A Librarian's Treasure- Jean Preston's $8 Million Dollar Art Trove

I ran across a remarkable story in Reuter's today. Oh what I wouldn't have given to be first on this scene. I know that frankly, I wouldn't have been able to identify all these fantastic works, but what a thrill it must have been for the folks who walked in and found this cache in this little house!

LONDON (Reuters) - From the outside it's an ordinary, red-brick house in a terraced row, not unlike tens of thousands of others scattered across Britain.

But on the inside, Jean Preston's spartan Oxford home contained works of art of international significance, carefully acquired over a lifetime and haphazardly displayed.

Preston, a thrifty 77-year-old spinster who rode the bus and ate frozen meals, died in 2006. But art experts and auctioneers have now completed the sale of the exceptional works hoarded in her modest home.

The auctions have raised an estimated 4 million pounds ($7.95 million), according to valuers, about 20 times the price of the house they were kept in, stunning experts and Preston's relatives alike.

Among the treasures were two paintings by Fra Angelico, the 15th century Italian Renaissance master, that were the missing pieces of an eight-part altar decoration.

They were sold together for $3.4 million and are expected to be returned to the Uffizi Gallery, Florence's famed art museum.

"We knew we were going to a house that contained some important works," Guy Schwinge of Dukes art auctioneers in Dorchester, which helped with the sale, told Reuters. "But I was amazed to see quite how many treasures there were ... The Fra Angelicos were behind the bedroom door and we only spotted them on the way out."

Hanging in the kitchen was a 19th century watercolor by pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and in the sitting room, above an electric fire, a work by Sir Edward Burne-Jones.
Those two, estimated to be worth $2 million, have been saved for Britain and are expected to go on display at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, Schwinge said.

Another hidden treasure was a rare edition of the works of Chaucer that was too big to fit on Preston's bookshelf and was found buried in a wardrobe. It sold for nearly $150,000.
"We often go to fabulous homes to evaluate artworks, but in this case the house was just so modest from the outside, and had very modest decor on the inside too," said Schwinge.
"It's just rare to stumble across something quite so breathtaking."

Preston, who worked as a librarian for much of her life, inherited many of the works from her father, a keen collector. Her relatives were stunned by the artworks she had tucked away.

"My aunt bought her clothes from a catalog, ate frozen meals and went everywhere on the bus," the Daily Mail newspaper quoted one of them as saying.

"Who would have thought she had the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket in her spare room all these years?"

Not Gone-Just Sick

I promise I haven't stopped writing. I've just had walking pneumonia for the last two weeks.

I have a new interest. Alma Mahler. She friggin rocks.

Seeing Water in a Different Way in NYC

Well, we might be in a drought situation in Georgia, but New York City has no concerns. Starting this summer (July to be specific) four giant waterfalls will be erected in the city that never sleeps.

The waterfalls, including one that will fall from the Brooklyn Bridge, are the concept of Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. "It's about seeing water in a different way," Eliasson told a news conference on Wednesday, unveiling plans for the waterfalls, which will range in height from 90 to 120 feet -- around the same as the Statue of Liberty from head to toe.

Three of the waterfalls will cascade into the East River and New York Harbor from free-standing scaffolding towers that Eliasson said were part of his artistic vision, mirroring the scaffolding towers that sprout up throughout New York. The falls will be in place from mid-July to mid-October.

The Circle Line Downtown boat company will offer free and discounted trips to give visitors a closer look at the waterfalls.

Eliasson said the tour boats would not be able to get as close to the water as tourist boats do to New York state's most famous waterfall, Niagara Falls, on the Canadian border. "It's quite a lot of water, it would not be good to go under," Eliasson said. The scaffolding will have a floating barrier at the bottom to stop small boats going underneath and a "shark cage" under the water to stop fish being sucked into the pumps that will take the water to the top. The pumps will be powered by renewable energy sources and the falls will be lit only by low-level lighting at night that Eliasson said would be "not Las Vegas-style." (thank God)

The waterfalls project will coincide with a retrospective of Eliasson's work, called "Take Your Time," which will run at the Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 between April 20 and June 30.

Eliasson is known for creating immersive environments that take their inspiration from nature and play tricks with viewers' perceptions. With "The Weather Project," Mr. Eliasson used mist, mirrors, and 200 monofilament light bulbs to create an image of a glowing sun in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. In a work called "Green River," in 2000, he poured nontoxic dye into a river in Stockholm, turning it green. In an early work called "Beauty" (1993), he created a rainbow in a gallery by projecting light across a fine mist of water.

Born in Copenhagen to Icelandic parents, Mr. Eliasson has long been interested in waterfalls, which form an important part of the landscape of Iceland. A piece called "Reversed Waterfall" (1998), which will be included in the P.S.1 exhibition, uses a system of pumps and basins to send water jetting uphill. In 2005, he created a 20-foot outdoor waterfall as part of an exhibition at Dundee University in Scotland.

Mr. Eliasson is one of a number of contemporary artists working on a scale that requires vast work spaces and fleets of assistants. According to a 2006 profile in the New Yorker, he has a 15,000-square-foot studio in a former train depot in East Berlin and employs about 40 people there, including mathematicians, technicians, lighting designers, and architects.

Can't wait. I didn't get to see Cristo's "The Gates" but I'm not missin this one. Imagine how cool it will be at night.

Lincoln Images Rediscovered

No, they weren't images of the Grand Review of the Armies, nor were they of the inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant- the three glass negatives previously mislabeled by the Library of Congress have recently been discovered to be of Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address.

The pictures, taken on March 4, 1865-just one month before Lincoln was shot at the Ford Theater show a rainy day and mud soaked crowds thronging the area around the podium where Lincoln was sworn in as the 16th President of the United States. A curator of the Library of Congress spotted the misidentification on Friday, January 4th while checking old logbooks and discovering the annotation 'Lincoln' in the margin. The Library of Congress was able to confirm by "careful visual comparison" with the two existing photos of the event that the images were in fact from Lincoln's inauguration.

Carol Johnson, a curator of photography at the Library of Congress was prompted to review the negatives after a patron altered her to the fact that while the photos were visually similar, they had radically different identifications in the Library's online Civil War photographic negative collection. Sadly, I haven't been able to find any note of the savvy patron who pointed this out-who I think should get some credit.

The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division has updated the catalog records. To view the full set of photos, visit the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog at www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html.

Here are the photo links:
Soldiers and crowd: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpb.01430
Soldiers lining up: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpb.00601
Soldiers lined up: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpb.00602
People arriving (previously known image used for comparison): http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsc.02927

Lichtenstein Outdoors in Miami

Best known as a painter, Roy Lichtenstein was also a prolific sculptor. He began making sculptural works in the early 1960's, just after his first exhibition of paintings at Leo Castelli Gallery. His earliest sculptures were renderings of utilitarian objects and mannequin style heads, both directly influenced by the representation of commercial techniques in his painting. As his career progressed, Lichtenstein's sculpture evolved with his painting. In the 1980's this convergence of media culminated in his monumental brushstroke sculptures. Evoking the movement and color of paint on canvas, these totem-like works suspend the artist's sweeping brushstrokes in midair.

If you find yourself in the Miami area before the end of May make sure to stop into the Fairchild Tropical Gardens which is currently exhibiting a series of Lichtenstein's beautiful pop sculptures. Much like the events that the Atlanta Botanical Gardens have done with Dale Chihuly and Niki de Saint Phalle in the past, the Art in the Garden series at Fairchild seamlessly blends the natural beauty of the gardens with stunning artwork.

I could write tons about both the gardens and the artist, but I'm in a time pinch today, so in the meantime I'll leave you to do your own hunting about both if you're interested.

Check out this awesome video about the exhibit at: http://miamibeach.plumtv.com/videos/art_basel_miami_beach_2007_roy_lichtenstein_fairchild

Use Your Ears and Read

I love audio books. I don't really listen to the radio anymore, haven't in years. I probably listen to more than 100 audio books a year. Yes, some of them are total drivel. Sappy detective novels that I'd be embarrassed to be caught reading (did I mention I'm a literature snob-or didn't you already assume that?) classics that I read long ago and enjoy hearing performed, even some really good "young adult" stuff that I would usually never even know about without the genre.

A friend forwarded me this site today and I can't wait to delve deeper into it. I'm not going to buy one of those cool, yet totally expensive Kindle's (which I probably couldn't track down even if I wanted to) but do check out this site.

http://librivox.org/

Have a great day. Read or listen to a book today.

Coolest Job EVER Up For Grabs

Okay, so I'm not qualified, but boy howdy if I was I would be dancing the Irish jig right now and greasing palms and calling in favors all over New York City today. Pilippe de Montebello, the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the last 30 years announced his retirement today. The eighth, and longest serving director in the museum's 138-year history announced at the Met's board of trustees meeting on Tuesday afternoon that he intended to leave at the end of 2008 or as soon as a successor had been found.

Why is it time to go? The New York Times phoned de Montebello up yesterday and he is quoted as saying, "“After three decades, to stay much further would be to skirt decency,” he said. "This has not been an easy decision — it’s wrenching for me, it’s been my entire life. But it’s time.”

You would have to pry my cold dead body out of that gig.

Okay-de Montebello isn't a saint. He's drawn controversy for not being a big fan of modern art-but that being said he was responsible to acquiring "White Flag" by Jasper John's and placing Damien Hirst's "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" (or the shark floating in formaldehyde to laymen) prominently at the opening of the modern wing of the museum where it will stay for the next three years.

They are big shoes to fill. I sure wish I could fill them. I wouldn't care for all the fundraising and posh boot licking that would have to be done to make the museum a success, but imagine....all that magnificent art at your fingertips. Think of walking through the completely empty museum by yourself and sitting quietly in front of an ancient bust of Akhenaten, spending hours searching through the visual layers of a Pollock or the following the dancing lines of brushwork of a VanGogh. Absolute bliss.

Mr. de Montebello you will be greatly missed.

Long Unseen Mucha Posters Sold at Auction

Oh, how I love Mucha. And how I wish I had oodles and oodles of money so that I could have bought some of his work last week at the Swan Galleries sale in New York.

Frankly, the prices weren't too shabby. Most of them were downright affordable. There was a particular print, hand-tipped and signed by the artist that went for several hundred thousand dollars, but for the most part, the majority of the works went for under 10K. Of course, that being said, these were posters, not the originals. But oh, how beautiful they are!

For those of you not familliar with his work, Alfons Mucha, born in Moravia (previously part of the Czech Republic) is the cornerstone of the Art Nouveau movement.

His work was prodigious, including commercial art, posters, advertisements, wallpaper patterns, jewelry designs, book illustrations, furniture and theater set designs, etc. In 1894, he produced the artwork for a lithographed poster advertising Sarah Bernhardt at the Theatre de la Renaissance. Mucha's lush stylized poster art won him fame and numerous commissions. But, Mucha was frustrated. While his art nouveau style was often imitated it was a style that Mucha attempted to distance himself from throughout his life; he insisted always that, rather than adhering to any fashionable stylistic form, his paintings came purely from within. He declared that art existed only to communicate a spiritual message, and nothing more; hence his frustration at the fame he gained through commercial art, when he wanted always to concentrate on more lofty projects that would ennoble art and his birthplace.

Mucha lived all over the world, from Prague to Paris, teaching at the Applied Arts College for Women in New York City, art schools in Chicago and Philadelphia and later at Whistler's Acadame in Vienna.

And, while he might be considered now as a "commercial artist" he certainly was not during his lifetime. He shared a studio with Gaughuin, trucked with the theosophoical circle of De Rochas and Flammarion, and accompanied Rodin to Prague and Moravia at the time of the Rodin exhibition as his friend and companion.

Sadly, Mucha was among the first to be arrested by the Gestapo when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. He was questioned and allowed to return home but his health was greatly impaired by the ordeal. On 14th July, Mucha died in Prague. He is buried at Vysehrad cemetery. Despite the Nazis banning the public from his funeral, over 100,000 Czechs attended.

History hasn't been kind to either Mucha or to the Czechs - as the current unrest in the area at the turn of this century shows. Mucha's bequest to his country was received with unkindly cold shoulders. The geopolitical world ten years after World War I was very different from the one in which Mucha had begun his project. Moravia was now a part of a new nation, Czechoslovakia (Mucha offered to help the new country by designing its postage stamps and bank notes).

The art world was just as changed. And just as the proponents of "Modern Art" cast their slings and arrows at the oh-so 19th century style, varying political groups brought out their personal arsenals of vitriolic prejudice in damning one aspect or other of Mucha's work. The public seemed to appreciate them, but political agendas seldom give much weight to public opinion. Only recently have they been made available again. They are on permanent display in the castle at Morovsky Krumlov.

First Post of a New Year

I've been off my stride lately. But, its a new year and I thought I'd start it off with a little of my favorite Dorothy P. From me to you. Happy New Year.

De Profundis

Oh, is it, then, Utopian
To hope that I may meet a man
Who'll not relate, in accents suave,
The tale of girls he used to have?

Oh Dorothy--I do love ya!