J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Orazio Gentileschi’s Danaë
The J. Paul Getty Museum paid a record $30.5m (with premium) for Orazio Gentileschi’s Danaë (1621), the top lot at Sotheby’s Old Master auctions in New York in January (est $25m-$35m). The oil painting depicts the scene from Greek mythology in which Zeus transforms himself into a shower of gold to seduce the princess of Argos. It was the first of three commissions for the Genoese nobleman Antonio Sauli. Another work in the set has been in the Getty collection since 1998. Reuniting them “not only makes art-historical sense but multiplies greatly the visual impact of both works”, says Timothy Potts, the director of the museum. “Baroque paintings were often conceived as ensembles that play off each other in both subject matter and composition, as these two works so clearly do.”
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Frida Kahlo’s Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia)
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has purchased its first work by Frida Kahlo, Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia) (1928), for an undisclosed sum. The portrait of two maids from the artist’s childhood home in Mexico City was also the first painting that Kahlo ever sold, to the US industrialist Jackson Cole Phillips in 1929. It is due to go on display after conservation at the museum later this year.
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Street Scene in Front of the Hair Salon
Dresden’s State Art Collections have bought back an Expressionist painting that was confiscated by the Nazis as “degenerate art” from the Dresden City Art Gallery in 1937. The acquisition of Kirchner’s 1926 painting holds “special significance for Dresden,” says Hilke Wagner, the director of the Albertinum museum, where the painting will be displayed, as “the birthplace of German Expressionism”.
With additional reporting by Catherine Hickley