The artwork sold at Christie's in New York City Tuesday evening.

Christie's estimated that the portrait would sell for $500,000 to $700,000.

The 1984 portrait depicts a smiling Jackson in a jacket with squiggles of red and yellow in his hair.

The auction house says the seller is an anonymous private collector based in New York who bought the image from the Andy Warhol Foundation in the 1990s. It did not say who bought the artwork.

The image was one of 47 lots auctioned Tuesday, including two other Warhol paintings.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-ES-11-11-09 0036EST

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - If you're a North Carolina artist in need of some money, here's a chance to get $10,000.

The North Carolina Arts Council is accepting applications for the 2010-2011 Artist Fellowship awards until Monday. The awards are for visual arts, crafts, choreography and film or video. The award is $10,000.

The Legislature funds the program, which supports creative development of North Carolina artists and new work by them. The awards allow artists to set aside time to work and to buy supplies and equipment.

Artists who have been year-round residents of North Carolina for at least a year immediately prior to the application deadline may apply. Students are not eligible.

___

On the Net:

2010-2011 Artist Fellowship Awards, http://www.ncarts.org/fellowships.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-ES-10-31-09 0402EDT

Dr. Jim Huffman took two weeks to decide and finally paid a little at a time to buy to 30-by-40 inch painting on layaway.

He told the Lexington Herald-Leader it was so dirty that he took it to a Cincinnati restoration expert for cleaning.

Huffman said when the artist's name was uncovered, it was Robert Scott Duncanson, a noted 19th-century African-American painter.

The restoration expert appraised the work at $100,000.

Antique shop owner Dennis Pigg said he bought the painting at a northern Kentucky estate sale a few months earlier.

___

Information from: Lexington Herald-Leader, http://www.kentucky.com

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-CS-10-29-09 0810EDT

NEW YORK - The Salmagundi Club, a historic arts institution at 47 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, will formally launch its Capital Campaign to raise funds for the renovation of its Main Gallery with an "Urban Renewal" Gala Event on Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009. Taking place from 6:30-9:30 p.m., the gala will feature cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, a live jazz performance, and a silent auction that includes such items as autographed copies of beautiful artist books, oil painting instruction, the use of a Vermont vacation home, and even spa treatments.

During its seminal days at the beginning of the 20th century, one of the principal achievements of the Salmagundi Club's founders and charter members was to provide a gallery as beautiful as the artwork it showcased - a tour de force with a spectacular glass skylight. After many years without major improvements, it is now time to restore this gallery to its former grandeur, as well as to bring it up to the standards of 21st-century lighting, artwork display, environmental controls, and energy efficiency.

A major step has been undertaken with the hiring of a renowned and respected architect, Lisa Easton, who has had experience with major institutions and historical projects such as this one.

The "Urban Renewal" Gala Event is the first of a series of fundraising events. Net proceeds from the Salmagundi's American Masters Exhibition and Sale in the past two years launched the initial funding for this major renovation project. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization, the Salmagundi Club is also submitting grant applications to many potential funding sources. However, there is no doubt that additional contributions will be required to complete this project. The Salmagundi Club hopes to engage the public, its neighbors in Greenwich Village, friends and patrons from the arts community, the media and, of course, its membership, in this campaign for the renaissance of an important fine arts exhibition center in New York City.

The Salmagundi Club is dedicated primarily to the exhibition of fine art created by living American artists, providing exhibitions of paintings, sculpture and photography. An additional major part of Salmagundi's mission is to nurture a friendly atmosphere conducive to learning about art with classes and demonstrations in drawing and painting, discussions and presentations about art materials and techniques, and lectures and workshops on being a professional artist. All exhibitions and most events are open to the public for free or a nominal charge.

Tickets must be purchased in advance to attend the gala. Single tickets start at $40. For make a reservation, call 212-255-7740 or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

# # #

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) - A series of illuminated pillars alongside Route 66 at Postal Boulevard that cost taxpayers $50,000 several years ago is now gathering dust in a city warehouse.

City officials scrapped what some in Flagstaff facetiously dubbed the "alien outhouses" on Monday after a car hit the sculpture a few weeks ago. That accident exposed a 110-volt electrical terminal, creating a public hazard, said City Architect Karl Eberhard. This was the second time a car plowed into the expensive piece of art since its installation. Named Solar Calendar by artist Mary Boone Wellington, the artwork has been plagued by problems, mainly in illuminating it.

The city had brought in various experts over the years in an attempt to fix it, Eberhard said, but estimates pegged the repairs at several thousand dollars. The city also made numerous attempts to contact Wellington over the years for a consultation but never received a response from the artist.

Several attempts to relocate the piece were also explored over the years but were eventually ruled out because it would have been cost-prohibitive.

Former Councilmember Karen Cooper, a strong advocate for public art, called the piece ``interesting'' and said it fostered discussion about the role of publicly funded art in the community.

"Public art shouldn't just be bronze cowboys,'' Cooper said.

She said the placement of the artwork along the busy Route 66 corridor was unfortunate, as few people actually got a chance to see it up close. She said she would have preferred to see the sculpture installed in a city park.

But the decommissioning of the artwork could mean that the final resting place might be on someone's front lawn.

Eberhard said the city will attempt to auction off the remaining pieces of the artwork to the public in the coming weeks.

Portions of the Solar Calendar, including pieces too damaged to be fixed, were taken to the city landfill. The used batteries, replaced by the city several years ago, were taken to the hazardous products center, he said.

___

Information from: Arizona Daily Sun, http://www.azdailysun.com/

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WS-10-28-09 0400EDT

LONDON (AP) - Damien Hirst has made a fortune and become an art-world brand by peering at life's dark side.

Rows of skulls stare sightless from deep blue backgrounds in the new exhibition by the man who turned pickled sharks and rotting cows' heads into multimillion-dollar works of art.

"I got called morbid at school,'' Hirst said Tuesday ahead of the show's opening at London's Wallace Collection. "I used to borrow the teacher's red pen to draw the blood on severed limbs.

"I like looking into the darkness. It fills me with wanting to live," added the 44-year-old former enfant terrible of British art. "The further into the darkness you look, the brighter the brightness becomes."

The most striking thing about the show, No Love Lost, isn't the skulls - Hirst's work has long dwelled on mortality and decay. The surprise is that these are paintings, executed in oil by Hirst himself.

After gaining fame as a Britart bad boy in the 1990s, Hirst became an industry, employing dozens of assistants to create signature works such as multicolored dot paintings and rows of pill bottles in medicine cabinets.

Some critics carped that Hirst's factory-scale output devalued his work - a criticism Hirst says is misguided.

"Architects don't build their own houses," he said. "That's a criticism of craft, really, not of art.

"People want something made by the actual artist. But in terms of art, I don't like that. I just want a beautiful object."

In any case, prices for Hirst's work soared. A Sotheby's auction last year netted almost $200 million, a record for a living artist. A buyer paid $17 million for a shark preserved in formaldehyde, and an embalmed calf with golden hoofs sold for $18.5 million.

The two-day sale began on Sept. 15, 2008 - the day Lehman Brothers bank collapsed and the global economy tipped into crisis. That timing has made the auction seem like the end of an era, the twilight of a long art-market boom.

Since then, even Hirst has been hit by the credit crunch, laying off staff and closing two workshops.

"We're definitely not selling like we were," Hirst said. "We were very lucky with that auction. I think it's a lot more to do with luck than skill."

The paintings in the current show represent a return to basics, although Hirst says his new focus is not a response to the economic crisis. He started work on the paintings in 2006, and continues to paint. An exhibition of more recent paintings - branching out from blue into red and other colors - opens at London's White Cube gallery next month.

Hirst said he enjoys the time and attention that painting requires.

"I'm very impatient as a person," he said. "I got into the rhythm of getting a lot of things done using other people."

Hirst has matured over the years. The artist once famed as a celebrity hell-raiser gave up drinking and smoking three years ago.

But it still feels incongruous to see his work in the Wallace Collection, an 18th-century mansion chock full of Old Master paintings, antique furniture and assorted gorgeous objets. Hirst's paintings take up two rooms, their walls lined in pale-blue silk chosen by the artist to complement the classical surroundings.

Clare O'Brien, the collection's director of development, said the show situates Hirst "within the European painterly tradition."

"There is the connection with life and death, which are subjects artists have been painting for centuries," she said. "And it is obviously one he thinks very deeply about."

Critics acknowledge Hirst's bravery in placing his work alongside the Titians and Rembrandts in the Wallace Collection, but early reviews for the show are not good. The Guardian said that "at its worst, Hirst's drawing just looks amateurish and adolescent," and The Independent dismissed the paintings as "not worth looking at."

Hirst said he tries to ignore reviews.

"The biggest effort I make is not to get excited by the good ones. Then you can ignore the bad ones.''

He also tries not to think about money, calling the prices his work fetched at last year's auction "bonkers."

"Last year, I (had) the most expensive artwork ever paid for a living artist, and then two weeks later it was Jeff Koons," he said. "And for a moment you do go, ‘Damn.' But it's just meaningless ... It's like buying a yacht. Somebody always parks next to you in a bigger one."

No Love Lost is at the Wallace Collection in London from Wednesday until
Jan. 24.

___

On the Net: www.wallacecollection.org <http://www.wallacecollection.org>

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-CS-10-13-09 1117EDT

TORONTO (AP) - Mona Lisa has something new to smile about.

A portrait of a young woman thought to be created by a 19th century German artist and sold two years ago for about $19,000 is now being attributed by art experts to Leonardo da Vinci and valued at more than $150 million.

The unsigned chalk, ink and pencil drawing, known as La Bella Principessa, was matched to Leonardo via a technique more suited to a crime lab than an art studio - a fingerprint and palm print found on the 13 1/2-inch-by-10-inch (34 centimeters by 25 centimeters) work.

Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, said the print of an index or middle finger matched a fingerprint found on Leonardo's St. Jerome in the Vatican.

Technical, stylistic and material composition evidence - including carbon dating - had art experts believing as early as last year that they had found another work by the creator of the Mona Lisa.

The discovery of the fingerprint has them convinced the work was by Leonardo, whose myth and mystery already put him at the center of such best-sellers as The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol.

Biro examined multispectral images of the drawing taken by the Luminere Technology laboratory in Paris, which used a special digital scanner to show successive layers of the work.

"Leonardo used his hands liberally and frequently as part of his painting technique. His fingerprints are found on many of his works," Biro said. "I was able to make use of multispectral images to make a little smudge a very readable fingerprint."

Alessandro Vezzosi, director of a museum dedicated to Leonardo in the artist's hometown of Vinci, Italy, said Wednesday he was "very happy'' to hear about the fingerprint analysis, saying it confirmed his own conclusion that the portrait can be attributed to Leonardo with ``reasonable certainty.''

"For me, it's extraordinary there is confirmation'' through the fingerprint, although "it's not like I had any doubt,'' he said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Even before the fingerprint discovery, Vezzosi said several experts agreed with his conclusion, which was based on "historical, artistic, stylistic (and) aesthetic'' considerations.

Based on its style, the portrait has been dated to 1485-1490, placing it at a time when Leonardo (1452-1519) was living in Milan.

Canadian-born art collector Peter Silverman bought La Bella Principessa - or The Beautiful Princess - at the gallery in New York on behalf of an anonymous Swiss collector in 2007 for about $19,000. New York art dealer Kate Ganz had owned it for about nine years after buying it at auction for a similar price.

One London art dealer now says it could be worth more than $150 million.

If experts are correct, it will be the first major work by Leonardo to be identified in 100 years.

Ganz still doesn't believe it is a Leonardo.

"Nothing that I have seen or read in the past two years has changed my mind. I do not believe that this drawing is by Leonardo da Vinci," Ganz told the AP on Wednesday. She declined to comment further.

Silverman said he didn't expect Ganz to acknowledge it's a Leonardo because that would damage her credibility, adding that if she wants to "go against science and say the Earth is not round,'' then that's her prerogative.
"Thank God, we have the fingerprint because there will still be those doubting Thomases out there saying it couldn't possibly be and giving all sorts of reasons for it. We not only have a fingerprint, but a palm print.''

He said the palm print was found in the neck of the portrait's subject, who is believed to be the daughter of a 15th century Milanese duke.

Biro said the two main ideas to emerge from the news are the discovery of "an important lost work by Leonardo," and how "science, technology, scholars and art historians are learning to work together to solve these incredibly complex puzzles.''

Silverman said the Swiss collector first raised suspicions about the drawing, saying it didn't look like 19th century artwork. When Silverman saw it at the Ganz gallery in 2007, he thought it might be a Leonardo, although the idea seemed far-fetched. He hurriedly bought it for his Swiss friend and then started researching it.

"Of course, you say, 'Come on, that's ridiculous. There's no such thing as a da Vinci floating around,''' Silverman said. "I started looking in the areas around da Vinci and all the people who could have possibly done it and through elimination I came back to da Vinci.''

Last year, Silverman asked Nicholas Turner, a former curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the British Museum. Turner said it was a Leonardo.

Silverman described the Swiss collector as a very rich man who has promised to buy him "lunch and dinner and caviar for the rest of my life if it ever does get sold.''

Vezzosi said the portrait seemed to be of a prospective bride and compared its purpose to today's photos of clients of Internet matchmaking agencies.

As for the possibility of finding other Leonardo works, "there are thousands of lost works of Leonardo, mainly pages from codexes or drawings,'' Vezzosi said, but discovering a lost or undocumented painting would be "much more difficult.''

___

Associated Press writer Frances D'Emilio in Rome contributed to this report.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-CS-10-14-09 2021EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) - You can't see it, but there's a quiet cultural revolution under way at the White House.

The Obamas are decorating their private spaces with more modern and abstract artwork than has ever hung on the White House walls. New pieces by contemporary African-American and Native American artists are on display. Bold colors, odd shapes, squiggly lines have arrived. So, too, have some obscure artifacts, such as patent models for a gear cutter and a steamboat paddlewheel, that now sit in the Oval Office.

Works by big names from the modern art world - Jasper Johns and Mark Rothko - are rubbing shoulders with lesser-known artists such as Alma Thomas, an African-American abstract painter of the 1960s and 1970s.

Thomas' Watusi (Hard Edge) now hangs in the East Wing, where Michelle Obama has her offices. The acrylic on canvas, on loan from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, shows a jumble of geometric shapes in bright reds, blues and greens.

Glenn Ligon's Black Like Me No. 2, a Hirshhorn loan now hanging in the first family's living quarters, is a "text painting" that reproduces words from the 1961 book Black Like Me, a nonfiction account by a white man who disguised himself as a black man and traveled through the South.

Ligon, a black artist from Brooklyn in New York, said in an interview that the painting's theme fits with President Barack Obama's efforts to create a dialogue between the races.

"It's a really important part of what he's about and symbolically what he's done," Ligon said, adding that it was "intensely flattering" for the Obamas to want his painting to hang in their private spaces.

The Obamas got to work selecting new artwork for the White House even before the inauguration and had the first pieces installed on Day One. Other pieces have arrived only in recent weeks. And there's a Rothko piece - No. 17 (or) No. 15 - in limbo; they haven't quite decided what to do with it.

Working with California decorator Michael Smith and White House curator William Allman, the Obamas have borrowed dozens of works from various Washington museums and galleries, being sure to use only items that weren't already on display. Other recent first families hung a few modern pieces in their living quarters, but none approached the scope of the Obamas, Allman said.

Smith ferried lists back and forth between the White House and the galleries and museums as the Obamas narrowed down their choices.

"The first lady had clear ideas about what they were aiming for," Allman said. "They knew their tastes, and Michael Smith knew a lot about their tastes."

The new artwork is on display only in the first family's living quarters and office areas. Any changes to the historic public spaces - such as the Blue Room or the State Dining Room - must be approved by the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, which has yet to meet in the Obama administration.

Could more modern artwork be headed for public spaces at the White House?

"Undoubtedly, this will be a subject that will be raised," says Allman. There may be an opening, he said, to "collect something new and different and take a leap."

As for the private spaces, the first lady's office provided a list Tuesday of dozens of pieces of artwork-on-loan that now supplement the hundreds of more traditional landscapes, portraits and still life paintings that dominate the permanent White House collection.

Richard Feigen, a private art dealer in New York, scanned the list and pronounced it "highly sophisticated."

"We're encouraged as far as the art world," Feigen said. "We feel we have someone now in the White House who is saying that culture is an important part of this country."

Jeri Redcorn, a 69-year-old Native American artist from Norman, Oklahoma, said she started jumping up and down and screaming when she found out last week that a piece of her pottery was on a bookshelf in the Oval Office. Redcorn, who uses the same pottery techniques her Caddo ancestors relied on 500 years ago, says the Obamas' artwork selections represent "a bridge, and a reaching out to other cultures."

"To have this artwork in the Oval Office is like a beautiful tribute to the way that my ancestors did things," she said.

The Obamas' selections include an impressive assortment of modern and contemporary works from the National Gallery of Art. One of the most striking is Edward Ruscha's I Think I'll ... , which superimposes phrases such as "I think I'll ..." and "maybe ... no" and "wait a minute" on top of a blood-red sunset. Others include Susan Rothenberg's Butterfly, which shows a horse with an X through it, and Richard Diebenkorn's Berkeley No. 52, an abstract oil on canvas in soft colors based on the landscape of Berkeley, Calif.

Harry Cooper, curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery, said the Obama's selections are exciting the art world and should provide a significant boost to the arts in general.

"This is great art to live with," he said. "A lot of it is challenging. There are different styles: figurative art, abstract art. A lot of it is avant-garde: It was avant-garde, and a lot of it still is avant-garde."

The Obamas' list of borrowed items also includes an intriguing trio of patent models on loan from the National Museum of American History, including models for Samuel Morse's 1849 telegraph register, a gear-cutting machine and a paddlewheel for a steamboat.

Peter Liebhold, curator of the museum's Work and Industry Division, said the museum was both surprised and pleased by the White House choices, especially since two of them are from minor inventors. All three models, he said, are "intrinsically beautiful. They say a lot about American ingenuity."

They're also small enough to fit on the president's bookshelves, Allman said, and they make great conversation pieces.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-CS-10-07-09 0111EDT

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - The psychedelic image of Marilyn Monroe's face dominating the front of Union Station is a bold announcement that something different is afoot.

Workers have installed the station's first out-and-out art exhibit with a major collection of 84 pieces by Andy Warhol.

It's not profound as in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's not unnerving as in Bodies Revealed. It's not candy as in The Chronicles of Narnia. But the new exhibit runs through Jan. 10 has a bit of all that.

Station officials hope Andy Warhol Portfolios: Life & Legends will appeal to a broad audience.

"I encounter in people all the time an expectation that Union Station should be doing new and different things and testing boundaries," said Christopher Leitch, director of the Kansas City Museum and the station's project manager for the exhibit.

Warhol once said that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. He died in 1987, but his art and reputation have endured. Warhol worked at the intersection of art and popular culture, and his name became synonymous with Pop Art. He worked in many media, including film. The Union Station exhibit is composed exclusively of silkscreen prints on loan from Bank of America.

It features Warhol's "unique interpretations of American consumerism, pop culture and an obsession with visual identity," according to Lillian Lambrechts, senior curator for Bank of America.

The works span Warhol's career. There's the familiar, such as the Marilyn portrait and 10 Campbell's soup cans. But the subjects also encompass a Birmingham, Ala., race riot, endangered species and portraits of Jews of the 20th century. There is a set of wildflower prints. The portraits range from Howdy Doody to Uncle Sam to Muhammad Ali to Robert Mapplethorpe.

"These prints are exquisitely made and beautifully framed," Leitch said. "This is an excellent presentation."

The exhibit is self-guided with printed programs and a recorded guide that can be downloaded. There is an opportunity at the end for a hands-on exercise in color.

Other Warhol exhibits currently at the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kan., and at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita are composed of photographic works and are complementary to the Union Station exhibit.

Bank of America has long been a patron of Union Station, contributing to the annual Memorial Day concert as well as to the creation of the lower-level exhibit space where the Warhol show will be presented.

The exhibit will coincide with the 10th anniversary, on Nov. 10, of Union Station's reopening. President and chief executive officer George Guastello said he was excited to be offering Warhol's works.

"One good icon deserves another," he said in a promotional statement.

But officials have no illusion that the Warhol exhibit will solve the station's financial difficulties.

Union Station's operating costs far exceed the revenue it brings in, and the board of directors has told the Kansas City Council that the station will need public support to stay open.

They conservatively project attendance at about 16,000. Tickets, on sale now, are priced lower than those of the blockbuster shows of recent years.

Admission for those 13 and older is $12. For children 3-12 and for Union Station members, it is $8. Group rates also are available. Call 816-460-2020 for more information.

The exhibit will remain open until 9 p.m. on Fridays.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not by published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-CS-10-03-09 1501EDT

WILMINGTON, Del. - Federal authorities have recovered a counterfeit copy of a 1939 watercolor by artist Andrew Wyeth.

The painting is a copy of Wreck at Doughnut Point. It was recovered by the FBI after a California dealer who purchased it nine years ago for about $20,000 contacted a Texas auction house to sell it.

The auction house contacted the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pa. A curator there recognized it as a painting

Wyeth had identified as fake in response to an inquiry from a Connecticut art dealer a decade earlier.

Wyeth was the son of famed painter and book illustrator N.C. Wyeth and father of painter Jamie Wyeth. He died in January at his Chadds Ford home at age 91.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Mexican federal prosecutors said Tuesday they are investigating a claim that more than 1,000 items attributed to artist Frida Kahlo were forged.

The Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Trust filed a complaint saying signed paintings, notes and drawings featured in two recent art history books are fake, the Attorney General's Office said.

"We must stop the commercialization of false works," said Hilda Trujillo, director of the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums.

The works in question come from a private collection and appear in two books, Finding Frida Kahlo and The Labyrinth of Frida Kahlo: Death, Pain and Ambivalence.

Kahlo, who died in 1954, was known for her tortured self-portraits and a tumultuous relationship with Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who she married.

Katharine Myers at Princeton Architectural Press, the publisher of Finding Frida Kahlo, said it plans to keep selling the book.

"In the book, we state that the pieces have not been 100 percent authenticated, that it's still being researched," Myers said.

Members of the trust and some art history scholars hope the publishers will take the books off the market, saying at a news conference in Mexico City that the consequences could be severe if the books keep being sold.

"This will infect all the studies of Frida Kahlo with a virus, with bad, inaccurate information," said James Oles, an assistant professor at Wellesley College who has joined with other art historians in criticizing the publications.

The owners of the art, according to Oles, say the collection came from five boxes that Kahlo gave to a carpenter.

Oles said items in the collection include significant spelling errors, low-quality paintings and other suspicious details.

"What woman signs her recipes? No one, unless they want to sell them," he said.

___

Associated Press writer Istra Pacheco contributed to this report.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-ES-09-22-09 2008EDT

LONDON (AP) - A Rembrandt portrait that once hung in the president's office at Columbia University is expected to sell for up to 25 million pounds ($41 million) when it is auctioned later this year.

Christie's auction house said Friday it will offer Portrait of a Man, Half-Length With his Arms Akimbo in London on Dec. 8, with an estimated price of 18 million pounds to 25 million pounds ($30 million to $41 million).

The painting has not been seen in public for almost 40 years, and has not been offered at auction since 1930, Christie's said.

Its Old Masters expert Richard Knight said the 1658 painting - which depicts an unknown subject, hands on hips in a defiant pose - was "a truly remarkable portrait" from one of Rembrandt's most artistically fertile periods.

The painting was donated to New York's Columbia University in 1958 by George Huntington Hartford II, the art-loving heir to the A&P supermarket chain.

When left-wing students occupied the university president's office in 1968, authorities - terrified for the painting's safety - sent in security officials to remove it and put it into storage.

Christie's said the painting has not been on display to the public since it was part of an exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1970. The university sold it privately a few years later.

Christie's did not identify the seller, saying only that the painting was in "a distinguished private collection."

The auction house said the current record price for a Rembrandt is 19.8 million pounds ($28.7 million at the time) paid for Portrait of a Lady Aged 62 at a Christie's sale in 2000.

___

On the Net: www.christies.com

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-CS-09-18-09 0654EDT

NEW YORK - The Guggenheim Museum has received an extraordinary gift - a major oil-on-canvas artwork by Ellsworth Kelly titled Blue Relief - that will be auctioned in New York at The Guggenheim International Gala on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2009. Those who cannot attend the event in person can bid absentee or by phone until noon tomorrow (Wednesday).

The 2007 painting, which comes with provenance from the artist, is valued at $1.2 million. The work consists of two joined panels measuring 80 inches by 80 inches by 2¾ inches (depth).

Blue Relief was displayed from Oct. 11, 2007 through Feb. 28, 2008 at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain as part of the exhibition "Art in America: Three Hundred Years of Innovation." Subsequently the painting was exhibited at Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

In the late 1940s, Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923, Newburgh, N.Y.) formulated a reductive visual language that he has continued to refine and elaborate upon throughout his career. Although relentlessly abstract, his forms are anchored to the legible details of architecture and landscape, as Kelly, using his keen eye for contour, extracts fragments from the surrounding world-the sweeping curve of a Romanesque church's nave, a crescent moon, or an opened window-and condenses them into elemental colors and shapes.

The foreground panel of Blue Relief is a sapphire quadrilateral reminiscent of a shadow cast from an unseen building. In a lyrical gesture, this vividly colored form is set askew on top of an underlying matte-white panel. This work's chromatic splendor and the visual imbalance created by the layered canvases exemplify Kelly's experimentation with composition and his ongoing engagement with the sculptural possibilities of painting.

For additional information about Ellsworth Kelly's Blue Relief or to bid on the artwork, call 212-423-3584 or e-mail Ben Whine at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

About the Guggenheim International Gala:

The fifth annual Guggenheim International Gala fundraiser celebrating the Museum's 50th anniversary will take place on Sept. 16, 2009, within the Guggenheim's Frank Lloyd Wright-designed landmark on Fifth Avenue, where guests will enjoy a preview of the full-scale Kandinsky retrospective that opens to the public on Sept. 18. In addition, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's new performance installation, "Levels of Nothingness," commissioned and produced by Works & Process at the Guggenheim, will premiere with two 25-minute performances at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. The evening will begin with cocktails at 7 p.m. in the rotunda and in the newly opened Cafe 3 space overlooking Central Park.

# # #

LOS ANGELES - CNN is reporting that art thieves have made off with a collection of Andy Warhol paintings from a private residence in Los Angeles. An employee is said to have discovered the theft.

The multimillion-dollar collection, which belongs to businessman Richard Weisman, includes distinctive pop-art-style Warhol portraits of professional athletes Chris Evert, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tom Seaver and Pelé.

A $1 million reward has been offered for information leading to the recovery of the artworks.

"This reattribution to Velázquez of a work that has been in the Metropolitan Museum's collection for decades is the result of the fine collaborative work of two of the Museum's renowned experts: Keith Christiansen, the newly named John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of European Paintings, and Michael Gallagher, the Sherman Fairchild Conservator in Charge of Paintings Conservation. It highlights the depth of the Museum's collection as well as the acumen of its superb curatorial and conservation staff."

The painting shows a man in his mid-thirties, bust length, wearing a black doublet with a stiff white collar, posed in three-quarter view. It is a study from life rather than a finished work. Many areas are in a simple, sketched-in state, with passages left abbreviated in terms of form and finish. The shadowed side of the torso is indicated with long free strokes of black paint that have an intentionally "broken" quality where they have been dragged over the canvas weave. Although the picture has suffered from abrasion, its quality of directness and immediacy is undiminished.

The picture entered the collection in 1949 as part of the bequest of Jules Bache, who headed one of the most successful brokerage firms in the country before the Second World War, and who was an art collector of great distinction as well as one of the major benefactors of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Acquired sometime before 1811 by Johann Ludwig Reichsgraf von Wallmoden-Gimborn (the illegitimate son of George II of Great Britain) and later in the collection of George V, King of Hannover, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, Duke of Cumberland (1857-d. 1878), the picture was acquired by Bache from the famous dealer Duveen in 1926. At the time, it was considered by a leading specialist as a self-portrait of Velázquez, and as such it entered the Museum. However, more recent scholarship has had a less favorable view of the picture. In the standard 1963 monograph on the artist by José López-Rey, it is described as a "school piece rather close to Velázquez's manner." In 1979, the Museum demoted the attribution to the workshop of Velázquez. What was not realized was the degree to which unnecessarily heavy retouching and a thick, discolored varnish obfuscated the qualities of the picture, making a proper evaluation impossible.

In conjunction with an ongoing project to catalogue the Spanish paintings in the collection, this summer the picture was examined closely. A test cleaning suggested that beneath the yellowed varnish was a work painted in a pale, light-filled palette. Complete removal of the varnish and of the extensive retouching done in a previous restoration revealed a work of astonishing freshness, with all of the hallmarks of Velázquez's sure touch of the brush.

Jonathan Brown, the author of the authoritative monograph in English on the artist and a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, was asked to examine the newly cleaned picture. He concurred that the work was, indeed, by the artist - most likely an informal, rapidly painted study, with the head more highly finished than the costume and background, which is a thinly painted gray over a warm pinkish-buff ground. Professor Brown will write an article on the picture, re-introducing it to the scholarly literature.

Scholars have long remarked on the resemblance of the sitter in the Metropolitan Museum's painting to a bystander who appears at the far right of Velázquez's great masterpiece, The Surrender of Breda, painted in 1634-35 to commemorate the Spanish victory over the Dutch (Museo del Prado, Madrid). Because of its placement at the edge of the composition, looking out at the viewer, that figure has sometimes been thought to be a self-portrait, whence the idea that the Metropolitan's painting is also a self-portrait - a study for inclusion in that picture and therefore dating from the same moment, when the artist would have been 35. The matter remains highly speculative. There is no consensus who the figure in the Surrender of Breda actually shows; other depictions of Velázquez - most famously his inclusion of himself in his most celebrated masterpiece, Las Meninas - are all much later in date (Velázquez was 57 when he painted La Meninas). The identification of the sitter will doubtless be much discussed by scholars, but the attribution of the Metropolitan's painting to Velázquez seems now beyond question.

The Museum plans to display the picture together with information relating to its provenance, attribution history, and cleaning.

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