Archive for August, 2010

'Portrait of a Girl,' the missing painting worth $1.35 million.

A Manhattan man is being sued for losing a $1.35 million painting.

He blames the booze – saying the Jean Baptiste Camille Corot masterpiece, “Portrait of a Girl,” vanished following a bender at The Mark hotel.

The artwork’s co-owner, Kristyn Trudgeon, isn’t buying James Haggerty’s tale.

“I think he’s a complete fumbling idiot,” a visibly annoyed Trudgeon said outside her West Side apartment. “He’s just a complete a–hole.”

Trudgeon and Tom Doyle, who co-own the painting, had hired Haggerty, an old pal, to assist with a possible sale of “Portrait of a Girl” to London gallery owner Offer Waterman.

A July 28 afternoon appointment in Doyle’s Empire State Building office fell apart when the Brit wanted a closer look at the painting.

The men agreed to meet later at midtown bistro Rue 57 with Doyle,who then ordered Haggerty to take the painting to The Mark, which is on the upper East Side, for further inspection by Waterman.

What happened next remains a boozy blur.

The suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, says hotel security footage at 10:54 p.m. shows Haggerty sitting at a table with the painting. Six minutes later, he left the painting at the hotel’s front desk and entered its bar with Waterman, who yesterday told the Daily News he was annoyed that Haggerty showed up without an appointment.

“That struck me as wrong,” he said in a phone interview from London.

At 11:30 p.m., the two men left the bar, retrieved the painting and had a conversation in the hotel lobby, court papers say.

“Something just didn’t feel right and I didn’t want to be involved,” Waterman said. “So I said no, and I said goodbye.”

Haggerty went back to the hotel bar at 11:34 p.m. and once more deposited the painting at the front desk. He resurfaced 90 minutes later, the suit says, when he stumbled out with the painting and a doorman asked if he needed a taxi. “No,” Haggerty allegedly slurred. “I have a car.”

At 2:30 a.m., he finally returned home to his Trump Place apartment, minus the painting. Later that morning, the suit says, he informed Doyle that he couldn’t recall its whereabouts because of his boozy blowout.

“We’re skeptical as to the explanation,” said Max DiFabio, a lawyer for Trudgeon.

The painting was part of a collection that made the rounds of museums in Paris, Beijing, San Francisco, Tokyo and Buffalo. Doyle, an executive with Imperial Jets, did not return calls, and Haggerty, who also works at the company, was missing in action at his homes in Manhattan and Long Island.

“Until we are able to account for that one hour and 40 minutes, we suspect anything,” DiFabio said.

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Contemporary art is getting bolder and burgeoning by the day and younger generation artists are experimenting with a range of media. This ranges across fibre glass, steel, video and digital prints, to mention a few. And, the themes vary from ethnic Indian to western contemporary styles. This tribe of artists has developed a different language and created boundaries of their own.

Says Vikram Bachhawat, director of Aakriti, one of Kolkata’s biggest art galleries, whose GenNext shows have come to be known internationally, “This year, we received over a thousand entries from young artists across the globe for our GenNext V show. Eventually, a panel of experts reviewed the works and put together 34 young artists for the exhibition. Of the selections, seven are from Croatia, France, UK, China, Lithuania and Pakistan. The rest hail from Baroda, Kolkata, Shantiniketan, Chennai, Bangalore, Mangalore and Delhi, among other locales.”

According to him, the artists shortlisted will be displaying paintings, sculptures, digital prints, photographs and new media. The main criterion for choosing the works was the original style of the artist and their intellectual content, more than just their skill. Of course, many of the works are of the experimental genre. Most of the artists are young and fresh. “We are planning to mount a couple of works of each artist in the two wings in our gallery. Young Baroda-based contemporary artist Mansoor Ali Makrani, who is making a mark both domestically and internationally, finds high levels of direct influences from the West in many young artists, “which actually misguides them”. “If you ask me, I will say that my art work chooses its own material. I have an obsession for executing my work in a desired scale or material that my art work/the subject and the content demands and suits it best. I feel the material has a language of its own. An example could be the Dance of Democracy, (displayed at Gallery Maskara, Mumbai and in the first ever Indian art show—The Empire Strikes Back—at Saatchi, London), where I did the installation with broken and discarded official chairs. The chairs lay rotten to collect dust, and for me they spoke for the political and administrative system of my country,” says Makrani.

Mansoor says that he has always been engaged in evolving a broader, more open-ended sculptural vocabulary, in order to communicate with a spectator regardless of his/her linguistic, social and religious identity. “Deciphering and questioning political and social inclinations in a rapidly changing society have constantly informed my works. Moreover, Identitarian politics, too, determine my artistic concerns and choices. My art practice revolves around local as well as national concerns for identity search of/and as a an individual. As a result, my works echo the individual, who is sometimes me, sometimes you and sometimes he or she,” says Makrani.

He feels the Indian art scene has high potential and there’s a lot yet to be seen. “We just wish that the art market flourishes again soon. The new art market also poses immense challenges for artists and galleries alike and, of course, demands inclusion of courses like new media art and curatorial practice within an art institution,” Mansoor expresses.

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