Category: visual

Since Iran’s June presidential election, the curator of a gallery show in downtown L.A. “has had trouble communicating with the five male artists, securing basic biographical information about each of them and, in some cases, even obtaining their artwork.” On Facebook, “he hesitated to link … to the artists’ personal pages out of concern for their safety.”

“The Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton has won the final round of a five-year legal battle, allowing dozens of disputed paintings worth an estimated $100-million [Can] to remain in Canada.”

“After years of halted attempts to find a permanent home, the Portrait Gallery of Canada is a gallery no more, shuffled Wednesday into the programs branch of Canada’s national archives. The move is part of a larger shakeup at Library and Archives Canada.”

“Sweden’s Moderna Museet and the heirs of a Jewish businessman forced to flee Germany before World War II settled a seven-year dispute over a Nazi-looted Emil Nolde painting in the museum’s collection.”

“Count Jaromir Czernin had sold Flemish painter Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece to the Nazi dictator ‘to protect the life of his family’, his descendants’ attorney, Andreas Theiss, told Der Standard. … The Art of Painting, which Vermeer created in 1665, has been on the walls of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum since 1946. It is the Flemish master’s largest painting.”

“Ever since Thomas P. Campbell took over as director of the [museum] on Jan. 1, there has been speculation about when he would put together his own senior management team … On Tuesday the museum’s board of trustees met and approved the first [four] of Mr. Campbell’s top appointments.”

“Annie, who dunked Kate Winslet in water, roped up Clint Eastwood and bathed Whoopi Goldberg in milk, is saucy but always for a reason – her pictures show us something we have never seen before: humour in the po-faced, age in the beautiful, vulnerability in the powerful, poise in the angry.”

“Now, for the first time, anyone looking to establish the origins of an artwork or simply peruse the vast catalogue of the world’s stolen treasures can do so for free at the click of a mouse. Interpol, the global policing body, has unveiled an online database of about 34,000 items known to have gone missing….”

Why New Yorkers loathe the chair-strewn, tourist-friendly pedestrian plaza that is Mike Bloomberg’s Times Square (even if they’re slightly unfair about it), and why they love the High Line (hint: nudity!).

“Now in its fourth year, the Carbuncle Cup is to the Stirling Prize what the Golden Raspberries are to the Oscars – the award that no architect could possibly want.”