Georges Braque was a major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. His most notable contributions were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1905, and the role he played in the development of Cubism. Braque's work between 1908 and 1912 is closely associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was partially eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of Picasso.
José Victoriano González-Pérez , better known as Juan Gris, was a Spanish painter born in Madrid who lived and worked in France for most of his active period. Closely connected to the innovative artistic genre Cubism, his works are among the movement's most distinctive.
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.
Art theft, sometimes called artnapping, is the stealing of paintings, sculptures, or other forms of visual art from galleries, museums or other public and private locations. Stolen art is often resold or used by criminals as collateral to secure loans. Only a small percentage of stolen art is recovered—an estimated 10%. Many nations operate police squads to investigate art theft and illegal trade in stolen art and antiquities.
Vincenzo Peruggia was an Italian museum worker, artist and thief, most famous for stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum in Paris on 21 August 1911.
The Salon d'Automne, or Société du Salon d'automne, is an art exhibition held annually in Paris. Since 2011, it is held on the Champs-Élysées, between the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, in mid-October. The first Salon d'Automne was created in 1903 by Frantz Jourdain, with Hector Guimard, George Desvallières, Eugène Carrière, Félix Vallotton, Édouard Vuillard, Eugène Chigot and Maison Jansen.
Stéphane Breitwieser is a French art thief and author, notorious for his art thefts between 1995 and 2001. He admitted to stealing 239 artworks and other exhibits from 172 museums while travelling around Europe and working as a waiter, an average of one theft every 15 days. The Guardian called him "arguably the world's most consistent art thief". He has also been called "one of the most prolific and successful art thieves who have ever lived", and "one of the greatest art thieves of all time". His thefts resulted in the destruction of many works of art, destroyed by his family to conceal evidence of his crimes.
The Kunsthal is an art space in Rotterdam. It opened in 1992.
Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris or MAM Paris, is a major municipal museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art of the 20th and 21st centuries, including monumental murals by Raoul Dufy, Gaston Suisse, and Henri Matisse. It is located at 11, Avenue du Président Wilson in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
The year 2010 in art involves some significant events.
Fauvism is a style of painting and an art movement that emerged in France at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the style of les Fauves, a group of modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1904 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1905–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were André Derain and Henri Matisse.
Le pigeon aux petit pois, sometimes referred to as Dove with green peas, is a 1911 oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso. It is an example of Picasso's Cubist works and has an estimated value of €23 million. The painting was one of five artworks stolen from the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris on 20 May 2010, which together are valued at €100 million. It has so far not been recovered and its whereabouts remain unknown.
The Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art (LaM), formerly known as Villeneuve d'Ascq Museum of Modern Art, is an art museum in Villeneuve d'Ascq, France.
Berthe Weill was a French art dealer who played a vital role in the creation of the market for twentieth-century art with the manifestation of the Parisian Avant-Garde. Although she is much less known than her well-established competitors like Ambroise Vollard, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Paul Rosenberg, she may be credited with producing the first sales in Paris for Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse and with providing Amedeo Modigliani with the only solo exhibition in his lifetime.
The Musée Cantini is a museum in Marseille that has been open to the public since 1936. The museum specializes in modern art, especially paintings from the first half of the twentieth century.
Proto-Cubism is an intermediary transition phase in the history of art chronologically extending from 1906 to 1910. Evidence suggests that the production of proto-Cubist paintings resulted from a wide-ranging series of experiments, circumstances, influences and conditions, rather than from one isolated static event, trajectory, artist or discourse. With its roots stemming from at least the late 19th century, this period is characterized by a move towards the radical geometrization of form and a reduction or limitation of the color palette. It is essentially the first experimental and exploratory phase of an art movement that would become altogether more extreme, known from the spring of 1911 as Cubism.
The theft of The Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria took place on 2 August 1986 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The stolen work was one of a series of paintings by Pablo Picasso all known as The Weeping Woman and had been purchased by the gallery for A$1.6 million in 1985—at the time the highest price paid by an Australian art gallery for an artwork. A group calling itself "Australian Cultural Terrorists" claimed responsibility, making a number of demands in letters to the then-Victorian Minister for the Arts, Race Mathews. The demands included increases to funding for the arts; threats were made that the painting would be destroyed. After an anonymous tip-off to police, the painting was found undamaged in a locker at Spencer Street railway station on 19 August 1986. The theft still remains unsolved.
Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques, is a book written by Guillaume Apollinaire between 1905 and 1912, published in 1913. This was the third major text on Cubism; following Du "Cubisme" by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger (1912); and André Salmon, Histoire anecdotique du cubisme (1912).
Woman's Head is a 1939 oil-on-canvas painting by Pablo Picasso. It is a depiction of Dora Maar, Picasso's companion at the time. Picasso donated the work to the people of Greece in recognition of their resistance against the Axis during the Second World War. Woman's Head was first exhibited in 1949, alongside other donated works, at the Institut Français in Athens. It was not shown again until an exhibition starting in 1980 at the National Gallery and was on continuous show from 2011 until the gallery closed for renovation in 2012. In January 2012 Woman's Head was stolen from the closed gallery, alongside a painting by Piet Mondrian. It was recovered from a gorge near Athens in June 2021 and the alleged thief was arrested.
