Category: today’s top story

“One of the most vaunted private art collections in Los Angeles, highlighted by a prized Picasso nude and including works by Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore, Georges Braque, Edgar Degas and Edouard Vuillard, is expected to fetch more than $150 million at auction when it goes on sale in May, Christie’s announced Tuesday.”

“For many months, [Italian TV host Silvano] Vinceti and a team of scientists have been exhuming remains they believe are Caravaggio’s in hopes of performing a belated autopsy. After digging up dozens of bodies, Mr. Vinceti has narrowed the field to a handful of long-buried corpses.”

“[T]his Phantom is not the phantom we knew. The ‘poisoned gargoyle who burns in hell’ has clearly taken an anger management course in New York. … Would he whimsically hang the backstage crew or send a chandelier crashing into a crowd? Not any more.”

“[T]he trade let go chief film critic Todd McCarthy and chief theater critic David Rooney. Longtime film critic Derek Elley also was cut, as was features editor/indie film reporter Sharon Swart, along with several copy and design desk employees.” All three critics were asked to work as freelancers. The paper’s editor said the “changes won’t be noticed by readers.”

In the Cunningham studio, “dancers were rehearsing Roaratorio, a work last performed by the modern dance company in 1997. A lean, young man shuffled and picked up his feet in a series of pas de chats in front of Robert Swinston, assistant to the choreographer, and Patricia Lent, a former dancer who had performed the original version of the dance. They both shook their heads. ‘I interpreted that as this step,’ Ms. Lent, 50, said as she demonstrated the move. ‘But I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe.'”

Over the past quarter-century, the Pew Charitable Trusts “has supported documentary filmmaking to the tune of $26 million. But that was mostly for films of the Ken Burns variety, straightforward educational fare destined, in many cases, for public television. Now the organization is on the receiving end of a polemical blast from a small, independent filmmaker who has mastered the art of asymmetrical documentary warfare.”

As a script editor at the BBC during the 1950s, she acquired, translated and/or commissioned scripts by (among others) Genet, Sartre, Anouilh, Pirandello, Pinter and Samuel Beckett, with whom she had a romantic and creative partnership for 30 years.

The robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, “which included three Rembrandts and a Vermeer, remains the world’s largest art theft in dollar value.” Sources said the evidence to be analyzed “would probably include long strips of duct tape used to tie up the museum’s two night watchmen, whom the thieves overpowered to get access to the artwork.”

“In a blow to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which has just received an emergency Arts Council bailout of £1.2m, Mark Sladen, its director of exhibitions, has told bosses he would consider a new role in the organisation only if its director, Ekow Eshun, resigned. … The staff have also taken a vote of no confidence in Eshun.”

“The cut will happen immediately: the government grant for 2010/11 will fall from £10m to £5m,” hobbling a fund “which helped to save an eclectic list, including … the medieval Mappa Mundi, Canova’s sculpture of the Three Graces, the archive of the second world war poet Siegfried Sassoon and an island, Skokholm in Pembrokeshire.”