Category: visual

“To the adult eye, [the Please Touch Museum’s] $88 million new home in [Philadelphia’s Memorial Hall,] a Beaux-Arts-style granite palace built for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Fairmount Park, is super-size in every way… The reborn children’s museum, which reopened last month, offers 38,000 square feet of exhibit space, almost four times that of its previous location.”

The Pen & Brush, “a century-old former club in Greenwich Village devoted to female artists and writers,” is selling its longtime home after concluding that it can no longer afford to maintain the space. “Those who rent the artist studios on the upper floors, are distressed by the prospect of losing work and exhibition spaces to which they have grown attached.”

“In a salesroom overflowing with collectors like the actor Steve Martin, the financier Eli Broad and the fashion designer Valentino, Sotheby’s barely managed to sell $125.1 million worth of contemporary art on Tuesday night, well below the low estimate of $202.4 million.”

“Two newly discovered paintings by the Italian artist Caravaggio will go on display in Scotland for the first time… the pieces were verified as Caravaggio originals during the cleaning process, when specialists were able to carry out detailed examinations of several paintings and assess their status with scholars in the field.”

The National Gallery has opened the first-ever survey of the paintings of Jan Lievens, who launched his career alongside Rembrandt in Leiden. Constantine Huygens even commissioned the two men to paint the same subjects in a sort of competition. Blake Gopnik finds that, “[j]udging by this show, the almost unknown test-pictures by Lievens aren’t obviously weaker than the very famous versions Rembrandt came up with.”

In San Diego, “Kimono as Art: The Landscapes of Itchiku Kubota” showcases the work of the late Tokyo artist whose medium was the traditional Japanese robe. Robert Pincus says that photos “don’t capture the vibrancy of the color in these objects – or the way Kubota used texture and layers to make them virtually sculptural.” (The magnum opus is a series of 40 kimonos that form a continuous panorama.)

“The first scholarly survey of the drawings collection of the New York Historical Society has brought to light previously unknown or misattributed works by John Singer Sargent, Louis Comfort Tiffany, David Wilkie and others.”

“Like Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum,” the newly refurbished Art Gallery of Ontario, which reopens Friday, “has built the business plan for expanded premises around the assumption that more people will pay more money to see more art and artifacts. And, like the ROM, it remains bullish about the prospects of increased attendance and revenue from a higher ticket price despite a looming recession.”

“This week, the auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s will attempt to sell works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol, along with Roy Lichtenstein and Mark Rothko.” Sarah Thornton, author of “Seven Days in the Art World,” explains who won’t be bidding in this hideous economy, as well as why owners might be hanging on to their art for emotional reasons right now.

“With both the housing and art-bubble markets deflating fast, perhaps it’s no surprise that MoMA’s ‘Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling’ didn’t do so well as real estate. The architects were allowed to sell their dream houses after the show closed October 26, and Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev expressed interest in buying all five. But that fell through.”