Salvador Dali Portrait by Dan Twyman

The original painting is a 30" x 40" on stretched canvas and was

hand painted by Dan Twyman

Dan hand drew the image on the canvas with pencil and then hand painted 

colors with brush and acrylic paints.

You can order prints by clicking the image on the website here. 

If you have any questions for the artist

or would like to see other works by this artist, send an Email here.

Winslow Homer Painting to be sold

By Associated Press, Published: April 12

WILMINGTON, Del. — One of the Delaware Art Museum’s most treasured works has been taken off the museum’s collections database as the museum prepares to sell artworks to repay debt and replenish its endowment.

The News Journal  reported Saturday that Winslow Homer’s painting “Milking Time” disappeared from the museum’s collections database. But museum officials won’t confirm whether the 1875 painting is among the works to be sold.

Museum and art experts said the change likely signals the painting of rural America will be sold. On Saturday, the painting of a milkmaid and child looking at cows was no longer hanging in the museum.

Board members have said they won’t release the names of works to be sold because it could lower their value on the market. Museum CEO Mike Miller would not explain why Homer’s painting was removed.

“You can make your own speculations,” he said.

The museum has said it’s planning to sell as many as four artworks by October to repay nearly $20 million in debt from a 2005 expansion. Museum leaders said the only other alternative was to shut down.

The Association of Art Museum Directors has strongly opposed the museum board’s decision to sell artworks. The move violates national museum standards and the Delaware museum’s own collections policy. It could result in sanctions or a possible loss of the museum’s accreditation.

“Milking Time” was purchased in 1967 using a bank loan and donations from the group Friends of Art, Miller said. Art experts said it’s a “landmark painting” for Homer and that it is extremely rare for a Homer piece of that quality to leave a museum.

Danielle Rice, the museum’s former executive director, said that shortly after she began leading the museum in 2005, trustees began pressuring her to sell art to pay off construction debt. Rice said she threatened to resign and urged trustees to pursue alternatives.

“You just basically keep knocking on doors,” she said. “You can always get a mortgage.”

The state has declined to intervene to stop the art sale or provide funding to the museum. At least one trustee has met with Gov. Jack Markell to discuss a state takeover of the museum, Miller said. But Markell said budgetary constraints wouldn’t allow state assistance.

Jeffrey Fuller, a Philadelphia-based art appraiser, said he encouraged the Delaware museum to sell lesser works that are kept in storage, rather than the most valuable pieces.

“I guess it’s just an easy way out,” he said.

Largest outdoor art show Five U.S. museums unite for Art Everywhere

By Deborah Vankin

April 6, 2014, 4:15 p.m.

Among the denim-clad glamour girls and blockbuster movie stars staring down from the billboards of the Sunset Strip, images of great American artworks will be displayed this summer in what organizers are calling “the largest outdoor art show ever conceived.”

Five museums — the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York — have come together with the Outdoor Advertising Assn. of America to execute Art Everywhere, a sweeping, interactive art campaign.

Along with billboards in Hollywood, the images will be displayed in Times Square and bus stops, subway platforms and signs around the country.

ART: Can you guess the high price?

Starting Monday, the public will be invited to vote on its favorite American artworks from a master list of 100 that the museums have curated from their combined collections, the frenetic color-drippings of Jackson Pollock and the fluid curves of Georgia O’Keeffe’s oil blossoms among them. The 50 most popular images will then be featured throughout August on about 50,000 billboards and signs in select U.S. cities.

The campaign, which follows a similar progam in England last year that was a collaboration between Innocent Drinks co-founder Richard Reed, arts fundraiser the Art Fund, Tate, and the U.K. out of home advertising industry, may be a publicity play for the museums, but it’s also an effort to raise awareness of art nationwide.

“Images out of sight may be out of mind,” LACMA Director Michael Govan said. “Art Everywhere puts marvelously diverse American ideas and stories told through images in the open air with public involvement — reminding us of the many more great images that are accessible in our museums.”

Voters will be asked to consider not just paintings but photographs, multimedia works, drawings on paper and decorative objects from the 18th century to 2008. Grant Wood’s now-iconic “American Gothic,” of a rigid-looking farmer clutching a pitchfork beside his daughter, was nominated by the Art Institute of Chicago. LACMA’s black and white John Baldessari photograph from the mid-’60s, “Wrong,” is also in the mix.

CHEATSHEET: Spring 2014 arts preview

“In a way, it’s a mini history of American art — and an opportunity for people to identify which works resonate for them personally,” said Dallas Museum of Art Director Maxwell L. Anderson. “I hope families and individuals will have a fresh look at our collective cultural heritage and see the potential in their lives of visiting museums and appreciating great works of art.”

Voting will take place at ArtEverywhereUS.org, where the final list of artworks will be announced June 20. Among the artists whose works are on the ballot: Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Ed Ruscha, Catherine Opie, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman and Frank Lloyd Wright.

“The beauty of this project,” Govan said, “is that we can share these masterpieces of American art with people all around L.A. and the rest of the country — no admission necessary.”

Flea market Renoir returns to the Baltimore Museum of Art six decades after its theft

By Ian Shapira

The tiny Renoir that was supposedly purchased for $7 at a flea market and captivated art mystery lovers around the world went back on display Thursday at the Baltimore Museum of Art, more than 62 years after it wasstolen from the building.

BMA officials unveiled “On the Shore of the Seine,” a 51 / 2-by-9-inch oil painting, as part of its newest exhibit, “The Renoir Returns.”

“It’s a moment we’ve been looking forward to,” BMA Director Doreen Bolger told a media horde, many of whom wielded cameras larger than the painting.

The museum is hoping to capitalize on the stolen painting’s improbable saga, which generated headlines far and wide and even inspired an episode of “The Simpsons” this month. As part of the fanfare, the BMA launched a blog in which readers are invited to invent fictional chapters about the painting’s theft — the first of which was penned by a renowned Baltimore crime writer, David Simon.

The impressionist landscape, which Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted on a linen napkin for his mistress at a cafe along the Seine in 1879, was originally purchased by longtime BMA donor Saidie A. May at a Paris gallery and donated to the museum in 1937. While it was on exhibit on Nov. 17, 1951, the painting was somehow spirited out of the building. The thief was never found.

Decades passed, and the BMA forgot about the Renoir. The museum lost track of records showing that it had reported the piece stolen, and an insurance claim had been paid.

But in 2012, the Renoir suddenly vaulted into the news when Martha Fuqua — a driving teacher in Loudoun County, Va., who initially concealed her identity with the alias “Renoir Girl” — said she had unwittingly bought the painting at a West Virginia flea market. The Potomack Company, an Alexandria auction house, was scheduled to sell the flea market find for as much as $100,000, which attracted buyers from Japan, China and Europe.

Days before the auction, however, a Washington Post reporter discovered documents at the BMA’s library showing that the museum had once owned and exhibited the painting. Armed with the paperwork, the BMA found records showing that its staff had reported the painting stolen.

The news prompted the auction house to cancel the sale. The FBI seized the Renoir, and questions about the painting’s murky provenance began to mount.

Friends of Fuqua’s mother, Marcia Fouquet, told The Post that they had seen the Renoir hanging in the mother’s Fairfax County home during the 1980s and 1990s. Fouquet, a painter, attended art college in Baltimore at the time of the Renoir’s theft.

Fuqua’s brother, Matt Fuqua, said that before their mother’s death last year, she told her daughter to “return the painting to its rightful owner — the museum — so all of this goes away.”

Martha Fuqua, 52, declined to comment. She battled in federal court to hang on to the painting, arguing that she was an “innocent owner” who could not have known that the painting was stolen. In January, a judge in U.S. Eastern District Court in Alexandria ordered that the painting be returned to the museum.

The FBI said this week that it has closed its investigation into the theft. Gregg Horner, the special agent in charge of the Renoir case, said it was too difficult to track down anyone who might have known about the painting’s theft because so many people who worked at the museum in the 1950s are dead. Horner said he interviewed Fouquet before she died but did not ask her whether she’d had a role in the painting’s disappearance or had the painting hanging in her home.

“She fell ill quickly, and I didn’t feel [asking those questions] was appropriate,” he said.

On Thursday, the painting’s strange journey was part of its appeal.

“The Renoir Returns” features more than 20 artworks May donated to the BMA, including an oil sketch by Georges Seurat she had purchased with “On the Shore of the Seine” at the same Paris art gallery. The exhibit is open only to museum members until Sunday, when it will open to the public. One display case features May’s diary entry in which she writes about having purchased the piece, as well as the $2,000 receipt for the Renoir and the Seurat.

Susan Helen Adler, one of May’s great-great-nieces and the author of May’s biography, said she was grateful that the museum was honoring her ancestor and the Renoir.

“Recognition of what Saidie May did for this museum is long overdue. It’s fantastic,” she said. “It’s unfortunate that it had to be this way, that it took a stolen painting and the publicity around that painting to bring [attention to] what May did for the museum.”

Katy Rothkopf, the museum’s senior curator of European painting and sculpture, said that the Renoir needed only a light cleaning when it was returned. “It was an absolute thrill to finally be able to get it here,” she said. “It’s such a lovely painting, and it really sparkles. It’s going to play such a great role here because it fills out our collection of Renoirs.”

It may also serve as a marketing tool to boost museum membership. In the days leading to the opening of “The Renoir Returns,” the BMA blasted out e-mails with a picture of the gold-framed Renoir. “Join today!” the e-mails urged. “Receive a free Renoir magnet. Plus save 50% on a mug or a print featuring the Renoir.”

A Renoir mug that, no doubt, will wind up one of these days in a flea market.

Salvador Dali

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalí de Pubol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), known as Salvador Dalí (Catalan pronunciation: , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres, Spain.
Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.
Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to an "Arab lineage", claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.
Dalí was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and grandiose behavior. His eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork, to the dismay of those who held his work in high esteem, and to the irritation of his critics.

Guelph Treasure still in limbo. Stolen Nazi Art some say was sold legally

BERLIN — It’s a medieval treasure trove worth an estimated quarter of a billion dollars, filled with gold crosses studded with gems and intricate silverwork. For years, it’s been at the centre of a dispute between a Berlin museum foundation and the heirs of Holocaust-era Jewish art dealers.
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