Art Dealer

Victor J. Hammer, an art dealer who with his brothers Armand and Harry founded the internationally recognized Hammer Galleries in New York City in the 1920s, has died in Lake Worth, Fla., near his Palm Beach home. He was 83 and died Sunday of heart disease. Dr. Armand Hammer, now chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp., established the gallery with his brothers after his business affiliations with the then-infant Soviet government enabled him to purchase art treasures at a favorable rate.

On May 24 at China's Hong Kong Convention Center an outfit called Intelligence Squared will host a formal debate during the debut of the newest spinoff of the Art Basel franchise of international art fairs. The motion under consideration will be: "The Market Is the Best Judge of Art's Quality. " Honest. That's the topic for debate. I figure the program harbors two, maybe three minutes of chat -- tops. The panel is a retread of a 2011 program held at London's Saatchi Gallery.

A New York art dealer who duped collectors including tennis star John McEnroe and actor Robert De Niro out of more than $100 million was sentenced Tuesday to at least six years in prison. Lawrence Salander, 61, pleaded guilty in March in New York Supreme Court to an array of schemes, such as selling shares of the same work of art to multiple owners and selling artwork that did not belong to him and pocketing the proceeds. Salander was sentenced to between six and 18 years in prison and must also pay $120 million in restitution to victims under a plea agreement.

"It wasn't because of my 'advanced' age that my ankle broke. " - New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter , 38 and out until at least the All-Star break, scoffing at the question of whether he ponders his baseball mortality. - "I thought David Ortiz's choice of words was outstanding. " - Commissioner Bud Selig , on Ortiz's "This is our [bleeping] city" oratory before the Red Sox played their first home game after the Boston Marathon bombings. - "I was engaged in discussions in the world about pictures, as in paintings, not pitchers, guys who can or can't paint the strike zone.

On May 24 at China's Hong Kong Convention Center an outfit called Intelligence Squared will host a formal debate during the debut of the newest spinoff of the Art Basel franchise of international art fairs. The motion under consideration will be: "The Market Is the Best Judge of Art's Quality. " Honest. That's the topic for debate. I figure the program harbors two, maybe three minutes of chat -- tops. The panel is a retread of a 2011 program held at London's Saatchi Gallery.

Ruth Schaffner, 81, contemporary art dealer in California and Africa. Born Ruth Staudinger in Germany, she fled to France at the outset of World War II and was educated there. Later she moved to New York City where she was a commercial photographer of children. One of her major projects was photographing youngsters for the classic series of Ivory Soap commercials. She married Joseph Schaffner of the Hart Schaffner & Marx clothing fortune, and after his death in 1972 opened her art gallery.

On a defense motion, the preliminary hearing of West Hollywood art dealer Douglas James Chrismas in Los Angeles Municipal court has been continued until June 30. The hearing had been scheduled to begin Tuesday. Chrismas, 42, faces seven counts of felony grand theft arising out of allegations that he stole more than $1 million in artworks by such leading contemporary artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and others.

The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the fatal shooting of a Granada Hills resident who was followed home from a night business meeting and held up in his driveway. The victim, Fritz Waninger, 39, an art dealer, was shot Feb. 27 as he got out of his car. Authorities said it was the most violent of 17 follow-home robberies in affluent neighborhoods north of the Simi Valley Freeway between December and early March.

Pierre Matisse, an art dealer whose renowned Manhattan gallery was the United States' most distinguished repository for the works of such contemporary masters as Marc Chagall, Joan Miro, Balthus, Jean Dubuffet and others, has died at age 89. Matisse, the younger of two sons of the painter Henri Matisse, died Wednesday at Princess Grace Hospital in Monaco, not far from his home in St. Jean-Cap Ferrat, France, hospital officials said. The cause of death was not disclosed.

David Stary-Sheets, 60, former creator of custom furniture who became an art dealer and expert on the California Regionalist movement. The son of premier Southern California realist painter Millard Sheets, he had operated Stary-Sheets Fine Art Gallery with his wife, Susan, for the last decade.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has proposed acquiring the troubled Museum of Contemporary Art - a move that would combine the biggest art collection west of the Mississippi with one of the world's most prestigious troves of contemporary art. The acquisition could put to rest long-standing concerns over the financial viability of the Museum of Contemporary Art, or MOCA. But it also faces potential opposition from the region's most influential art patron, billionaire Eli Broad.

One of the biggest problems in our politics is that people don't think for themselves. We let radio and television hosts, pundits and politicians tell us what to believe. And one of the biggest problems in our arts is that people don't enjoy for themselves. We let museum curators, gallery owners, critics and professors tell us what to feel. A recent battle in the art world illustrates the point. The billionaire Ronald Perelman is suing the multimillionaire art dealer Larry Gagosian on the grounds, among others, that Gagosian overvalued an unfinished sculpture of Popeye (yes, the Sailor Man)

Art thieves, beware: Savvy U.K. art sleuth Christopher Marinello is hot on your trail. Marinello recently recovered a stolen Impressionist painting -- "Le Jardin" by French artist Matisse -- which is valued at nearly $1 million, Reuters reported on Monday. The painting was stolen from Stockholm's Moderna Museet in 1987 when, in the middle of the night, thieves hacked their way into the museum with a sledgehammer.  It was retrieved in London on Thursday. At the time, the robbery was reported to the Art Loss Register, the world's largest international private database of stolen and missing artwork, as well as to the international police organization Interpol.

The year 2012 was an eventful one for the Los Angeles arts scene. The cultural landscape continued to reverberate from the economic shifts of the past few years. Many organizations continued to struggle financially. But artists struggle even in the best of times, and so local arts groups did what they normally do -- they kept on creating. Best of 2012: Jazz |  Art  |  Theater  |  Dance  |  Classical music As it did last year, the Museum of Contemporary Art dominated cultural headlines.

The sleek logo for LACMA's “art+film” gala does a beautiful job of balancing “art” and “film,” giving each word equal space around the plus sign. The museum gala that took place Saturday night under that rubric was another story: The entertainment world easily outshone the art world, and the evening designed to celebrate artist Ed Ruscha alongside filmmaker Stanley Kubrick became mainly a Kubrick odyssey, to borrow the title of the screening series that accompanies LACMA's new Kubrick exhibition.

A painting by American artist Roy Lichtenstein of a large electric cord, valued at some $4 million, is back with its rightful owner 42 years after it vanished while in the hands of an art restorer. Officials from the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan handed the work over to a smiling Barbara Bertozzi Castelli on Tuesday, ending a mystery that began in 1970 when Castelli's late husband, art dealer Leo Castelli, sent the painting out for cleaning. Castelli had acquired the painting in the 1960s for about $750 and had displayed it at his New York City gallery.

Archives of the Parisian art dealer who represented Picasso, Matisse and other early French modernists will be donated to the Museum of Modern Art for scholarly research, the museum announced. The Paul Rosenberg Archives encompass "a unique assemblage of materials" for the study of early 20th century French art and for "documenting the provenance of hundreds of paintings and sculptures," MoMA said in a statement about the Rosenberg family bequest.

Spencer A. Samuels, world-renowned art dealer and expert on Old Masters who advised J. Paul Getty on his art acquisitions and discovered an original 17th century Vermeer oil painting, has died. He was 85. Samuels, who moved to Santa Monica from New York a few years ago, died Saturday of pneumonia at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, according to his cousin, Eugene S. Jones.

A recently found work attributed to Gustav Klimt is inspiring a good amount of skepticism in the art world regarding the authenticity of the piece. The ceiling painting, which depicts a cherub playing a trumpet, was recently rediscovered in a garage near the Austrian city of Linz, and was expected to head to auction. Reports in the Austrian media attributed the work to Klimt. But some believe the work was actually created by Ernst Klimt, the brother of the famed Viennese artist.

As a young man, Roger Medearis had a dream - to be an artist. Studying under the noted Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute, his prospects seemed good. Then came World War II, and he served on the home front for the Navy, then the Army. When the war was over, he found to his disappointment that the folksy nostalgia of Regionalism had fallen out of favor, replaced in large part by the brash brush strokes of Abstract Expressionism. In 1950 Medearis gave up art and became a salesman, and in 1958 he moved to California.