Old masters and new worlds, with lawyers

3/5/2025

This year got off to a slow start for art markets. Christie’s Old Masters sale, considered a bellwether for art markets in general, produced better numbers than last year but not much better. Lawyers were blamed. 

The would-be star of the sale, El Greco’s “Saint Sebastian,” was estimated by Christie’s to sell for between $7 and $9 million. The painting was pulled at the last minute because of legal wrangling by the Prime Minister of Romania, who claimed that King Carol I of Romania (1866-1914) was the rightful owner.

The somber “Portrait of George the Bearded, Duke of Saxony” attributed to Lucas Cranach sold for $260,000 ($327,600 with fees), settling a dispute over ownership between the Allentown Art Museum and the heirs of Henry and Hertha Bromberg, whose forebears were forced to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s without any art.  

~ Valparaiso University has taken controversial steps to sell notable works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Childe Hassam and Frederic E. Church from the collection of its Brauer Museum of Art. That’s part of a plan to help stabilize the finances of the Indiana college, which, like most private colleges, is struggling with declining enrollment. The school might even close the museum permanently.

That Lutheran university has been losing students since it bent to woke pressures and changed its mascot from Crusaders to Beacon the Golden Retriever and Beacon the Chocolate Labrador. Spike the Drake Bulldog swept those Indiana dogs in both men’s and women’s basketball this year. 

~ In Des Moines, TJ Moberg of Moberg Gallery told us that a slow local market has pushed him to encourage gallery artists to expand into less expensive media, particularly works on paper. 

Chris Vance, a Des Moines artist who is immune to market trends, opens his annual show at Moberg on March 7. Vance is so popular that much of his show is sold out before the exhibition begins. 

“He has collectors who don’t collect anything else,” Moberg says. These shows are always one of the biggest and happiest events of the year in Iowa art. 

~ British sculptor Jason de Caires Taylor is trying to add value to his boat sculptures by drowning them. Partnering with Grenada, he sank 30 boat sculptures five meters deep in the Caribbean. His “A World Adrift” is this summer’s hottest art show for travelers and divers. It beats out “Jane Austen at 250” in multiple sites in Britain, particularly in Bath, and “Gatsby at 100” in the Hamptons. 

~ On the subject of travelers, we checked out Hera Hyesang Park’s itinerary when she was announced for the title role in Des Moines Metro Opera’s “The Cunning Little Vixen” this summer. This season Park will be featured with the LA Philharmonic, with Boston Baroque, at Edinburgh’s International Festival, with San Diego Symphony, NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, at the Hungarian State Opera, with Orchestre National de Bordeaux Aquitaine, at Staatsoper Hamburg, the Metropolitan Opera in NYC, in South Korea, and in London at St. John’s Smith’s Square.

“Vixen” is composer Leoš Janáček’s only expedition into light opera. Park’s schedule suggests a new interpretation for the vixen’s tragic death — exhaustion.

~ Des Moines Art Center debuted its new exhibition after press time for us and after a rare postponement for the museum. Scheduled for Valentine’s Day, it was pushed back one week rather last minute. The name of the show is “Time Travelers,” ironically or not.

~ Des Moines Symphony celebrates the end of winter with a concert about new worlds and awakenings: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s epic “Song of Hiawatha” with a choral part often compared to Handl’s Messiah; Handl himself with “Concerto for Cello” featuring soloist Sterling Elliott who has played the piece for just about every major symphony in America; and Dvorak’s New World Symphony.

Both “Song of Hiawatha” and Dvorak’s symphony were among the very first classical music creations based on American folk and hymnal music. March 8 and 9 at the Civic Center. ♦