Category: visual

“The latest design for the $210 million Whitney Museum of American Art looks like a top-heavy container ship run aground in Manhattan’s Chelsea district.”

“A leading old masters specialist has surprised the art world by identifying three previously overlooked paintings by the 17th-century artist Anthony van Dyck.”

There’s “a small band of graffiti artists in the Afghan capital who, encouraged by a group of western ‘art activists’, are set on bringing tagging, wall-painting and graphic stencils to public spaces across the city. … ‘The idea is to make people ask questions’,” says one street artist.

“One is an original. The other, evidently, a copy. But René Magritte was a Surrealist, and the truth behind The Flavour of Tears suggests he was enjoying a huge – and probably lucrative – joke” by forging and selling his own painting. (But then, he had “made a living during the Nazi occupation of Belgium by forging Picassos and Renoirs.”)

“Like a new owner in an old home, chief curator Michael Darling is overseeing a philosophical gut rehab whose ultimate goal is clarity. … By [next month], every last corner of the building … will have been re-imagined, perhaps for the first time in its 15-year history, with the museum’s permanent collection in mind.”

“In an exclusive deal with New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Art Gallery of Western Australia [in Perth] will display the works from some of the biggest superstars of surrealism, minimalism and abstract expressionism. The exhibition, entitled Picasso to Warhol: Twelve Modern Masters, will open next year and feature more than 100 modern art masterpieces from MoMA’s collection.”

The modernist starchitect rues the “disappearance of the crusader-architect, and the public disfavor into which so much modern design eventually fell … [and] sees the designer in his present estate as a creature hemmed in by petty bureaucrats with docent badges.”

They were a “group banded around Wyndham Lewis which exploded on the London scene with a full manifesto and magazine just before the First World War, only to become all-too-quickly subsumed by that terrible conflict and to be forgotten once it was over.”

“There is – at least for a modern sensibility – a stark disconnection between the splendid appearance of a reliquary and what it contains: a gnarled piece of bone such as the arm of St George … For the culture that made them, however, those values were reversed: the gold, jewels and workmanship were a way of making visible the – infinitely greater – spiritual treasure within.”

“An exhibition of work by the wonderkid painter Aelita Andre opened on June 4 at the Agora Gallery in Manhattan … Collectors have reportedly spent upwards of $24,000 for what the gallery has called Aelita’s ‘contemplative and powerful’ canvases. … A lot of things might come from a young child, but reflection and reverence are not at the top of the list.”