Modern art curator donates 32 works to AGO / CBC News

Ydessa Hendeles, founder of the Ydessa Gallery and a significant collector of contemporary art through her art foundation, has donated 32 works to the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The Toronto-based gallery says it is the most significant gift of contemporary art in the 110-year history of the AGO.

Hendeles has played a role in bringing Canadian contemporary artists to international attention, including Kim Adams, Liz Magor, Ken Lum and John McEwen, whose works are among the collection she is donating to the gallery.

The Hendeles gift also adds works by:

* James Coleman of Ireland.
* Gary Hill of the U.S.
* Thomas Schutte of Germany.
* Bill Viola of the U.S.
* Krzysztof Wodiczko of Poland.
* Giulio Paolini of Italy.
* Ian Carr-Harris of Toronto.
* Betty Goodwin of Montreal.
* Ron Martin of London, Ont.
* Ian Wallace of Vancouver.

AGO chief executive Matthew Teitelbaum said the gift "boldly augments the art we hold in the public trust."

"It adds key works by significant Canadian artists who are important voices in our time, and highlights the many ways that artists use media to create their identity," he said in a statement released Thursday.

Hendeles is a member of the AGO board of trustees and founder of the Toronto-based Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, a privately funded exhibition space for contemporary art. She has been curating and mounting exhibition program from works in her collection for the last 22 years.

The daughter of parents who survived the Holocaust, Hendeles came to Canada after the Second World War and grew up in Toronto. She recalls visiting the AGO with her parents as an important part of her early life.

Her father became affluent in real estate and she became an art historian and curator.
'Art is a civilizing force'

She founded the Ydessa Gallery, a commercial contemporary art gallery, and operated it from 1980 to 1988.

As her collection grew, she opened the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation to the public and it became a forum to advance the cause of contemporary art in Canada.

"My ongoing goal has been to integrate the works of Canadian artists in the context of the international art community. Art bypasses that which is socially acceptable. It helps us live our lives by giving expression to what we cannot do or say. In this way, art is a civilizing force," she said in a statement.

She has been generous in the past, donating works such as Rebecca Horn's The Yellow-Black Race of the Pigments, Barbara Kruger's Untitled (Jam Life into Death) and Kim Adams's Decoy Homes to the AGO.

The AGO plans to exhibit the new collection within the next 18 months.

CBC News

Image  1 - Untitled (Orfeo) by Guilio Paolini of Italy is among the works donated to the AGO by Ydessa Hendeles. (Art Gallery of Ontario) 

Image  2 - Inasmuch As It Is Always Already Taking Place, an audio-video, closed-loop installation for 16 black-and-white TV tubes by Gary Hill of the U.S., is also among the works donated. Inasmuch As It Is Always Already Taking Place, an audio-video, closed-loop installation for 16 black-and-white TV tubes by Gary Hill of the U.S., is also among the works donated. (Art Gallery of Ontario)
 

New Leonardo da Vinci painting 'discovered'

• Portrait may have 500-year-old Leonardo fingerprint on it
• If correct, £12,000 print could be worth tens of millions


* Helen Pidd and agencies
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 October 2009 09.24 BST


Art experts believe a new portrait by Leonardo da Vinci may have been discovered thanks to a 500-year-old fingerprint.
The Head of a young Girl, a painting attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci A Young Girl in Profile in Renaissance Dress, the painting which has been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. Photograph: Christie's

The small picture of a young woman in profile was previously believed to be a German work from the early 19th century and has changed hands in recent years for around £12,000.

But a growing number of leading Leonardo scholars agree the work is almost certainly by the Renaissance figurehead because it appears to have his fingerprint on it. Carbon dating and infrared analysis of Leonardo's techniques back up the theory.

If the scholars are correct, it will be the first major work by Leonardo to be identified for 100 years and will be worth tens of millions of pounds.

Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of the history of art at Oxford University, is so convinced the portrait is a Leonardo that he has written an as yet unpublished 200-page book about it.

Kemp said he first thought the find was "too good to be true – after 40 years in the Leonardo business I thought I'd seen it all".

But gradually, "all the bits fell into place like a well-made piece of furniture. All the drawers slotted in," he told the Times.

The fingerprint, which corresponds to the tip of the index or middle finger, was found by Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, when he examined images taken of the portrait by the revolutionary multispectral camera. Multi-spectral analysis can capture light from frequencies beyond the visible light range, such as infrared, allowing the extraction of information that the human eye fails to capture.

Biro believed the fingerprint, which was found near the top left corner of the work, was "highly comparable" to a fingerprint on Leonardo's St Jerome in the Vatican, the Antiques Trade Gazette reported.

The magazine said infrared analysis showed "significant" stylistic parallels with those in Leonardo's Portrait of a Woman in Profile in Windsor Castle and showed the work was made by a left-handed artist, as Leonardo is known to have been.

Drawn in ink and chalks, the beautiful young woman's costume and elaborate hairstyle reflected Milanese fashion of the late 15th century, and carbon analysis was consistent with that dating, the magazine reported.

Kemp believed that "by a process of elimination", the fresh-faced teenager could be Bianca Sforza, the daughter of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan from 1452-1508, and his mistress Bernardina de Corradis.

Kemp said he thought the portrait, which measures 33cm x 22cm (13in x 9in), must date from around 1496 when, aged 13 or 14, the Bella Principessa married the Duke's army captain, Galeazzo Sanseverino, a patron of Leonardo's. She died four months after the wedding.

It would be Leonardo's first known portrait of the princess, although he painted two of the duke's mistresses Cecilia Gallerani and Lucrezia Crivelli.

The picture was sold at Christie's in New York in 1998, in an Old Master Drawings sale as a Young Girl in Profile in Renaissance Dress, catalogued as German, early 19th century, with an estimate of $12,000-$16,000.

It sold for $19,000 (£12,000) and later went for a similar sum to Canadian-born collector Peter Silverman, in 2007.

Silverman believed there was more to the portrait and delved into the matter after a discussion last year with Dr Nicholas Turner, formerly the keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum.

Silverman told the Times that when he first saw the picture, "my heart started to beat a million times a minute. I immediately thought this could be a Florentine artist. The idea of Leonardo came to me in a flash."

The portrait is due to go on display in an exhibition in Sweden next year.


* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010