Word: last
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even for great American prose writers, the theatrical muse has been a bitch. Henry James' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's plays were disappointments; Saul Bellow's The Last Analysis lasted less than a month. Thus Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer and Collaborator Eve Friedman find themselves in distinguished company with Teibele and Her Demon, a "fable" for Broadway...
...Icebergs, a flamboyant canvas by one of America's best landscapists, was bought by Texas Oilman Lamar Hunt. Despite its size (9 ft. by 5 ft.), weight (more than 500 lbs. with frame) and fame, the painting had disappeared for more than a century until it was rediscovered last June in a penny-pinched English juvenile home...
American folk art, however humble its origin, is soaring in value as well-crafted objects like pewter pots, duck decoys, quilts and scrimshaw (erotic examples in particular) become ever scarcer. Photographs are commanding fine arts prices; an original print of Ansel Adams' Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico sold last week for a record $22,000. "We can see the day when a single photograph will fetch $100,000," says Philippe Garner, a Sotheby's photographic expert. Almost any object from the once scorned 19th century now seems as precious as Suez Canal Co. stock was in its heyday. Twenty...
What kind of people are spending for such things? And why? An immensely wealthy individual-a Getty, a Norton Simon, a Mellon-finds in great art what eluded Alexander of Macedon-a last world to conquer. It is a lust to which overachievers have been notoriously susceptible, from Catherine the Great, who built Leningrad's incomparable Hermitage ("I am not a nibbler but a glutton") to U.S. Industrialist Joseph Hirshhorn, the great benefactor of the Smithsonian ("I have a madman's rage for art"). To be sure, such stupendous collectors and donors still make record purchases...
Some of the canniest collectors of all are thieves, whose acquisitions from museums, galleries, churches and private homes are seldom recovered, despite intensive international police work. Interpol has an FBI-style Most Wanted list of stolen art works, some dating from 1938. Last week a priceless Tintoretto painting missing for nearly 30 years was recovered by the FBI in New York...