History
Who obtained the painting in the 1940s?
Dora Maar au Chat
The Death of Captain James Cook (Zoffany) André Lanskoy Ruin at Daphne Dora Maar au Chat Post-painterly abstraction
The_Death_of_Captain_James_Cook_(Zoffany)-Provenance André_Lanskoy-Abstract Ruin_at_Daphne-Abstract Dora_Maar_au_Chat-History Post-painterly_abstraction-Abstract
Zoffany's painting was obtained in its unfinished state by Cook's widow. When she died in 1835 the painting was not mentioned specifically and it was left to John Leach Bennet who gave it to Greenwich Hospital. The painting is now in the collection of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London. 
André Lanskoy (31 March 1902 – 24 August 1976) was a Russian painter and printmaker who worked in France. He is associated with the School of Paris and Tachisme, an abstract painting movement that began during the 1940s. 
Ruin at Daphne is a painting by the American artist Edwin Dickinson (1891–1978). His major painting of the 1940s, the work occupied Dickinson between 1943 and 1953. The painting, which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is an architectural fantasy in red and gray tones. 
The canvas (50 ½ by 37 ½ inches / 128.3 cm by 95.3 cm) was one of many portraits of Dora Maar painted by Pablo Picasso over their nearly decade-long relationship. Picasso fell in love with the 29-year old Maar at the age of 55 and soon began living with her. This painting was done during the year 1941, when the Nazis were occupying France. In the 1940s, the painting was obtained by Chicago collectors Leigh and Mary Block. They sold the painting in 1963 After that, the painting was never shown until the 21st century. During 2005 and 2006, "Dora Maar au Chat", then owned by the Gidwitz family of Chicago, was shown worldwide as part of Sotheby's exhibitions in London, Hong Kong and New York. It came up for sale in an auction of Impressionist/Modern works held at Sotheby's on May 3, 2006 in New York and making it the second-highest price ever paid for a painting at auction. An anonymous Russian bidder present at the New York auction won the work with a final bid of US$95,216,000, well exceeding the pre-auction US$50 million estimates. The identity of the bidder, who spent more than US$100 million in total, and purchased an 1883 Monet seascape and a 1978 Chagall in addition to the Picasso, was a topic of much speculation. Apparently a novice bidder, though possibly acting as an agent for a more well-known collector, the anonymous buyer may have been unknown at the start of the auction even to Sotheby's officials. As of mid-2007, the ownership of the "Dora Maar au Chat" is still unknown to the general public, although rumors have focused on the Georgian mining magnate and current Prime Minister of Georgia Bidzina (Boris) Ivanishvili, who sold his Moscow bank a week before the auction for $550 m.
Post-painterly abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto. Greenberg had perceived that there was a new movement in painting that derived from the abstract expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s but "favored openness or clarity" as opposed to the dense painterly surfaces of that painting style. The 31 artists in the exhibition included Walter Darby Bannard, Jack Bush, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Friedel Dzubas, Paul Feeley, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Nicholas Krushenick, Alexander Liberman, Morris Louis, Arthur Fortescue McKay, Howard Mehring, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Ray Parker, David Simpson, Albert Stadler, Frank Stella, Mason Wells, Emerson Woelffer, and a number of other American and Canadian artists who were becoming well known in the 1960s. Among the prior generation of contemporary artists, Barnett Newman has been singled out as one who anticipated "some of the characteristics of post-painterly abstraction. "As painting continued to move in different directions, initially away from abstract expressionism, powered by the spirit of innovation of the time, the term "post-painterly abstraction", which had obtained some currency in the 1960s, was gradually supplanted by minimalism, hard-edge painting, lyrical abstraction, and color field painting. 