AFA 22nd Anniversary

22nd Anniversary 72 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Christie’s auction by the J. Paul Getty Museum of the artist’s Young Man at His Window (1876) (Fig. 8), formerly considered the most important work by the artist in private hands. Watanabe Shikō (1683–1755), a Japanese artist who lived and worked in Kyoto, was best known for landscape paintings on doors, walls and screens. Examples of his work are in the British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, the Harvard Art Museums, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and now in the Cleveland Museum of Art , which purchased a pair of his six-panel folding screens depicting flowers and trees of the four seasons (Fig. 9). Every year, there are gifts to museums that outshine all the others. The Metropolitan Museum of Art received a cash donation from trustee Oscar Tang and his wife, Agnes Hsu-Tang, of $125 million to fund a renovation of the museum’s modern wing, which will include creating 80,000 square feet of galleries and public space. Emily Rauh Pulitzer, continuing a legacy of patronage to the Saint Louis Art Museum by the Pulitzer family that dates back more than ninety years, made a promised gift to the institution of twenty-two works, including paintings and sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Constantin Brancusi, Joan Miró (Fig. 10), Philip Guston, Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Warhol, and others. Min Jung Kim, the newly appointed director of the museum, said, “the most extraordinary thing about this gift is its surpassing quality. . . These works are, by themselves, an art historical primer.” Another major gift is a donation to the Walters Art Museum from Baltimore art collectors Deborah and Philip English of $2.5 million (to hire a curator in the areas of decorative arts, design, and material culture) and a promised gift of more than five hundred objects from their collection of British and continental-European majolica (Fig. 11). Yet another major gift of artwork, this to New York’s Frick Collection , is a group of twenty-six drawings, pastels, and prints by European artists, such as François Boucher, Edgar Degas, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Maurice Quentin de La Tour (Fig. 12), Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Thomas Lawrence, and Jean-François Millet. The promised donation came from Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard, both of whom are long-time supporters of the museum. Fig. 13a, b: Dosso Dossi (1489–1542), (right), The Trojans Building the Temple to Venus at Eryx and Making Offerings at Anchises’s Grave, ca. 1520. Oil on canvas, 23⅜ x 33 ⁄ inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington; Purchased as the Gift of Anonymous, (left) Aeneas and Achates on the Libyan Coast, ca. 1520. Oil on canvas, 23⅛ x 34½ inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington; Samuel H. Kress Collection (1939.1.250).