“Woman-Ochre” by Willem de Kooning. (Courtesy of University of Arizona Museum of Art)
“Woman-Ochre” by Willem de Kooning. (Courtesy of University of Arizona Museum of Art)
I will vouch for myself....I have no art taste, but this is something that I could paint with a half-bottle of rum in my system. How it’s worth $100-million is a mystery to me.
My gut feeling is that they had viewed the tasteless art 30 years ago, and just thought for a joke....they’d steal it. They obviously knew the value.
Art-lovers? As in, saving the world from that anti-art horror?
How big is this painting? I know his work pretty well and often those pieces are pretty big. You just can’t put it in your purse and walk off. So that part of the story confuses me.
It’s not a bad de Kooning: action painting, guys. Yes, and the hooters are obvious. He worked along with Pollock. There is a good deal of energy and complexity of space in these works, but, yes, it helps to take a course in modern art to really understand it (if not necessarily like it).
/sarcasm
For $160 million who needs taste.
It could very well have been stolen before and left to the museum. Such stories are not uncommon.
For example, a Holocaust-surviving couple in their nineties residing in San Diego just 10 years ago were called by their son in NYC, Their son had received a call from a friend who was traveling in Spain and was in Madrid looking at tourist sites. This friend had gone into the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza where there was a new exhibit of impressionist paintings that had never been exhibited before. The friend called the son in NYC and said “you’re not going to believe what I saw!”.
When the elderly couple was driven out of Germany into a camp for Jews, their apartment was ransacked by Nazis and the artwork they had collected was taken. One of the pieces of art was a masterpiece by Pizarro. The elderly couple had kept photos of all their artwork. They had submitted copies of the photos years before to the German government for recovery.
The friend had seen the photos kept by the family and in the Madrid museum, he saw the Pizarro worth then about $50 million.
Heine Thyssen was a German-Swiss shipping magnate whose art collection hidden away in Lucerne rivaled that of Queen Elizabeth’s. The Pizarro had come from his estate left to his gold-digger wife Baroness Tita who was Miss Spain in 1961.
In the art world, there are a lot of ‘title’ issues. Just because a piece hangs in a museum, it does not mean title is clean.
If I was reporting the background story on this, I would definitely consider investigating along these lines.
Have to say I would have gone for a Monet or a Sargent but to each their own.
The FBI or Interpol should examine the documentation of all their trips to see if any of them correspond to any art thefts in the respective countries they visited.
They obviously know art since they kept the painting rather than put it up for sale......
There has to be a black market for stolen artifacts but I'll be dared if I know how to go about entering it to sell something.
I read of a man who had an unsigned DeKooning painting worth several hundred thousand dollars.
When he wanted to sell it, an art appraiser examined it and concluded it was NOT a DeKoong.
So, it went from a high price piece of art to only the value of the paint and canvas, which proves it is not the quality of the painting, it is the artist who did the painting that gives it value.
Reminds me of Picasso who declared one of his own paintings to be a fake. “I can paint a fake Picasso as well as anyone!”-Picasso
The painting is butt-ugly.
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Did the museum a favor getting that crap out.