Inspiring!

Stolen Roy Lichtenstein art work returned after 42 years!

Among the most inspiring stories from the art world are those of stolen or lost paintings and other works which have been rightfully returned to their real owners or the owners' heirs. From Holocaust survivors to other people, those who have gotten back lost art works---these are feel-good tales and news which we should all support.

We shouldn't condone, in any way, the stealing of art works.

(Associated Press photo below: Barbara Bertozzi, the widow of American art dealer Leo Castelli, standing beside the Roy Lichtenstein painting "Electric Cord" which was missing for 42 years)

Here, allow me to share good news which I read from the October 17, 2012 article by Bloomberg writer Katya Kazakina. 

(New York) --- A $4 million Roy Lichtenstein painting that disappeared 42 years ago when it was sent out for cleaning was returned Tuesday to its owner in Manhattan.

The painting was returned to Barbara Bertozzi Castelli, the widow of art dealer Leo Castelli, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and the FBI said at a press conference.

The 1961 painting "Electric Cord" was purchased by Castelli in the early 1960s for about $750 and displayed in the Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan, according to a statement by Bharara's office. In January 1970, the painting was sent to art restorer Daniel Goldreyer and it disappeared, according to the statement.

In July, Manhattan art dealer James Goodman received an offer to buy the painting, Goodman said in a telephone interview Tuesday. The sellers e-mailed him a photo of "Electric Cord" and said the work was at Hayes Storage in Manhattan.

"As soon as I saw the image, I knew what it was," Goodman said. The Lichtenstein Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to the artist's legacy, published an image of the painting on its holiday greeting card in 2006 and asked for help in finding the painting.

Goodman said he remembered the card. "For an old guy, I have a very good memory," he said.

Goodman said he alerted the foundation, and a representative accompanied him to the storage facility to view the work. The foundation notified Bertozzi Castelli.

"I did my Good Samaritan thing," said Goodman.

The FBI discovered that the storage facility had received the painting from the Quinta Galeria art gallery in Bogota, Colombia, which had received it on consignment from Goldreyer's widow, Sally Goldreyer, authorities said.

Goldreyer told authorities that when her husband died in 2009, she and others cleaned out the lockers of his company's employees, including one named Ben Dolinsky, according to the statement.

She said the contents of Dolinsky's locker were boxed and given to a friend, who, three years later, asked her to sell the painting for him, according to the statement. She offered to sell it to the Quinta gallery but refunded the gallery's deposit when she saw a missing notice for the painting posted on the Internet, according to the statement.

On Oct. 9, Goldreyer and Bharara's office "entered into a stipulation" in which Goldreyer relinquished all rights, title and interest to "Electric Cord" and return it to Castelli, authorities said.

Bertozzi Castelli said she may hang the painting in her home.

"Thank you for everything you did," she said to authorities at the press conference. "It's the first time I have seen it in my life. I came to the U.S. in 1993. I got married to Leo in 1995. And the painting was missing since 1970. I actually can tell you that Leo spoke on several occasions to me about this painting. He was saying it was a really beautiful painting."

Authorities value "Electric Cord,' which measures 28-by-17 inches, at $4 million.

"We are delighted to have played a role in securing the return" of the painting, Bharara said in the statement. "Returning stolen art and artifacts is an important mission of this office, and it is always gratifying when we are successful."

(Photograph of artist Roy Lichtenstein by Michael Fredericks)






"Photo: © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012"

Congrats Larry Gagosian for his new (and second) art gallery in Paris!

Inaugural exhibit on Oct. 19, 2012: German artist Anselm Kiefer

The world's biggest mega art dealer Larry Gagosian  is opening another presence in Paris, France in the private jets airport of Le Bourget. This will be his second art place in this beautiful city, two years after opening his gallery in Paris.







(Art dealer Larry Gagosian as featured in the French newspaper Le Figaro. Credits photo: Patrick MC Mullan Photo; Photo BILLY FARRELL/Patrick McMullan.com)





Location of new art gallery: Le Bourget. A former 1950s private airport hangar, 2 storeys, with area of 1,650 square meters or 17,760 square feet. In the outskirts of Paris City, France.

Gallery address: 800 Avenue de l'Europe 93350, Paris, Le Bourget

Telephone:  +33.1.48.16.16.47
Fax:  +33.1.70.24.87.10

Email: P A R I S @ G A G O S I A N . C O M

Designer of new art space: French architect and Pritzker Prize winner Jean Nouvel


Some informations on the inaugural art exhibition of Anselm Kiefer works

First art exhibit: "Morgenthau Plan" art exhibit by conceptual painter Anselm Kiefer of Germany

Opening reception for the artist: Thursday, October 19th, from 4:00 to 8:00pm

Opening schedule to the public: October 19, 2012

End of Kiefer show: January 26, 2013

Gallery hours: Tuesdays to Saturdays 11 am  to 7 pm


(German artist Anselm Kiefer)





(The new Gagosian gallery)




(Photo below: Interior shot of new Gagosian Gallery at Le Bourget, just outside Paris. Photographer: Thomas Lannes/Jean Nouvel/HW Architecture/Claudine Colin Communication via Bloomberg)




For detailed informations about the inaugural art exhibition of Anselm Kiefer, click this link: http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/anselm-kiefer--october-19-2012

 

To view map of the art gallery location, just click this link https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&q=Avenue+de+l%27Europe,+%C3%8Ele-de-France,+France&aq=&sll=48.910901,2.40886&sspn=0.005987,0.013937&vpsrc=6&ie=UTF8&geocode=FaL86gIdR0QlAA&split=0&hq=&hnear=Avenue+de+l%27Europe,+%C3%8Ele-de-France,+France&ll=48.95453,2.442312&spn=0.002991,0.006968&t=m&z=18

 

Wow! 

Musician Eric Clapton’s Gerhard Richter painting auctioned for $34 Million, 30 Times Purchase

"Abstraktes Bild (809-4)," a 1994 painting by Gerhard Richter. The painting was sold by the rock guitarist Eric Clapton in a Sotheby's "Frieze Week" auction of contemporary works in London on Oct. 12. The work sold for 21.3 million pounds ($34.2 million) -- more than 30 times what Clapton paid for it in 2001. Source: Sotheby's via Bloomberg.



British-born guitarist/singer/songwriter and 17-times Grammy Awardee Eric Clapton (photo below) must be clapping all the way to the bank, for having recently on October 12, 2012 sold a painting by the German artist Gerhard Richter  at a huge gain on his original investment or purchase price. 
The 67-year-old musician Eric Clapton is rich, but just became even richer due to his wise investment in outstanding art. 
Art indeed is not only priceless and sublime, it is also a solid investment almost anywhere in the world.


Photo below of the talented 80-year-old German painter Gerhard Richter. He is now considered the top-selling living artist of the world.  Richter creates outstanding abstract and photorealistic painted works, also photographs and glass pieces. 
Last year at a question and answer forum before his retrospective exhibit at the Tate Modern on October 4, 2011, Richter was asked: "Has the role of artist changed over the years?" The German artist answered: "It’s more entertainment now. We entertain people.”

Additional news report from Scott Reyburn of Bloomberg said: 

Eric Clapton's 1994 oil-on-canvas “Abstraktes Bild (809-4)” was sold by Sotheby’s in London for its “Frieze Week” auction of contemporary artworks with an estimate of 9 million pounds to 12 million pounds. 

The buyer was Natasha Mendelsohn of Sotheby’s, acting for a client on the telephone. She was underbid by her colleague Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s worldwide head of contemporary art, also taking instructions for another client.

The predominantly red, dark blue and yellow abstract was one of three Richters bought by the U.K.-born guitarist for $3.4 million at Sotheby's New York in November 2001. At the time, this was an auction record for a lot containing abstracts by the German artist, with each worth about a third of the figure. Last night's sale was both a record for Richter at auction and for a living artist at auction.

“People are still ready to pay top prices for great paintings,” Christophe Van de Weghe, a New York dealer, said in an interview. “While the market is selective, the Clapton provenance made a difference. It could have added as much as 20 percent to the price.”

Richter, 80, who works in Cologne in both figurative and abstract idioms, has become the world’s most bankable living artist, dealers said. His highly decorative abstractions, often painted with a squeegee, have become particularly sought-after by wealthy international collectors and set seven of the 10 highest prices paid for the artist at auction.

Rising Richter

When Clapton bought his painting, the average auction price of a Richter work was $461,910, according to the database Artnet. 

Values have been boosted by the critical and popular success of recent retrospectives at Tate Modern, London, and the Pompidou Center, Paris, dealers said.

The previous auction record for the artist was the $21.8 million for the 1993 “Abstraktes Bild (798-3)” at Christie’s International, New York, in May.

Congratulations to Asia and to China

writer Mo Yan wins 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature

Asia is rising not only economically, but hopefully also culturally. 

Chinese author Mo Yan has just won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature! 

The Nobel Prize is worth around US$1.2 million, but this achievement is priceless for the writer and for all of us Asians.. 

(Below is illustration of author Mo Yan by Adolfo Arranz from the October 13, 2012 article of Hong Kong's South China Morning Post on his forthcoming four new works http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1059912/new-books-way-nobel-laureate-mo-yan) 

(Below is DVD of director Zhang Yimou's first and award-winning 1987 movie Red Sorghum, based on a novel by Mo Yan and also  starring the actress Gong Li. The movie won the prestigious Golden Bear Award for best film at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival )

The Swedish Academy’s official announcement read, “Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”

(Below images of writers Gabriel Garcia Marquez and William Faulkner)

As an aspiring literary writer who used to write poetry as a student, who penned two unpublished novellas and other works, and as an ethnic Chinese born and raised in the Philippines of which I am its citizen, as an Asian and as a lover of books and literature, I congratulate  the 57-year-old writer Mo Yan for winning the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature.

  

CHINA DAILY / REUTERS

Chinese writer Mo Yan smiles during an interview at his house in Beijing

Below is video of writers celebrating the win of the Chinese author.... 

Chinese author Mo Yan wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Chinese author Mo Yan has been awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for literature.

By British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) October 11, 2012

A prolific author, Mo has published dozens of short stories, with his first work published in 1981.

The Swedish Academy praised his work which "with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

The 57-year-old is the first Chinese resident to win the prize. Chinese-born Gao Xingjian was honoured in 2000, but is a French citizen.

Mo is the 109th recipient of the prestigious prize, won last year by Swedish poet Tomas Transtroemer.

Presented by the Nobel Foundation, the award - only given to living writers - is worth 8 million kronor (£741,000).

"He has such a unique way of writing. If you read half a page of Mo Yan you immediately recognise it as him," said Peter Englund, head of the Academy.

He said Mo had been told of the award, adding: "He was at home with his dad. He said he was overjoyed and terrified."

Born Guan Moye, the author writes under the pen name Mo Yan, which means "don't speak" in Chinese.

He began writing while a soldier in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and received international fame in 1987 for Red Sorghum: A Novel of China.

Made into a film which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1988, the novella was a tale of the brutal violence in the eastern China countryside, where he grew up, during the 1920s and 1930s.

Mo Yan "merges folk tales, history, and the contemporary", said Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, announcing the award

Favouring to write about China's past rather than contemporary issues, the settings for Mo's works range from the 1911 revolution, Japan's wartime invasion and Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.

"He has a very impressive oeuvre," Michel Hockx, Professor of Chinese at the University of London, said.

"He has a large readership and he addresses the human condition in a way in which the Nobel Committee likes to see."

Mo's other acclaimed works include Republic of Wine, Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out and Big Breasts and Wide Hips.

The latter book caused controversy when it was published in 1995 for its sexual content and depicting a class struggle contrary to the Chinese Communist Party line.

The author was forced by the PLA to withdraw it from publication although it was pirated many times.

After it was translated into English a decade later, the book won him a nomination for the Man Asian Literary Prize.

Chinese people react to the news that writer Mo Yan has won the 2012 Nobel Prize for literature

Despite his social criticism Mo is seen in his homeland as one of the foremost contemporary authors, however critics have accused him of being too close to the Communist Party.

"A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature," the author said in a speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009.

"Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions."

His latest novel, Frog, about China's "one child" population control policy, won the Mao Dun Literature Prize - one of his country's most prestigious literature prizes - last year.

Mo and the other Nobel laureates for medicine, physics, chemistry and peace, will receive their prizes at formal ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on 10 December - the anniversary of the death of prize creator Alfred Nobel in 1896.

Excited with Franz Kafka Papers, finally to be released to the world soon!

 

This is Good News to all literature lovers of the world! I am celebrating this good news by starting this blog.

I couldn't forget my 2008 visit to the beautiful historic Prague City in the Czech Republic, and the highlight of the trip was my retracing the life of the great Jewish writer Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924)---from where he lived, worked, where he and the German Jewish scientist Albert Einstein had met/dined at a restaurant, to the synagogue and to the Jewish cemetery where he was finally buried.



"And yet Kafka was Prague and Prague was Kafka. Never had it been Prague so perfectly, so typically, as during Kafka's lifetime, and never would it be so again. And we, his friends, 'the happy few'...we knew that the smallest elements of this Prague were distilled everywhere in Kafka's work."
- Johannes Urzidil in The World of Franz Kafka 

I believe outstanding writers like Franz Kafka are indeed immortal! He was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century.

(Below images of Franz Kafka and his handwritten letter)

 

 

 now, sharing the good news...

Israeli Court Rules Library to Get Kafka Papers, Lawyer Says

By Gwen Ackerman - Oct 15, 2012 12:01 AM GMT+0800 Bloomberg

A cache of as yet unseen Franz Kafka manuscripts will be made available online to scholars after an Israeli court ruled they weren’t given as a gift to the secretary of the author’s executor and friend Max Brod.

According to the Tel Aviv Family Court decision, the papers, which were stashed away in safes and attics for years, will become the property of the National Libraty of Israel, which promised in a statement to scan and put them on its website.

Papers that once belonged to Franz Kafka have been the subject of a court case as archivists collect other material by the late author. This photo shows a collection of photographs of the writer and his friends.


Source: The National Library of Israel via Bloomberg.

An undated handout photo, provided to the media on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008 shows Franz Kafka. Source: Schocken Books via Bloomberg News

“We are talking about a historical decision that brought justice to Max Brod and his friend Kafka,” Meir Heller, lawyer for the library, said by telephone. Harel Ashwall, the lawyer for the secretary’s two daughters, disagreed and said he planned to appeal the ruling.

Kathi Diamant, director of the Kafka Project at San Diego State University, has said in the past that papers that may be part of the collection may help scholars locate some Kafka notebooks that the Gestapo confiscated from the author’s companion, Dora Diamant.

The dispute over the papers began with Brod, a German- language author best known for his Kafka biography and historical novels. Though Kafka’s last wish was for his papers to be burned, Brod kept them, ensuring the publication of “The Trial” and “The Castle.”

Literary Estate

When Brod died in 1968, he left his estate to his secretary Esther Hoffe, who then left it to her daughters. The court ruled today that the will intended for Brod’s literary estate, including the Kafka manuscripts, to be given to a public institution and kept intact.

“We think that the decision does not reflect the intentions and desire of Max Brod, in fact the opposite is true,” Ashwall said in an e-mailed response to the ruling. “We also think the ruling is flawed in legal terms.”

For decades, Hoffe declined to make the papers available to the public, frustrating archivists and scholars alike. Kafka specialists had hoped her daughters would open the files, providing new insights into the author, who died of tuberculosis in 1924.

When the sisters, now in their 70s, attempted to ratify their mother’s will in January 2008, the state of Israel  intervened. The case landed in the family court, where the National Library became a party to the proceedings.

Internet Plan

The library plans to catalog and preserve the papers, then, “in the not so distant future scan and open them up to all on the Internet, in this way fulfilling Brod’s will,” Oren Weinberg, director of the library, said in an e-mailed statement.

During her lifetime, Hoffe sold a handwritten manuscript of Kafka’s “The Trial” for $1.98 million at a 1988 Sotheby’s auction in  London.

Heller said he hoped that all Kafka papers that were bought from Hoffe in the past will now be returned to their proper place at the library in Jerusalem so they can be presented together to scholars.

Muse highlights include New York Weekend, Lewis Lapham on history and Richard Vines on food. s, Hoffe declined to make the papers available to the public, frustrating archivists and scholars alike. Kafka specialists had hoped her daughters would open the files, providing new insights into the author, who died of tuberculosis in 1924.

When the sisters, now in their 70s, attempted to ratify their mother’s will in January 2008, the state of  Israel intervened. The case landed in the family court, where the National Library became a party to the proceedings.

To contact the reporter on this story: Gwen Ackerman in Jerusalem at gackerman@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff or.

***

The following are images I had researched in the Internet, on places and memorials in Prague City associated with the great writer Franz Kafka)


(Photo below is that of the unique Franz Kakfa Monument in Prague)




(Photo of the Franz Kafka grave in the Jewish Cemetery of Prague City)




(Photo below of the Jewish synagogue of Prague)




(Photo below of Prague's Spanish Synagogue)





(Photo of the entrance to the Franz Kafka Museum in Prague)