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Steve Wynn's Bad Dream Vegas mogul sues Lloyd's over $54 million damaged Picasso claim JANUARY 11--Months after he accidentally poked a hole in a Picasso painting, casino magnate Steve Wynn today sued Lloyd's of London for failing to pay off a $54 million insurance claim. Wynn, who purchased the painting "Le Reve" for $48.4 million in 1997, contends that the painting was worth $139 million when, on September 30, he "accidentally placed a tear" in it while showing the work (pictured at right) to friends visiting his Las Vegas office. According to Wynn's U.S. District Court complaint, a copy of...

Pablo Picasso's "dream" painting has turned into a $139 million nightmare for Steve Wynn. In an accident witnessed by a group that included Barbara Walters and screenwriters Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi, Wynn accidentally poked a hole in Picasso's 74-year-old painting, "Le Reve," French for "The Dream." A day earlier, Wynn had finalized a record $139 million deal for the painting of Picasso's mistress, Wynn told The New Yorker magazine The accident occurred as a gesturing Wynn, who suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that affects peripheral vision, struck the painting with his right elbow, leaving a hole the...

WHEN student Ambroise Vollard first saw a Cézanne painting in a Paris dealer's window, he regretted bitterly that he couldn't afford it. "I thought to myself how nice it must be to be a picture dealer," he wrote later. "Spending one's life among beautiful things like that." Vollard, who within a few years did indeed become a picture dealer, soon lacked neither beautiful things nor interesting people around him. In 1895, he hosted the first major exhibition of Paul Cézanne's work. He gave Pablo Picasso his first Paris show in 1901 and Henri Matisse his first solo exhibition in 1904....

...This unidentified bidder at Sotheby's auction in New York on Wednesday bid $95.2 million for a Picasso and $2.5 million for a Chagall. Yesterday that man's face was being sent by e-mail around the world, as art dealers and collectors frenziedly speculated on his identity. He ended up spending $102.7 million, for a 1941 Picasso portrait, "Dora Maar With Cat." ...an 1883 Monet seascape for $5 million...a Chagall, a 1978 biblical scene, for which the man paid $2.5 million But who was he? Sotheby's has refused to say. It is unclear whether he was acting for a client or buying...

NEW YORK (Reuters)- Picasso's 1941 portrait of his mistress, "Dora Maar with cat," sold for an astounding $95 million at Sotheby's on Wednesday, becoming the second most expensive painting in auction history. The vibrant, large-scale work depicts Maar, the surrealist photographer Picasso was romantically involved with for a decade, seated in a chair with a small cat perched on the back. It had been expected to sell for upwards of $40 million, but the winning bid of $95,216,000, including commission, caught even Sotheby's officials by surprise. "I was hoping for 70-plus," said David Norman, Sotheby's co-chair of Impressionist and modern...

A painting by Vincent Van Gogh has sold at auction in New York for more than $40m (£22m). L'Arlesienne, Madame Ginoux commanded the fourth highest price on record for a work by the renowned Dutch artist. The 1890 painting was one in a series of five created in homage to Van Gogh's friend, the artist Paul Gaugin. Madame Marie Ginoux owned a cafe in Arles, France where both artists lived briefly. It was during this period that Van Gogh cut off his own ear. The painting was created while the artist recovered at an asylum in Provence, France. Artistic homage...

He was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century and also one of the most controversial. And now, 33 years after his death, the first significant exhibition of Pablo Picasso's work in South Africa has provoked a furious row after a senior government official accused him of stealing the work of African artists to boost his "flagging talent". The Picasso and Africa exhibition, which has been drawing capacity crowds at Johannesburg's Standard Bank Gallery, contains 84 original works by Picasso along with 29 African sculptures similar to those in the artist's own collection, and is described as an...

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — Gunmen overpowered security guards and stole paintings by Picasso, Dali, Matisse and Monet from a Rio museum Friday, using the cover of a Carnival crowd to make their getaway, Brazilian authorities said. The thieves entered the Chacara do Ceu museum as a samba band performed on the street outside and stole Pablo Picasso's The Dance, Salvador Dali's The Two Balconies, Henri Matisse's Luxemburg Garden and Claude Monet's Marine. The paintings were considered the most valuable pieces at the museum but their exact value was not immediately available, said Thais Isel, a spokeswoman for Rio's Public...

ALARM - Flights of works of Picasso, Monet, Dali and Matisse with the museum of Rio RIO OF JANEIRO - works of El Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Claude Monet were flights Friday in a museum of Rio by a group of men armed which moreover attacked foreign tourists, according to the museum.

Swiss bailiffs yesterday seized dozens of Impressionist masterpieces on loan from Moscow as part of an octogenarian businessman's long campaign to recover debts from Russia. The impounding of the paintings, insured for £720 million and including works by Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, Picasso and Monet, provoked indignation in Russia itself. The Swiss government last night overruled the canton that ordered the seizure and allowed the canvasses to return home - but not before a diplomatic scandal had blown up. "Although the paintings are kept in Russia, they are the inheritance of all people in the world and as such are...

Chicago Tribune CHICAGO - A Chicago art collector has agreed to pay $6.5 million to settle a claim that a Picasso oil painting she bought in 1975 was looted by the Nazis. Marilynn Alsdorf, who acquired Picasso's "Femme en blanc" ("Woman in White") from New York art dealer Stephen Hahn for $357,000, will pay the sum to Californian Thomas Bennigson, whose grandmother owned the painting before it was confiscated during the Holocaust. Though Alsdorf has fought Bennigson's claim since 2002, when he sued for $10 million in California state court, she agreed to settle after attorneys for both parties met...

PARIS (Reuters) - A lover of Pablo Picasso sold a collection of his sketches and engravings for 1.54 million euros (1 million pounds) on Monday, half a century after most of them were drawn during a romantic holiday. Genevieve Laporte, now 79, left just before the start of the auction at which "Odalisque", a 1951 sketch of her lying naked on a bed, was bought by Paris's Picasso Museum for 473,000 euros including costs -- three times the asking price. Another sketch, "The Dream", also showing Laporte on a bed, fetched 417,000 euros including costs, the Artcurial Auction House said....

Time to deal with Cubism and its development. For those who are really intense about all this, there is an excellent book from which many of today’s ideas come from. It’s edited by William Rubin (former curator of the Museum of Modern Art) and is called Cezanne: The Late Work. It’s the essay on Cezannism and the beginnings of Cubism that opened my eyes to how it was not Picasso, but his buddy Georges Braque, who really did the first cubist paintings. Surprised? I think most of the art world was surprised at that and most of them probably still...

Picasso's paintings have captured the imagination of art lovers the world over but they remain a mystery to many in China, as visitors at an exhibition of his lesser-known works here attest. Beijing has a lively art scene and its residents pride themselves as the most culturally informed in the country. But visitors said even they were mystified by the Spanish master's lesser-known collection -- mostly etchings and engravings that are illustrations in books of European classics. "I don't really understand his works, they are relatively abstract. I think this is because I know too little about his culture and...

>>> John Collomosse research pages >>> Video demo of the technology [may be slow for dial-up users] The family portrait is set to become a great work of art thanks to new computer software that can turn photographs into cubist artworks in the style of Picasso.The Picasso-effect software is part of a unique suite of imaging technologies developed by computer scientists at the University of Bath that turns photo albums, videos and movies into drawings, paintings, and cartoons. The software could also revolutionise the way that animations are made.In order to create the software, the researchers had to teach...

Appointment for Return of Art Left in the Subway By COREY KILGANNON The man on the telephone called himself Paul and said to meet him this afternoon at 80th Street and Broadway. "No third parties," he said. And so the stage seems to be set for the final act of the case of the mislaid art. This is the affair of the professional art framer who left two precious pieces of art on a subway platform on Thursday: an original Picasso print and a study by Sophie Matisse, great-granddaughter of Henri Matisse. The framer, William H. Bailey, 63, who was...

Three paintings by Picasso, Van Gogh and Gauguin worth a total of £1m were stolen from a Manchester art gallery over the weekend in a "well planned" theft by professional art thieves, police said. Staff at the Whitworth Gallery only discovered the three works were missing when they turned up for work at about midday yesterday. The paintings are believed to have been in the same room at the museum, which has a world-renowned collection of 40,000 works by artists ranging from Lucian Freud to Toulouse Lautrec. Detectives said the thieves had broken into the building at some point after...

Feb 14, 2003Picasso Work Stolen From Art Festival in Madrid The Associated Press MADRID, Spain (AP) - A ceramic plate with a bullfighting motif painted by Pablo Picasso in 1949 has been stolen from an art show in Madrid. The 10-inch, blue and white plate disappeared two hours after the weeklong international ARCO art festival opened to the public Thursday, director Rosina Gomez-Baez said The piece was for sale for $12,400 and was displayed on a low shelf with other Picasso ceramic pieces at a stand representing the Bonn, Germany-based gallery Pudelko. Security guards checked people leaving the Madrid...

<p>A tapestry of Pablo Picasso's powerful anti-war tableau "Guernica" has hung outside the U.N. Security Council since 1985, and it would be difficult to imagine a more fitting example of site-specific art.</p> <p>The original 1937 painting depicts the terrorized and dying civilians at Guernica, a small Basque village in northern Spain that Generalissimo Francisco Franco's Nationalist regime, battling the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War, allowed the German air force to use for target practice. About 1,600 civilians were killed or wounded in three hours of bombardment.</p>