting, “The Halt” by Dutch painter Pieter Jansz Van Asch, was stolen by the Gestapo in Prague in 1939 from a Jewish banker, Josef Wiener, who was later deported and died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

After the war, the painting was confused with a work owned by a Frenchman and erroneously sent to Paris, so Wiener’s widow’s efforts to locate the painting in Germany were fruitless.

For years it hung in the Louvre, until the family finally tracked it down online in the mid-2000s. After problems identifying the painting were cleared up, then-French Prime Minister Francois Fillon gave the family the green light to give it back last year.

Other Jewish owned property was “legally” appropriated by the state itself. Some 100,000 houses were seized and sold to non-Jews between 1940 and 1944, as the Vichy government copied the Nazi’s anti-Semitic policy of “Aryanization” — of displacing Jews from society. The French state then pocketed the money.

A national exhibit at Paris’ Shoah Memorial confronts the issue for the first time, tracing the 1941 creation of a commission that enforced the seizures — often with the help of volunteers, coldly called “administrators.” They exercised full rights over the property of Jewish families.

All around the country, billboards, posters and classified ads in newspapers popped up calling on the public to buy the stolen property.

The exhibit features one which reads “For Sale: Beautiful bourgeois home,” or another in bold writing: “Sale of Jewish property… Belonging to (an) Israelite.”

The exhibit’s curator, Tal Bruttman, said this is the only time in history where the state actually called on the whole nation to take part in anti-Semitism.

“It’s a crucial story that’s not been told before,” Bruttmann said. The exhibit runs until Sept. 21

Stolen $3M Matisse painting to be returned to Caracas

A painting by Henri Matisse stolen more than a decade ago from a museum in Venezuela will soon be returned to the country, officials said Friday.

The painting, “Odalisque in Red Pants,” is to be returned from the United States within three to five weeks, said Raul Grioni, president of Venezuela’s Cultural Patrimony Institute.

Grioni told the Associated Press that the painting will arrive at the Caracas Museum of Contemporary Art once officials complete necessary requirements to ship it and verify its authenticity.

Venezuelan authorities say the 1925 painting, which is valued at about $3 million, was stolen from the Caracas museum in 2000.

It was found in July when a couple tried to sell it to undercover FBI agents at a hotel in Miami Beach. The two were sentenced last month in U.S. federal court in Miami for attempting to sell the stolen work.

Cuban Pedro Antonio Marcuello Guzman of Miami was sentenced to two years and nine months in prison, and Mexican Maria Martha Elisa Ornelas Lazo was sentenced to one year and nine months. Both pleaded guilty to the charges in October.

Court records show that FBI agents and an informant posing as art dealers were negotiating with Marcuello for the sale of the painting for $740,000 in Miami last year. Prosecutors said Ornelas brought the painting to Miami from Mexico City.

Grioni said the U.S. State Department contacted Venezuelan officials to begin the process of returning the Matisse painting after the trial concluded.

Venezuelan prosecutors say the painting was stolen from the museum in 2000. It was discovered to be missing in 2002 after Venezuelan collector Genaro Ambrosino sent an email to various people expressing surprise and outrage that the work had been put up for sale in Miami.

The authorities then detected that the original work had been swapped and replaced with a copy.

The U.S. government recently asked Venezuela for documents proving that it owns the painting and that it hasn’t received any insurance payment, and the foreign ministry will provide those documents soon, Grioni said.

Venezuelan officials also plan to hire a French expert to travel to Miami and help confirm the painting’s authenticity, he said. He said government officials believe it is the painting “but we want to take precautions.”

When the painting was taken out of the country remains a mystery, and Grioni said Venezuelan officials plan to ask U.S. authorities to assist with their investigation.

He said the country is taking precautions to prevent similar thefts.

mothernaturenetwork:

Meet Piper, the one-eyed bulldog with a passion for painting

When Piper, a one-eyed English bulldog, was surrendered to the San Antonio Bulldog Rescue in Texas, rescue worker Mother Teresa worried it would be difficult to find the dog a new home.

Piper’s owner said he was afraid of the dog, claiming that she often growled and would charge at him if he raised his voice. But as Mother Teresa got to know Piper, she realized the bulldog had every right to be a little grumpy. In addition to the missing an eye, Piper had arthritis, a limp and a skin infection.

Clearly, what the dog needed was a little love and affection, so Mother Teresa spent three months working to earn Piper’s trust, even treating her to car rides to Sonic where the two would split a hot dog.

Although Mother Teresa knew how wonderful Piper was, she was concerned no one would want a one-eyed cranky canine, but then she received an adoption application from a couple looking for a special-needs dog. Jessica Stone, an artist, and her husband, Jeff, seemed like a perfect fit, so they took Piper home to meet her new sister, a rescued pit bull named Roxie.

Piper took to her forever home quickly. Even though she can hardly walk due to hip dysplasia, she wobbled to her new mom’s studio every day and watched her paint for hours. That’s when Jessica got the idea to give Piper a paintbrush of her own.

“All I had to do was shake up a can of paint, rustle paper or clang palette knives and she would appear,” Jessica said. “After six weeks of Piper excitedly wobbling into the studio every time I painted, I realized something fantastic was happening in her eyes and I wondered if she had a desire to paint.”

So Jessica dipped a paintbrush into nontoxic paint and placed the other end in Piper’s mouth. Then, while Jessica held the paper, Piper began to paint.

“People often ask how I trained Piper to become a painter, but I never trained her.  It was all Piper,” Jessica said.

Today, Piper paints alongside Jessica, creating original artwork, which is sold across the globe, with a portion of the proceeds going to the San Antonio Bulldog Rescue.

“This unloved and rejected, one-eyed dog blossomed into a beautiful role model who touches hearts. Piper’s cause is not only to raise money and awareness for rescues, but also to show children and adults that different is beautiful,” Jessica said.

To learn more about Piper, check out her website and Facebook page.

Scientists may be one step closer to revealing a hidden portrait behind a 380-year-old Rembrandt painting.

The masterpiece, “Old Man in Military Costume” by Dutch painter Rembrant Harmenszoon van Rijn, resides at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Scientists had noticed the painting bears faint traces of another portrait beneath its surface. Researchers had previously probed the painting with infrared, neutron and conventional X-ray methods, but could not see the behind the top coat, largely because Rembrandt used the same paint (with the same chemical composition) for the underpainting and the final version.

New studies with more sophisticated X-ray techniques that can parse through the painting’s layers give art historians hope that they may finally get to see who is depicted in the secret image.

“Our experiments demonstrate a possibility of how to reveal much of the hidden picture,” Matthias Alfeld from the University of Antwerp said in a statement. “Compared to other techniques, the X-ray investigation we tested is currently the best method to look underneath the original painting.”

Alfeld and an international team used macro X-ray fluorescence analysis to examine a mock-up of Rembrandt’s original, created by museum intern Andrea Sartorius, who used paints with the same chemical composition as those used by the Dutch master. Sartorius painted one portrait on the canvas and then an imitation of “Old Man in Military Costume” on top. 

When bombarded with these high-energy X-rays, light is absorbed and emitted from different pigments in different ways. The scientists targeted four elements of the paint to fluoresce, including calcium, iron, mercury and lead, and got much better impressions of the hidden painting in the mock-up than they were able to before.

“The successful completion of these preliminary investigations on the mock-up painting was an important first step,” Karen Trentelman, of the Getty Conservation Institute, said in a statement. “The results of these studies will enable us determine the best possible approach to employ in our planned upcoming study of the real Rembrandt painting.”

This isn’t the first time scientists have delved into Rembrandt’s paintings. Previous research revealed why his art possesses such calming beauty, finding the artist may have pioneered a technique that guides the viewer’s gaze around a portrait, creating a special narrative and “calmer” viewing experience.  Essentially, the researchers found Rembrandt painted more detail in and around the eyes of his subjects, tapping into an innate human attraction to the face.

Rare Italian Painting Worth $12,000 Found In Goodwill Donation Bin In Virginia

When a keen-eyed employee at Goodwill came across a striking painting of a woman sipping a cup of tea, she knew well enough to set it aside.

“I didn’t know how much at that time, but I said, ‘We have some money here,’”Maria Rivera, a worker at Goodwill in Manassas, Va., told NBC Washington.

Turns out, the work of art is a rare piece by Italian 19th century painter Giovanni Battista Torriglia and is worth about $12,000.

The valuable painting will go to the highest bidder on Goodwill’s website and proceeds will be used for the organization’s job training programs, according to NBC.

While such a find is an exciting boon for the nonprofit that empowers people in need, this wasn’t the first time Goodwill has stumbled upon a valuable piece of art in a donation bin.

Back in November, an anonymous donor dropped off a signed painting by Surrealist master Salvador Dali, the Tacoma News Tribune reports.

Considering that Goodwill employees are trained to spot high-valued items, the worker who found the piece of art knew not to let it slip by.

“Anything with a signature or paperwork attached to the back gets a second look,”Dylan Lippert, an e-sales manager at the Tacoma Goodwill, told The Huffington Post in an email. “After a bit of research, it was apparent that [the Dali etching] was indeed something very special.”

Lost Diego Rivera painting discovered in Corpus Christi during ‘Antiques Roadshow’ taping

A million dollars sat in a box in the corner of Rue Ferguson’s office and he didn’t know it.

His great-grandparents bought a painting about 1920, and it was given to Ferguson in May after his mother died. He knew it had some value, but he wasn’t sure what to do with it.

In August, he took it to PBS’ “Antiques Roadshow” appraisers when the television show made a stop in Corpus Christi.

The lost Diego Rivera painting “El Albanil” was appraised at $800,000 to $1 million. It was the highest appraisal of the show’s latest season.

“I was dumbfounded. I didn’t know what to say,” Ferguson said. “I thought it might be worth a tenth of what they said. I had no idea.”

Mariel A. MacNaughton, account executive of Antiques Roadshow, said it’s exciting for all of the staff when they come across something like this.

“It’s very rare to see works of Rivera’s that old. It’s not a painting that was sitting in museum for people to see every day,” MacNaughton said.

The show’s 17th season will kick off Jan. 7 with three episodes filmed in Corpus Christi.

Ferguson’s great-grandparents purchased the painting in Mexico. They kept it behind a door in their home until it was passed on to Ferguson’s parents. For nearly 30 years, his parents thought the painting was a fake and kept it in a storage room inside the home. In the early 80s, his father found out the painting was real, and he had it restored, still unaware of its value.

The family then donated it to the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio for several years, but when Ferguson found out the museum wasn’t displaying it anymore he asked for it back, he said.

Rivera’s “El Albanil” was created in 1904 when he was a teenager. It was labeled in his personal archive, but after his death in 1957, family didn’t know where the painting was, MacNaughton said. They registered the work in the mid-90s even though its location was unknown.

Rivera was a prominent Mexican painter of the 20th century married to Frieda Kahlo. He is credited with the reintroduction of fresco painting, mural paintings on fresh plaster, into modern art and architecture, according to the PBS website on American Masters. Rivera’s paintings focus on the human’s physical development and the effects of technological progress.

MacNaughton said the rare find is a part of history.

“It gives us the chance to share with viewers the historical significance and it sheds light on Rivera as an artist.” she said.

Ferguson is looking to put the painting in a museum that features Diego’s work or Latin American art.

Until then, it is safe and sound, he said, inside a bank vault.

30,000 paintings from across Scotland go online

More than 30,000 oil paintings from across Scotland are available to inspect online for the first time in a ground-breaking new project to open up access to the nation’s artistic masterpieces.

Museums and galleries across Scotland have agreed to allow their collections to be part of a vast catalogue of works.

The project allows the public to access a one-stop-shop where they can see the paintings held by famous attractions like the Burrell Collection and Kelvingrove, in Glasgow, Edinburgh Castle, the Scottish Parliament building and Aberdeen Art Gallery. It also includes paintings held in hospitals and health centres, sports centres, police and fire stations, airports and even high schools.

Made up from 441 separate collections, the new database includes many of Scotland’s best-known works of art, including Henry Raeburn’s famous image of the skating minister, Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen and Jack Vettriano’s self-portraits.

A joint project between the Public Catalogue Foundation charity and the BBC, “Your Paintings” has won the backing of Scotland’s national museums and galleries bodies, as well as the National Trust for Scotland. Among the more unusual collections going online are those held at Edinburgh Zoo, Hampden Park stadium, BBC Scotland’s studios in Glasgow, Inverness Airport, the Scottish Police College, in Fife, and the New Lanark world heritage site.

Among the most prolific artists featured are Edinburgh-born duo Raeburn, who has 259 paintings on the website, and Allan Ramsay, who has 159. The four “Scottish Colourists” – John Duncan Fergusson, Francis Cadell, Samuel Peploe and Leslie Hunter – boast about 600 between them. John Leighton, director-general of the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “The completion of this catalogue is an amazing achievement and a cause for great celebration.

“The Your Paintings website demonstrates how the reach and impact of public collections is changing dramatically in the digital age bringing us all much closer to the paintings that we own and, I’m sure, encouraging even more people to search out the actual objects in museums and galleries across the country.” Kate Mavor, chief executive of NTS, said: “It is fantastic that each of our 2,000 paintings are now available as part of this amazing resource. From stern lairds with their beloved pets to stunning landscapes and dazzling colourists, our fine art collection is one of the nation’s treasures.”

Scottish culture secretary Fiona Hyslop said: “Scotland is home to a wealth of oil paintings, with more than 30,000 in collections.

“The successful completion of this hugely ambitious project means our nation’s best-known treasures and hidden gems are now available online, free of charge, for all to enjoy.”

• The full catalogue is available at bbc.co.uk/yourpaintings

The school where you are TOLD to paint on the walls: World’s first mural institute opens in Lyon France

With the majority of the world’s population now living in cities and towns a new breed of designers are coming through to help create urban settings a little more pleasing to the eye.

The world’s first ever school for mural art has opened in Lyon, the global leader in the field, in a bid to meet the demand for artworks which can transform cityscapes.

The EcholCite School of Mural Art specialises in teaching students how to create art that covers entire sides of multi-storey buildings, as seen across Lyon.

The school’s founder Gilbert Coudene said the city featured 150 murals, which had led it to become the world’s capital of the art form, attracting tourists from across the world, the BBC has reported. Mr Coudene said this had provided the spark for the school, which he hoped would pass on the knowledge of mural painting.

He said: ‘We are responding to what we know to be a very strong demand all over the world to modify the way cities look, to make them more beautiful but also to create more social links through aesthetic tools, such as mural painting.’

Mr Coudene said the demand had grown as more and more people moved from the country to urban settings. He told the BBC: ‘Up to the days of our grandfathers life was rural, there was very few towns, but today 60 per cent of the world’s people live in cities.

‘It all happened so quickly, thousands of years in the country then suddenly in the city, and it means in the city we focus too much on the functional and not on all the other elements, the emotional, the aesthetic, which are what make the difference between animals and human beings.’

huffingtonpost:

No, this isn’t an Onion article.

Patty The Rescue Donkey Creates Collection Of $150 Paintings In Minutes

Picasso once said that it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. Well, it only took Pic-ass-o, the painting donkey, three weeks to paint like an abstract professional. The talented four-legged rescue animal, whose story first appeared in The Daily Mail, has wowed the equine art world by creating a series of paintings that have sold for more than than £100 ($150) each.

Patty the rescue donkey, or Pic-ass-o as she’s come to be known, had garnered a reputation for being a little mouthy around her Bristol rescue center, HorseWorld, picking up just about any random object with her teeth. So when she showed an interest in her handler Vicky Greenslade’s painting pastime, everyone knew what to do. With paintbrush in mouth and her very own easel before her, an artist was born.

It took only three weeks for Patty’s art skills to mature to what they are today. To sharpen the donkey’s budding talents, Greensladee utilized clicker training, a technique first used to help Patty relax when she arrived at the rescue center. Greenslade places a paint covered brush in Patty’s mouth and the donkey is then prompted to make a brushstroke on an available canvas.

Patty was rescued when she arrived at a UK auction from Romania, reports Metro UK. Now happily making art, Patty’s masterpieces, including a series of Patty-painted horse figurines, are on sale in a Bristol gallery located in Cabot Circus. All of the proceeds from the sale of her portraits go directly to HorseWorld’s efforts of rehabilitating and rehoming mistreated horses, ponies and donkeys.

Patty also regularly demonstrates her talents at the HorseWorld Visitor Center in Bristol. “We can’t ask her to do too many demonstrations in a week though,” said Greensdale to The Daily Mail, “or she gets bored, throws the paintbrush down and walks off.” Oh, the life of a successful artist.

‘Payback painter’ thanks town for kindness with mural

They helped him after horrendous accident; he paints them as they would like to be

Transcript/Read more HERE.

Munch’s “The Scream” sells for record $120 million

Edvard Munch’s masterpiece “The Scream,” one of the world’s most recognizable works of art, sold for $120 million at Sotheby’s on Wednesday, setting a new record as the most expensive piece of art ever sold at auction.

Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art auction featured top works by Picasso, Dali and Miro, but Munch’s vibrant work from 1895 was the star attraction in a salesroom packed with art collectors, dealers and media.

The vibrant pastel was conservatively estimated to sell for about $80 million, but two determined bidders competing via telephone emerged from an initial group of seven, driving the final price to $107 million, or $119,922,500 including commission, over the course of a nearly 15-minute bidding war.

The winning bid was taken by a Sotheby’s executive, and the bidder was not identified.

One of four versions by the Scandinavian painter, sold by Norwegian businessman Petter Olsen, “The Scream” easily eclipsed the old auction record held by Picasso’s “Nude, green leaves and bust,” which sold for $106.5 million at Christie’s two years ago.

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PICTURED ABOVE: The Blue Bottle by Fernand Leger was among the paintings stolen and recovered.

Four paintings worth $1m (£625,000) stolen from a New York gallery have been recovered in Germany 24 years on.

A total of six contemporary artworks were taken from the Soloman Gallery in 1988, with one turning up in 2003.

But the remainder of works remained hidden until they turned up in the estate of a dead German art dealer.

The dealer’s daughter had attempted to get the paintings authenticated, alerting the Art Loss Register (ALR) to their whereabouts.

The ALR said there was still one painting yet to be found.

Mulberry Centre by Franz Kline was stolen along with five other works by Robert Motherwell, Karel Appel, Jean Dubuffet and Fernand Leger.

In 2003 the Appel canvas was recovered after a solicitor working for the unnamed German art dealer searched the ALR database, alerting authorities to it existence.

The dealer claimed to have unwittingly bought five of the six stolen paintings, but no financial records could be located and none of the other paintings could be located as the lawyer refused to divulge his client’s name.

Four of the paintings were discovered when the daughter of the now deceased art dealer, approached New York’s Dedalus Foundation to authenticate one of the artworks.

The organisation alerted the ALR, who despatched a team to identify the artworks.

ALR lawyer Christopher A Marinello said: “We’re going to make life difficult for those who attempt to sell stolen art.

“You can hide behind lawyers and look for loopholes in civil law jurisdictions, but eventually you’re going to have to deal with some very uncomfortable issues.

“The problem will not simply disappear with the passage of time. Leaving stolen artworks to the next generation is a losing proposition.”

The paintings are now owned by the gallery’s insurance company which is currently holding talks with the former gallery owners about returning the pictures to their collection.