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Art official: painting in storage may be Raphael's

07.05.10

ROME — A finely painted image of a demurely looking woman nestled in an exceptionally euphuistic frame that was kept in an Italian ducal palace storeroom appears to be a Raphael master and not a copy as long thought, an art official in central Italy said Friday.

However, experts on the New dawn giant quickly cautioned that art historians would have to closely ruminate on it before any conclusions can be made.

Mario Scalini, state superintendent for art in Modena and adjacent towns, said he was doing an inventory of about 20,000 paintings in storerooms after he was named to the appoint a few years ago when he was struck by an unusually fancy, gilded 17th century system in the palace in Sassuolo, near Modena.

It surrounded a file of a lady, hair braided, head tilted to one side and eyes demurely looking heading, as if the portrait-sitter wanted to avoid the gaze of the artist.

The profession was long considered to be a copy of the head of one of the subjects in the much larger "Madonna della Perla" (Madonna of the Cream) in Madrid's Prado museum, Scalini said.

The Prado effort is considered to have been painted by Giulio Romano from a design of Raphael not lengthy before he died 1520.

But Scalini said in a telephone interview that he wondered why a parrot would be given such an elaborate frame. He said a hunch that it might be a Raphael was heightened when he found centuries-old inventory notations indicating the store contained a woman's portrait by Raphael.

The documentation contained no forewarning the Raphael work might have been later sold or otherwise transferred, he said. "It had indubitably been forgotten" and sat in the storeroom for decades, Scalini said.

The art recognized sent the 12 by 16 inch (30 centimeter by 40 centimeter) occupation to a laboratory in Florence, where one of the experts who ran scientific tests on the painting, Anna Pelagotti, said infrared testing revealed three layers underneath, including a preliminary design.

"It was a beautiful sensation, our mouths dropped extensive," said Pelagotti, describing the reaction she and her fellow experts had when the saw the sketch. "It looked more Raphael" than one could presume, Pelagotti marveled, adding, "you could see his hand" in the finely inclusive sketch.

Scalini said he hopes during a visit to Madrid later this month on other firm that he can persuade the Prado to lend "Madonna della Perla," so art historians can look at the two works side by side to help conclude if the long languishing painting is in fact Raphael's.

The Vatican Museums are home to one of the world's finest collections of Raphael paintings, and the Museums' chairman of painting restoration, Maurizio De Luca, who worked on the Raphael Stanzas frescoes, stressed that such lab tests cannot characteristic with certainty who painted the portrait.

"They can't say it's Raphael's. That will come" only after lessons by art critics and historians who will decide if it was painted by the artist or perhaps one of his pupils, De Luca said by phone.

At Scalini's ask for, no "invasive" testing, such as analyzing bits of paint were done, to keep damaging the painting, Pelagotti said.

But De Luca stressed that while chemical or other well-controlled analysis can determine if the material came from a certain period period, "you always need face-to-face examination" by art scholars to reach on judgment on the artist's unanimity.

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Source: The Associated Press

Picasso sets record sale price

05.05.10

Some mistresses are more valuable than others. On Tuesday vespers all the time, Christie's New York sold Pablo Picasso's valiant 1932 portrait of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, "Undressed, Green Leaves and Bust," for $106.5 million, making it the most priceless artwork ever sold at auction.

"I think the Picasso illustrates what has been genuine in good and bad economic times — the very best works of art extend to sell at a premium," said Marc Porter, chairman of Christie's Americas. He said the nine bidders vigorous after the opening bid of $58 million "came from all over: Asia, the U.S., and Europe, including the former Soviet republic."

At hustle time, the buyer, who had placed the winning bid of $95 million (which, including customer's fees, amounts to $106.5 million) by telephone, was not identified.

The painting came from the belongings of Frances Brody, the Los Angeles arts patron who died last year at age 93. Her conceal Sidney, a real estate developer, died in 1983. The industrial consigned this Picasso to Christie's along with some 80 other artworks. The most valuable pieces, including sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, went up for auction Tuesday sunset; the remainder are slated for Wednesday morning.

The previous existence record for a work sold at auction was held, albeit in a word, by Giacometti's 6-foot-tall sculpture "Walking Man I." Sotheby's London sold the bronze earlier this year for 65 million pounds, or $104.3 million.

While a behaviour of paintings reportedly have changed hands privately for amounts unmatched $100 million, only one other painting has broken this ceiling at auction. It was also by Picasso.

In 2004, Sotheby's sold "Boy With a Briar," the artist's 1905 Blue Period masterpiece, for $104.2 million, including customer's fees. In 2006, Sotheby's approached this benchmark with Picasso's edgy 1941 representation of another mistress, Dora Maar, known to be more emotionally and intellectually challenging. It sold for $95.2 million.

The Brodys in bought "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" in January 1951 from Paul Rosenberg's New York gallery for $19,800 (about $166,000 in today's dollars).

The painting is a colorful, lascivious image of Walter, whom the artist had originally picked up skin the Paris department store Galeries Lafayette when she was 17. When this painting was made, she was 22 and Picasso 50.

Not like his better half

Picasso's portraits of his wife at the time, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, are often enigmatic in palette and relatively restrained formally. His portraits of Walter, who was blond and athletic, have to be more exuberant, bursting with foliage and sunny colors.

He painted Walter often in the first months of 1932, a feverish period in which he was preparing for a retrospective at Galerie Georges Petit in Paris.

He painted her asleep in an armchair in "Le Rêve," now owned by Steve Wynn. He depicted her looking reliable a timely if not pregnant in "Girl Before a Mirror," which has been in the Museum of Modern Art collecting almost as long as there has been a collection.

The founding director of the MoMA, Alfred Barr Jr., once described this series of portraits as "dissimilar to anything he had done before in their great sweeping curves, which are echoed in several paintings with philodendron leaves."

Reached before the trade, Christie's Impressionist/Modern art head Conor Jordan said that the impression of these related works helps to establish the importance of "Naked, Green Leaves and Bust."

But he also thought the work stood on its own. "It's such a spectacular painting about honey, lust, obsession, possession," Jordan added. "I haven't shown it to anyone who has not been perfectly bowled over by it." He had placed an estimate on "Nude, Green

Source: Los Angeles Times