A rediscovered Leonardo Da Vinci painting, valued by dealers at a record $200 million, is no longer for sale. The work is due to be included in an exhibition at London’s National Gallery starting in November.

The image of Christ, once owned by King Charles I, was acquired in the mid-2000s by the American art dealer Alex Parish and is currently owned by a group comprising him and at least two other traders, according to two persons with knowledge of the matter who declined to be named.

“There were some discussions with a museum concerning the possible acquisition of the painting, but it hasn’t been offered for many months,” said the New York-based private dealer Robert Simon. “I’ve assured the National Gallery that the painting isn’t on the market and that there are no plans to sell it after the exhibition.”

“I have an interest in the painting,” said Simon, who began studying the Leonardo in 2005. “I’m coordinating the research and representing the owners.” He declined to reveal who is in the group or the Leonardo’s price when it was on the market. He described its condition as “typical for a work of about 1500.”

“Salvator Mundi,” a 2-foot-high (0.6 meter) panel painting showing Christ half-length holding a crystal orb, will be among more than 90 works on display in “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan” running from Nov. 9, 2011 through Feb. 5, 2012. The museum in Trafalgar Square has stringent guidelines to prevent being compromised by commercial interests.

Gallery Guidelines

“The National Gallery does not display paintings when they are for sale,” the museum said in an e-mail yesterday. “Any painting for sale is removed from display and returned to the owner, following a standard procedure for returning a loan picture.”

Simon issued a statement yesterday describing the provenance, conservation and authorship of “Salvator Mundi.” Scholars at the National Gallery and other institutions have agreed it is by Leonardo, making it the first painting by the artist to have been discovered since 1909. It is described as dating either from the late 1490s or from about 1500, when the “Mona Lisa” was painted. Only about 15 oils by the Italian Renaissance master survive, said the statement.

The painting was sold at auction by descendants of the U.K. collector Frederick Cook in 1958. It was described as the work of the Leonardo follower Boltraffio and fetched 45 pounds (now $72). More recently, it was part of an American collection, said the statement.

Paint Layers

The Leonardo had been offered for sale after being acquired six or seven years ago at an estate auction in the U.S., ARTnews magazine reported in June. The original Leonardo composition had been revealed after the removal of layers of later overpaint.

Potential buyers were being asked about $200 million for “Salvator Mundi,” making it the most expensive work of art ever offered for sale, said dealers. An offer of $100 million had been turned down, they said.

The highest price achieved for a work of art is the $140 million paid for the Jackson Pollock abstract, “No.5, 1948,” in a private sale in 2006, according to the New York Times.

The auction record for an Old Master is the 49.5 million pounds given for Rubens’s “Massacre of the Innocents” at Sotheby’s (BID) in 2002. Titian’s “Diana and Actaeon” was bought by the U.K. on behalf of the National Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland for 50 million pounds in 2009.

As pot and kettle moments go, having Jeffrey Archer accuse you of vulgarity is surely up there with the best of them – but Alastair Sooke, recipient of this eye-opening rebuke, handled it pretty well in The World's Most Expensive Paintings.

He didn't bridle or protest. He merely pointed out the silver-gilt cigarette box on a nearby table, crafted into the form of a paperback edition of Archer's Kane and Abel. A nice net-cord volley, I thought. Quite why Sooke had gone to see Archer I'm still not entirely sure, because the smug little perjurer didn't really have anything very illuminating to say about the subject under discussion. Perhaps they just wanted to get a look at his penthouse apartment. Or perhaps they wanted to show you that in the world of the super-paintings even someone as rich as Archer is a comparative pauper. The cheapest painting Sooke focused on here – in a film that took its structure from a Top Ten countdown – had cost its buyer just a little under $73m. Well, not just a little perhaps, given that it was $160,000 under. But mere loose change to the kind of oligarchs and billionaires who haunt the New York salerooms.

Next up was Rubens's Massacre of the Innocents, which made the point that a collector's obsession often lies behind the stratospheric prices some paintings command. When a rarity comes up – and the acquisitive egos of several very rich people collide in one room – there's no saying when the gavel will finally come down. In the case of Massacre of the Innocents it was at £76,529,058 and it went to the Canadian billionaire Kenneth Thomson, a lifetime collector who actually had the decency to put his trophies into a public gallery so that everyone could share them. That doesn't always happen. The Japanese paper magnate who bought Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr Gachet and Renoir's Bal du Moulin de la Galette in a breathtaking spending spree in 1990 wouldn't even let his family look at them, and threatened to burn them both when he ran into financial difficulties. They haven't been seen in public since.

There was a bit of desultory reflection on the disconnection between price and value, with Sooke allowing himself to hint that the $87m an Estée Lauder heir paid for Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was considerably over the odds if artistic merit was all that counted. And a French collector called François Pinault, who has a stunning contemporary collection in Venice, tutted sadly about the vulgarity of some of the big recent buyers, who care less about the art than showing that they have the ability to buy it. But it wasn't really until the last 15 minutes that the film began to acquire any real bite, as Sooke explored the recent history of several paintings by the world's "ultimate luxury brand" – Pablo Picasso. The fate of La Rêve was particularly touching. It was bought in the Forties by Victor and Sally Ganz, a middle-class New York couple who paid $7,000 for it – the equivalent of two years' rent and a sum they could only just scrape together. Fifty years on it was in the ownership of a Las Vegas casino owner called Steve Wynn, who was on the brink of selling it for $139m when he accidentally put his elbow through the canvas. The Ganz's daughter talked with rueful common sense about its transformation from an object of aesthetic obsession to a kind of high-stakes poker chip. Sooke, as usual an affable presence on screen, couldn't quite match her for gravitas and authority. He's a good presenter already – he could be a very good one if he thought a bit harder about the words he uses. To describe a Rubens masterpiece as "a total, total knockout!", as he did earlier in the programme, falls some way short of what's required.

"Can I walk?" said one lucky attendee as she tried to stand up after a jewelry appraiser put a value of $140,000 to $160,000 on a yellow diamond engagement ring. The owner of the 3.4 carat stone hugged appraiser Lila Bankston as she walked away Saturday during a taping of the popular PBS program "Antiques Roadshow" at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

PDA's (public displays of affection) were all around when an item was appraised highly. Leila Dunbar got a big hug after she appraised a Sonja Henie skating dress for a large amount.
 
Others, such as Tracy Stone of Golden Valley, left with less exuberance. "I thought it was handmade in Norway," she said of the 6-ft tapestry she brought. Turns out it's machine-made, probably from France, and is a common tourist item worth about $75. Ouch.
The star of the show, besides the yellow diamond, was a Frederic Remington bronze sculpture (right) called "Mountain Man." Although the signed piece lacks a model number, making its exact date difficult to determine, the appraiser put the value between $250,000 and $300,000 at auction. The piece was inherited from the guest's grandfather and has been in his family for 100 years.

The university has asked a Los Angeles judge to order the Oscar-nominated star to hand over the painting it claims the actress bequeathed its Austin campus.

O'Neal's spokesman said the portrait was one of two Warhol made of the Charlie's Angels star in 1979.

Arnold Robinson added the legal action was "completely ridiculous".

The university had hired investigators to track down the Warhol portrait,. However, its whereabouts was discovered after O'Neal's current reality TV show revealed it to be hanging above his bed at his Malibu home.

In a statement, Mr Robinson said the university had known for more than a year that the actor had the painting, which is thought to be worth $30m (£18.7m).

"Ryan O'Neal's friendship with Andy Warhol began 10 years prior to his meeting Farrah Fawcett," Mr Robinson said.

"When Ryan introduced Andy to Farrah, Mr Warhol chose to complete two portraits of her, one for Ms Fawcett and one for Mr O'Neal."

A giant buxom blonde stands bowlegged at the Gagosian Gallery in London.

“3-Meter Girl” (2011) is a towering sculpture by Takashi Murakami, a Japanese artist whose works are derived from comic strips and pop culture. She’s on sale for an undisclosed price in the sexually charged exhibition.

Murakami, wearing army pants, his hair in a pigtail, is dwarfed by the barrel-chested lady. Does he find her alluring?

“Not personally,” he says. Investigating trends in youth sexuality, he was told by a comic-book author that “giant is really sexy” and that young generations are drawn to tall, powerful women with “big heads, big hair, big breasts.”

In the same room are naked-women triptychs and two- and three-dimensional close-ups of male and female genitalia. They’re Murakami’s contemporary take on the nudes and explicit images produced by Japanese artists in centuries past.

Eroticism, he says, cropped up in his own work after he traveled to the West. The 1990s New York art scene looked “like porn” to him: Sex was inside the museum and linked to beauty, unlike in Japan, where it was in magazines and books.

Money is another favorite theme. Murakami’s company Kaikai Kiki Co. markets merchandise derived from his art; the Gagosian Gallery has a stack of folded cutouts that visitors can take.

Vuitton Bags

More controversially, Murakami, 49, has designed monogrammed bags for Louis Vuitton. They were on sale in a boutique that was part of his 2007-8 shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Brooklyn Museum.

“I love business,” says the artist, who’s interested in evoking money and the market in his art (though he’s no longer keen on designing bags, he says).

His 1998 sculpture of an aroused male, “My Lonesome Cowboy,” sold for $15.2 million at Sotheby’s in New York in May 2008, a record for Murakami. He is part of a group of artists, including Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, whose prices fell as much as 50 percent during the 2009 financial crisis.

Still, Murakami is baffled by what his art costs today. He says he discussed prices with dealer Larry Gagosian before the show, and hearing the figures, told Gagosian that they were “a little bit expensive.” According to Murakami, Gagosian replied, “No, this is big, this is big!”

Nobody does Art Cars quite like BMW. Others try, from time to time, sure. But over the past 40 years, the Bavarian automaker has collaborated with world-renowned artists to create no fewer than 17 unique art cars, each a work of art in its own right.

One of the things we love the most about BMWs art cars is that, as creative as they are, they're not just for show. Many of them have been raced, and raced hard – from the first 3.0 CSL painted by Alexander Calder (pictured above) to the latest M3 GT2 by Jeff Koons.

Unfortunately, while the cars have gone on display in galleries and museums around the world, seeing all 17 in one place is a rarity. So to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the art car program, BMW has put the entire collection online. Each car gets its own exhibit and film highlighting its creation, all laid out in a virtual museum.

Art buyers rarely yearned for Old Masters as intensely as they appeared to do this week. Sadly, auction houses never had so few desirable pictures to offer them.

The bidders’ eagerness was reflected in surprising world records set for works that would hardly have caused such a sensation only a decade ago.

At Christie’s Tuesday sale, the two highest prices were realized by 18th century English school pictures that appealed to a limited constituency until fairly recently.

True, the huge £22.44 million, or $35.79 million, paid for “Gimcrack on New Market Heath,” painted by Stubbs and portraying a famous racehorse that had belonged to Lord Bolingbroke, was an artificial price achieved through a now all too common procedure publicly spelled out.

Before opening the session, Christie’s auctioneer, James Bruce-Gardyne, informed the room that “a third party” was financing a guarantee given to the vendor. This did not just ensure the consignor that he would be paid a minimum amount whether the picture sold or failed to do so. It also meant that the financial burden of failure risk was transferred from Christie’s to the “third party,” who would become the owner of the Stubbs at the “guaranteed” level if it remained unwanted. The said party was contractually entitled to participate in the bidding in order to raise prices to whatever level it wished, thus skewing the spontaneous character that auction bidding is supposed to have.

The financed guarantee procedure is in itself a sign of the desperate efforts that auction houses make to secure top-level works of art for sale as supplies keep vanishing. It tends to be used when pictures are billed with some exaggeration as masterpieces of stellar importance.

While Christie’s team sang the Stubbs to high heaven, blatant weaknesses might have limited its appeal. The trainer who clutches the horse’s bridle and the stable lad are as stiff as Madame Tussaud’s waxen figures and the outhouse in the distance is painted with curiously amateurish clumsiness.

As far as I could tell, only one bid came in, allowing the Stubbs to sell at the low estimate. Had the history of the horse not been recorded in minute detail, the bland picture could never have fetched its phenomenal price.

“IT IS a phoenix that rose out of the ashes of Grosvenor House,” says Geoffrey Munn, managing director of Wartski, a London jeweller. He is talking about the Masterpiece fair, which has just finished its second year alongside the river Thames. When Grosvenor, the grande dame of London’s annual art and antiques fairs, shut down in 2009, Masterpiece was one of two new fairs to have emerged, along with Brian and Anna Haughton’s Art Antiques London, which took place in Kensington Gardens in early June. After maiden voyages last year, both improved in 2011.
 
Art Antiques London is pitched to mid-range collectors with an emphasis on exceptional ceramics. Masterpiece is a bigger and glitzier bird, which aims to exhibit the best of the best. A visitor to this more ambitious fair, which closed on July 5th, could have taken home some 18th-century scenic wallpaper (at Carolle Thibaut-Pomerantz); a sleekly sensual, modern white sofa (Ciancimino); a series of four Commedia dell’Arte paintings by Giandomenico Tiepolo (Dickinson); a sapphire blue Rolls-Royce (pictured); or a Spitfire plane. The stands are generously proportioned, the colours soothingly neutral and the aisles thickly carpeted. For the peckish, there were outposts of the fashionable Le Caprice and Harry’s Bar.

The fair essentially felt like a shopping mall in an absurdly smart hotel, which helped to make the targeted demographic feel right at home. Though some serious art collectors are not thrilled with the inclusion of luxury goods, this mix is likely to continue. The unique blue Rolls-Royce Phantom, complete with an Asprey jewellery box fitted in its glove compartment, sold “in the region of £400,000” ($640,000). JAR Parfums, an exclusive Parisian appointment-only jewellery designer and perfumier, made a rare appearance to launch an “affordable” line of bold, limited-edition earrings inspired by flowers and fans. Priced from €1,000 to €3,800, they flew out of the stall, designed to look just like the Paris boutique.
    
Thomas Woodham-Smith, a former managing director of Mallet, an English and Continental furniture specialist (a veteran of Grosvenor and now Masterpiece), is one of the founders of this new fair. He still looks surprised as he reports that last year, at the post-fair meeting with dealers, he was greeted with applause. Many were thrilled with the fair’s new look and the clients they’d met. In 2010 there were fewer than 120 exhibitors; this year 300 dealers reportedly signed on to the waiting list, and some 150 took part.

The billionaire Franco-American art dealer, Guy Wildenstein, has been formally accused of fraud after 30 valuable paintings and sculptures that had been missing for decades were discovered in the strong room of his family's institute in Paris.

Mr Wildenstein, 65, a leading financial backer and friend of President Nicolas Sarkozy, blamed the presence of the works, including several allegedly looted by the Nazis, on "an oversight" by his late father. He has been placed under formal investigation by a French magistrate on a possible charge of "receiving fraudulently obtained goods".

The case is part of a cat's cradle of interconnected lawsuits, on both sides of the Atlantic, which threatens one of the wealthiest and most powerful art-dealing families in the world. Mr Wildenstein is the son of Daniel Wildenstein, who made his reputation and fortune, from cataloguing and selling the works of French impressionists, including Claude Monet and Édouard Manet.

The missing works were first discovered during a police raid in Paris at the end of last year. The investigators were looking for priceless artworks belonging to Daniel Wildenstein, which his second wife, Sylvia, believed to have been hidden away by her two stepsons after his death in 2001.

Instead, officers from the French agency which tracks stolen art – L'Office Central de lutte contre le trafic des Biens Culturels – found 30 works from other large French family collections which had been missing for decades.

They included Cottage en Normandie, by the impressionist artist Berthe Morisot, whose whereabouts had been in dispute since the 1990s. They also included sketches and sculptures by another impressionist, Edgar Degas, which were believed to have been looted by the Nazis from a mansion near Paris in 1941.

U.S. casino owner Steve Wynn paid 8 million pounds ($12.8 million) at a London auction last night for a set of four 18th-century Chinese porcelain vases that will decorate his new resort in Macau.

The 4-foot (1.2 meter) vases, painted with Buddhist and Taoist emblems and embellished with 19th-century gilded metal mounts, were the most expensive of 50 lots at Christie’s International’s “Exceptional’’ sale in the U.K. capital.

Sold by a private collector, the Jiaqing period (1796-1821) vases had formerly been in the collection of the Scottish aristocrats, the Dukes of Buccleuch, and had been estimated at 600,000 pounds to 1 million pounds.

After the auction, the casino-owner’s leisure group said the vases had been bought by Wynn Resorts Macau Ltd. for its new Cotai Resort Hotel, scheduled to open in 2015. It was also the buyer of a Chinoiserie tapestry for 169,250 pounds.

“We are delighted to return works of this extraordinary quality to the city of Macau and the People’s Republic of China,” Roger Thomas, executive vice president of Design for Wynn Design and Development, said after the sale.

Thomas was bidding at the auction while on the telephone to Steve Wynn, said Christie’s. The event raised 28.8 million pounds with 36 of the lots selling.

The predicted highlight of the sale had been 17th-century bronze of a mythological figure by the Dutch sculptor Adriaen de Vries, estimated at 5 million pounds to 8 million pounds.

“Do you mind?” LeRoy Neiman asks as he leans forward in his painting studio and reaches for a great-smelling cigar.

“Is it a Macanudo?” he says, peering down at the label and exhaling a fine stream of smoke. “Then it’s a gift, it’s not mine. I like the real Cuban cigars.”

Now he was smoking and telling stories. Or rather, backstories: the narratives to the scenes he created in his brilliantly colored paintings of athletes and sporting events.

Mr. Neiman, one of America’s best-known artists, turned 90 on June 8, and he still paints and draws daily in the same bright, bold style, and in the spacious studio in his longtime Central Park West apartment.

He recently completed a commissioned painting for the 2012 Ryder Cup golf tournament and plans to travel to Medinah, Ill., in September 2012 to attend the match.

Going to sporting events, always sitting in front rows, helped make Mr. Neiman as familiar a sight as his paintings. And he still has his trademark Dalí-esque mustache and a full head of hair neatly brushed back. But because he has trouble walking, he is largely unable to attend live sporting events anymore, and he misses it.

“Very much,” he said the other day in his studio, which overlooks Central Park. He was dressed in a pink Oxford shirt and white linen pants and pink socks and gray bucks.

He was surrounded by a vast array of paints and brushes, and while he spoke, he rocked his wheelchair back and forth on the paint-splattered floor.

His trademark style was evident on the huge canvas of jazz greats on the wall, and on the painting clamped to his easel, of Frank Sinatra at the bar at Rao’s with the bartender, Nick the Vest, mixing a drink.

Mr. Neiman is finishing up his autobiography, which he promises is chock full of his personal encounters with athletes, and their reactions to him.

“I think it was a discovery for them to see a live artist and to see this character hanging around before ballgames or in dressing rooms or at a fight, that close — my whole thing was to draw close,” he said. “If you get close to the game, there are a lot of things that go on.”

For example, there was the boxing match when Bobo Olson, a middleweight, was punched so hard by Sugar Ray Robinson that he went cross-eyed, said Mr. Neiman, who was sitting next to Mr. Olson’s corner during that fight.

“He was hit so hard that his eyes were crossed,” he said. “Even after being revived in the dressing room, his eyes stayed that way. These are the discoveries you make.”

He recalled being close enough to the fights of Emile Griffith to notice that the boxer’s good luck charms were the silk robes handmade by his mother, a different color every fight.

Whatever the event, it was important to be ringside, he said. Even the time he painted Leonard Bernstein athletically conducting an orchestra.

Britain has never "got" abstract art. Even articles that appeared this week marking the death of Cy Twombly attracted comments of the "my child could do that" variety. It is tempting to dismiss these attacks as philistine, but that would be to ignore an eminently respectable and artistically sophisticated British tradition of disdain for abstract painting.

In a justly famous collection of essays called Art and Illusion, the leading art historian of postwar Britain EH Gombrich argued that western painting is the pursuit of reality – that in effect representational painting has a scientific vocation. This is a translation to art of the empiricism that goes back in British philosophy to John Locke. To look is to discover (although Gombrich showed how what we see is coloured by what we expect to see). If art is about trying to see things how they really are, what is the value of abstraction? For Gombrich it basically had no value at all.

It was not only theorists who believed this in postwar Britain. The best artists did, too. Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud fearsomely depicted real life as they found it – real human life, with the figure at the heart of the matter, the lonely human predicament their weighty concern. Bacon loudly dismissed the American abstract painting of the 1950s as looking like "old lace". Freud paints to this day with total commitment to reality and no interest whatsoever in abstraction.

So British sceptics who think abstract art like that of Twombly is just a load of visual guff can claim a tradition on their side.

Why, then, are we so different from Americans? In the same postwar years that saw British art dig itself into a realistic trench, US painting became heroically and famously abstract. From the moment Jackson Pollock appeared in Life magazine, the New York abstract painters were revered, renowned, and part of modern American national identity. The US and Britain were very different places at the time: America was at the height of its wealth and global power, and abstract expressionism suited the confidence of this epic society. Britain was living through the end of empire; everything was shrinking. Gloomy realism suited the times.

"Painting the American Vision," an exhibition by Hudson River School painters from the collection of the New-York Historical Society, is coming to the Peabody Essex museum in Salem on July 30 until November 6.

The exhibit features 45 landscape paintings featuring panoramic nature scenes by 19th century artists, of the Hudson River School, a loosely affiliated group of painters, poets and writers, according to the museum. The landscape painters, who were influenced by the Romanticism movement, sought to create a distinctly American aesthetic for their art. The artists looked to the nature for their inspiration, and the paintings reflect the fascination with the vast American countryside, particularly in the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding areas.

"These works were intended to make the viewer care about nature by conveying the sense that you are present at the edge of a pristinely beautiful scene," Sam Scott, the museum's associate curator of maritime art and history and coordinating curator for the exhibition said in a statement. "The artists used composition and relative scale to inspire awe in the grandeur of the outdoors, and show man's place in the immensity of it."

The exhibit features works by Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Hiram Hotchkiss and John Frederick Kensett, among others, according to the museum.

Before the era of the paparazzi, Hollywood stars would pose for glamorous portraits for their adoring public.

Today an astonishing collection of never before seen photographs, featuring iconic figures from the Twenties to the Forties, go on show in London.

Images of stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable form part of a new exhibition called Glamour of the Gods: Hollywood Portraits, which opens at the National Portrait Gallery.

Organised by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the photographs come from the archive of the London-based John Kobal Foundation.

Images like these were instrumental in transforming actors into international stars. They were used as posters and postcards and still attract hordes of admirers.

This new collection of 70 photographs and prints will be shown alongside vintage film stills from classic movies including Lillian Gish in The Wind, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swing Time and James Dean in Rebel Without  A Cause.

John Kobal was an avid film historian and collector of Hollywood film photography. He donated his entire collection of negatives and fine art photographs to his foundation prior to his death in 1991.

He began collecting film photographs in the 1950s, visiting Los Angeles frequently where his interest began to shift to the photographers behind the portraits.

Film and art critic John Russell Taylor, who has written an overview of the project, said: 'Of John it can be said with certainty that he did something no one else had thought at that time to do.

'When he became interested in the men behind the images, almost all of them were still alive and reachable.

Ah, the art world. White cube galleries, all black outfits, white wine openings…golf.

That’s right, dear reader, golf. If you think there’s nothing like hitting the links after a long day in the gallery district, the Baer Faxt Golf Invitational is right up your fairway! The invitational happens September 26 at Manhattan Woods Golf Club in West Nyack. Entry per player is $500 and proceeds go to the Andrew Glover Youth Program, which helps at-risk youths from the Lower East Side and East Harlem. Josh Baer, known to art world insiders for his long-running email newsletter The Baer Faxt, is the event’s organizer, and the Chairman of the charity. This is the second year of the invitational, which made about $40,000 last year. Mr. Baer said he’s hoping to make between $75,000 and $100,000 this year (roughly the annual salary for one or two youth workers). The Observer called up Mr. Baer asked him if he thought golf and art were as incongruous as they seem on paper.

“I’m in the art world and I play golf,” he said. “There will be close to 80 or 100 people playing.”

After spending 40 years at Louisville’s Speed Art Museum, a stolen 14th century work is going home.

The Speed Art Museum bought the piece from a New York Gallery in 1973 for 38 thousand dollars, not realizing the Italian art was stolen from a home in Italy two years earlier.

The work is a three panel altarpiece.  The center panel depicts the Madonna and Child, with the other panels portraying various saints and the crucifixion.

The United States government will hand it over to the Italian government, which will decide whether or not to return it to the family that was burglarized.

Museum Director Charles Venable said at a handover ceremony that it’s often difficult to verify the authenticity of stolen art.

It's a case of lost and found for a Pablo Picasso drawing stolen from an art gallery Tuesday in San Francisco.

The 1965 pencil drawing, "Tete de Femme," was hanging in the Weinstein Gallery when, witnesses said, a man walked through the entrance, took the drawing off the wall and left in a waiting cab. The sketch is worth an estimated $275,000.

Today, police arrested Mark Lugo, 30, of New Jersey on charges of burglary, grand theft, possession of stolen property and possession of narcotics.

After a series of investigative leads, San Francisco police said, they arrested Lugo at a hotel in Napa, Calif., where his hotel room was searched and the missing Picasso sketch was recovered.

Lugo invoked his right to remain silent, so, authorities said, they don't know what he was doing in San Francisco or if he traveled to steal the painting.

"I think a 48-hour turnaround on a crime like this another case of just unbelievable police work," San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr said.

The pencil sketch isn't damaged, but the frame was removed, authorities said.

Two surveillance videos and other tips helped lead to Lugo's arrest. The first video came from a restaurant on the block, Lefty O'Douls, and showed a man matching police and witnesses' descriptions carrying a framed piece of art.

His most notable attribute was that he was wearing a dark jacket and loafers with no socks. According to police, the frame size appeared to be the same dimensions as the stolen Picasso -- 10.5 by 8.5 inches.

René Magritte has inspired more book covers than any other visual artist. The first Magritte cover adorned Mary Potter's Useful Mathematics Workbook, published in Boston in 1939. The designer used a detail of Mental Arithmetic (1931; destroyed), in which a village of conventional houses with tiled roofs has been colonised by a cluster of gigantic white spheres, hemispheres and cuboids.

This eerie toytown image deftly prophesies what was about to happen in architecture – the colossal "pure forms" of Le Corbusier's modernism usurping more complex and cosy traditional forms. At the same time, the juxtaposition panders to the human need to find patterns and geometry in nature. We notice that the rising sun is also hemispherical, and that the pitched roofs of the houses are triangular: the similarities between the pure white forms and the rural idyll they find themselves in are as striking as the differences. Indeed, could not the sun simply be another hemisphere placed on the horizon? Here lateral thinking and seeing can render what initially seems alien to be archetypal and even natural; and it can in turn make the houses and trees seem cramped, gloomy and unhomely. Yet in Magritteville, the friction between forms never falters, never settles into a reassuring pattern. His sites – with their pathological neatness, cleanness, staticness – cannot be fully stabilised or surveyed. Mental Arithmetic defies conventional computation: here 1 + 1 = 2 and infinity.

A recent exhibition in Boston of Magritte-inspired book covers had 60 works of fiction and non-fiction, and could have featured many others (the curator Karl Baden now owns about 100). Examples include Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (the woman-as-nightdress, hanging from a rail); Michel Foucault's meditation on the picture of a pipe inscribed "This Is Not a Pipe"; Georges Simenon's Maigret's Pipe (a bowler-hatted man seen from the back); and Patrick Süskind's The Pigeon (a bowler-hatted man seen from the back with a pigeon perching on his hat). What appeals to publishers and readers is the epigrammatic spareness of Magritte's work, together with an almost heraldic clarity. You register the naively limpid image/word instantly, then do a double-take and are insidiously hooked – intellectually, if not emotionally. No less important is the fact that book titles and author names can be deposited in one of the many voids that punctuate his pictures. He leaves blank and blandly patterned zones into which all manner of mental furniture can be scattered.

René Magritte (1898-1967) was brought up in Hainault, Belgium's coal-mining region, the eldest son of a prosperous businessman (edible oils, stock cubes). He soon showed talent as an artist, which his father encouraged, and went to art school in Brussels in 1915. His mother was a depressive, with suicidal tendencies, and when René was 13 she drowned herself in the river at the back of their house. Magritte only ever spoke about her death to one close friend, years later. He said that when the body was dragged from the polluted waters several days later her face was covered by her nightdress. It was not known whether she had hidden her eyes with it before jumping in, or whether the river had "veiled her thus". The only feeling Magritte remembered was "intense pride at the thought of being the pitiable centre of attention in a drama".

The "drama" involving the nightdress sounds too good to be true, like a carefully contrived primal scene, ripe for Freudian analysis. It is surely a period piece, borrowed from a symbolist novel or painting, invented or imagined by Magritte to lend his mother romance and gravitas – and to endow himself with superhuman sang froid.

Veiled figures were a symbolist leitmotif. The Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso's Impression on the Boulevard: Woman with a Veil (1893) is the obvious example, yet all of Rosso's bust-length figures, mostly women and children, seem equally veiled. Their hiddenness adds to the sense of mystery, melancholy and melodrama. Comparable figures, now facing away from the viewer, and blank mannikin heads, are found in the work of Rosso's younger Italian contemporary Giorgio de Chirico, the discovery of whose paintings in the 1920s came as a revelation to Magritte, and set him on the path he was to follow for the best part of his career. Magritte was to make the suspiciously hidden head – obscured, turned, featureless, missing, beheaded, behatted – his own.

In the early 1920s, Magritte had been working his way steadily through cubism and futurism, subsidising himself by doing commercial art – something he would have to do until after the second world war, when he secured a New York dealer (examples of his commercial work will be included in the new Tate Liverpool show). In the mid-1920s, the recently formed French surrealists, and the German dadaists Max Ernst and George Grosz, were hailing De Chirico as a founding father, and Magritte was bowled over by a reproduction of De Chirico's Love Song in an art magazine. De Chirico showed Magritte how you could make resonant paintings by "collaging" together disparate still-life objects painted in a deadpan, hyper-real style, with distorted scale and spatial logic. Magritte said of the Italian leader of the Scuola Metafisica: "It was a new vision through which the spectator might recognise his own isolation and hear the silence of the world".

But whereas De Chirico situated his objects within plunging architectural perspectives inspired by early renaissance painting, Magritte's compositions tend to spread out laterally, as if belonging to an illustrated textbook or display cabinet. Abetting this lateral extension is his penchant for dividing pictures into stark, shifting sequences of square and rectangular compartments, akin to advertising hoardings or stage flats. It is a modernist reworking of the medieval polyptych format, where each saint or protagonist is isolated in its own framed panel. Magritte liked the format because of the feeling of potentially endless shuffling and unfolding.

Magritte's work is, in part, a joke at the expense of the classifying, bureaucratic mind. His drily preposterous pedantry makes one think of Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881), in which the eponymous copy-clerks seek to become experts in every conceivable subject solely by reading books, rather than consulting people with experience. The hapless autodidacts try to bottle preserves, plant trees, look after farm animals, practise medicine; they try to learn how to write a novel and how to have imagination. All their experiments end in disaster, and their home becomes a museum, choked with specimens. Eventually they give up and go back to being copy-clerks. Magritte's paintings look as though they might have been made by a well-meaning but over-zealous autodidact – and it's a consummate irony that they end up on the covers of so many self-help books.

Magritte moved to Paris in 1927 with his wife and frequent model Georgette and, although he gained the respect and admiration of André Breton and the surrealists, he never became part of the inner circle. It was a matter partly of geography – he could only afford to rent a flat in the suburbs – and partly of style. At this stage in its evolution, surrealism was dominated by semi-abstract "automatic" drawing, as epitomised by the work of André Masson and Joan Miró: beauty, as Breton said, was convulsive. It wasn't until the 1930s, with the ascendancy of surrealist sculpture and photography, and of Salvador Dalí, that Magritte's work fitted the bill. By that stage, however, he had already returned to Brussels, due to both the fallout of the 1929 Wall Street crash and a row with Breton over a crucifix worn by Georgette to a party. The violently atheistical Breton insisted she remove it, but Magritte sided with his wife.

A man walking down the street with what may have been a stolen Pablo Picasso drawing was filmed by a Union Square restaurant's surveillance camera moments after the theft, police and the business' owner said Wednesday.

The footage taken just before noon Tuesday shows a well-dressed young man walking away from the Weinstein Gallery on Geary Street, where Picasso's 1965 pencil drawing, "Tête de Femme (Head of a Woman)," had just been stolen. Under his arm is a picture frame, with a newspaper covering whatever the frame holds.

Police spokesman Officer Albie Esparza said Wednesday investigators had not shown the footage to witnesses yet, but that the man is "presumably our suspect."

The footage was filmed by a security camera mounted next to the door at Lefty O'Doul's, a few doors west of the gallery. Owner Nick Bovis spotted the footage Tuesday evening and handed it to police Wednesday.

The man in the video has a dark jacket, light-colored pants and loafers with no socks, a description similar - though not identical - to the one police put out Tuesday. Witnesses told investigators the thief had dark-colored pants, not light ones, and was wearing dark glasses, which are not visible in the surveillance camera footage.

The restaurant's camera runs about 33 minutes fast, Bovis said, so the time stamp of 12:12 p.m. means the man was actually filmed at 11:39 a.m., two minutes before the gallery reported the theft.

A Canadian art authenticator claims The New Yorker magazine defamed him in a long investigative article: "The Mark of a Masterpiece: The man who keeps finding famous fingerprints on uncelebrated works of art."

Peter Paul Biro calls the article a "false and defamatory screed ... written and published with malice and an indifference to the standards of responsible journalism."

Biro, the subject of the article in the July 5, 2010 issue, demands $2 million from Condé Nast and the article's author, David Grann, whom he identifies as a New Yorker staff writer.

David Remnick, editor for The New Yorker, scoffed at the allegations.

"David Grann's reporting on this story and everything else he does is painstaking in both its attention to the facts and tone," Remnick said in a statement. "We stand with David Grann and behind the story and believe the suit has no merit."

Biro also sued Dan's Papers, Manhattan Media and Dan Rattiner, who he says "wrote and published an article in response to the [New Yorker] article, repeated many of the same defamatory statements as are contained therein, and also added some of their own."

Biro, of Montreal, claims to have pioneered a method of authenticating paintings through fingerprint analysis. "He is by profession a forensic scientist, specializing in the use of fingerprint technology to assist in the resolution of issues of authenticity in works of art," Biro says in his 31-page federal complaint. "He trained and practiced as a conservator, but some years ago began to study artists' fingerprints, and in particular on [sic] a painting which was possibly by J.M.W. Turner.

"Plaintiff discovered a fingerprint on the painting, and this led him to question whether traditional methods for attribution of works of art could be supplemented by more scientific means. By comparing the fingerprint found in the painting to another he found in a known Turner work, he provided strong evidence that the painting was an authentic Turner. The finding was corroborated by established fingerprint experts at the time.

"Since then plaintiff has continued to evolve his methodology and documented fingerprints from the works of other noted artists. As a leading authority in this emerging field, plaintiff's services have been retained in a number of challenging authentication studies for collections and private clients worldwide," the complaint states.

Biro says Grann's 16,000-word article, "purports to be an in-depth study of the science of forensic examination of art works, and of the use of fingerprint technology to advance that science." But, Biro says, "It is nothing of the sort, but rather a false and defamatory screed against plaintiff, written and published with malice and an indifference to the standards of responsible journalism.

"The article relies to a significant extent on anonymous sources, many of whom are no longer alive, and repeats defamatory statements made by those sources.