The Venice Biennial, which opens June 4, is the Olympics of the contemporary art world, a century-old event in which countries send their most promising artists to exhibit in pavilions and palazzos across the watery city. Instead of medals, artists vie for fame on the global art field.

Competition for attention will be tough this time around: 89 nations are participating, up from 77 two summers ago. A third are setting up their shows in small buildings dotting the Giardini, a Napoleonic park on the city's eastern edge; the rest are staking spaces in the city's historic shipyards or in buildings nearby. Nearly 40 art foundations and private collectors are also organizing separate exhibits citywide.

The government agencies and art councils that pay for these pavilions are doing whatever they can to help their art stand out. The United Arab Emirates plans to fete the 30 artists packed into its show with a May 31 gala on the terrace of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection overlooking the Grand Canal. Montenegro has enlisted performance-art heavyweight Marina Abramovic to make a cameo at its June 2 breakfast.

Not everyone on the map will be represented, though. Political unrest compelled Bahrain and Lebanon to back out. Egypt mulled withdrawal as well, but has decided to show up as planned, says biennial director Bice Curiger. First-timers this year include Haiti and Bangladesh.

The biennial's main exhibition, "ILLUMInations," will nod to Venice's artistic past by displaying several 16th century masterpieces by Tintoretto alongside newer pieces by rising stars like Loris Gréaud and Urs Fischer. Mr. Gréaud, who is based in Paris, has created "The Geppetto Pavilion," a life-sized sculpture of a whale whose belly contains a door that's been fenced off. New York-based Mr. Fischer has used candle wax to recreate Giovanni Bologna's iconic 1583 sculpture, "The Rape of the Sabine Women." Mr. Fischer intends for his waxy homage to melt entirely by the time the biennial closes Nov. 27.

The Vorticists, the summer exhibition at Tate Britain, opens next month: I saw the show in Venice at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation. Who were the Vorticists? Galvanic Ezra Pound was the band's vocalist, belting it out. With his ziggurat hair, he was the impresario, the excitationist, the amplificationist, just as another writer, Marinetti, was the vocal focal point of the Italian Futurists. Every movement needs a writer to whip up the manifesto. The philosopher TE Hulme was its theorist. The leading participants were expatriates – the American sculptor Jacob Epstein, the ex-Canadian Wyndham Lewis, the Frenchman Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the American photographer-in-exile Alvin Langdon Coburn.

The movement was short-lived, barely lasting from 1914 to 1917. Epstein was never an official Vorticist. Nor was David Bomberg. But both could see the commercial point of Vorticism – the biz of the buzz. And they made a more lasting impact than various other English painters who were drawn into the Vortex – Pound's wife Dorothy Shakespear, Jessica Dismorr, Frederick Etchells, Helen Saunders, Christopher Nevinson, the Yorkshireman Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts. Apart from Roberts (barely represented here), none of these slight painters is touched with talent: they are canon fodder. They are the infantry, the grunts, bulking agent, the barium meal which creates the sense of a movement. The flush New York lawyer, John Quinn, antisemite, lover of Lady Augusta Gregory, patron of TS Eliot and the avant-garde magazine the Dial, also threw money at and down the Vortex.

And what was Vorticism? For all its international recruits, it was a parochial British attempt to emulate and excel Cubism and Futurism. Another ism. No wonder (in 1925) Hans Arp and El Lissitzky co-authored the trilingual Kunstismen (Isms in Art in English). Constructivism was set up in Russia. Fernand Léger's Tubism was just round the corner. There was Suprematism, Expressionism, Verismus . . . Arp and Lissitzky don't mention Vorticism, however. Why not? Because it was effectively invisible, a variant, a hanger-on, a wannabe. Vorticism was keeping up with the Cubists. A great many of the catalogue essays here are intent on translating the art into ideology. Every picture is worth 1,000 words. Or more. And we get them. The art historians assiduously mine the art for traces of Bergson, Kant, Newton, Max Stirner, Nietzsche, Georges Sorel.

Actually, the impulse behind Vorticism, the theory, is simple. The machine is central to Vorticism. Everything was subsumed to the machine. Le Corbusier famously said in 1923 that a house was a machine for living in. By then, the idea was domesticated and cosy. In January 1914, Hulme wrote that "the specific differentiating quality of the new art [will be] the idea of machinery". It is an irony that Langdon Coburn's mechanical Vortographs – disappointing double- and triple-exposures – meant he was swiftly dumped by Pound. (Langdon Coburn's straight photograph portrait of Wyndham Lewis shows an inadvertent apostasy of vision: note the great gathering of cubist folds in Lewis's ample crotch.)

In Orlando, Virginia Woolf definitively mocked the idea that literature, that prose style, was the toy of social conditions: "Also that the streets were better drained and the houses better lit had its effect upon the style, it cannot be doubted." Apparently, Wyndham Lewis was of the opposite persuasion. Social conditioning was crucial: he is against prettiness, he favours abstraction, because "a man who passes his days amid the rigid lines of houses, a plague of cheap ornamentation, noisy street locomotion, the Bedlam of the press, will evidently possess a different habit of vision to a man living amongst the lines of a landscape". However, this glib assimilation of seeing to surroundings – falling for a formula – is effectively repudiated by Wyndham Lewis when he subsequently writes: "In a painting certain forms MUST be SO; in the same meticulous, profound manner that your pen or a book must lie on the table at a certain angle, your clothes at night be arranged in a set personal symmetry, certain birds be avoided, a set of railings tapped with your hand as you pass, without missing one." What does this mean? Lewis is invoking superstition and ritual – and the iron law of instinct.

Eliot means much the same thing when he writes, in After Strange Gods, that theories of romanticism and classicism – Eliot was a classicist – count for nothing at the moment of composition, when it is impossible "to repair the damage of a lifetime". You can read the sex manual but the warm living woman will come as a complete surprise. In art, the hand and the eye are decisive. The brain guides the eye which guides the hand. Or so we think. But frequently the chain of command is disrupted, reversed, and the mind sees what the hand has already done. We look for inevitability.

And, once or twice, we find it in this exhibition. Jacob Epstein's Rock Drill (1913-15) was reconstructed in polyester resin by Ken Cook and Ann Christopher in 1973-74. It is the exemplary Vorticist art work. It shows a man on a tripod who is one with his machine. His drill is also his rigid proboscis, his hard, angled phallus. The tripod has weights (embossed Colman Bros Ltd Camborne England) on each leg, just above midpoint – which look like enlarged joints, or a bee's pollen knee-pads (only available in black).

The rib cage of the figure is exactly like the twin cylinders on a motorbike. He is recognisably human, true, but the human body, with its curves and trim little bum, has been made-over to the angular machine: it is an armoured exoskeleton. The arms are like greaves. I thought of Seamus Heaney's description of a motorbike lying in flowers and grass like an unseated knight. And I thought too of "Not My Best Side", UA Fanthorpe's marvellous poem about Uccello's St George and the Dragon in the National Gallery. In it, Fanthorpe imagines the young girl being rather taken by the dragon's equipment, when suddenly, irritatingly, "this boy [St George] turned up, wearing machinery".

Rock Drill is a tour de force, of energy, a vibrant sculptural collage. The head is turned so we can ponder its long, insect profile. It is immensely alien and spooky, even after you realise it is a long welder's mask, untitled and initially unrecognisable, tilted but not revealing a face. There is no face. The mask is the face.

The other great work is the Frenchman Gaudier-Brzeska's Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound. No photographic reproduction prepares you for the scale of this piece. Or the satisfying solidity of the marble. In the Palazzo Guggenheim, the authorised copy was beautifully lit so the shadows were incised and the planes visible. The only thing that is Vorticist about the piece is Gaudier-Brzeska's direct carving, without prior clay models or plaster-of-Paris maquettes – an earnest of Vorticist energy, of vitalism.

In the Musée d'Orsay in Paris hang the revolutionary works of painters who made art modern in France more than a century ago. Here they are, the true greats of early modernism: Cézanne and Van Gogh, as well as Gauguin and Degas, Monet and, of course, Seurat. That's six, and there are obviously several more profoundly important figures in France at that time, including Toulouse-Lautrec and Odilon Redon. That makes eight. And there are more, too, including sculptors led by Rodin. Perhaps you could bring the figure up to 16, even 20, without scraping the barrel.

Say we agree, generously, that 20 artists genuinely mattered in late 19th-century France at the dawn of modernism, one of the truly great moments of art history. Now, how many living British artists are regarded as important, unmissable, revolutionary? To judge from the bonanza of 21st-century British art touted in newspaper articles, art fairs, group shows, magazines and a host of solo shows at legions of galleries, there must be – what? – a hundred, no, more like two hundred names to conjure with.

So this must be the greatest moment ever in the story of art, a cultural golden age to put fifth-century Athens to shame.

Or could 21st-century British art possibly be overhyped?

Come on – do the sums – they don't add up. The young and middle-aged artists celebrated in Britain today cannot all be marvellous. Just as Britain's economy in recent times turned out to be running on false credit, so too our art scene has ballooned into a mass delusion.

Magnus Renfrew, director of ART HK 11, the fourth edition of the Hong Kong International Art Fair, talks about the changing nature of the fair and the appetites of Chinese and Asia-Pacific art collectors.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Ileana Sonnabend. An Italian Portrait, on view 29 May–2 October 2011.

Considered by many to be among the greatest gallerists of late 20th century contemporary art, Ileana Sonnabend (1914–2007) also brought together a major art collection of her own. The exhibition Ileana Sonnabend. An Italian Portrait, on view at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, from May 29 to October 2, 2011, presents works from the Sonnabend Collection, New York, on the theme of Italy: works by Italian artists, and works by international artists which reference Italian culture, tradition, and topography.

Ileana Schapira was born in Bucharest, Romania. Her father was a successful businessman and financial advisor to King Carol II of Romania. She met Leo Krausz (later Castelli) in 1932 and married him a year later. In 1935 they moved to Paris and opened an art gallery there, with René Drouin, before emigrating to New York in 1941. Leo Castelli joined the US army, and Ileana studied at Columbia University, where she met Michael Sonnabend, whom she was to marry in 1959. In the 1940s and 50s the Castellis initiated a collection of art that included works by Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock. In 1957 they opened their first art gallery in New York. Together they discovered and exhibited the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and began lifetimes of showing new art, beginning with Neo-dada and Pop Art (Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and James Rosenquist). Late in 1962 Michael and Ileana Sonnabend opened the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris, where they exhibited the work of American artists but also the work of several young Italians, beginning with Mario Schifano (1963) and Michelangelo Pistoletto (1964), followed by Gilberto Zorio, Mario Merz and Giovanni Anselmo (1969), Piero Paolo Calzolari (1971), Jannis Kounellis (1972) and others.

In 1970 Ileana Sonnabend opened a gallery in New York, moving in 1971 to the SoHo district, together with the Castelli Gallery, thus spurring a migration of the contemporary art scene in New York. She opened her SoHo gallery with a now-celebrated performance by Gilbert & George. As she continued, through her gallery and collecting, to register new art as it emerged on both the European and the New York scene—Minimalism, Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, performance, Transavanguardia, Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Geo and new photography—she acquired a reputation for her connoisseurship, her appetite for ‘the new’ and for the international character of her gallery.

Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) and Ileana Sonnabend had in common that their careers were as both gallerists and collectors. In New York in the 1940s the Castellis frequented Guggenheim’s Art of This Century museum-gallery (1942–47)—about which Castelli remarked “Peggy’s gallery was a sensation… No one realized that Peggy was doing something of epoch-making importance.” The Castellis bought works of art from Guggenheim. However, whereas Guggenheim’s patronage focused on the generation of the American Abstract Expressionists, Ileana Sonnabend promoted subsequent avant-gardes over a fifty-year period, as if in a line of succession from Guggenheim.

Michael and Ileana Sonnabend had strong personal ties to Italy, and to Venice in particular, where for many years they rented an apartment for the summer. Beginning with a sojourn in Rome in 1960, where they were in contact with the ‘Scuola di Piazza del Popolo’ and the dealer Plinio de Martiis, and in 1962 in Venice, where they were befriended by artists, critics and dealers such as Giuseppe Santomaso, Giuseppe Marchiori, Attilio Codognato, Giovanni Camuffo and Carlo Cardazzo, they formed many close Italian friendships, including Gian Enzo Sperone, Germano Celant, Achille Bonito Oliva, Giuseppe and Giovanna Panza, and the many artists whose works Ileana would exhibit, in Paris and New York. Ileana, with Leo Castelli and Alan Solomon, played an important role in bringing Robert Rauschenberg to the 1964 Venice Biennale, where he won the Grand Prix for Painting—a crucial event in the career of Rauschenberg, in the history of the Venice Biennale and of European and American contemporary art as a whole.

Ileana Sonnabend. An Italian Portrait brings together more than 60 works by almost 50 artists, selected by Antonio Homem (director of the Sonnabend Gallery, New York, and adopted son of Ileana Sonnabend). It will include Andy Warhol’s portrait of Ileana Sonnabend, works on Italian themes by Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, works by Italians such as Tano Festa, Lucio Fontana, Mimmo Rotella, Schifano and Piero Manzoni, works by American artists inspired by Italian culture (Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, John Baldessari for example), by artists of the Arte Povera movement (Zorio, Anselmo, Calzolari, Jannis Kounnelis, and Merz), by several international photographers (including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Max Becher and Andrea Robbins), and by many others—whether Italian (Giulio Paolini, Luigi Ontani) or not (Bruce Nauman, Anselm Kiefer, Philip Haas, Rona Pondick for example). The exhibition moves beyond its Italian leitmotif to a more general survey of the diversity, originality and indeed brilliance of Ileana Sonnabend’s career as a promoter and collector of emerging art.

The exhibition is organized by Antonio Homem and Philip Rylands, director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The catalogue includes tributes to Ileana Sonnabend by Achille Bonito Oliva and Germano Celant, an interview with Antonio Homem, and catalogue texts by Mario Codognato.

The exhibition has been supported by Intrapresae Collezione Guggenheim and is in collaboration with Corriere della Sera. Hangar Design Group realized the graphic design. Radio Italia is media partner.

Daily at 3:30 pm free guided visits of the temporary exhibition are offered to the public.

Opening hours: 10:00 am–6:00 pm; closed Tuesdays

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A series of auctions of high-end goods from fine wine to Imperial Chinese ceramics goes into full swing this weekend in Hong Kong, as the city challenges the dominance of New York and London.

The multi-million-dollar auctions are looking to cash in on the vast wealth of China's growing number of millionaires keen to show off their newly-made cash.

Christie's six-day Spring sale kicks off Friday with more than 2,700 lots, including a rare Patek Philippe watch and several pieces of contemporary art, that the house expects to rake in about HK$2.4 billion ($308 million).

And on Tuesday rival Sotheby's will be hoping buyers will stump up as much HK$130 million for a series of paintings by famed Chinese artist Chang Dai-chien.

"This area is becoming a more and more important market for us," Christie's chief executive Steven Murphy told a press briefing Thursday, adding that Greater China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, was one of the firm's "fastest-growing markets."

Already this week, Bonhams Hong Kong said it posted a "Golden Gavel triumph" with the HK$38.3 million sale of Chinese snuff bottles on Wednesday.

But the big money should begin rolling in from Friday, when Christie's begins its sale, which includes hundreds of Chinese ceramics that may draw more than HK$1 billion and a Patek Philippe watch, which it says could fetch HK$9.5 million.

The auctioneer said its contemporary Asian and Chinese art sale will feature a self portrait of artist Zeng Fanzhi that could sell for HK$35 million.

Acker Merrall & Condit will hold a rare wine sale of 1,100 lots in the financial hub at the weekend, which it expects to take HK$80 million.

Among the rarities on offer are a wooden case of 1945 Mouton Rothschild with a HK$1.4 million high-end estimate and a trio of original wooden cases of 1988 Romanée Conti in "pristine condition", which could sell for HK$960,000, the auctioneer said.

Hong Kong has seen a surge in wine auctions in the past few years with the mainland Chinese market expected to hit $870 million by 2017, about 60 percent of the total Asian wine market excluding Japan.

"Our location obviously makes it very convenient for Asian collectors, particularly those from mainland China, to take part in our auctions," Donald Tong, Hong Kong's most senior trade representative in the US, said Thursday.

Strong demand for Brazilian abstract art and works by Colombia's Fernando Botero propelled Sotheby's to its best-selling auction of Latin American art with more than $21.6 million in sales.

Botero's painting "A Family," which fetched $1.4 million, was the top seller at Wednesday's sale and his "Man on a Horse" set a record for a bronze sculpture for the artist at auction -- at $1.17 million.

Overall, Botero works accounted for a third of the total sale, which topped Sotheby's $21 million Latin American sale record, set in the spring 2008 before the financial crisis sent art markets into a tailspin.

"In every crisis, there is somebody who makes money and they have to spend it," said Carmen Melian, Sotheby's Latin American art chief. "I think also the big shock is over ... some people are starting to buy and the whole cycle (of art buying) starts all over again.

Unusually for Botero at auction, three decades of his work were represented, including earlier art seen as political like the 1975 "El Presidente," which fetched $266,500.

The evening's most intense bidding was for Brazilian abstract sculptures made of wood.

Brazilian Cildo Meireles' 1982 sculpture "In-Mensa" sold for $518,000, an artist auction record. It fuses polished brown wood into hybrid furniture, tricking the eye into alternatively identifying what parts are chairs or tables.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is expanding -- in part to create space for the collection of late Gap founder Donald Fisher -- and Thursday we got the first glimpse of the new wing.

Designed by busy Norwegian firm Snøhetta, which is also at work on the museum at New York's ground zero, the addition will slip a massive, 335-foot-long cruise ship of a structure behind the museum's existing building, which was designed by Mario Botta and opened in 1995. The main entry to Botta's museum, along Third Street, will remain, but a second gateway to the museum will open up along Howard Street.

Analytic cubism -- the name couldn't be worse. It sounds like an advanced placement course in geometry, not a descriptor for the dramatic stylistic shift that moved art from impressionism to abstraction, albeit with a loud grinding of the gears.

This early conceptual attempt at rendering the fourth dimension was a head-scratcher when it first appeared, and it is still cause for much explanatory heavy lifting. The cubist paintings made between 1910 and 1912 by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque are considered the apogee of cubism, and that makes them the standard-bearers of this art moment that is underappreciated by most, and over-scrutinized by a few.

The work was reviled 100 years ago; time has proved it to be pivotal but hasn't helped its popularity. The Kimbell Art Museum has stepped into the breach with "Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912," which opens Sunday. The Kimbell owns two of the best works in the exhibit, and its conservation staff provided a gallery of supporting materials that show the various painting techniques the artists used to achieve their surface textures.

Between the 16 paintings, 20 etchings, a gallery of painting techniques employed by Braque and Picasso, a reading room and a special app for iPads called iCubist -- available to exhibition visitors free on 40 preloaded iPads -- there is a great deal of translation help with this exhibit. Although there may never be a "simply put" explanation for cubism, all this helps tremendously.

The tightly focused show, organized by the Kimbell and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, is a revelation. Too often these paintings are relegated to a quick art history hit because their dark colors and extreme textural effects muddy and flatten when they are reproduced, and the works on paper are almost never exhibited. Seeing the prints for the first time, and many of the paintings, is truly edifying.

Picasso and Braque's intense two-year collaboration produced paintings that are often so similar that it is difficult to ascertain which artist painted which canvas. They avoided putting their signatures on the front, so they didn't assist in attribution. They used almost identical palettes of subdued earthy darks and golds, the better to separate themselves from the tutti-fruitti colors of the impressionists and color saturation of the fauves. The browns and blacks in the paintings are similar to conté crayons used in drawings, to further suggest these are exploratory works.

The artists looked at their subject matter from above and from eye level, combining the viewpoints to create an approximation of a greater whole, in theory anyway. They used hard lines to define space, but the lines also fractured the plane of the canvas into prismatic sections. The sections would then bleed into adjoining ones through a blending of colors called passage.

The artists added hatch marks, incised lines in the wet pigment, mixed sand and metal filings into the paint, used stenciled letters and pasted on pre-printed papers for some of the first collage effects. Braque is given credit as the first to try many of these; Picasso would then push the limits of what the effects could do. Picasso's contribution to the additives was using Ripolin, an industrial house paint that would add brightness and shine to black pigments; he liked it because it dried quickly.

They used still lifes as their favorite departure point, at first using typical genre items such as fruit or wineglasses on a table. Soon the dining table turned into the round Parisian bistro tabletop with playing cards, wine bottles, wineglasses and beer. In Braque's early Glass on a Table (1909-10), the round curve of the table and the drinking glass are easily recognizable.

One year later, Picasso's Still Life With Bottle of Rum has a similar table curve in the righthand corner, the approximation of a bottle with a suggestion of fingers wrapped around it, and the floating letters "L," "E," "T" and "R." This is the first time Picasso included letters, and a painting done at the same time by Braque used fragments of the newspaper Le Torero; Picasso could have been mimicking Braque or using a play on lettre, the French word for letter.

A man in marble is giving me the finger.

I'm at Art HK, Asia's leading art fair, and the one-finger salute is from the 2007 sculpture "Marble Arm" by outspoken artist-activist Ai Weiwei. As we all should know by now, Ai was detained by Beijing authorities almost two months ago in an ongoing campaign against Chinese activists. Ai has since been accused of tax evasion.

"Marble Arm" is linked to a series of provocative snapshots featuring Ai raising his middle finger to various symbols of power from the White House to Tiananmen Square.  On reserve, it has a prospective buyer who is willing to pay $280,000 for the work.

And today, that marble middle finger is greeting prospective buyers and curious visitors at Art HK's Galerie Urs Meile exhibition space.

But it is a lonely protest. Among the 260 galleries at the international art fair, "Marble Arm" is the only work by Ai on display.

There are a few "Where is Ai Weiwei?" freebie pins and t-shirts available from Galerie Urs Meile and two other dealers at the fair. But for the most part, at Asian's largest art fair, China's most well-known artist is noticeably missing.

Both the United States and the European Union have called for the artist's release, but the commercial art community in Asia seems to be taking a more, shall we say, diplomatic approach. Art HK director Magnus Renfrew calls Ai Weiwei "an artist who we greatly admire."

And yet Renfrew delivers even more praise for the city of Hong Kong "where freedom of expression is greatly valued, and freedom of expression is protected under the Bill of Rights of Hong Kong and under the Basic Law of Hong Kong.  So it is a very good place for the full variety of voices to be heard."

Those voices are being heard far from the gleaming halls of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center.

In a gritty industrial space in the city's Chai Wan district, 50 Hong Kong artists are speaking out against Ai's detention in a non-selling exhibition called "Love the Future." In Mandarin, it reads as "Ai Wei Lai," a pun on "Ai Wei Wei" and a code name used by the artist's online supporters when he first went missing.

As many as 50,000 people may converge on a BMW M3 race car custom painted by Jeff Koons and thousands of other contemporary works as Hong Kong consolidates its position this week as Asia’s place to buy art.

ART HK 11, the fourth edition of the Hong Kong International Art Fair, opens to the public from today through May 29 with works ranging from Pablo Picasso to Andy Warhol to contemporary Chinese painter Zeng Fanzhi. About 6,000 Veuve Clicquot-sipping VIPs got first picks at the preview yesterday.

The gathering of 260 galleries from 38 countries is part of an eight-day spending spree in the city that includes Spring auctions by Bonham’s and Christie’s International, a wine sale by New York-based Acker, Merrall & Condit, and gallery shows including those by Chinese performance artist Zhang Huan at Edouard Malingue and American photographer David LaChapelle at de Sarthe Fine Art.

“You better get some sleep in advance,” said Nick Simunovic, director of Gagosian’s Hong Kong gallery, which is simultaneously running a one-man show featuring biker girls and nurses by American artist Richard Prince and a booth at ART HK selling works by artists including Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami.

In four years, ART HK has become a major stop of the global art fair circuit, closing in on London’s Frieze and Art Basel Miami Beach, which draw crowds of about 60,000 to 70,000.

“The art market tends to follow wealth and the greatest wealth is being created in Asia,” said fair director Magnus Renfrew.

A decades-long dispute between Russia and an Orthodox Jewish group over ownership of holy texts collected for centuries by influential rabbis and seized by the Soviet Union has jolted the U.S. art world, threatening an end to major cultural loans between the two countries.

Russia has already frozen art loans to major American institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Houston Museum of Natural Science, fearing that its cultural property could be seized after the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Chabad-Lubavitch movement won a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in 2010 compelling the return of its texts.

The Met, and possibly other major lending institutions, are weighing whether to discontinue loans of cultural property to Russia.

The issue has become so important to relations between the U.S. and Russia that the Justice Department has signaled for the first time in court papers that by Monday, it may weigh in on the legal case, which the Russians pulled out of in 2009, citing sovereign immunity.

Federal attorneys declined to comment for this story, and Russia's Culture Ministry did not respond to numerous calls, emails and faxes from The Associated Press seeking comment.
The U.S. State Department has worked to support Chabad's campaign to reclaim its sacred texts since the 1990s.

Chabad is a worldwide Orthodox Hasidic Jewish movement, and has spent decades trying to reclaim the trove of thousands of religious books, manuscripts and handwritten documents, known as the Schneerson Collection, held in Russian repositories. Collected since 1772 by the leaders of the movement, the revered religious papers include Chabad's core teachings and traditions.

Russian officials have argued that Chabad has no ownership rights over the collection and that the case belongs in Russian courts because it considers the works part of the country's cultural heritage.

Chabad won the right to reclaim the sacred texts from a Soviet court in 1991, but after the collapse of the USSR, the new Russian authorities threw out the judgment.

Cultural objects lent from foreign countries are protected from legal claims under U.S. law, as long as they are deemed to be "in the national interest" and "of cultural significance" by the State Department, which is the case in major exhibitions.

Nevertheless, some Russian officials are convinced that seizure of that country's cultural property is a preordained outcome of the court's decision.

"We know what is done in such cases: the state property -- planes, ships, paintings -- is arrested," said Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, the director of Russia's State Hermitage Museum, in a recent interview with the Russian newspaper, the St. Petersburg Vedomosty. "Consequently, the Russian government won't issue permits for exhibitions in the U.S."

But Seth Gerber of Bingham McCutchen, an attorney for Chabad, said the group had no plans to ask the court to seize Russian cultural property.

"Chabad will not seek to enforce its judgment by attaching or executing against any art or object of cultural significance which is immune from seizure under federal law and loaned by the Russian Federation to American museums," he said in an email to the AP.

Chabad filed a statement and letter to State Department officials with the court Friday, assuring the U.S. government of its intentions.

The Russian culture minister announced the ban in January.

A painting by Francis Bacon that he gave to another artist in return for the use of his studio could fetch as much as £11 million at Christie’s next month. In 1951, grief-stricken at the death of his former nanny and companion, Jessie Lightfoot, Bacon left his flat in Cromwell Place, South Kensington, which they shared, and embarked on a nomadic existence, borrowing the studio of the Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art, Rodrigo Moynihan, to work in. He used the studio for another two years, producing some of the most haunting images of his career, and exercising a powerful influence on the students at the college.

Study for Portrait was one of the last works he produced there. For Bacon, according to his biographer Michael Peppiatt, 1953 was an “annus mirabilis as inventive as it was prolific”. In spite of “flitting from debt to debt, and digs to digs”, he managed to produce more than 20 “majestic and terrifying” paintings including eight paintings of popes.

With the artist finding stimulation in adversity, Peppiatt concludes, “this was the period when Bacon acquired the means he needed to bring forth his vision.”

The subject of Study for Portrait is not known. The painting bears resemblances at once to Velazquez’s Portrait of Philip IV of Spain, to a photograph of Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference, to the art critic David Sylvester and to Bacon’s lover at the time, Peter Lacy. Whoever it is, it is a figure of power, seated on a semi-gilded throne and staring menacingly down at the viewer from the dark, caged solitude in which he is trapped. Look closely at the darkness, and it is a vivid Prussian blue-black that recedes in tone to the depths of the unknown where the subject sits regally, his starched white collar and brilliant flesh tones glowing like a ghostly apparition.

At some point, the painting was acquired from Moynihan by the successful Irish artist, Louis Le Brocquy, known for his spectral paintings of Bacon, who in turn sold it to Marlborough Fine Art, which had become Bacon’s principal dealers.

In 1984 it was bought from Marlborough by the Swiss entrepreneur and wine producer Donald M Hess, who, though not identified as such by Christie’s, is the seller next month.

Detroit-area developer and philanthropist A. Alfred Taubman today pledged to give $11 million to Lawrence Technological University for an engineering, architecture and life sciences building in his name.

The donation brings to about $225 million the amount of money Taubman has given to universities, art schools and institutes and other causes.

Last month, he donated $56 million to the University of Michigan for stem-cell medical research. Taubman has given $142 million to U-M, of which $100 million went to the A. Alfred Taubman Medical Research Institute.

Asked what motivates the giving, he quipped. “I’m 87 years old. Gotta give it away some time.”

With a net worth of $2.3 billion, Taubman is the fourth richest man in Michigan and ranks 512th among 1,210 listed this year on Forbes magazine’s World’s Billionaires list.

Taubman, who did not complete college, studied at the University of Michigan for three years before transferring to night school at Lawrence Tech as a junior. He took classes at night for two years when the school, now in Southfield, held classes in Highland Park. In the last year, he returned to teach at the school, though he joked that his title as affiliate professor of architecture and design came without faculty parking privileges.

The secret behind the famously enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa, the world's most famous painting, could soon be solved.

Archaeologists on a dig in Italy claim to have discovered the skull of the woman who posed for Leonardo's da Vinci's  masterpiece.

The excavation team revealed over the weekend that it had found a crypt after a two-week search at an abandoned convent in Florence.

But the grave beneath St. Ursula convent, believed to be the final resting place of Lisa Gherardini Del Giocondo, has now yielded a female-sized skull.

The merchant's wife is widely believed to have been the life model for da Vinci's best-known work.

Officials say the skull was found five feet under the convent's original floor along with other fragments of human ribs and vertebrae.

Now scientists will compare the DNA in the bones with the remains of the model's two children who were buried nearby in an attempt to authenticate the find.

If scientists can confirm the skull belongs to the model, forensic artists will then attempt to reconstruct her face to see how it compares to the 500-year-old version painted by da Vinci - and perhaps solve the riddle of the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile in the process.

Archeologist Silvano Vinceti, who is in charge of the dig, explained: 'We don't know yet if the bones belong to one single skeleton or more than one.

'But this confirms our hypothesis that in St.Ursula convent there are still human bones and we cannot exclude that among them there are bones belonging to Lisa Gherardini.'

Don't look now, but the Wayside Inn Antiques Show is making antiquing fun again. Staged most recently at the historic Wayside Inn, May 13–15, this 46-dealer fair mixes business and pleasure, striking a calculated balance between affordable fare and choice specimens for dedicated collectors.

Everything about this show seems designed to give pleasure. There is the verdant setting, lushly beautiful in springtime but just 30 minutes from central Boston. And the festive tent offers 20,000 square feet of heated and air-conditioned luxury. The people are a happy mix of costumed interpreters, ardent collectors, supporters of the historic Wayside Inn, and, of course, experts from Skinner, the Boston auction house that generously sponsors the show. As evidence of the show's caliber, exhibitors include six from the Winter Antiques Show, seven from The American Antiques Show and 17 from the Philadelphia Antiques Show.

Two exhibitors, Diana H. Bittel and Ralph DiSaia, manage the two-year-old fair on behalf of Wayside Inn, a Massachusetts Historic Landmark. Bittel serves as show manager. DiSaia is the facilities manager. DiSaia's job was made more difficult by a downpour on Sunday afternoon.

"Show logistics went amazingly well, considering," DiSaia told Antiques and The Arts Weekly . "The tent is 120 by 180 feet. The floor is plywood over a two-layer under-structure that is about 4 inches off the ground. We had some seepage in the tent, but no leaks. Rain made the site muddy for move-out, but exhibitors were packed out by 10:30 pm on Sunday. Next year, we are totally regrading the area to address these problems."

"I think attendance was fine, though we were hurt by the rain," Bittel said the day after the show's closing. "We drew supporters of the old Ellis Memorial Antiques and a number of very prominent collectors from the area. Some exhibitors sold well. A few did not do much business at all. Overall, people love the show and want to come back next year. I can't say enough about Skinner. They were fabulous."

This year's Wayside Inn Antiques Show was especially rich in regional American painting. On Newbury Street in Boston, Childs Gallery brought a selection of paintings from its current gallery exhibition, "A Shore Thing: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Marine Paintings." The tour de force was "Maine Rock," by William P. Burpee, who worked in Maine and Massachusetts.

"This is my Modernist corner," said Sarah Cunningham of Walker-Cunningham Fine Art, pointing to a nook ornamented with Albert Wein's 1946 bronze "Man with Plow," his Prix de Rome entry. She paired the bronze with Virginia True's "Nude," an oil on canvas mediation of the human form as structure. A pen and ink study accompanied the painting.

"Henry Ward Ranger really founded the Old Lyme colony in 1899 before moving to Mystic, Conn.," said Old Lyme, Conn., dealer Jeffrey Cooley. Ranger's "Evening Sky" was a highlight of Cooley's display of mostly Tonalist paintings.

"It's a great treat to be here with such a fine audience of art lovers and artists," cooed Debbie Harry, surveying the crowd at the Whitney's groundbreaking gala last week. "Downtown people, uptown people, all kinds of New Yorkers."

When Blondie's right, she's right—many of the museum's supporters, arrayed in front of her at tables that cost some $25,000 apiece, were indeed uptown people, Upper East Side people, neighbors of the museum's current location at 75th and Madison. But they were gathered downtown, in a tent surrounded by chain-link fencing and construction paraphernalia on the corner of Washington and Gansevoort—future site of the museum's Renzo Piano building, planned to open in 2015. It was different!

"It might be the most groundbreaking groundbreaking you've ever seen," said Mayor Bloomberg at the dirt ceremony Tuesday. Dancers from the Elizabeth Streb company threw themselves through plate-glass windows as Ms. Streb stood under a cylinder that sprayed sand at her head. In the audience, Renzo Piano wore safety goggles.

The mayor and various trustees then crowded around Ms. Streb to dig at her feet, for photos.

Downtown wasn't the Whitney's first choice. A previous expansion plan had the museum building off its current building at 75th, but it fell through after the Landmarks Commission wanted a change that Mr. Piano said he'd jump in a lake before making.

"I prefer here," Mr. Piano told The Observer after the ceremony Tuesday. "It's more vibrant."

The space at the base of the High Line had been considered by at least one other art institution—the Dia Foundation. For a while, the Whitney's plan was unclear—would it build a downtown annex, or make a wholesale move? After some trustee disagreement, it became clear it would be the latter—it would bet the house on downtown—and now the writing is on the wall in the meatpacking district. Or on the streetlights, anyhow, which have been embellished with fluttering banners announcing, with the mute drama of haiku, the museum's imminent arrival: "The Whitney/Ground Breaking/ The Future."

If ground breaking is in the streets, at the gala it was also in the air—and on the table. Above the diners, and the stage where Blondie performed, hung lines of teal-color shovels. Centerpieces were composed of orange construction tape.

"It makes sense, doesn't it?" Whitney director Adam Weinberg said at the gala. "I still think we'll bring in a lot of people from our East Side base. We're not even way downtown, at the bottom, we're not at the tip of Manhattan. Fourteenth Street is semi-midtown, even."

Translation: downtown, but not too downtown. Close enough that, if you build it, they'll come, even if that means—egads!—public transportation. "Sure I take the subway!" enthused Amy Phelan, Dallas Cowboys cheerleader-turned-contemporary art collector and Whitney donor, at the gala. When in New York, she lives on the U.E.S. 

The Whitney has some $212 million to raise on its $720 million building project—the gala made a $2 million dent, and they nabbed $100 million by selling the uptown townhouses bought for the aborted expansion—but this is not bad news. "They've got four years to show potential donors the building site and, as the building goes up, to show them the cavernous hall that could be named after them," said David Gordon, a former museum director and now consultant to cultural institutions. "There's something to be said for starting construction. The most important thing is to convince the doubters who said, 'It's never going to happen.'"

The cash will come from wealthy benefactors—"I hope they have a Russian oligarch hidden in a closet," one art world source joked—but where will visitors come from downtown? Shoppers at the Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney boutiques? Diners from Spice Market and Pastis? Artsy swells lodging at the Gansevoort, Soho House and Andre Balazs's Standard Hotel, which has launched its own culture program?

What nerve they had!

Barely out of their 20s, Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, expatriate Americans who had grown up in Oakland, began buying work by several of the most radical artists then working in Paris. Their older brother Michael and his wife, Sarah, soon followed their example, no less daringly.

"The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde," which opens today at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, breathtakingly unfolds the record of the family's taste in early 20th century modernism.

The show's wealth of documentary material includes the catalog of the 1970-71 exhibition "Four Americans in Paris: The Collections of Gertrude Stein and Her Family," forerunner of the present project and a rudimentary template for it.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York organized "Four Americans" - and sent a version of the show to the San Francisco Museum of Art, as SFMOMA called itself then - shortly after acquiring several works from Gertrude's estate after the 1967 death of her companion of 36 years, Alice B. Toklas. Visitors to SFMOMA who happened to see "Four Americans" in New York will remember a grand experience, but "The Steins Collect" expands all of its dimensions, like a mansion built around a cottage.

Picasso and Matisse tower over everyone else here, but outstanding works by others do crop up.

The first room, dedicated to Leo's self-education as a collector, includes Cézanne's "Five Apples" (1877-78), in whose tiny dimensions his concentration feels explosively compressed. In a later room, which dramatizes the divergence of Gertrude's taste from Leo's, Juan Gris' "Flowers" (1914) proves that Picasso's Cubism had in it implicit graces unexploited even by him.

Mural-scale enlargements of historical photos in several rooms show us paintings in the exhibition as the Steins lived with them. The example most striking to me: a shot of Gertrude's atelier at 27 Rue de Fleurus showing a row of small proto-Cubist Picasso female heads. Several of them hang here, foreshadowing, as grimaces do a sneeze, the epochal novelty of his 1908 "Demoiselles d'Avignon." That picture's ringing absence from the exhibition raises again the question why Gertrude did not buy it when no one else would.

"The Steins Collect" tells the complicated story of Leo taking the lead as a bohemian in Paris, of Gertrude joining him, and their collecting taste evolving in tandem until a breach occurred over Picasso's breakthrough into Cubism.

Meanwhile, Michael and Sarah Stein, who relocated from France to Palo Alto in 1935, championed Matisse above all his contemporaries. They influenced several American friends abroad and in the Bay Area to acquire pieces by Matisse, leading to major gifts and bequests of the artist's work to SFMOMA, including his painted portraits of Michael and Sarah.

He may not be a household name in Western countries, but over the past few years the Chinese painter Qi Baishi (齐白石, 1864-1957) has quietly emerged as one of the world’s top-selling artists on the strength of his popularity among cashed-up mainland Chinese collectors. As the global financial crisis hit international auction houses in 2009, emergent Chinese collectors pumped millions into works by Qi at domestic Chinese auctions, making his ascent appear even more dramatic, and following two years of strong sales, last year Qi Baishi trailed only Pablo Picasso in ArtPrice’s annual artist sales ranking with US$70 million in sales. This saw Qi, for the first time, surpass list stalwart Andy Warhol, an achievement that was not lost on the international art press.

Now, in the wake of this weekend’s China Guardian spring auctions in Beijing, held this past weekend, Qi is back in the news. On Sunday, Qi’s 1946 ink painting “A Long Life, a Peaceful World” sold for a jaw-dropping 425.5 million yuan (US$65 million), in the process setting a new record for a Chinese painting. The 100 x 266 cm (3 x 8.5 feet) ink wash, originally created as a gift to then-Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, depicts a falcon on a pine branch, flanked on either side by Qi’s masterful calligraphy. The sale of this work, along with another of Qi’s paintings that sold for 92 million yuan (US$14 million) this weekend, helped the China Guardian spring auctions pull in a grand total of 1 billion yuan ($649 million) so far.

As Artinfo points out, on the strength of its ongoing spring auctions, China Guardian looks to reassert dominance in the domestic Chinese auction house over its rival Poly, which edged the former out last year with US$1.5 billion in sales last year. With the priority these auction houses place on traditional Chinese artists (though they are increasingly championing contemporary Chinese artists as well), Artinfo notes that China Guardian and Poly are hoping to tap an increasingly important market:

Over the last couple of years, as Chinese collectors have increasingly made their presence felt in auction rooms around the world, the value of works by modern masters like Qi Baishi, Xu Beihong, Zhang Daqian, and Fu Baoshi have skyrocketed. Last year these modern artists, whose work is in the traditional Chinese style, took out four of the top ten spots in Artprice’s global rankings by auction revenue.

The previous record for a Chinese painting at auction was set last year at Beijing’s Hanhai auction house, when Xu Beihong’s “Ba People Fetching Water” (1937) sold for for RMB 171 million ($25.8 million). Qi Baishi’s work now takes third place overall in the record rankings of Chinese works of art at auction. First place is held by the Qianlong vase that sold at Bainbridges in the United Kingdom for $85.9 million last November, with second place going to a calligraphy by Song Dynasty master Huang Tingjian that sold at Poly Auctions in Beijing last June for RMB 436.8 million ($64 million).

The Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation, created by the theatre impresario behind Cats and Phantom of the Opera, is donating nearly £32 million ($50.5 million Cdn) to British arts groups.

The funding is directed at arts programs that make a "significant contribution to many people's lives." Established in 1982, Lloyd Webber Foundation's objective is to promote the arts, culture and heritage for the public benefit.

The money for the new donations came from the approximately $54 million Cdn. sale ofPablo Picasso's 1903 painting Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto (Absinthe Drinker) in June 2010. Lloyd Webber had owned the painting for 25 years.