Canalblog
Editer l'article Suivre ce blog Administration + Créer mon blog
Alain.R.Truong
Alain.R.Truong
Visiteurs
Depuis la création 51 150 144
Archives
Newsletter
Alain.R.Truong
11 juillet 2015

$300 Million Gauguin Painting Goes on View at Madrid's Reina Sofia Before Heading to DC

7

Detail of Paul Gauguin's 1892 oil painting, Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?, sold for a record price of near $300 million in Feb. 2015.

MADRID - A record-setting Paul Gauguin painting sold by a Swiss family foundation to a group of state museums in Qatar was unveiled at Madrid's Museo Reina Sofia last week.

The 1892 double portrait, “Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?),” depicting two Tahitian girls, fetched nearly $300 million in February 2015, making it the most expensive single artwork ever sold. 

Qatari buyers surpassed the previous top art price of $250 million that the oil-rich nation itself had paid three years ago for Paul Cezanne’s “The Card Players,” and the record-holder at auction, a $142.4 million Francis Bacon triptych.

The seller was Rudolf Staechelin, an ex-Sotheby's executive from Basel whose father had formed a collection of major Post-Impressionist works.

The family's Gauguin, bought in 1917, was on loan to the Kunstmuseum Basel for almost five decades. Staechelin reportedly pulled the iconic painting and others from the Basel museum because he was unhappy with the handling of building renovations.

Since the February sale, the Gauguin was loaned to the Beyeler Foundation. Now on view until Sept. 14 at Museo Reina Sofia, in an exhibition featuring the Staechelin collection, the Gauguin will next travel to the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC (October 10-January 10, 2016).

The Gauguin was a late --- and buzz-worthy --- addition to the Reina Sofia's current exhibition, "Colletionism and Modernity."

"Stop this hype," Ruedi Staechelin, of the Staechelin Family Trust, told reporters gathered at the museum for the work's unveiling. "...Look at this painting! It is not an amount of dollars hanging here. There are wonderful paintings here."

"This is art; it's not an investment. We had it close to 100 years in our family," he said of the Gauguin. 

"It was one of the paintings that Gauguin made when he [was] first...in Tahiti. It was a happy painting. Only later on he discovered that not everything was so happy in Tahiti. In this painting it is only happy elements."

Commentaires