She’s almost 90 and still living very much in the present, quietly painting every day in her West Side studio. Yet Françoise Gilot — Picasso’s muse and lover and the mother of two of his children — is about to revisit her past.

In May, John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, together with Valentina Castellani, a director of the Gagosian Gallery, will present an exhibition that chronicles the years when Ms. Gilot and Picasso were together — from roughly 1943 through 1952 — living in Vallauris, a small hillside town near Cannes in the south of France. It will be the gallery’s fourth Picasso exhibition and will include paintings, sculptures, drawings, pottery and prints.

Ms. Gilot doesn’t mind dredging up what must seem like many lifetimes ago. “When you are old your life has different chapters,” she said the other day, standing near a colorful abstract painting perched on an easel.

“I was an artist before I ever met Picasso,” she emphatically explained. Yet those years “are very much a part of my life.”

Like other blockbuster shows that are proliferating among some of today’s most prosperous galleries, Mr. Richardson believes the exhibition will be an eye-opener because “nobody realizes the tremendous importance of Françoise to Picasso during that whole period.”

The show, which will open at Gagosian’s newly renovated Madison Avenue gallery, is poised to generate as much excitement as the other Picasso shows that Mr. Richardson has masterminded. (The first, “Picasso: Mosqueteros,” in 2009 drew more than 100,000 visitors, a figure more normally associated with a museum exhibition.)

And the show, like all the others, will be a costly undertaking that involves getting loans from museums, publishing a lavish catalog with scholarly essays and bringing in an architect to redesign the gallery. It’s a lot of work and expense. Often dealers say nothing is for sale; generally, however, one or two works are available — at the right price — making these shows profitable after all.

Larry Gagosian says he believes that either way, the headaches were worth it. “Now we get offered all kinds of Picassos,” he said. “Everything from a print worth $4,000 to, well, the sky’s the limit.”

With his network of 11 galleries around the world, Mr. Gagosian is by far the most visible of all the dealers presenting these kinds of crowd-pleasing shows. But other blue-chip galleries including Acquavella and Pace have been presenting them on and off for decades. “I’ll never forget in the early ’70s when we had a Matisse show,” William Acquavella recalled. “We had people waiting on line in the pouring rain.”

His gallery, just two blocks north of Gagosian’s Madison Avenue headquarters, is attracting crowds right now with “Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism,” which opened on Oct. 12. The show, which was organized by Dieter Buchhart, an Austrian curator, includes 42 paintings, many on loan from museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Tate in London. “It’s good advertising,” Mr. Acquavella said. “Braque is an amazing artist and hasn’t really gotten his due.”

“There’s one thing I’ve heard over and over again here,” says Edward Saywell, the top contemporary art curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, who is showing off works by Ellsworth Kelly, Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman and other contemporary artists in his domain, including many new ones. “They say, ‘This can’t be Boston,’ and I say, ‘Yes, it really is.’ ”

The people in Mr. Saywell’s tale are marveling at the museum’s new Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art, an airy 80,000 square-foot space that opened in mid-September, but they may as well be talking about the city as a whole. Boston is known for its wealth of Old Masters, Impressionist paintings and historic American art, not for works by living artists.

But mark fall 2011 as the moment that may change that reputation, and not just because of the Linde wing, whose 24-hour inaugural party managed to muster a small crowd even at 3 a.m., when tickets cost $50, compared with $200 at 7 p.m. (If they had waited until 7 a.m., tickets were free.)

Since September, the Institute of Contemporary Art has been celebrating its 75th birthday and its fifth year in new home, where attendance has shot up to 200,000 a year from 20,000 in its previous site. “Before we got the new building, Jill used to say we were striving to be marginal,” says Barbara Lee, a trustee, referring to the institute’s director, Jill Medvedow.

Now, the Institute of Contemporary Art is credited with helping to revitalize Boston’s waterfront. And under its chief curator, Helen Molesworth, who was hired last year, it is mounting more ambitious exhibitions with prestigious partners like the Tate Modern in London, an important step to gaining influence nationally and internationally.

More change is coming. In January, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a Venetian-style palazzo full of masterpieces from earlier eras, will open a glass-walled building with new gallery space for temporary exhibitions, including contemporary art.

The List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will soon have a new director, Paul Ha, who has been the leader of the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis in Missouri. There, he improved his museum’s stature and earned a reputation for giving future art stars their first major museum exhibitions.

In 2013, the Harvard Art Museums will open bigger and renovated premises with “a significantly expanded program for the exhibition, study, and interpretation of the art of our time,” says Deborah Martin Kao, its chief curator. And the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, just one of the area’s art schools with a growing student population, is in the midst of an expansion, too.

Eight years ago it was considered dead and buried, but FIAC (Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain), France’s premier contemporary art fair in Paris, has since staged a dramatic revival, with some commentators claiming that its latest edition, which closed on Sunday, was even better than Frieze.

Now in its 38th year, FIAC was long regarded as a ’must attend’ fair for collectors of modern and contemporary art along with fairs in Basel and Cologne. But following the recession of 1991, it became largely dependent on French exhibitors and French artists, and experienced a slump in the international ratings. The Frieze Art Fair, which began in 2003, was timed to run bang in between the autumnal fairs in Cologne and Paris, and was a direct challenge to both. But while Cologne succumbed, changing shape and shifting dates, FIAC hung on in there to meet the challenge.

Although the two are essentially different in that FIAC combines early 20th century modern art with the contemporary, and Frieze is exclusively focussed on the latter, FIAC needed a more international contemporary edge, so a battle for key exhibitors ensued.

The most important change came in 2006 when FIAC moved from a convention centre on the outskirts of Paris to the imposing splendour of the Grand Palais, with a courtyard at the Louvre for the younger galleries. Outdoor sculptures were placed in the Tuileries Gardens, satellite art fairs sprung up, and private collectors and museums mounted special exhibitions to make FIAC a special cultural event.

Within the fair, a process of internationalising the exhibitor list began to the point where French gallery representation has been reduced from 70 per cent in 2003, to 31 per cent this year. Major names to have joined the fair recently are New York’s Barbara Gladstone, which ceased exhibiting at Frieze after it opened a gallery in Brussels, and Gagosian, which opened a gallery in Paris last year, but still does both fairs. About a dozen other galleries have opted for Paris over London in the last four years, but rather than a drift, it’s been more of a game of musical chairs as galleries leave and then return to FIAC, as they did this year.

Recognized as one of the finest antique shows in the world, the Dallas International Art, Antique & Jewelry Show will be held November 2-6, 2011 at the new, state-of-the-art Irving Convention Center at Las Colinas. The sold-out show will feature more than 100 of the world's most acclaimed exhibitors, including TEFAF Maastricht exhibitors Antiquariaat FORUM BV, Daniel Crouch Rare Books, Dr. Joern Guenther Rare Books AG and Inlibris, who will each showcase their impressive collections of rare books, manuscripts and autographs. Also highlighted at the show will be fine art, antique and estate jewelry, furniture, porcelain, Asian antiquities, American and European silver, glass, textiles, sculpture, contemporary art and more.
 
Notable guests at last year’s show included Laura Bush, who charmed exhibitors with a surprise visit  during the last day of the show. The former First Lady was accompanied by Debbie Francis and interior designer Ken Blasingame who helped the Bushes with the décor in the White House residence. Also seen shopping the show were Margot Perot, Catherine Perot, Betty Blake, Alan May, Joanne Stroud, Lynn and Alan McBee, Steve and Anne Stoghill, Phil Lacerte, Larry and Joyce Lacerte, Frank Bonilla and Minnie Carruth.
 
Adding to the show’s cultural experience, the Dallas International Art, Antique & Jewelry Show will present an educational lecture series that is free to the public as well as show attendees.  The lecture series will include presentations on a wide array of captivating topics by respected dealers and industry experts, including Alan C. Lowe, Director of the George W. Bush Presidential Library; Dr. Joern Guenther of Dr. Joern Guenther Rare Books; and Miller Gaffney of Miller Gaffney Art Advisory.
 
“What makes this show so unique is that it brings together more than 80 world-renowned galleries in a location that couldn’t be more fitting for an event of this nature,” said Scott Diament, President and CEO of the Palm Beach Show Group. “With its iconic design and high-end finishes, the Irving Convention Center at Las Colinas is the perfect setting for the Dallas International Art, Antique & Jewelry Show.”

The Palm Beach Show Group is pleased to announce that TACA (The Arts Community Alliance), Dallas' premier umbrella arts organization, has once again been selected as the charity partner for the prestigious opening night preview party of the Dallas International Art, Antique & Jewelry Show.  Since 1966, TACA has promoted a diverse and vibrant North Texas arts scene by providing financial support, building public awareness and increasing participation for performing arts organizations.  TACA began as an auction to benefit the Dallas Theater Center, and has grown into a year-round organization that has donated millions of dollars to approximately 75 arts organizations.

The Irving Convention Center at Las Colinas is located at 500 West Las Colinas Boulevard in Irving, Texas. Las Colinas, a 12,000-acre master planned community known worldwide for its quality as a major business center, is home to 2,000-plus corporations and the global headquarters of five Fortune 500 companies, with a taxable base of more than $7 billion. The community's central location between Dallas and Fort Worth as well as the DFW International Airport makes it an attractive location for business and commerce.
   
This area of Irving boasts several luxury resorts, including the only 5 Diamond resort in Texas, The Four Seasons Las Colinas Resort. In addition, the area is home to the world's largest equestrian sculpture, the bronze Mustangs of Las Colinas, which gallop across the granite stream in Williams Square. Lake Carolyn and the Mandalay Canal wind through the urban center while the Las Colinas APT rides high overhead connecting the various office towers. Las Colinas also features three private country clubs and four championship golf courses surrounded by gated communities.

For more information, please call (561) 822-5440 or visit www.dallasfallshow.com

Five weeks after protesters occupied a Lower Manhattan plaza to press for economic and political change, they’ve turned their attention to what they call “temples of cultural elitism,” New York’s museums.

Members of an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street calling itself Occupy Museums yesterday targeted the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

They took turns reading from a statement, with the crowd repeating each line in a call-and-response system used at their Wall Street base in Zuccotti Park and in many protests.

“The Occupy Wall Street Movement will bring forth an era of new art, true experimentation outside the narrow parameters set by the market,” was the chant at one point, voiced by a crowd comprising a few dozen artists, students and passers-by outside MoMA.

Artist Dave Kearns complained about MoMA’s regular admission fee, calling $25 “an obscene amount of money,” and adding, “There should be more nights when it’s free.”

A person in a gorilla mask said he or she -- the gender wasn’t clear from the voice -- worked in a New York museum and didn’t care for its exclusionist curatorial choices.

A 34-year-old artist named Blithe Riley proposed that the group skip the Frick Collection, which was to be temple No. 2, and go directly to No. 3, the New Museum.

“Three museums might be a lot for one day,” she said.

Show of Hands

With a show of hands, the group indicated a consensus for her proposal.

“We’re going to occupy the New Museum now,” Riley said.

A couple exiting MoMA looked perplexed.

“I don’t know what they mean, ‘Occupy the New Museum?’” said Ruth Geisenheimer, 82, from Chicago.

“What do they intend to do with this museum?” asked her husband, Ed, 87.

Noah Fischer, a 34-year-old Brooklyn-based artist who devised Occupy Museums, said the group makes no demands.

“We want to use the democratic process to bring people together and learn what a society that is not about money is like,” he said in an interview.

Outside the New Museum, Fischer called it a “pyramid scheme of the 1 percent.”

“These artists are conflated with capital,” he said.

Faced with a class-action suit over artists’ royalties that potentially would expose them to a huge cash verdict, Christie’s and Sotheby’s likely will challenge the constitutionality of the California law on which the claim is based. 

The suit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles contends that the two big auction houses have ignored their obligation to ensure that 5% of what a seller receives should go to the artist or the artist’s heirs. The law applies to all profitable sales of more than $1,000 — if the works are by American or California-based artists and the seller is a California resident or the sale takes place in California. The royalty siphons $250 from the proceeds of a $5,000 sale and $250,000 from a $5-million sale.

“We have meaningful defenses,” Sotheby’s said in a statement Wednesday, while Christie’s said, “it views the California Resale Royalties Act as subject to serious legal challenges” and “looks forward” to making its case in court.

The courts have been down this path once before.

Eric George, attorney for plaintiffs who include artists Chuck Close and Laddie John Dill and the estate of Robert Graham,  said it’s unlikely Sotheby’s and Christie’s can argue successfully that the law is unconstitutional, since there’s a legal precedent to the contrary.
Soon after the California royalty rule went into effect in 1977, a Los Angeles art dealer, Howard Morseburg, filed a test case with the support of other art dealers, contending that “the state has no business interfering” in art sales. A trial judge and the  9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found otherwise, and in 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up Morseburg’s appeal.

But some legal minds aren’t so sure that the Morseburg precedent matters anymore. Because he sued in 1977, his contention that the California law was an unconstitutional intrusion on the federal government's prerogative of making copyright law had to be weighed against provisions of the federal Copyright Act of 1909. The courts found no conflict. But the ground rules may have changed in 1978, when the Copyright Act of 1976 took effect. Writing in 1980 in the Boston College International & Comparative Law Review, Carole M. Vickers noted that the new federal copyright law specifically says that it stands “exclusively” as the law of the land on all copyright-related matters, and that “the statutes of any state” are not valid.

Vickers wrote that the California law “arguably … conflicts” with the federal copyright law, and a 1995 article by Michael B. Reddy in Loyola Marymount University’s Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review says that “because of the unambiguous language found in both the legislative history and the text of the Copyright Act of 1976, there are serious doubts” about whether a constitutional challenge to the California resale royalty law would fail again.

Like Lazarus rising from the dead, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University will reopen this week (26-27 October) after a four-month renovation with two celebrations that university president Frederick Lawrence says are heavy with significance for the museum’s future.

“The fact that we are having the reopenings during the fall board of trustees meeting is designed to raise the profile of the Rose in the university community,” he says. It was these same trustees, mostly, who in January 2009 voted to sell the Rose’s famed collection of modern and contemporary art to keep the university from shrinking drastically after the 2008 markets’ crash.

Since then, the Rose has been in limbo. Its supporters successfully sued to block the sale, reaching a settlement this June. But former director Michael Rush, who helped foment the opposition, left when his contract expired in the spring of 2009, and has never been replaced. Instead, Roy Dawes, an artist who joined the Rose staff in 2002 and was once a gallery manager at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art, has led it as “director of museum operations”. Some exhibitions had to be cancelled, including one for James Rosenquist, who blamed a fire in his studio for his withdrawal, but also said he didn’t want to have to deal with the controversy.

Rosenquist is now part of the 26 October re-opening, which kicks off a series of events to mark the Rose’s 50th anniversary. On 27 October, there is also a public reception and viewing.

More important, Lawrence says the search to replace Rush, which was announced in September 2010, will accelerate. Brandeis has hired an executive search firm and formed a committee that includes Lois Foster, a member of Rose’s Board of Overseers who was a plaintiff in the suit against Brandeis, and Jock Reynolds, the director of the Yale University Art Gallery. “Jock Reynolds is the dean of university art museum directors, and the fact that he stepped up to be part of the search committee speaks volumes,” Lawrence says.

"The Painterly Voice: Buck's County's Fertile Ground," at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, is as unique an exhibit as the distinctly individualistic 19th- and 20th-century Bucks County artists it presents. For one thing, it is not really a single show, but an installation spanning three galleries and 25 sections, essentially giving each artist of significance a small solo exhibit. For another, it represents the personal vision of its curator as few other exhibits do, from its unique hierarchy to its unconventional wall text that reads like a casual conversation with a close, knowledgeable friend.

Running through April 1, "The Painterly Voice" is by far the biggest show the Michener Museum has ever staged, with more than 200 paintings by 50 artists drawn from over 35 sources, including private collectors and institutions. The works range from iconic works such as Edward Hicks' "The Peaceable Kingdom," one of the most beloved images in the history of American art, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to rarely seen gems from private collections.

Most likely, it is the largest exhibit of Pennsylvania Impressionist works in recent history. Possibly the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco came close to it in quantity, but never before has there been such a concentration of such quality paintings from Bucks County artists in a single exhibition.

It is notable that the title of the show blatantly turns its back on the phrase "Pennsylvania Impressionism." For chief curator Brian Peterson, those words are fine as far as identifying the group of Bucks County painters associated with the New Hope art colony.

Certainly the bulk of these works are landscapes, although figure paintings are well represented. But as to the implication of a collective style? "For years I've tried to find that unified Pennsylvania Impressionist style, and for years it has eluded me," Peterson says.

The search for an artist's individual soul has been Peterson's holy grail for his entire career, so it makes sense the exhibit is organized around individuals, not "isms." "While many curators love to think up inventive and insightful themes, I've always been more interested in the artist as individual — not the rugged loner saving art one picture at a time, but the connected individual, the individual who is nourished by a community," he says. Peterson does allow for one or two themes, however. There's an entire section, for example, devoted to Modernism.

"The Painterly Voice" is exceptional not only in its sheer volume, but also in the intensity with which it represents individual artists. "There's a difference in showing one work by an artist versus eight or nine works. When you multiply that by 50 artists, then there's a real weight to it," Peterson says. "I'm trying to show people that what I've learned over all these years is the sense of substance of this group of painters, and give them a chance to shine better than ever before."

Indeed, to view nine big, juicy Edward Redfield plein air works on a single wall, their pigment laid on thick in frantic pleasure with gobs and drips, is a sensual experience. Adjacent to Redfield's territory are separate subdivisions for Morgan Colt, Walter Schofield and Walter Baum, who share similar extroverted orbits.

In stark contrast are William Lathrop's paintings, whose deliberate, fine brushwork is executed in a more somber, moodier palette. So important was Lathrop in engendering the New Hope art colony that Peterson selected his imposing portrait, painted by Daniel Garber, as the first painting visitors see when entering the exhibit.

Photography is a mechanical art. The photographer points a lens at an object, records the image on a plate or film or, today, in digital memory. Therefore all photographs should be similar, the hands of individual photographers unrecognisable. Yet the new Photographs Gallery at the V&A, which opened on Monday to showcase the world's oldest museum collection of photographs, reveals the apparently limitless variety of the art and the utterly personal genius of great photographers.

A photograph of a steam train taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1902 hangs near Henri Cartier-Bresson's 1932 picture Behind Gare St Lazare, Paris, on the blue-painted wall of the long, elegantly restored, Victorian gallery.

Both black and white prints portray a ragged industrial landscape of rail tracks in brooding weather. But they are so profoundly different that you almost feel you are looking at two different art forms, two technologies. Cartier-Bresson's image is so light and mobile, an impression of a passing moment, whose meaning is as enigmatic as it is poignant. Stieglitz gives his print a monumental power, a weight, that is the very opposite: a column of black smoke assumes iron authority.

Lightness and weight, the momentary and the enduring: right from its invention at the close of the Romantic age, photography displayed these extreme possibilities in its nature. The oldest photograph in the V&A collection is an ethereal silvery phantom of a London street in 1839, taken using Louis Daguerre's pioneering method in the year he made it public. By the 1850s photographers were shooting such diverse masterpieces as Robert Howlett's 1857 portrait of the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, cigar at the corner of his mouth, tall hat on his head, the chains of the Great Eastern falling into Miltonic darkness behind him, and John Murray's icily majestic panorama of the Taj Mahal, taken in about 1855. The camera could capture the craggily real – Brunel lives for ever in his portrait – or the stupendously beautiful.

Peeking over a railing, I look down into a heavily wooded ravine where beefy buildings in concrete curve around courtyards and wrap two ponds vaulted by copper- roofed bridges.

This hidden castle is the Crystal Bridges museum, in Bentonville, Arkansas.

It houses a historical survey of American art collected in just a few years at astonishing cost at the instigation of Alice Walton, heiress to the Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) fortune.

Passing a stainless-steel tree sculpture by artist Roxy Paine, I cross a bridge to an elevator tower and descend three floors, where one of the bridges that give the museum its name opens up in front of me.

It’s a tour de force. Deep beams of yellow Arkansas pine vault overhead, rising and swelling outward like the belly of a particularly elegant whale. Light filters in from slots overhead. Outwardly slanting glass walls held together by elegant pipes, ball-joint fittings and cables pick up reflections from the wind-riffled surface of the ponds.

No art could compete with this spectacle. The vast space is used as a restaurant called Eleven and for parties.

With Walton, 62, architect Moshe Safdie chose a wooded streambed in a 120-acre swath of woodlands the family owns just north of the headquarters of the retail giant her father built. Safdie dammed the streams to form the ponds. Walton chose the generically bucolic name Crystal Bridges.

Sensual Safdie

Safdie, 73, doesn’t need to strain for grandeur; bold forms come to him naturally. He shaped balconied and arcaded gallery suites into broad crescents with draped copper roofs to echo the slope of the land. He tones down a characteristic bombast in recognition of the lovely ravine, and he achieves a lyricism and sensuality rarely found in other projects.

Tightly wedged, the 200,000 square feet (18,580 meters) of pavilions stare narcissistically at each other over the water. The Walton family has threaded the surrounding forest with pleasurable trails dotted with sculptures including a “Skyspace” installation by James Turrell.

As you enter the first two gallery suites devoted to art from the colonial era to the end of the 19th century, you encounter a collection that’s esthetically conservative and methodically assembled, including two famous portraits of George Washington (Charles Wilson Peale and Gilbert Stuart) and great painters of grand, idealized nature like Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Asher Durand, whose 1849 “Kindred Spirits” cost $35 million.

Stupendously gifted, internationally famous and living to the age of 67, Leonardo da Vinci did not lack the opportunity to complete great and lasting works. His patrons were the most powerful men of the era – the Medici, the Borgias, the Duke of Milan, the Pope, the king of France – and he was in continual demand for altarpieces, portraits, murals and monuments. At the same time his brain (famously, even then) teemed with extramural ideas in anatomy, mathematics, engineering, architecture, natural history, optics, cosmology, stage design, powered flight, weaponry, games, stories, jokes and toys, all of which he detailed in thousands of notebook pages.

Yet today he is most famous for the “Mona Lisa”, a work to which he returned intermittently for 16 years and still considered unfinished, for the great “Cartoon” in London’s National Gallery, supposedly a preparatory work for a mighty picture that never materialised, and for the “Last Supper”, whose technical problems threaten its very survival. In all he brought fewer than a dozen works of art to completion and, of his other schemes, only a handful got beyond the drawing board. Of his architecture, only a few plans and sketches survive.

To measure this record against his reputation as the “universal man” is to confront the Leonardean enigma. Despairing of a solution to the puzzle, the art historian Kenneth Clark wrote haplessly that “Leonardo was the Hamlet of art history, whom each of us must recreate for himself”. The National Gallery’s new exhibition Leonardo: A Painter at the Court of Milan, opening on November 9, will allow everyone to have a tilt at decoding and recreating Leonardo, by returning to his self-definition. He did not, it argues, primarily see himself as scientist, engineer, aeronaut or any of the other labels implicit in London’s last big Leonardo show, Martin Kemp’s Experience, Experiment and Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum five years ago. Rather, he was first and last a picture-maker, and the show seeks to celebrate his achievements in paint, under his most significant patrons the Sforza of Milan.

There is no question about Leonardo’s brilliant conceptual skills or his supreme draughtsmanship. One puzzle is actually more prosaic: how could so intelligent and superbly trained an artist make such catastrophic technical mistakes?

Take his lost painting, “The Battle of Anghiari”. Leonardo was commissioned in 1503 to cover a wall of Florence’s council chamber with a mural depicting Florence’s victory over Milan six decades earlier. This battle may in reality have been a disappointingly bloodless affair with, according to one source, just a single fatality when a soldier fell off his horse. No matter. A few years earlier Leonardo had written himself a brief for painting a no-holds-barred cavalry clash of unparalleled ferocity, stressing that all the tangled violence and agony of mass slaughter must be evoked, with no part of the ground unslaked with gore. The known preliminary sketches for “The Battle of Anghiari” suggest that it would have been one of the world’s most marvellous paintings.

Early on the morning of July 27, 1861, the Irish brigade of New York’s 69th Regiment returned From the First Battle of Bull Run, landing by steamboat at what is now Battery Park.

The crowd that massed along the bay to welcome the weary soldiers included all manner of society: flower sellers, fruit vendors, dignitaries, newsboys, grieving widows, well wishers and families of the wounded.

The mood was triumphant — New York’s immigrant boys had returned — but also melancholy; their Civil War battle had ended in defeat. And the artist Louis Lang captured it all on a sprawling canvas in oil paint.

Now “Return of the 69th (Irish) Regiment, N.Y.S.M. From the Seat of War,” restored and reframed, is to become a permanent, prominent fixture in the New-York Historical Society’s renovated building, which reopens, fittingly, on Nov. 11 — Veterans’ Day.

Huge, detailed and colorful, it comes from an era when paintings were expressive and descriptive, tools not only to evoke emotions, but also to do the very real work of simply documenting and recounting history.

“The whole human comedy is played out across the stage of the painting,” said Linda S. Ferber, the society’s vice president and senior art historian. “It’s a combination of the sentimental — of the personal stories — and the collective narrative of this heroic group of men.”

The painting will be the centerpiece of the society’s opening exhibition, “Making American Taste: Narrative Art for a New Democracy,” which looks at taste in art as it was defined from the 1830s to the late 1860s. The society’s other main opening exhibitions include “Freedom Now: Photographs by Platon,” which considers the African-American fight for civil rights through the lens of the British photographer Platon; and ”Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn,” which relates the American, French and Haitian struggles as a single 18th-century global narrative and features the original Stamp Act document, which is leaving Britain for the first time.

The return of Lang’s panorama, which is about 11 feet wide by 7 feet tall and weighs in at 700 pounds with the frame, required its own renovation. Donated by Lang in 1886, the painting was on display until sometime after World War II, after which the society has difficulty tracking it. Unearthed from storage in 1977, it was in pieces.

So when the society decided to revive the painting in 2006, it meant essentially tackling a jumbo jigsaw puzzle.

“Can we put the painting back together again?” Ms. Ferber said the society asked. “Are the pieces all here?”

The daunting prospect seemed worth the time and $220,000 expense. The painting captures a moment in Civil War history, when the Irish rose to defend the Union and were lauded as heroes. Their joyful homecoming, however, was followed by the 1863 Draft Riots, blamed largely on the Irish.

The Abu Dhabi developer building a vast cultural district in the Emirati capital said Monday a branch of the famed Louvre museum will open there in late 2013, despite questions about the timetable for another part of the project.

The Tourism Development and Investment Company said a branch of the Parisian art institution will be the first museum to open in the Saadiyat Island cultural district, a year behind schedule. Plans originally called for a 2012 opening date.

TDIC's comments came a day after the state-run developer disclosed it had dropped a tender seeking bids for major construction work on a branch of the Guggenheim Museum, raising questions about that project's future.

The developer insisted that all projects on the island will be completed.

"TDIC continuously monitors the delivery of its projects to ensure they remain on schedule, within budget and that TDIC's high standards are upheld throughout the process. TDIC is moving forward as planned with all of its announced projects including all the projects on Saadiyat," the company said.

Art historians believe that if the painting of Mary with a dying Christ is confirmed as the work of the Italian master, it could be worth up to £190 million.

The work, known as The Ragusa Pieta, went on display for the first time in more than a century on Tuesday in a museum in Rome, surrounded by authenticated paintings by Michelangelo and Raphael.

The official catalogue for the exhibition notes that the painting has been "attributed to Michelangelo by several scholars".

It is owned by Martin Kober, a retired US air force fighter pilot, who remembers it hanging on the wall of the family home near Buffalo in New York State and being inadvertently hit by the occasional tennis ball during children's games.

After it was accidentally knocked off the wall while being dusted in the 1970s, it was wrapped in a case and stored behind a sofa for 25 years.

Mr Kober only began taking more notice of the painting, which his family affectionately referred to as 'The Mike' after Michelangelo, after he retired in 2002.

He showed it to an Italian art historian, Antonio Forcellino, who became convinced that the work is a painted version of Michelangelo's famous 'Pieta' sculpture in St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.

He set out his evidence in a book published last year, "The Lost Pieta", fuelling what has become a classic Renaissance art detective story.

One of the bronze sculptures stolen from the Johannesburg Art Gallery is worth about $16,000. Curators fear thieves sold it to a scrap dealer for a mere $250.

Prices for metals with industrial uses like copper — the main component in bronze — have been booming. And as the stolen bronzes fail to turn up at auction houses, galleries can only fear the worst.

“I understand that art will be stolen,” said Noah Charney, who founded a think tank called the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art. “But I get very upset when art is destroyed ... that is an irrevocable attack on beauty, culture and civilization.”

Bronze sculptures are only the latest target in South Africa: Days before U2 played a stadium in Johannesburg earlier this year, officials blamed copper thieves for power problems at the venue. Cable theft has led to service interruptions on the Gautrain, a sleek new South African light rail service.

At the Johannesburg Art Gallery, home to Picassos, van Goghs and Rodins, thieves stole a figure of a woman in mourning by South African master sculptor Sydney Kumalo. The Kumalo is one of a total of four bronzes taken in a robbery in January and another in September at the city-owned gallery.

A small bronze titled “A chair, a boat and a vase” by well-known South African sculptor Barend De Wet was wrenched from the facade of the national art museum in Cape Town in May.

“There’s a lot of very sophisticated (security) systems internationally that, unfortunately, we just can’t afford,” said Antoinette Murdoch, chief curator of the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Murdoch said the city has promised her 1 million rand (about $125,000) to upgrade security, and she is seeking more from donors.

Lucian Freud and Alberto Burri paintings sold for $5 million each in London last night at a Sotheby’s auction overshadowed by concern about market weakness and a protest by U.S. art handlers over a labor dispute.

Bidders had to pass a group of 20 chanting and whistling demonstrators, including three who had flown from New York and promised more action. While the contemporary and 20th-century Italian sale set six artist records and raised 40 million pounds ($63 million), the top presale estimate at hammer prices was 48.3 million pounds. Some paintings went unsold, such as Peter Doig’s “Bellevarde,” valued at as much as 2 million pounds.

“That would have sold a year ago,” the London-based dealer Edmondo di Robilant said. “The mood has changed. Auction houses entice things with high estimates and in the past they’ve been able to sell them. That wasn’t always the case tonight. A number of lots that sold were knocked down against lowered reserves.”

Dealers said economic worries were weighing on some buyers. Even headline-grabbing pieces such as Marc Quinn’s 18-carat gold sculpture of Kate Moss in a yoga pose attracted just one bid. The 2008 “Microcosmos (SIREN)” was knocked down to a bidder represented by Patti Wong of Sotheby’s Asia for 577,250 pounds.

There was also just one telephone bid for the 1952 close-up portrait “Boy’s Head” by Freud, who died in July, aged 88. It was valued at 3 million pounds and fetched 3.2 million pounds.

With buyers spoiled for choice by the $500 million of art on sale in the U.K. this week, 23 percent of the contemporary lots went unsold. The preceding Italian component was more enthusiastically received.

On October 4, 2011, art dealer, Richard H. Love, and his Chicago gallery, R. H. Love Galleries, Inc. were found liable for over $16 million in claims for breach of contract, misrepresentation, fraud and punitive damages by Chief Judge Barbara J. Vigil of the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The claims arose from Love’s dealings surrounding an oil painting entitled “Sunset Over the Plains” by Albert Bierstadt. The sellers of the painting, Jerald Freeman, Thomas Nygard and Tea Leaf, Inc., represented by Kurt Wihl and Christina Gooch of the Albuquerque firm of Keleher & McLeod, received an award of $5,122,389. The purchaser of the painting, Paul W. Fairchild, Jr., represented by David F. Cunningham of the Santa Fe firm of Thompson, Hickey, Cunningham, Clow, April & Dolan, received an award of $11,654,678. For further details, refer to the First Judicial District Court Cause No. CV-2005-1424 court file.

Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and activist who was imprisoned for 81 days earlier this year, topped ArtReview’s annual ranking of the 100 most influential people in the art world, the Power 100, published today.

The Beijing-based artist -- who last year paved Tate Modern’s monumental Turbine Hall with 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds -- “was ranked number one as a result of his activism as much as his art practice,” London-based ArtReview said in an e-mailed release, noting that artists no longer worked in “a privileged zone” defined by galleries or museums.

Every year, timed to coincide with London’s Frieze Art Fair, Art Review gathers an international panel of art-world professionals to pick the 100 most influential people in their field. Last year’s Power 100 topper, international art dealer Larry Gagosian, ranked fourth this year.

The Ellis Boston Antiques Show is returning to the city this October after a three-year hiatus, re-launching a 49-year tradition that will feature nearly 40 of the finest antiques exhibitors from across the country and around the world.

Housed this year in the Cyclorama, the show kicks off on Thursday, October 20, with a Gala Preview benefiting the South End’s Ellis Memorial & Eldredge House. The show continues on Friday, October 21, and runs through Sunday, October 23.

“The Ellis Antiques show is the tops for New England,” said Marc Glasberg, owner and founder of Boston’s Marcoz Antiques, one of this year’s exhibitors. “It gives the Boston area and dealers a certain charisma regarding antiques.”

In addition to Marcoz Antiques, this year’s Boston exhibitors include Polly Latham Asian Art and Vose Galleries.

“We’re really glad that it’s back,” said Vose Galleries assistant manager Chris Greene. “It’s important to have these types of shows in the city. It really livens up the city’s whole culture.”

Ceramics, Rare Maps, Quilts And Fine Art

The show will feature a range of antiques including ceramics, rare maps and prints, jewelry, quilts, pottery, and fine art, among other items.

“We worked really hard to get a wide array of antiques into the show, both in terms of what they are and in terms of pricing,” said co-producer Tony Fusco of Fusco & Four.

The show was originally established by Ellis Memorial’s Board of Directors in 1960 as a fundraising event.

Fusco contacted Ellis Memorial’s Board of Directors as soon as he heard that the 2009 show would be canceled, and he has been working with his Fusco & Four partner, and event co-producer, Robert Four over the past three years to make the show’s return a success.

“There was a huge vacuum when they closed the show,” he said. “People in the antiques world were shocked. To think that Boston, a city that is totally steeped in history, would not have an antiques show—that shocked people.”

Many arts groups are struggling because of the sour economy, but last year the Philadelphia Museum of Art managed to raise more than $56-million, an increase of more than 55 percent.

A big reason for the museum’s success is its campaign to endow 29 staff positions—or all of its curatorial, conservation, education, and library employees.

“The great thing about this initiative is that it allows us to shine light on our staff,” says Kelly O’Brien, the museum’s executive director of development. “It helps bring the museum to life.”

The campaign seeks to raise $54-million. To inspire gifts for the drive, the Philadelphia donors Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest pledged to give up to $27-million of the goal if the money is matched dollar for dollar by other gifts. Mr. Lenfest has served as chairman of the museum’s board.

Now halfway through the five-year drive, the museum has raised $23-million, including the dollars matched so far. Thirteen of the 29 staff positions have been endowed.