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Thursday, 21 April 2011 02:00

The "Lady with an Ermine", a rare painting of a woman by Leonardo da Vinci and Poland's greatest art treasure, was set to hit the road Wednesday after a year of heated debate by officials and experts.

Fearing it could be damaged, Poland's culture ministry was initially hostile to the idea of the masterpiece painted on wood leaving the country.

But Poland's deputy minister of culture, Piotr Zuchowski, said Wednesday that a personal appeal by its owner, Polish aristocrat Prince Adam Karol Czartoryski, convinced the ministry to allow it to go on display in Madrid, Berlin and London.

Spain's King Juan Carlos himself apparently asked for the da Vinci gem to travel to Spain.

"It's difficult to refuse the King of Spain, especially since he's my cousin," Czartoryski said, quoted by Poland's PAP news agency.

After agreeing to the Spanish request, Polish authorities also gave the nod to German and British appeals.

Thursday, 21 April 2011 01:58

Ben Stiller is getting some of the biggest names in contemporary art to help Haitian children affected by last year's earthquake.

The actor and comedian announced Wednesday that he is partnering with New York art dealer David Zwirner on a benefit auction called "Artists for Haiti," scheduled for Sept. 22 at Christie's auction house.

Some of the artists who have already donated works include Chuck Close, Paul McCarthy, Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin, Jeff Koons and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

"Over a year after the massive quake in Haiti, there remains a huge need to rebuild and help the country," Stiller said in a statement. "David and I are working to help raise funds so that the children of Haiti have an opportunity to receive the education they need to lead a better life and fulfill the potential of this vibrant and important culture."

Thursday, 21 April 2011 01:51

A naked youth had oil poured over him inside Tate Britain today in an artist-led demonstration against oil company BP Plc (BP/)’s sponsorship of Tate.

The performance marked the first anniversary of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil-rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S.’s worst-ever oil spill. BP is a longstanding sponsor of Tate Britain, the British Museum, the Royal Opera House and the National Portrait Gallery, and has said it will maintain those London sponsorships, which cost it a total of more than 1 million pounds ($1.6 million) a year.

Today’s action was staged by Liberate Tate, a group of 15 to 20 artists who want BP’s sponsorship of Tate to end. Shortly after Tate Britain’s 10 a.m. opening, about eight black-clad activists entered the building to perform the strip-in.

The young man “removed his clothes carefully and slowly, and handed it to two other people dressed in black,” said Nina Jones, a 27-year-old painter who took part in the protest. He was “curled in a fetal-like position.”

A man and a woman, “both with veils over their faces, arrived from the very back of the gallery carrying two green petrol cans with BP logos on them,” she recalled. “They started to slowly pour the oil over his body.”

Thursday, 21 April 2011 01:29

Many of North America's best old-house neighborhoods are in long- or formerly forgotten cities, towns, and 'burbs that are worth a fresh look. They're also places where you'll discover some of the best, most architecturally eye-popping older houses on the continent. With help from our friends at Portland, Oregon-based PreservationDirectory.com—who distributed our nomination forms to more than 14,000 historical societies, neighborhood groups, and preservation nonprofits—we've tracked down off-the-beaten-path places that are home to block after block of stately brownstones, Cape Cods, Colonial Revivals, Victorian-era cottages, and more. Check out the following gallery to see six of the old-house neighborhoods that won over the editors of This Old House this year.

Or skip ahead and see all 64 Best Old House Neighborhoods for 2011.

Wednesday, 20 April 2011 03:01

A New York man charged with illegally acquiring a Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot portrait that was found in the bushes across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art is scheduled to go on trial Sept. 12

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan, who set the trial date yesterday, warned Thomas A. Doyle, who is accused of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, not to miss any more court dates. He shouldn’t have refused an order earlier this month by the U.S. Marshals Service to attend court, she said.

“If the marshals tell you to go, you go,” McMahon said. “This never happens again.”

Doyle’s lawyer, Donald Duboulay, told reporters that Doyle, who is incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, wasn’t feeling well the morning of April 13, when the status conference was initially scheduled. Doyle knew that Duboulay was involved in a trial at the time, his lawyer said.

Duboulay said his client will probably go to trial, rather than plead guilty to a lesser charge.

“That’s what the innocent do,” he said.

Corot’s 1857-58 “Portrait of a Girl” already had attracted tabloid press coverage by the time Doyle was arrested. A self-described co-owner of the painting and friend of Doyle, Kristyn Trudgeon, had filed a lawsuit in August claiming that another man she and Doyle hired to sell the artwork lost it after a night of heavy drinking in midtown Manhattan.

Wednesday, 20 April 2011 02:57

It’s generally not a good idea to censor a mural you commissioned, especially when that mural is part of a show about uncommissioned street art.

When Museum of Contemporary Art director and curator Jeffrey Deitch whitewashed a mural by Italian artist Blu in December, the episode perfectly illustrated how graffiti’s unruly, in-your-face attitude, even when sanitized under the banner of “street art,” might not be a good fit for a museum retrospective. The very idea of the exhibition “Art in the Streets” at the Geffen Contemporary asks whether this erstwhile outlaw culture can or should be folded into the grand narrative of art history.

Despite its first, faltering steps, the exhibition answers this question with a resounding “Yes.” Viewers will encounter a bombastic, near-overwhelming cavalcade of eye candy: colorful swirling murals, immersive installations, walls papered with candid and provocative photos, and a custom-designed skate ramp. Immodestly anticipating the response, there’s even a big “WOW” painted on the inside of the building’s roll down doors. But the exhibition’s strong suit is not its impressive array of large-scale work but rather its art historical treatment of an outsider form, complete with a timeline, “period” rooms, and plenty of video and photographic documentation.

Although bright colors, lights and sounds beckon from the galleries on the main floor, it’s worth spending some time with the terse but informative timeline upstairs. It moves briskly from the movement’s beginnings in tagging in New York and Philadelphia in the 1960s, through cholo graffiti in L.A. in ’70s, and the form’s emergence on the New York gallery scene in the ’80s.

It also charts graffiti’s overlap with punk and skateboarding cultures and the emergence of the “Wild Style” that famously blanketed New York subway cars in the ’70s and ’80s. The timeline stops abruptly in 1989, when the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority began its anti-graffiti campaign, but picks up again on the other side of the galleries to chart the movement’s increasing popularity: the founding of Juxtapoz magazine, Shepard Fairey’s Obama “Hope” poster, and last year’s Academy Award-nominated documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”

Because of its outlaw status (despite its long-running influence in art and fashion), street art has not been fully welcomed into the annals of art history. At the press preview, Deitch, his co-curators Roger Gastman and Aaron Rose, and artist Fab 5 Freddy compared street art’s effect to that of Cubism, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism and Pop Art. That might be a stretch, but this hyping of the exhibition is completely in step with graffiti’s ethos of self-presentation. Spawned with tagging — scrawling one’s name on every available surface — graffiti began as a simple act of self-assertion. In fact, perhaps the first piece of graffiti was created by World War II shipyard inspector James J. Kilroy, who inscribed every piece of equipment with a long-nosed cartoon face and the words “Kilroy was here.”

This character is revitalized in Lance Mountain’s and Geoff McFetridge’s custom skate ramp, basically a collection of inclines and blocks decorated with large, Kilroy-esque faces. Nike, a co-sponsor of the exhibition, will send members of its SB skate team to skate the ramp twice a week, filling the galleries with a soundtrack of scraping and crashing. It’s not the first time skaters have been welcomed into a museum — co-curator Rose built a skate bowl in the 2004 exhibition “Beautiful Losers” at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco — but in the context of this show, their performance underscores the importance of the body and self-fashioning in street art.

Wednesday, 20 April 2011 02:53

Wolves and bears still prowl the wooded foothills of the Carpathian Mountains along the border between Poland and Slovakia, and the local populace — a motley blend of Czechs, Slovaks, Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, gypsies and Ruthenians — still clings to ancient rural ways.

It’s a corner of the world where nothing would seem more out of place than a museum dedicated to Andy Warhol.

“I come from nowhere,” the artist once famously quipped. Yet sub-Carpathian Ruthenia — a region that was once part of the former Czechoslovakia and is now divided among Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland and Romania — is where Warhol’s parents came from. Warhol himself never visited the area, but in 1991, his brother John made the trip to this remote corner of what is now Slovakia to found the Andy Warhol Family Museum of Modern Art in the town of Medzilaborce.

People in the nearby village of Mikova, where Warhol’s parents were born, had always known that Warhol was a painter. But it wasn’t until he died in 1987 and Polish newspapers first wrote about Warhol’s Slovak connection that they learned that he was world-famous. Soon the Slovak papers were writing about his roots, too. Everyone wanted to claim him as a native son.

Yet when it opened, the museum stirred suspicions in this deeply religious, conservative part of rural Slovakia, where decades of communism had left their stamp. There were campaigns to close it down. It didn’t surprise me to learn that the director, a high school art teacher by the name of Michal Bycko, had been accused of being a CIA agent, or that the museum was seen as a cover for U.S. intelligence operations in part of a dark plot to spread Western decadence to Slovakia.

This at any rate was the story as related in the Czech media. Looking to find out more, I headed to Medzilaborce to get the scoop for myself.

The train from Prague left at midnight. Surprisingly, it was full, but I managed to find a seat in a compartment occupied by a babushka wearing a floral headscarf, her son, and three Ukrainians in ski hats.

Five minutes into the journey, the Ukrainians uncorked a bottle of vodka and began a boisterous game of cards, playing for pistachio nuts. I dozed off, and as the train hurtled through the dark eastern night, I glided in and out of sleep, half-aware of the din around me.

Wednesday, 20 April 2011 02:50

The paintings of LS Lowry are unforgettable. That's partly because they can be reduced to such simple elements – Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs, as one-hit wonders Brian and Michael pointed out in a 1978 No 1 hit. But it is also because Lowry is a visionary who recorded the inner life of British cities in the 20th century more powerfully than any other artist.

They have gone now, the forests of tall, thin chimneys belching out black smoke, the crowds coming out of the factory gates in the evening, the Lyons cafes and pithead scaffolds. I can still remember the stench of sulphur mingling with the taste of fish and chips in a Welsh industrial town in the 1970s. Now British city centres are more likely to smell of Costa coffee. No wonder some would rather not remember Lowry.

Now it seems that the painter's champions, led by actor Ian McKellen, claim that the Tate is guilty of filing away and forgetting him. It owns 23 of his paintings, but apparently has only ever exhibited one of them, and that only briefly. McKellen challenges the Tate to either show these works or sell them, accusing them of anti-northern prejudice. "It is a shame verging on the iniquitous," McKellen says, "that foreign visitors to London shouldn't have access to the painter English people like more than most others."

Current building works at Tate Britain will allow it to do justice to its collection, we are promised, and the museum claims that Lowry, among others, will get his due. Yet in the meantime, its displays currently go deep into 20th-century art history without a sniff of a Salford mill scene. But this is not because of any animus against the north: it is the result of a snobbery towards "naive" and popular art.

Wednesday, 20 April 2011 02:47

In London this fall, art critics piled on the superlatives. In New York this winter, crowds braved the cold to line up outside Paula Cooper Gallery and get a look. Now Angelenos will have their chance to see Christian Marclay's video-art hit "The Clock," which the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has just purchased as part of an annual fundraising and collecting event.

Through this event, known as Collectors Committee Weekend, LACMA acquired eight artworks for roughly $2.7 million. Priced at under half a million dollars for one in an edition of six, "The Clock" was not the most expensive work of the group, but it was the biggest attention-getter.

A 24-hour-long meditation on the nature and artifice of time, "The Clock" consists of thousands of film (and to a lesser degree television) clips that feature clocks and watch faces, edited so that the time you see on-screen reflects the current time. "I can't imagine a piece more appropriate for LACMA, the epicenter for film and art," said associate contemporary art curator Christine Kim. The museum will screen the work in May.

Another high-profile purchase was a 2006 spherical sculpture by the Chinese artist-activist Ai Weiwei, who is currently in the news because of his detention by Chinese authorities. This sculpture, the first by the artist to enter LACMA's collection, was purchased for $400,000 from the Friedman Benda gallery in New York.

"We always try to pursue a very balanced group of artworks that reflect the encyclopedic nature of the museum," LACMA director Michael Govan said, "but it did happen this year that we had strong contemporary works.

"We don't have a general acquisitions endowment, which most museums of our size have, so this is an important occasion where we can buy works of art for the public," he added.

The collectors' event is also meant to be fun, making a semi-public sport out of the usual buttoned-up museum acquisition process. Instead of curators proposing new acquisitions before board members behind closed doors, they make pitches to a broader group of LACMA supporters who have ponied up money for the right to vote on acquisitions at a Saturday night gala dinner.

This year, 83 people bought gala tickets starting at $15,000 per couple, creating a kitty of nearly $1.5 million to spend on art. LACMA trustee Viveca Paulin-Ferrell, actor Will Ferrell's wife, chaired a live auction Saturday night that raised an additional $435,000 for purchases.

Some individual donors helped out. At the dinner on Saturday, Govan announced that Marclay's "The Clock" was no longer in the popular competition, as Steve Tisch, who became a LACMA trustee last year, pledged the $467,500 needed for the acquisition.

Wednesday, 20 April 2011 02:44

On a mild day in January, French police investigators poured into the regal Right Bank building of an art research center called the Wildenstein Institute and began sifting through a substantial trove of artworks there.

It was the third police raid on the institute, and at the end of it the investigators carried away armloads of art, including Degas drawings, a bronze sculpture by Rembrandt Bugatti and an Impressionist painting of a Normandy cottage by Berthe Morisot. All had been reported missing or stolen, some by Jewish families whose property was looted by the Nazis, and others by heirs who said their treasures had vanished during the settlement of their family estates.

The seizure of about 30 works has put an uncomfortable focus on the Wildenstein family, a discreet dynasty of French Jewish art dealers stretching back five generations whose name has long been one of the most prestigious in the international art world.

At the center of the current wave of troubles is Guy Wildenstein, 65, the president of Wildenstein & Company, an operation with spaces in New York, Tokyo and Paris. The family has faced controversies in the past, and lawsuits too, but never of the number or magnitude of those on the docket now. Mr. Wildenstein was summoned to Paris from New York to face questioning this week by French antifraud investigators who discovered the artworks while investigating money-laundering and tax evasion alleged in a criminal lawsuit against him.

Mr. Wildenstein, who holds dual French and American citizenship, is enmeshed in at least a half-dozen lawsuits; some, provoked by the raid, are being brought by heirs who claim the artwork was stolen from their families.

Also seeking answers is the Académie des Beaux-Arts, a prestigious French cultural society that has filed a legal complaint seeking an inquiry about a missing painting; Mr. Wildenstein’s father, Daniel, and grandfather Georges were elected members.

Mr. Wildenstein has declined to speak publicly about the inquiry or the suits. His newly hired spokesman in Paris, Matthias Leridon, said by telephone on Friday that Mr. Wildenstein “will not answer by using the media.”

Wednesday, 20 April 2011 02:40

The High Museum of Art will organize and host “Alfred Stieglitz and His Circle: American Moderns from Atlanta Collections,” an exhibition featuring approximately 60 works watercolors, prints, paintings and photographs drawn from the High’s permanent collection, as well as loans from private collections located in Atlanta. On display will be works by both Alfred Stieglitz and the artists who engaged with him over the course of five decades—from the early experimental works of Max Weber to the mature expressions of John Marin and Marsden Hartley, and the progressive photographic compositions of Paul Strand and Edward Steichen.

The exhibition will be on view from June 18 through September 11, 2011, and will run concurrently with “John Marin’s Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism.” The Marin exhibition, organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, was largely drawn from that museum’s Stieglitz Collection given by the modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe in honor of her late husband. Marin was a central artist in Stieglitz’s circle and the two maintained a close working relationship and deep friendship over the course of four decades.

“Few individuals had a greater impact upon the rise and development of modern art in America than Alfred Stieglitz.” says Stephanie Heydt, the High’s Terry and Margaret Stent Curator of American Art. “A photographer, artist, critic, art dealer, and collector, Stieglitz championed many of America’s most progressive artists in the first decades of the twentieth century.”

This exhibition will showcase how Stieglitz’s impact extended well beyond his individual support of singular artists. His format of grouping and promoting new talents—photographers, painters, and sculptors alike—created a loose knit community whose shared purpose was to advance new approaches to artistic representation. His galleries served as avant-garde incubators in which new forms of art were, often for the first time in the United States, presented.

Alfred Stieglitz and His Circle
Already an accomplished pioneering photographer by the time he opened his famous Gallery 291 in 1905, Alfred Stieglitz shifted focus around 1909 to primarily promoting and advancing modern art in America through exhibitions and in his quarterly photographic journal “Camerawork.” Stieglitz’s earliest works supported an expansive group of artists who practiced a modernism reflective of European influences, such as continental Cubism and Expressionism, seen in the works of Max Weber, Arthur B. Carles, Oscar Bluemner, Abraham Walkowitz, Alfred Maurer, John Marin, and Marsden Hartley.

After World War I and with the closing of Gallery 291 in 1917, Stieglitz shifted towards a more exclusive group of artists, which he featured in a series of new exhibition spaces (including The Anderson Galleries, The Intimate Gallery, and An American Place) modeled after Gallery 291’s initial success. Stieglitz’s group of “Seven Americans,” took shape during this time, a group which included himself, the photographer Paul Strand, and painters Hartley, Marin, Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Demuth.

Tuesday, 19 April 2011 01:56

PHILADELPHIA, PA. – The 23rd Street Armory Antiques Show has moved three times since debuting in 1995. This year, the 16-year-old fair founded by Barn Star Productions looked more settled than ever when it opened with mimosas and chocolates on Friday, April 8, continuing through the weekend.
 
The fair’s renewed glow comes from its winning combination of tenured exhibitors and its comfortable setting in what is affectionately known as the “Little Armory,” the small regimental drill hall between Market and Chestnut Streets. By contrast, the Philadelphia Antiques Show, the anchor fair that this one orbits, has been thrown into temporary disarray by two forced moves in the last five years.
 
But, in show business, what is good for one is good for all. Destination events like Philadelphia’s April fairs require quality, depth and variety to lure collectors from around the country. Thus Barn Star chief Frank Gaglio fervently wishes for the Philadelphia Antiques Show to be comfortably settled in a new home and is delighted to learn that Pennsylvania Convention Center, only a few minutes away from the 23rd Street Armory by taxi, is the Philadelphia Antiques Show’s likely new venue.
 
“Our goal is to stay at the 23rd Street Armory but it is imperative that our 2012 dates be consistent with those of the Philadelphia Antiques Show,” Gaglio told Antiques and Fine Art shortly after both fairs closed. “Together with Freeman’s April Americana auction, our two shows constitute, in a very loose sense, an Antiques Week in Philadelphia.”
 
Though dealers discourage frank discussion of it, vigorous trading among exhibitors is an industry mainstay. Thus it was promising that the 23rd Street Armory Antiques Show enjoyed robust early sales, with many Philadelphia Antiques Show exhibitors buying from their 23rd Street colleagues on Friday before their own fair opened.
 
“The hard-core collectors came through on Friday but business continued through the weekend. We see new collectors on Sunday, which is so important to us,” explained Bev Norwood of Norwoods’ Spirit of America Antiques.  The Maryland dealers made an early sale of a boldly graphic tailor’s trade sign of about 1850.
 
“This isn’t like New England. We sell on all three days here,” said Stephen Corrigan of Stephen-Douglas Antiques, whose stack of receipts offered a hopeful sign that the sluggish Americana market is recovering from its slump of several years. Catering to the middle and high ends of the market, Stephen-Douglas featured a petite green and red painted Pennsylvania corner cupboard, $12,500.
 
While the 23rd Street Armory Antiques Show benefits from the perception that it is an affordable place to shop, not everything is inexpensive. A bona fide masterpiece with a price tag to match, an 18th century tall-case clock from Germantown, Pa., was a much ballyhooed sale at Baldwin House Antiques of Lancaster, Pa.  Marked $330,000, the clock, illustrated in Timeless:  Masterpieces of American Brass Dial Clocks by Frank Homan, is signed by its maker, John Heilig, and dated 1789. Distinguishing characteristics include a brass dial that is engraved with a portrait of George Washington flanked by drums, cannons and flags.
 
“The date is a very important feature. Washington was going through Philadelphia for the first inauguration in New York. This clock is certainly commemorative,” said Bruce G. Shoemaker of Baldwin House Antiques. A dove on the clock’s second hand corresponds with the dove weathervane that George Washington ordered from Philadelphia for Mount Vernon in 1787. The clock’s rare mulberry wood case has tulip side windows.
 
Arts of Pennsylvania made a prominent appearance at Thurston Nichols American Antiques, where a signed John Bellamy presentation box carved with an eagle was $150,000 and a Berks County unicorn chest was $69,000. They joined “Portrait of Charles Seward’s Farm,” an oil on linen farmscape of circa 1875 that the Breinigsville, Pa., dealer recently attributed to Indiana painter Granville Bishop (1831-1902).
 
Hooked mats and assorted items made in the 1930s at the Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador were strong sellers at A Bird in Hand Antiques of Florham Park, N.J. By Saturday, proprietors Ron and Joyce Bassin had marked up four choice mats from a collection of seven. All went to one collector.  Floral-embroidered, fur-trimmed suede glove and a carved stone walrus, all bearing Grenfell labels and marks, were other rarities on offer.
 
“We sold a big hutch table, a lot of early American glass and windmill weights. Good, expensive, small things,” said Ed Holden of Holden Antiques.
 
New Jersey dealer James Grievo parted with a tall-case clock and a slant-front desk. Cape Cod dealer Hilary Nolan wrote up an early walnut hanging cupboard and a red-leather covered Chinese camphorwood chest with unusual paw feet. A woodworker’s cabinet with trompe l’oeil decorations was one of Mario Pollo’s early transactions.
 
Other reported sales included a pair of Asian apothecary cabinets and a screen at John H. Rogers and a  ship’s eagle figurehead and an oval carving of a stag at Charles Wilson Antiques and Folk Art. Connecticut dealer Martin Chasen sold more than $16,000 in silver to one client while Massachusetts dealer Bill Union placed seven paintings with a single customer.
 
“’I’ve expanded the show’s parameters by adding Asian and French art and antiques. Next year, I’d like to have a glass dealer and a specialist in paper and manuscripts,” said Gaglio. The 45 exhibitors in this year’s fair included 12 new or returning dealers.
 
From Philadelphia, Barn Star Productions moves to New Hampshire for the Manchester Pickers’ Market Antiques Show on August 8 and Midweek in Manchester Antiques Show on August 10-11. For details, see barnstar.com.
 
Write to Laura Beach at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Saturday, 16 April 2011 04:56

Hedda Sterne, an artist whose association with the Abstract Expressionists became fixed forever when she appeared prominently in a now-famous 1951 Life magazine photograph of the movement’s leading lights, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 100.
Her death was announced by Clara Diament Sujo, the director of CDS Gallery in Manhattan.

Ms. Sterne, who was the last surviving artist from the Life photograph, shared few of the stylistic or philosophical concerns of the Abstract Expressionists, nor did she cast herself in the heroic mold favored by many artists in the movement.

She did, however, join with 17 prominent Abstract Expressionists and other avant-gardists in signing a notorious open letter to the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1950 accusing it of hostility to “advanced art.”

The letter, with signatures from the likes of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, caused a stir. The artists were dubbed the Irascible 18 by Emily Genauer, the chief art critic of The New York Herald Tribune, and 15 of them were gathered by Life magazine for a group portrait by the photographer Nina Leen. Ms. Sterne, who arrived late, was positioned on a table in the back row, where, she later said, she stood out “like a feather on top.”

Saturday, 16 April 2011 04:54

There’s no tutu for the terpsichorean in Guenther Uecker’s show at Manhattan’s L&M Arts.

“New York Dancer I” wears a cape of nails and spins to the rhythm of an electric motor. By stepping on a red button, visitors make the dancer whirl in a noisy blur.

Nails are a recurrent motif in “The Early Years” exhibition, which displays work from the 1950s through the 1970s.

“The nails represent on the one hand a defense, like ruffled hair, like a hedgehog curling up into a ball, but on the other hand tenderness,” Uecker, 81, said in an interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist published in the exhibition catalog.

In “White Bird,” nails are arranged in the shape of a flying bird. The canvas of “Diagonal Division” is divided in half by a stripe filled with nails. With this simple, beautiful creation and its play of nail shadows, different lines appear as you change your point of view.

“Sand Mill” departs from nails for something Uecker has said is derived from agriculture: a circle of sand with a post in the center to which strings are attached. A small motor makes the strings draw and then erase trails in the sand. An accompanying video shows Uecker, dressed in white, installing the piece.

“He took sandbags all the way from Germany,” said Leila Saadai, exhibitions director of L&M Arts.

Saturday, 16 April 2011 04:46

A triptych of self portraits by Francis Bacon may raise at least $20 million at auction next month as demand grows for the U.K.’s most expensive artist.

“Three Studies for Self Portrait,” from 1974, are included in Christie’s International’s May 11 New York auction of contemporary art. They are part of a London show, opening tomorrow, that also includes Bacon’s 1952 painting, “Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail),” estimated at $10 million to $15 million in the same sale.

Owners of high-value paintings by Bacon are more confident about selling at auction after the 1964 triptych, “Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud,” fetched 23 million pounds at Sotheby’s in London on Feb. 10.

“That result helped bring Bacons out of the woodwork,” London-based dealer Offer Waterman said in an interview. “Up until then the market had been in a state of flux. Prices had dropped, and people found it difficult to value his paintings.”

Works by Bacon were in short supply at auctions during 2009 and 2010. In May 2008, before the financial crisis, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich paid a record $86.3 million for a 1976 “Triptych” at Sotheby’s (BID) New York, said dealers. Nine months later, the 1954 picture “Man in Blue VI” failed to sell at a Christie’s auction in London after being estimated at as much as 5 million pounds ($8.2 million).

Saturday, 16 April 2011 04:24

Two valuable paintings that are considered part of Spain's art heritage were found by police more than 10 years after they were stolen, officials said.

The works by El Greco and Francisco de Goya were discovered in the province of Alicante, Think Spain reported.

The paintings were reported missing in the late 1990s.

Saturday, 16 April 2011 04:18

A lawyer linked to Ai Weiwei went missing on Thursday night and a designer from the company handling the artist's affairs was taken by police six days ago, according to supporters.

Friends have not been able to reach Liu Xiaoyuan for almost 24 hours. The rights lawyer posted a message on a microblog at 8pm on Thursday saying he was being "followed by identified people". His phone is switched off.

Last week he said he would "of course" act for Ai if requested. He spent several hours at a police station on the day Ai disappeared, although his brief detention did not appear to relate to the artist. It occurred after he requested to visit a female activist and officers reportedly berated him for tweeting about another missing lawyer.

Separately, a letter issued online on Friday said plainclothes police seized designer Liu Zhenggang, 49, at his home in Beijing on 9 April and no one had been able to reach him since. Liu worked for FAKE, the design and architecture firm that handles Ai's affairs and belongs to the artist's wife.

Police did not respond to queries about the two men.

Ai's detention has sparked an international outcry, and his case is far from alone. The last two months have seen dozens of lawyers, dissidents and activists being criminally detained and arrested or simply going missing in one of the toughest crackdowns for years. It appears to have been sparked by anonymous calls on websites overseas for "jasmine revolution" protests inspired by the Middle East uprisings.

Ai was stopped at Beijing airport on 3 April and has been incommunicado ever since. Officials have said he is under investigation for economic crimes but police have still not informed his family that he is detained.

Saturday, 16 April 2011 04:16

The 40-year-old ex-JPMorgan (JPM.N) banker with a penchant for works by pop artist Andy Warhol had created a $600 million hedge fund and was preparing to move to Asia to woo the region's deep-pocketed investors.

After making a big impression on the Singapore art scene with his recent Warhol exhibition, Moccia was confident the brewing U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown could not dent his plan to stoke returns from his "Cannonball" fund with art and real estate investments.

"I had received a working permit from the Singapore authorities," recalls Italian-born Moccia, speaking from his London office. "The future was bright."

Moccia never got there.

His sprawling portfolio -- including holdings in everything from leveraged hedge funds, pop-art prints of Superman and boutique hotels in Bali -- was suspended in October 2008 when the financial crisis peaked. Moccia's diversification only left him more exposed.

Saturday, 16 April 2011 04:11

Los Angeles police expressed concern Thursday about a jump in vandalism and graffiti just before the  opening of the "Art in the Streets" exhibit at the Geffen Contemporary museum in Little Tokyo.

Over the last two days, dozens of tags, including monikers and larger so-called bombs have blighted several commercial buildings behind 1st Street as well dumpsters and light poles within a stone's throw of the museum entrance.

"In the last two weeks, we've seen an enormous amount of vandalism in the Little Tokyo area, near the MOCA entrance," said LAPD Officer Jack Richter. "We respect the rights to have an art exhibition but we demand the security of other people's property."

"As former Chief Bratton was found of saying, "if you want to be an artist, buy a canvas," Richter said.

Brian Kito, President of the Little Tokyo Public Safety Assn. and owner of the Fugetosu-do sweet shop, the oldest business in the area, said the museum has reached out to community leaders, previewing the exhibit for them, and encouraging them to contact the museum if there are any problems.

"We are welcoming people that appreciate street art but we hope they are not inspired to show off their work on the buildings outside," Kito said.

The Geffen Contemporary museum website describes "Art in the Streets" as the "first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti and street art."

The exhibition, which opens Sunday and runs through Aug. 8, traces the development of graffiti and street art from the 1970s "to the global movement, concentrating on key cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Sao Paulo, where a unique visual language or attitude has evolved," the MOCA website says.

Saturday, 16 April 2011 03:58
PHILADELPHIA, PA.  - Philadelphia Antiques Show organizers are positioning their long-running fair for the future.
 
Following the close of 50th anniversary festivities at the city’s Navy Pier from April 8-12, the 200-member committee charged with planning the annual benefit for Penn Medicine is getting to work on the 2012 show, which will have new dates, April 27-May 1, and a new location, the Pennsylvania Convention Center in downtown Philadelphia.
 
The fair was forced from its home of 46 years, the 32th Street Armory, in 2008. It briefly settled on the outskirts of the city at Navy Pier but recently learned that another tenant in the sprawling complex, Urban Outfitters, is taking over the space. Gretchen Riley, the 2012 show chairman, briefed the fair’s 51 exhibitors on the changes at an annual wrap-up meeting on April 12.
 
“We are reinventing ourselves for the next fifty years. Times are changing and we have to appeal to a younger demographic,” Riley later told Antiques and Fine Art by phone, cautioning that attorneys for Penn Medicine are still reviewing the Convention Center contract, which she expects will be signed.
 
Riley and others anticipate that attendance will increase with a move back to Center City, where visitors enjoy a greater range of amenities and transportation options.  Riley quelled exhibitors’ concerns when she said that neither booth rates nor the size of the show is likely to change much. Penn will provide dealer parking, which was also a concern to some exhibitors.
 
“I personally think that the new show dates are better, from the perception of both buyers and sellers, who will have more time to stock fresh material,” said Fred Giampietro, an exhibitor from New Haven, Ct. Giampietro and others have suggested that the Philadelphia Antiques Show be shortened, that the dateline be extended, and that the number of exhibitors be increased to around 70.
 
“Philadelphia should remain an American show but, by expanding the dateline into the 20th century, it could include Wharton Esherick, George Nakashima, the New Hope school and other important regional specialties,” said Giampietro. A major sale for the Connecticut folk art specialist was a life-sized carved and painted Punch tobacconist figure of 1880. The sculpture had been off the market for fifty years.
 
Among the show’s handful of 20th century design specialists are Dalton’s Decorative Arts of Syracuse, N.Y., which featured a Gustav Stickley books cabinet of circa 1901; JAGR Projects of Philadelphia, emphasizing international expressions of the Arts & Crafts movement ; and Lillian Nassau LLC of Manhattan.
 
“Tiffany is what our clients are looking for and Philadelphia continues to be a great show for us,” said Nassau’s Arlie Sulka, who rounded out her display of Tiffany lighting with “Playing Dogs,” a bronze of 1916 by William Hunt Dietrich.
 
“I had one of my best shows in ten years,” said exhibitor Diana Bittel.  A favorite of Philadelphia collectors, Bittel sold chests, weathervanes, shell-work pieces and a clock.
 
“We sold quite a bit on opening night,” said Chinese export porcelain specialist John Suval, whose centerpiece was a decorated punchbowl of circa 1790, $35,000.
 
Joan Brownstein, a Newbury, Ma., specialist in American folk painting, sold “Girl in A Paint Decorated Chair,” an oil on poplar panel of around 1825. Brownstein’s research on the painting, from a group of not yet identified portraits, appears in the Spring 2011 issue of Antiques and Fine Art.
 
“Most of our sales this year were over the weekend, said Ed Hild of Olde Hope Antiques, whose impeccably appointed stand featured an iconic South Shaftsbury, Vt., painted chest of circa 1825, priced $285,000. “We wrote up folk art, paintings and accessories but furniture was soft for us.”
 
Tillou Gallery sold a signed Fiske & Co., cast-iron recumbent stag dating to the late 19th century. Jonathan Trace of Portsmouth, N.H., parted with a writing table that was probably made in North Carolina or Virginia. It went to a delighted Virginia collector, Peter Barretta.
 
Needlework specialist Amy Finkel’s opening night sales included an exceptional Chester County, Pa., sampler dated 1798. A closely related sampler, formerly in the collection of Theodore H. Kapnek, is illustrated in The Flowering of American Folk Art. Finkel also sold an important Ohio sampler and two Philadelphia samplers.
 
“We came back for the 50th anniversary,” said returning exhibitor Suzanne Courcier of Courcier & Wilkins. The Yarmouth Port, Ma., dealers covered their side wall with a Baltimore album quilt, $32,000, that was featured in Robert Bishop’s New Discoveries in American Quilts in 1975.

Notable among Christopher Rebollo’s many sales was a pair of oil on canvas portraits of about 1808-1810 that are attributed to Jacob Eichholtz. The subjects are Benjamin Schaum and Maria Schaum of Lancaster, Pa.  The Mechanicsville, Pa., dealer also wrote up a portrait of Hannah Claypoole, attributed to James Claypoole.
 
From two mid-19th century oil on canvas portraits of George Washington at Schwarz Gallery of Philadelphia to Allan Katz’s 1874 oil on canvas portrait of the steamship Daniel Drew with Prospect Park Hotel by James Bard, the Philadelphia Show excels in the field of Americana. A 34-inch tall Father Time figure from a fraternal lodge was $135,000 at Hill Gallery of Birmingham, Mi.
 
Early New England furniture included a Rhode Island William & Mary dressing table with crossed stretchers and ball feet, $95,000, and a musical tall-case clock by Asa Munger of Herkimer, N.Y., $225,000, at Nathan Liverant & Son. A circa 1690 carver chair, $38,500; a ball-turned gate-leg table, probably from Massachusetts, $19,500; and an inscribed William & Mary chest, $12,000, were highlights at Peter Eaton Antiques, Newbury, Ma.
 
West Chester, Pa., dealer Skip Chalfant of H.L. Chalfant Antiques featured an unusual splay-legged walnut table, $46,000, that may be from Virginia or Pennsylvania. A similar table, formerly owned by Joe Kindig, is pictured in Paul Burrough’s classic text, Southern Furniture.
 
In a nod to the city, several exhibitors brought prominent works by Philadelphia cabinetmaker Joseph Barry. One example, at Carswell Rush Berlin, was a mahogany sideboard carved with female herms wearing turbans. It dated to 1820.
 
From the preview party, which drew 1,000 guests on April 8, to the Antique Dealers Association’s sold-out dinner for Morrison Heckscher on April 9, to lectures by designer Alexa Hampton, art-crime expert Robert K. Wittman and floral artist Jane Godshalk, accompanying events were heavily subscribed.
 
“In some ways, this was the end of an era,” reflected outgoing show chairman Patricia W. Cheek.
 
“Next year we will pull out all the stops,” added Riley, who is saving the announcement of the 2012 loan show for the moment that the Convention Center contract is signed.
 
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