Free Republic

You may remember Georges Bergès. He’s the New York art gallery proprietor who has exhibited Hunter Biden’s paintings and insisted, with a straight face, that the Big Guy’s bag man is a genuine artist. Now, however, Bergès has admitted what the entire world knew all along: the whole Hunter-As-Picasso shtick was just another Biden influence-peddling scheme. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer interviewed Bergès and issued this statement on Tuesday:The Biden White House appears to have deceived the American people about facilitating an ethics agreement governing the sale of Hunter Biden’s art. Hunter Biden’s gallerist never had...

The 1932 oil painting will be the focal point of a two-day auction event at Sotheby's in New York in November, featuring artworks from the Emily Fisher Landau collection. The art world is buzzing with anticipation as a stunning masterpiece by Pablo Picasso, titled "Femme a la montre," has been unveiled in Dubai as part of a pre-auction tour. Coinciding with the 50 year anniversary since the legendary artist's death, the work is being made available in November as part of a two-day sale featuring the late New Yorker Emily Fisher Landau's renowned art collection.

Françoise Gilot, a painter who wrote a famed 1964 memoir detailing her tumultuous decade-long relationship with Pablo Picasso, has died at 101. The New York Times reported that she died in New York on Tuesday. Long dismissed as one of Picasso’s “muses,” Gilot has in recent decades been reappraised as an artist in her own right. She had energetically worked alongside Picasso, however, and even maintained a contract with Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, the same dealer who represented him at various points. “In the course of her long life, Françoise Gilot has consistently been true to herself, even as she has repeatedly...

Australian feminist comedian Hannah Gadsby has been roasted by art critics after launching her 'It's Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby' exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. The art show features more than 100 works, including pieces by Picasso and by modern female artists, as well as audio descriptions by Gadsby herself. An official press release says the exhibition 'reckons with complex questions around misogyny, creativity, the art-historical canon, and "genius"'.

Modernism is a reactionary culture, a fact that I demonstrated by pointing in detail to the works of a dozen leading Modernist figures including T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Pablo Picasso, and others. In all of these writers and artists, there was a similar rejection of all that is truly modern: a democratic capitalist society in which ordinary citizens seek freedom and opportunity for themselves and their families, including economic, religious, and political liberty.

A 50-year-old man who was accused of stealing three artworks from Greece’s National Gallery in Athens in January 2012 received a suspended prison sentence of six years on Friday. The works stolen included Pablo Picasso’s painting Head of a Woman (1934), Piet Mondrian’s painting Stammer Windmill with Summer House (1905), and Guglielmo Caccia’s sketch St. Diego de Alcala in Ecstasy with the Holy Trinity and the Symbols of Passion. The man, Giorgos Sarmantzopoulos, was found guilty of aggravated theft; the court, however, recognized his good behavior following the heist and suspended his sentence pending his appeal on the condition that...

Belle et Belle gallery has now been dissolved, closing the chapter on a decade-long criminal investigationA major French criminal court case reached a verdict last week after a judge pronounced the "dissolution" of the Parisian gallery Belle et Belle, which offered dozens of drawings and prints stolen by a handyman from the daughters of Jacqueline Picasso and the gallerist Aimé Maeght. In a ruling on 18 November, the owners of Belle et Belle, the 80-year-old Anne Pfeffer and her husband Herbert, were found guilty of having purchased and concealed stolen art. They have been given suspended jail sentences of...

A missing Pablo Picasso painting was spotted at the home of the Philippines’ controversial former first lady — as she celebrated her son’s presidential victory, according to a former official familiar with the artwork. Imelda Marcos — the widow of late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos — was filmed hugging her son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., in footage that aired this week with the apparent long-lost masterpiece “Reclining Woman VI” hanging on a wall behind them. The bombshell in the background was broadcast in a news segment by the local station TV Patrol Tuesday after Marcos Jr. became the country’s next...

On Wednesday evening in Hong Kong, Sotheby’s modern and contemporary art evening sales brought in a combined $164.2 million with premium, landing within the presale estimate of HK$ 927 million–1.4 billion ($118 million–$178 million). Despite a tense political climate in the region amid strict pandemic-related measures in Hong Kong and Shanghai, the sale performed well, with high sell-through rates and records set for 14 artists. Among those artists were Anna Weyant, Louise Bonnet, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Robert Alice, Chris Huen Sin Kan, Michael Lau, Atsushi Kaga, and Peter McDonald. Ahead of Wednesday night’s sale, Sotheby’s was forced to postpone the event...

Pablo Picasso's track-record with women certainly would not make him a feminist pin-up today.There were two wives, at least six mistresses and countless lovers -- with a tendency to abandon women when they became ill, a voracious appetite for prostitutes, and some eye-popping age differences (his second wife was 27 when he married her at 79). Some of the quotes attributed to him would probably cause Twitter's servers to combust if he said them now ("For me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats"). SNIP But in a post-MeToo world, it poses a challenge for those who...

Sotheby's is announcing Tuesday three more major paintings to be offered at its March sales in London, including paintings from Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh. Leading the three is one of Monet’s 250 waterlilies, which was painted between 1914 and 1917, with an estimate of between £15 million and £20 million (US$20.3 million and US$27 million), according to a news release The work has not been exhibited since 1995, when it was displayed across three museums in Japan. It was last auctioned in 1978 at Christie’s in New York with an undisclosed selling price, which was probably...

The fact that both the Clinton and Biden schemes operate in the open with such impunity is an indictment of the DOJ and its various agencies. What does Hunter Biden’s art and the Clinton Foundation have in common? We’ll circle back to that in a moment. First, let’s take a look at what happened to the Clinton Foundation since Madame Secretary Box-Wine lost the presidential election of 2016. Surprise, surprise, its donations have all dried up. But the foundation is still chartered to provide worldwide charity. Have its donors suddenly become less charitable -- all of them? Don’t the friends...

BARCELONA - A professor from a Barcelona art school has staged a protest at a museum dedicated to Pablo Picasso intending to shed light on the Spanish painter's sometimes callous behaviour towards women. Maria Llopis and seven of her female students appeared at the Picasso Museum wearing t-shirts that read "Picasso, women abuser" and others that referred to Dora Maar, a French artist who is believed to have suffered abuse by Picasso during their relationship in the 1930s and 1940s. The protest last week echoed the global debate on men's treatment of women, led by the #MeToo movement, which includes...

They discovered Picasso's 'Head of a Young Woman', a 1906 painting valued at £22million, stowed away on the vessel by the ship's captain. Prosecutors argued Botin had been attempting to sell it abroad, in breach of rules over paintings of cultural significance to Spain. But Botin denied the charges and claimed he was simply taking it to Switzerland for safe-keeping.

Philip Stapleton was perusing a thrift sale in the U.K. when he came across a painting he liked so much, he spent nearly $300 on it, even though he assumed it was fake. But after doing some research and talking to experts, the 52-year-old antique collector may have made the purchase of a lifetime – an original work by Pablo Picasso. Stapleton said that he spent $293, even though he believed it to be fake because he "loved the picture," SWNS reports. Acting on a whim, Stapleton took it to Brighton and Hove Auction House, where he received the potentially...

Philip Stapleton was perusing a thrift sale in the U.K. when he came across a painting he liked so much, he spent nearly $300 on it, even though he assumed it was fake. But after doing some research and talking to experts, the 52-year-old antique collector may have made the purchase of a lifetime – an original work by Pablo Picasso. Stapleton said that he spent 230 British pounds ($293), even though he believed to be fake because he "loved the picture," SWNS reports. Acting on a whim, Stapleton took it Brighton and Hove Auction House, where he received the...

The first evening of a three day auction of billionaire oil dynasty scion David Rockefeller’s world class private art collection has raised over $646m, an amount that already exceeds the valuation of the entire 1,600 item list. Among the works of art for sale at Christie’s in Manhattan on Tuesday evening were a Rose period portrait by Pablo Picasso that sold for $115m (including fees) and a painting by Monet from his water garden series that sold for a record $80.7m.

The drab free port zone near the Geneva city center, a compound of blocky gray and vanilla warehouses surrounded by train tracks, roads and a barbed-wire fence, looks like the kind of place where beauty goes to die. But within its walls, crated or sealed cheek by jowl in cramped storage vaults, are more than a million of some of the most exquisite artworks ever made. Treasures from the glory days of ancient Rome. Museum-quality paintings by old masters. An estimated 1,000 works by Picasso. As the price of art has skyrocketed, perhaps nothing illustrates the art-as-bullion approach to contemporary...

A team of Spanish police experts flew to the French island of Corsica on Tuesday to retrieve a masterpiece by Pablo Picasso that was smuggled out of Spain, where it is considered a national treasure. A spokesman for Spain's Civil Guard said four police experts in national heritage and several Culture Ministry officials flew to recover the painting, "Head of a Young Woman," which is valued at 24 million euros ($26 million). The officer said they expect to return with the painting later Tuesday. The work is owned by Spanish banker Jaime Botin, brother of the late Emilio Botin, former...

New York City's spring art auctions get underway Tuesday with exceptional pieces by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Vincent Van Gogh and others whose work continues to fuel a robust market for impressionist, modern and contemporary art. Picasso's "Women of Algiers (Version O)," estimated to bring over $140 million, is poised to become the most expensive artwork sold at auction, while Giacometti's "Pointing Man" could set an auction record for a sculpture if bidding soars to an expected $130 million.