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Art Business News, March, 2001 by Emmett Murphy

SAN FRANCISCO

* The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has added nine important wall drawings and structures and 16 working drawings by the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt to its permanent holdings. "Buying works directly from artists has increasingly become our modus operandi," said David A. Ross, the museum's director. "These are works the artists have felt particularly strongly about, which is why they have saved them." Ross went on to add, "We now have the largest collection of LeWitts of any museum in the country. Within our community of collectors, we are hoping that about seven or eight more LeWitts will eventually come to us."

PHILADELPHIA

* The J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles bailed out the troubled Barnes Collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist works in Merion, Pa., with a grant of $500,000. Bernard Watson, president of the board of the Barnes Foundation, said that the Getty money would be used to devise a restruction plan and to catalog its holdings. The Pennsylvania Orphans Court, which oversees the charitable trust, will certainly also be asked to loosen Albert C. Barnes' own strict rules, which limit visitors to 1,200 a week and the ticket price to $5.

HAVANA, CUBA

* Fidel Castro has paid homage to John Lennon by unveiling a new statue of the late Beatle here. The ceremony in El Vedado Park coincided with the 20th anniversary of Lennon's assassination at the end of 1980 outside the Dakota apartment building in New York where the musician lived. The Cuban president praised Lennon as "a revolutionary whose thinking made him great. "The statue is of a long-haired Lennon sitting casually on a park bench, wearing jeans and his trademark wire-rimmed round glasses.

PARIS

* Fifteen paintings by Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dali were damaged when a deadly fire swept through the home of a longtime friend of the artist. Artist and singer Amanda Lear, who modeled for Dali in the 1960s and `70s, was not at home when the fire broke out in the farmhouse, which the artist designed. But her husband, Alain Philippe Malagnac d'Argens, 50, and a 20-year-old family friend died in the blaze, which destroyed half of the four-story building. Police did not say which paintings were destroyed, nor did they give an estimate for the damage. They said the fire did not appear to be suspicious.

* Fourteen months after being bought by LVMH-Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Phillips, the emerging third-place auction house, is planning to merge with de Pury & Luxembourg, the Geneva-based private dealer run by two former top Sotheby's officials. The newly formed LVMH subsidiary, to be called Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg, will position itself as a boutique firm specializing in the top end of the art and antiques market. Simon de Pery, 49, the tri-lingual auctioneer and former chairman of Sotheby's Europe, will be its world-wide chairman. Daniella Luxembourg, 50, the former deputy chairman of Sotheby's Switzerland, will be its worldwide president.

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