ABOVE: Portuguese business magnate Joe Berardo, who is donating a huge collection to the Portuguese government to start a new museum of 20th century art.

After ten years of bickering over the details of the deal, Portuguese tycoon Joe Berardo and the government of Portugal have reached an agreement that sees Berardo loaning a significant portion of his 4,000-strong collection to the state to start a new museum of 20th century art. While the bulk of the collection is comprised of old books, jewelery, coins, and other upscale garage-sale fare, it also includes some Picasso, Dali, Miro, Koons, Bacon, and Warhol. Like other art-rich collectors before him, Berardo was holding the government’s feet to the fire by threatening to move his collection to another country, probably France.

The 900 pieces mentioned in the deal will be set up and on display in a new museum by the end of the year, according to the Portuguese culture minister. But it looks like it’s not going to be a flashy new building per se, as the works are going to be housed in the Belem Cultural Centre in Lisbon. Perhaps they’ll tack on a new wing to put it in? Perhaps there’s another big-bucked portuguese industrialist looking for a museum extension to put his name on?

LINK: Reuters > Portugal to create museum of 20th century art

ABOVE: Detail from Picasso’s Drawing Arles, bought on Costco.com for US$39,999.99 last year. Picasso’s daughter is now claiming the drawing is not genuine.

Perhaps it was always destined to end in a crying match. You may remember last July when megaretailer Costco started selling Picasso artworks on its website, essentially acting as a broker for a Florida art dealer named Jim Tutweiler. Costco’s expertise being deep discounts on Chinese mountain bikes and cases of Slovakian mineral water, the move into original Picasso drawings was perplexing. Well, as it turns out, the plan has hit a few snags: namely, Picasso’s daughter thinks two of those drawings are dodgy, and alleges that the certificates of authenticity that accompanied them are forgeries. Remember to check those return policies.

The best part of the New York Times’ coverage of this story is its description of Louis Knickerbocker, the unfortunate consumer who purchased one of the drawings in question. The description of Mr. Knickerbocker in the first passage is priceless: driving in his big SUV, listening to talk radio, and then phoning his wife by cellphone—while driving—to get her to rush to the nearest computer to charge the Picasso to his credit card. And who says there’s no life left in the American Consumer? Anyway, there’s been much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments among everyone involved in the sale, and Costco assured Mr. Knickerbocker that, as with all Costco merchandise, he could return the Picasso drawing. Can’t make this stuff up.

LINK: New York Times > It’s Costco, but Is It Picasso? Art Sale in Doubt

ABOVE: Detail from Canaletto’s Venice, the Grand Canal, Looking Northeast from Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto Bridge (circa 1730), the most expensive art purchase of 2005.

Picasso was again the most actively traded artist of the year, with 1,409 artworks trading hands internationally, according to Artprice, an art market analysis firm, Bloomberg reports today. Andy Warhol moved up, bumping Claude Monet from 2nd to 3rd place, and Canaletto, who ranked 239th last year in market churn, rocketed to 4th place because of the artist’s record-breaking sale of Venice, The Grand Canal (above) and the excitement that the sale generated for the 18th-century painter (it was the most expensive painting sold at auction last year, you may remember).

Other interesting trends of note: Dadaist art jumped in popularity and price, with Artprice’s Dada Index (yes, such a thing exists) rising 137 per cent. Futurist works closely followed in price, rising 93 per cent. Total fine art auction sales last year topped US$4.2 billion, up 15 per cent over 2004, and auction prices increased by 10 per cent.

And here’s the final list of the 10 most actively traded artists of 2005 (no drumroll necessary, 9 of them are dead and won’t care):

1. Pablo Picasso
2. Andy Warhol
3. Claude Monet
4. Canaletto
5. Mark Rothko
6. Marc Chagall
7. Willem de Kooning
8. Fernand Leger
9. Jean-Michel Basquiat
10. Lucian Freud

LINK: Bloomberg > Picasso, Warhol Top List of Actively Traded Art

ABOVE: Detail from Rembrandt’s The Apostle James the Major, for sale at the Maastricht art fair right now, one of the few Rembrandts to reach the market in the past decade.

There are two Rembrandts for sale at the current TEFAF Maastricht Art Fair (which runs through March 19), quite an oddity considering that there have been only about a dozen Rembrandts put on sale anywhere in the past decade, The Telegraph reports today. The Apostle James the Major (above) is on sale by New York-based Salander-O’Reilly with a price tag of upwards of €32 million, while Dutch dealer Robert Noortman is selling Portrait of a Man in a Red Doublet for around €26 million.

Rembrandts, despite their obvious cachet for collectors, have traditionally had a hard time selling because their enormous value limits the pool of collectors with the cash to buy them, and also because most of the best work is already in public museums, leaving gloomy also-rans like Self-Portrait with Shaded Eyes to the private market. Exchange rates have also shut out all but the richest American collectors, and we have to imagine that the risk of buying something that turns out not to be a real Rembrandt is also giving potential buyers the fantods.

LINK: Telegraph > Art sales: old Master seeks new owner

ABOVE: Detail from the poster for the famous 1913 Armory Show; the latest version opens today at piers 90 and 92 in New York.

Go today to the totally-not-owned-by-Dubai-and-damn-proud-of-it New York waterfront to see the legendary Armory Show, the international art fair for contemporary art held on the piers overlooking the Hudson River. The exotic locale (if pier 90 overlooking the verdant shores of New Jersey can be considered so) has led to some logistical difficulties in the past, the New York Times reports.

A 4.5 tonne Anish Kapoor sculpture, for example, had to be placed on a large and aesthetically disastrous steel plate to distribute its weight and keep it from plunging through the floor into the river below. And the whole thing is pretty much a temporary construction, housing spaces for 154 galleries spread over 100,000 square feet. Then, during last week’s frenzy of construction, a cruise ship carrying 4,000 passengers had to dock there because there were no other piers available. Light a candle for the put-upon Chuck Newman, who as executive vice president of Port Parties, the company that handles events on the piers; the Times interviewed him right after a stress test at his doctor’s.

LINK: New York Times > Move That Ship. It’s Time for an Art Fair.

Paul Kastel, founder of the influential Canadian Kastel Gallery, is closing after 45 years in business.

Dealer Kastel Closes Landmark Art Gallery — the famed Montreal art dealer Kastel Gallery has closed after 45 years in business. Paul Kastel’s first sale in the late 50s was an A.Y. Jackson, for CAN$275, (now worth CAN$20,000). [WE]

Sotheby’s Holdings, Inc. Announces 2005 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Results — Sotheby’s had revenues of over US$200 million in its fourth quarter, a record attributed to the blazing art market. Revenues for all of 2005 were US$513 million. [MSNm]

Tallinn’s new art rumour — The capital of Estonia, Tallinn, is getting a brand new national art gallery, called KUMU, or “rumour” in Estonian. [SaS]

ABOVE: Detail from Tigers, from a series of panels from Nanzen-ji Temple; the deteriorating paintings will be replaced soon with high-tech reproductions.

HP, the company that is taking us all to the cleaners with every overpriced inkjet cartridge we buy, is partnering with the Kyoto International Culture Foundation in Japan to make high-quality reproductions of irreplaceable and delicate artworks from temples across Japan. The Kyoto Digital Archive Project will make reproductions of 3,500 pieces of art, spanning between the 13th and 17th centuries, and the originals will be moved to special climate-controlled storage so their forgeries stunt doubles can take their place.

HP is reportedly pursuing fine art reproduction as a growth area for their business: CNN Money says the art reproduction racket is a $7.5 billion per year industry and growing fast. Making the high-resolution digital scans of the art, and then using cutting-edge printers to make the repro is persnickety work, the kind of skilled work that you can charge an arm and a leg for. Better keep those ink cartridges, then.

LINK: CNN Money > HP’s new big business: art reproduction?

ABOVE: some of Art Spiegelman’s artwork. He’s talking twice in SanFran this weekend.

Italy signs deal with Met over disputed art: Today the government of Italy inked its deal with the Met to get back the Euphronios Krater and a 15 Greek silver baubles; the Met will get items “of equivalent beauty and importance,” on long term loan from Italy in return. Go equivalency! [Reuters]

Spiegelman gets people to take comics seriously: comic-book auteur Art Spiegelman is speaking twice this coming weekend in the Bay Area, and he figures in the show “Masters of American Comics” currently on display at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum at UCLA. [SFChronicle]

Art sales: an old dog learns new tricks: Staid antiques firm Partridge Fine Arts in London has agreed to be taken over by London art dealer Mark Law and his company, and there are some changes being made, including a large, oddly financed sale at Christie’s. [Telegraph]

ABOVE: Detail from Paul Gauguin’s Deux Femmes (1902), which sold for £12,328,000 last week at Sotheby’s.

The Telegraph writes today with a certain dry wistfulness about the art auctions’ recent return to “irrational exuberance,” in the words of one observer, but it cautions that the huge Sotheby’s sale of Impressionist and modern art, which racked up total sales of £130 million, is not really a return to the overblown sales of the 1980s. For one thing, the number of paintings under the hammer at last week’s sale is quite large in comparison to the auctions of 20 years ago, when a big sale might clock in at 30 to 40 top-drawer items. The Sotheby’s sale last week topped 70 pieces, and a similar Christie’s sale broke the 100 item-mark, so the auction houses are certainly doing record-breaking sales, but they’re having to churn through dozens more paintings a night to get there.

Paul Gauguin’s Deux Femmes, above, for instance, sold for its lowest estimate (Sotheby’s added on the $1.3 million for their fee) and had only 2 bidders. The Impressionist market, the Telegraph says, is looking exhausted, with fewer good pieces coming up for sale. And the market has also moved on, these days favouring later modern pieces from the 1920s and 30s. On an optimistic note, however, the Telly notes that the buyers at these auctions are a more diverse group geographically and the number of collectors paying more than £1 million for a work has increased times three since the 80s. More buyers, paying more, but the overall picture for Impressionist auctions is looking a little, um, impressionistic.

LINK: Telegraph > Art sales: return to ‘irrational exuberance’

ABOVE: Detail from Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), considered by many Austrians a national treasure; an international arbitration panel, however, considers it the treasure of a 90-year-old Californian.

Who exactly has pegged the prospective price of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I at more than US$100 million is unknown to us; but frankly, we’ll believe it when we see it. $100m+ was the price cited in an article in the Globe and Mail over the weekend about the recent decision that Austria would have to hand over five paintings to a Mrs. Maria Altmann of California because the pieces are considered Nazi war loot. But Austria considers the painting a national treasure: “If we let that portrait go, we might just as well tear down St. Stephen’s Cathedral,” said one Austrian. Therefore, the country is looking to buy back the painting before it even leaves the country, and it’s looking more and more like it will pay through the nose.

If Altmann decides to sell the painting, there will naturally be other institutions and private collectors ready and waiting to take it off her hands for the right price. And if that price lands in the hundred-million neighbourhood, the painting has a good chance of becoming the most expensive single piece ever sold at auction, besting the $104 million achieved by a Picasso in 2004. Austrians (all 8,184,691 of you): your government will accept that US$12.70 per person in cash or cheque….

LINK: Globe and Mail > Klimt could top Picasso price

ABOVE: Detail from Picasso’s Boy with a pipe (1905), the most expensive single painting ever sold at auction for US$104 million. Investment funds hoping to hit it that big have struggled.

The concept of an investment fund that deals exclusively in fine art is one of those things that seems like a good idea but has remained largely unworkable (despite some valiant efforts). Bloomberg yesterday published a longish piece on the perma-fledgling field of art funds, essentially large hedge funds for high-rolling investors looking to diversify their bulging portfolios. Managers like a Mr. Philip Hoffman of London hold their noses and buy the most bankable art they can, storing the paintings or renting them out to their fund clients at a nominal fee until it’s time to sell and cash in for everyone’s collective benefit. But, as numerous people make clear in the article, cornering the market in Rembrandts is very different from the market in, say, soybeans, and more than a few such funds have stumbled early and been put out of their misery.

There’s an interesting bit describing something called the Fine Art Index, a sort of S&P 500 for the art market, which rises and falls with auction results for a selected list of artists and genres. The index climbed 14.5% in 2005 [but then, what index didn’t? - eds.], a handsome ROI for the mucketymucks who had kicked in their quarter mil or more necessary to get into one of the funds. This whole deal apparently parallels what happened in the 80s when the art market was at its last mountaintop, with everyone scrambling to find a way to make a cold, hard investment out of it. It didn’t work so well then, so to the wealthy few who are buying these funds, all we can say is: what goes up, must come down.

LINK: Bloomberg > Picasso Lures Hedge-Fund-Type Investors to Art Market

ABOVE: Sara Sutherland, an Edinburgh interior designer, says she is now more likely to splurge on a painting than a frou-frou frock.

The Arts Council in England has new figures that show that women now comprise 56 per cent of contemporary art buyers, The Scotsman writes. While there’s been some feminization of the upper echelons of collectors, the real change, notes the article, has come at the lower end of the market, for pieces selling for less than £1,000. Paintings, drawings, or original prints at that price point are purchased as luxury goods, much like a bag or a swank pair of shoes, the numbers seem to suggests.

One expert attributes the surge in female collectors to the increasing visibility and notoriety of female artists (Tracy Emin is the only one named in the article, but Gillian Carnegie, a more recent Turner Prize nominee, deserves credit too). Sara Sutherland, pictured above, tells the paper that she “would now rather own a beautiful painting than a designer dress.” To those lamenting the Sex and the Citification of the world, that’s music to the ears.

LINK: The Scotsman > World of modern art draws female buyers

ABOVE: Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oil and gas billionaire who just announced plans to open two new private galleries in Russia.

Times are good in Russia these days: billionaires running around all over the place, throwing their vast post-soviet oil fortunes at all kinds of crazy schemes. The newest such example is Viktor Vekselberg, estimated by Forbes to be worth more than US$5 billion, who has announced plans to open the first major private galleries open to the public in Russia.

Vekselberg’s private foundation, Link of Times, is currently renovating a building in St. Petersburg to use as its primary exhibition space, where it will show off items from the tycoon’s private collection, including a cache of Fabergé knickknacks that he bought in London just last month. Link of Times was only established in 2004, but has since become the single biggest buyer of Russian art in the world right now, acting on its mandate to repatriate Russian works to Russia. Vekselberg apparently keeps his collection in London to put it out of the Kremlin’s reach in case he ever gets the hairy eyeball from Putin et al.—the foundation will put a selection on display in St. Petersburg and later Moscow, when the second branch of the museum is built. Yes, it’s a good time to be a billionaire. As if there’s a bad time.

LINK: The Art Newspaper > Billionaire to open first private museums in Russia