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Art Business News, March, 2001 by Emmett Murphy

ANKARA, TURKEY

* The dammed waters from the Euphrates River in Southeast Turkey continue to rise, and a second part of the ancient Roman legionary city of Zeugma has been swallowed up. Emergency excavations by archaeologists from 11 countries, including Turkey, the United States, Britain, Germany and Italy, have made discoveries akin to those at Pompeii: streets, villas, fine mosaic floors, frescoes, statues and artifacts. Everything that is removable, including frescoes, will eventually go on display in a local museum. Another zone, to be spared by the waters, and compromising 70 percent of Zeugma, will be excavated later this year and will become an open-air museum.

PORTLAND, ORE.

* The Portland Museum of Art has announced its purchase of the private collection of Clement Greenberg (1904-94), one of the most influential art critics and arbiters of artistic taste of the mid-20th century. An opinionated champion of the Abstract Expressionist and Color-Field movements and what he called the "Post-Painterly Abstraction" movements, Greenberg preached the gospel of his brand of modernism from his pulpit at The Nation and The Partisan Review magazines. He was one of the first critics to recognize the importance of artists such as Jackson Pollock, whom he praised as "the most powerful painter in America."

WASHINGTON, D.C.

* The U. S. Congress has approved a $105 million budget for this year, an increase--the first in eight years--of $7 million, for the National Endowment of the Arts, the perennial target of Republican attacks. The NEA has said it will use the additional money to fund "Challenge America," a community outreach and arts education project that will link arts organizations with families and communities, giving the latter access to the arts and helping them to launch cultural organizations of their own.

* The National Gallery of Art here and the Museum of Modern Art in New York have acquired substantial holdings of work by Lee Friedlander directly from the artist's collection. Friedlander, a 66-year-old photographer known for what he has described as exploring the "social landscape," is already well represented at MoMA, which owns more than 200 of his prints. A spokesman for the two museums said, "We feel this is like a golden age of collecting. There are still important photographs available at reasonable prices. Their value is only going up."

BERLIN

* In an attempt to reach a reconciliation with the land of his birth, art dealer Heinz Berggruen is selling his private collection to the government of Germany for $200 million, far below its market value. The 113 works include 85 Picassos, seven Cezannes, two Van Goghs, 50 Klees, and other works by Matisse and Braque. Berggruen said that experts have valued his pictures at closer to $450 million. The dealer, who is Jewish, fled Germany for the United States in 1937 and later ended up in Paris where he opened a gallery. "I was born in Berlin and I have a sentimental attachment to this city." He went on to say that the sale of his 20th-century art was meant as "a gesture of reconciliation to the people who were not good to me or my family."

LONDON

* Old master paintings from the collection of the Baroness Barsheva de Rothschild brought exceptionally high prices at Christie's. The works were part of the auctioneer's old master paintings sale, which totaled $82.1 million, well above its high estimate of $65 million and the highest total ever for an old master painting sale here. The obvious star of the show was Rembrandt's "Portrait of a Lady, 62" (1632), bought for $28.6 million by Robert Noortman, a dealer based in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The price was more than three times the high estimate of $8.4 million and a record for the artist. Experts said Noortman was probably buying the painting to show this March at the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht.

STOCKHOLM

* In a style reminiscent of a Hollywood thriller, three brazen thieves made off with two Renoirs and a Rembrant from Sweden's National Museum. About five minutes before closing time, one man toting a sub-machine gun walked into the museum and pointed the gun at an unarmed guard, while two other men, who were already inside, grabbed the paintings. As they dashed out the front door, the perpetrators spread nails in the street and then jumped into a high-power motor boat that was docked nearby and disappeared into the winter's night. Vanishing with them was a Rembrandt self-portrait and Renoir's "Conversation" and "Young Parisian." "Either someone ordered those paintings, some millionaire who wants to peek at them in his safe, or the thieves will try and blackmail the museum" by demanding a ransom for the safe return of the paintings, worth $30 million, said Swedish Police Spokesman Bjorn Pihlblad.

BOSTON

* The Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, already known for its collection of Dutch paintings, has acquired more than 660 Dutch landscape prints from the 16th and 17th centuries, making it the country's leading center for the study of Dutch landscape works on paper. The group of prints, known as the Light-Outerbridge Collection, was assembled over the last 25 years by Robert McKenzie Light, a dealer in old master and 19th-century prints and drawings. Light's partner, Donald Graham Outerbridge, an artist who died in 1988, encouraged Light to start the collection.