Category: visual

“‘The Art of Painting’ is the most valuable painting in Vienna’s public collections and the only work by Johannes Vermeer in Austria. … The heirs say Jaromir Czernin, who spent 15 years in lawsuits to get it back after World War II and lost, had no choice but to sell it as his family was under threat.”

“In October, the L.A. artist admitted that he knowingly submitted false images and deleted others during the case in an attempt to conceal the fact that the AP had correctly identified the photo that Fairey had used as a reference for his ‘Hope’ poster of then-Sen. Barack Obama.” A grand jury is now considering an indictment over Fairey’s misrepresentations.

“The sculpture, to be built in the Olympic park, is to be funded by Lakshmi Mittal, the steel magnate and Britain’s richest man. Although the exact design is being kept secret, the asymmetric steel structure is understood to resemble a cluster of interlocking fractured rings.”

Charlotte Higgins on the Ofili retrospective at the Tate Britain: “I got a jolt when I walked into the final pair of rooms, filled with his most recent work. In the first, the paintings are entirely blue – deep, midnight shades of indigo, ultramarine and bilberry. In the second, the paintings are screaming with acid colours: strident purple next to citrus orange; a tintinnabulating turquoise; egg-yolk yellow. And there is no elephant dung. And no glitter.”

“Inoperable cellphones. Impenetrable Web sites. Neurotically overstyled objects. Too much packaging. Digital versions of this, that and the other. … There’s no excuse for this, not least because qualities like ‘clarity’ and ‘simplicity’ loom large in almost every design doctrine.”

“A team from Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage, a leading association of scientists and art historians, has asked to open the tomb in which the Renaissance painter and polymath is believed to lie” in order to “rebuild Leonardo’s face and compare it with the Mona Lisa.”

Friday’s damage to a Picasso recalls Stephen Wynn’s 2006 mishap. “But it is difficult to compare a 1932 Picasso with one painted in 1904-5. The early canvases are more delicate and the oil paint is thinner than the enamel-based kind the artist was known to have used later in his career. And then there is the question of whether there’s only one image involved.”

“Downtown L.A. is officially making a play, courtesy of the Grand Avenue Authority, which today authorized negotiations with Broad toward a possible deal that would wrest the museum from Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, which are also in the running.”

“Narrow Gate architects design only for low-income people. Their latest and biggest achievement is Dudley Village,” in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. “Nothing about this architecture says ‘affordable.’ It isn’t at the cutting edge of design, but it is handsome background architecture.”

“Dubbed the ‘Reading Room,'” the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new offering “is intended to make books, catalogs and other literature available that would otherwise be difficult to access.”