“New Yorker Films, the distributor that helped introduce American moviegoers to the works of Bernardo Bertolucci, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Ousmane Sembène, announced on Monday that it was going out of business after 44 years.” Founder Dan Talbot, 82, “said in a telephone interview that the company was going out of business because its library was being sold. It had been pledged as collateral on a loan taken out by its former owner, Madstone Films, which bought New Yorker Films in 2002.”
Tag: 02.24.09
1990 Gardner Museum Heist Is Subject Of Prisoner’s Tip
“An inmate serving a life sentence for murder asserts that just before his friend died 18 years ago, he confided that he was involved in the 1990 theft of more than $300 million worth of artwork from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and had stashed the masterpieces at an undisclosed ‘safe house’ in Maine, according to his lawyer.” But so far, the FBI and the museum say, the tip has led nowhere.
Do You Know Your Literary Lent — And Mardi Gras?
A quiz.
Washington Ballet Shaken By Dancer’s Death
“The Washington Ballet was reeling yesterday from the death of one of its Studio Company members,” Mary Saludares, 20, “who was hit by a car on Friday after a performance at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Md. … Less than two weeks ago, local audiences had seen Saludares dance in the corps of the Washington Ballet’s performances of ‘La Sylphide’ at the Kennedy Center.”
High-End Pawnshops Turn Artworks Into Sources Of Cash
“At a time when stock portfolios are plunging and many homes, even grand ones, have no equity left to borrow against, an increasing number of art owners are realizing that an Old Master or a prime photograph, when used as collateral, can bring in much-needed cash. … This little-known corner of the art business is lightly regulated and highly litigious. But this has not dissuaded clients who have included rich collectors like Veronica Hearst, art galleries and prominent artists themselves, including [Annie] Leibovitz and Julian Schnabel.”
Minus Many Treasures, Iraq’s National Museum Reopens
“Well over half the exhibition halls in Iraq’s National Museum are closed, darkened and in disrepair. And yet the museum, whose looting in 2003 became a symbol of the chaos that followed the American invasion, officially reopened on Monday. Thousands of works from its collection of antiquities and art — some of civilization’s earliest objects — remain lost.”
At YSL Auction, Lots Smash Records As In Days Of, Um, ’08
“The market for high art defied the global economic slump last night when bidders in Paris spent more than €210 million (£184 million) at the start of the sale of the sumptuous collection of the late couturier Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, his partner. In the first night of a three-day auction half a dozen records were broken in the sale of Impressionist and Modern works that was a test of the health of art when most other investments have collapsed.”