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Will Cotton's Latest Confection? A Naked Katy Perry (ARTINFO)
Thursday, July 22, 2010 3:08:07 PM CST
ARTINFO - When someone calls to tell you that candy-sweet pop star Katy Perry is in pastry-loving painter Will CottonÂs studio, and will talk to you about the nude portrait she commissioned from him for the cover of her latest album ("Teenage Dream"), but only if you get in a cab immediately, and then run through the streets of the Lower East Side — well, you do it. In fact, yesterday that is exactly what ARTINFO did in order to watch the tail end of the unveiling of Cotton’s luminous painting of a demure Perry, in the buff, reclining on a fluffy pink cotton-candy cloud.
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Obama and British PM Cameron Swap Art, Successfully (ARTINFO)
Thursday, July 22, 2010 1:10:59 PM CST
ARTINFO - These days, it’s hard for a talented underground graffiti artist to retain his or her street cred, with gallerists hovering in darkened back alleys in hopes of snatching up the next Banksy-esque spay-paint sensation. For 39-year-old artist Ben Eine (real name Ben Flynn), remaining an anti-establishment vandal just got even more difficult, as British prime minister David Cameron offered one of Eine’s paintings to president Barack Obama as a diplomatic gift earlier this week. (Obama, for his part, offered the newly elected pol a tasteful Ed Ruscha print — always a safe bet.)
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What Are New York's Richest Cultural Groups? (ARTINFO)
Thursday, July 22, 2010 11:37:00 AM CST
ARTINFO - New York’s largest cultural group is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, according to a report released by nonprofit arts advocacy group Alliance for the Arts and sponsored by Crain’s New York Business. With operating expenses of $309 million in 2008, the Met proves to be a dominant presence, beating out its closest rival, the Metropolitan Opera Association, by more than $40 million. The report estimates that the city’s 100 biggest-spending cultural groups have a total economic impact of $5.8 billion.
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Vatican to Show Matisse in the House Michelangelo Built (ARTINFO)
Thursday, July 22, 2010 11:36:30 AM CST
ARTINFO - Suddenly, the world has gone mad for Matisse. With the help of the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA has assembled a sizable exhibition of the French artist’s early work, earning a five-star review from Time Out New York critic Howard Halle and an admission from New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl that the artist’s "Piano Lesson" makes (1916) "makes me feel like a little boy again." Now the Vatican Museums in Rome are set to open an entire room devoted to his works as part of the institution's drive to modernize its engagement with art.
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With More Room for Its Past, the Israel Museum Looks Forward (ARTINFO)
Thursday, July 22, 2010 7:12:46 AM CST
ARTINFO - When the Israel Museum announced plans for a proposed expansion five years ago, everyone expected the board to select a star architect. After all, money seemed to be no object for an institution that counted among its supporters some of the richest people in the world, many of them based in America. Instead they opted for a little-known architectural team led by James Carpenter Design Associates of New York and Efrat-Kowalsky Architects of Tel Aviv.
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At Last, a $19 Million Settlement for Schiele's Nazi-Looted "Portrait of Wally" (ARTINFO)
Wednesday, July 21, 2010 10:45:30 AM CST
ARTINFO - In a settlement resolving one of the thorniest, most prominent restitution cases to stem from the Nazi pillage of Europe, an American judge has ruled that Egon SchieleÂs war-looted "Portrait of Wally" (1912) will remain in the hands of Austria's Leopold Foundation, with a $19 million settlement paid to the heirs of late Jewish art collector and dealer Lea Bondi Jaray. This decision, handed down by U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska, will render unnecessary a planned July 26 trial, in which the New York court was to rule whether or not collector Rudolph Leopold had known that the painting was stolen when he brought it into U.S. territory for a show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997.
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Austrian museum settles Nazi art theft row (AFP)
Tuesday, July 20, 2010 9:59:48 PM CST
AFP - An Austrian museum has agreed to settle a decades-long dispute by paying 19 million dollars to the estate of a Jewish woman for a painting the Nazis extorted from her during World War II, the US prosecutor's office in New York said.
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NY stolen art fight ends in $19 million settlement (AP)
Tuesday, July 20, 2010 6:52:29 PM CST
AP - A 12-year dispute that illustrated the difficulty of proving art was stolen by Nazis in World War II ended Tuesday with an agreement that a 1912 oil painting entitled "Portrait of Wally" will be returned to a Vienna museum and displayed with an acknowledgement that it was stolen from a Jewish art dealer by a Nazi agent.
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Austrian museum to pay $19 million for stolen painting (Reuters)
Tuesday, July 20, 2010 6:02:22 PM CST
Reuters - The Leopold Museum in Austria has agreed to pay an Austrian Jewish woman's estate $19 million for a painting that a Nazi stole from her in World War Two, U.S. officials announced on Tuesday.
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Just in Time for the 400th Anniversary of His Death, a Purported Caravaggio Is Discovered (ARTINFO)
Tuesday, July 20, 2010 4:13:26 PM CST
ARTINFO - In what would seem to be a case of suspiciously fortuitous timing, the Vatican is claiming to have found a previously undiscovered Caravaggio painting — an announcement that perfectly coincides with the 400th anniversary of the artist's death, which was celebrated across Italy over the weekend.
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Walking the Tightrope Through Europe's Postwar Art Scene (ARTINFO)
Tuesday, July 20, 2010 2:18:08 PM CST
ARTINFO - After World War II, France was on its knees. Traumatized by the German occupation and the atrocities of the Jewish genocide (to which it had contributed), the country sought to establish economic and political stability through alliances with neighboring nations. The old Europe had to be reinvented — and as much was true of its arts. In the same way that Dada broke with established visual codes after World War I, the artists and designers of postwar France strove to obliterate the civilization that led them to the concentration camps.
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Picasso, Chagall Forgery Ring Jailed in France (ARTINFO)
Tuesday, July 20, 2010 9:23:44 AM CST
ARTINFO - "Do you think I should confess?" Orson Welles, says in his final film, "F for Fake," quoting the notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory. "To what? Committing masterpieces?" On Friday, a similar question was resoundingly answered in court in Creteil, France, where 12 men were sentenced for an elaborate art con in which they sold almost 100 forged paintings — nearly impeccable copies of works by Picasso, Chagall, and Leger, to name a few — between the years of 1997 and 2005.
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Shortlist Announced for Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth (ARTINFO)
Tuesday, July 20, 2010 7:46:36 AM CST
ARTINFO - While Yinka Shonibare's sculpture of Admiral Nelson's ship still sails proudly on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square, the city of London has today announced the contenders for next year's commission in the storied public plaza. The six artists and artist duos shortlisted for the prize are: U.S./Cuban collaborators Allora and Calzadilla; Elmgreen & Dragset, puckish veterans of the Nordic and Danish pavilions in the last Venice Biennale; German sculptor Katharina Fritsch; Goldsmiths alumn Brian Griffiths; Scottish artist Hew Locke; and German multimedia artist Mariele Neudecker.
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Crystal Bridges, Expanding to Show Contemporary Art, Sets Opening Date (ARTINFO)
Monday, July 19, 2010 10:48:12 AM CST
ARTINFO - The Crystal Bridges Museum, the massive, much-delayed American art institution being established by Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton in Bentonville, Arkansas, finally has what appears to be an opening date. Now set to be unveiled by the end of 2011 or the beginning of 2012, the Moshe Safdie-designed museum will contain a vast, still-mysterious collection — which new director Don Bagliupchi has been helping to expand beyond 18th- and 19th-century work to encompass contemporary art.
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Michelle Obama to Host Design Award Ceremony (ARTINFO)
Monday, July 19, 2010 8:57:04 AM CST
ARTINFO - Michelle Obama, a longtime patron of up-and-coming fashion designers and a driving force behind the introduction of challenging contemporary art into the White House, will fete winners and finalists of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum 2010 National Design Awards at a ceremony at the first family's official home.
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Christie's to Sell Dennis Hopper's Art Collection (ARTINFO)
Friday, July 16, 2010 11:18:42 AM CST
ARTINFO - Dennis Hopper's posthumous retrospective that opened at Los Angeles’ MOCA last week makes abundantly clear that art played more than a bit part in the actor and director's life. But while Hopper's artwork — in particular, his photographs — is already renowned, the star's lifelong interest in collecting art is not as well known. That will change this November, when Christie’s holds a New York auction of the art that he owned, including several bold and brazen pieces he bought early on as an art-scene insider and self-professed "gallery bum."
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U.S. Returns Paintings "Liberated" by Soldier from Nazi Germany (ARTINFO)
Friday, July 16, 2010 9:31:07 AM CST
ARTINFO - Lawsuits relating to the restitution of art looted by the Nazis during World War II have been held up in courts in recent years. Eleven paintings that were stolen from Nazi Germany by an American serviceman following World War II, however, are finally making their way home, according to the Associated Press.
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U.S. Army unveils a trove of soldiers' war paintings (Reuters)
Monday, July 19, 2010 12:32:21 PM CST
Reuters - An American soldier stands alone amid the long grass of a Vietnamese field accompanied by the helicopter that brought him there while a few other soldiers are seen in the background.
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Sifting Through the London Old Master Sales (ARTINFO)
Friday, July 16, 2010 8:20:42 AM CST
ARTINFO - Silence abruptly quelled the hubbub at Sotheby’s on July 7 when bidding opened for what British dealer Simon Dickinson described as “the best painting in the whole summer series of Old Master paintings,” J.M.W. TurnerÂs 1839 masterpiece "Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino." After 10 minutes of jousting between half a dozen bidders, it was bought by the London dealership Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox on behalf of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for £29.7 million ($45 million).
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MoMA Throws a Dignified Homecoming Party for Matisse (ARTINFO)
Thursday, July 15, 2010 2:01:00 PM CST
ARTINFO - Planted in the ground next to a blank cement wall in the Museum of Modern ArtÂs sculpture garden is a sign explaining that the four bronze Henri Matisse sculptures usually occupying the space, The Back I–IV, are currently out on loan for the exhibition “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–17.” That show, devoted to early work by the artist, opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in March. Now it has come to MoMA, and last night the museum held an opening reception it.