In his annual letter sent to clients, Claremont Rug Company founder/president Jan David Winitz, highlighted the mix of technology, artistic/investment value and the appreciation of specific Oriental rug types from the “Second Golden Age of Persian Weaving,” ca. 1800 to ca. 1910, as the primary factors that influencing acquisitions decision by connoisseurs. He told clients that “Last year, we worked with a record number of clients who are investing strategically in a vital sector of the precious tangible asset class and building substantial collections of High-Collectible and Connoisseur-Caliber antique Persian and tribal rugs as defined by our ‘Oriental Rug Market Pyramid™.’” He pointed to overwhelming response to the 140-piece “London Vault of Antique Carpets,” a mid-year invitational private collection sale presenting the Gallery’s “perhaps…most wide-ranging, selecti

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, is presenting paradigm lost, an immersive installation by Charles Long. On view in the downstairs gallery from January 5 – February 9, 2019, the exhibition brings together a body of work that the artist created over the last year. For the artist’s thirteenth solo exhibition with the gallery, paradigm lost continues the artist’s investigation of the forms scattered on the shore of modernism’s receding wave. Long’s studio output of the last 3 decades reveals both a charting of this modernist trajectory and need to transcend its shortcomings. With references to Giacometti, Guston, Munch, Brancusi, and other patriarchs who haunt the artist’s studio, paradigm lost castrates these forbearers in a poetic socio-political examination of our present moment, to nuanced and playful ends. The inspiration for this body of work developed during the artist’s daily walks thr

At the height of their meteoric careers, Frederic Lord Leighton, Hans Makart, Jan Matejko, Mihály von Munkácsy, Franz von Lenbach, Friedrich August von Kaulbach and Franz von Stuck were celebrated as princely painters (Malerfürsten, literally ‘painter-princes’) and enjoyed all the privileges of Europe’s high society. They were wealthy, respected and moved in the same elite circles as the rich and famous. Their homes and studios were notable for their splendour, and people thronged to have their portraits painted and to see their sensational pictures. Very few artists attained the lofty status of princely painters and the public honours this exalted position entailed. This exhibition is the first to shed light on the phenomenon of the princely painter which transcended national borders, reaching its apogee in the 1870s and 80s before fading away with the outbreak of the First World War. The exhibition focuses on the painters’ carefully crafted, highly stylised publi

The mystical world of the ancient Egyptian gods comes to life in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (National Museum of Antiquities) in Leiden, the Netherlands. The large exhibition ‘Gods of Egypt’ is entirely devoted to the ancient Egyptian pantheon and brings together more than 500 imposing sculptures of gods and goddesses, magical papyri, gold jewels and richly painted mummy cases, from museums in the Netherlands and abroad, including the British Museum, the Louvre, the Museo Egizio of Turin, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna. ‘Gods of Egypt’ runs until 31 March. The ancient Egyptians believed that everything – the creation of the cosmos, transient life on earth and eternal life after death – lay in the hands of gods and goddesses. These deities determined their entire view of the world and their everyday life. The pharaoh was considered one of the gods and represented the Egyptian gods on earth.