Category: visual

Duke’s auction house said Monday the watercolor “Etreinte,” depicting the artist in an embrace with lover Louise Lenoir, was found propped up against a wall with two equine paintings by British artists George Stubbs and Alfred Munnings.

“Seven historic aboriginal paintings were stolen Tuesday from an Australian museum then recovered hours later after the thief apparently changed his mind and dumped them in a park, police said. The paintings, valued at more than $460,000 by officials at the Northern Territory Museum and Art Gallery, were undamaged.”

“Under the Influence,” the Phillips de Pury sale of contemporary art, failed to cast a spell on buyers yesterday. Of the 354 lots offered for sale, roughly 65% — 229 paintings — found buyers. Buyers still lingering in town after the Armory Show this weekend spent a total of $5.25 million at this sale, but the $4.25 million in hammer prices (the premium price includes the auction house commission which is not factored into estimates) did not measure up against a pre-sale estimate of between $6.2 million and $8.8 million.

“Over the last few years the growing clout of developers has gradually chipped away at the city’s resolve to protect its architectural legacy. The agency most responsible for defending that legacy, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, has sometimes been accused of putting developers’ interests above the well-being of the city’s inhabitants. A proposal before the commission to tear down several buildings in the Greenwich Village Historic District is shaping up as a crucial test of whether those critics are right.”

“The news that one of the most compelling pieces of German art in a British collection actually comes with the unsavoury pedigree of having once been owned, looked at and maybe even fantasised over by Hitler is a sad confirmation of the violence done to German history and culture by Germans in the 20th century.”

“Art has become perhaps the biggest legal economy in the world to be almost totally unregulated, so it should come as no surprise that the art world is the scene of a mighty struggle for control. The principal contenders are the auctioneers and the dealers, with a supporting cast of collectors, art advisers, entrepreneurs, curators and an increasingly active group of über-artists.”

“Remember when art appreciation used to be a simple, straightforward affair? You walked into a gallery, looked at some pictures, or maybe a few sculptures, and that was that. Then came photography, followed by film, the emergence of performance art and all that conceptual stuff with unmade beds, pickled sharks and rooms full of oil. Now, thanks to 21st-century technology, sound art – art for the ears, as well as the eyes – is bringing a new dimension to the art world.”

Jean Nouvel, one of architecture’s most insightful and bravura talents, has landed the coveted Pritzker Prize. The Pritzker jury lauded Nouvel for “his courageous pursuit of new ideas and his challenge of accepted norms in order to stretch the boundaries of the field.”

“The Guggenheim is not going through an easy time at the moment. Years ago, we chose a strategy geared toward achieving a worldwide presence — in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America. There is a document to this effect, which everyone enthusiastically agreed to at one point. What I have planned in Abu Dhabi is so much bigger than what I’ve done so far. It’ll be the kind of thing we’ve never seen before. The only expression I can think of to describe it is pharaonic.”

Any jitters by American buyers were offset by Europeans. “For Europeans the low dollar makes New York a bargain hunters’ paradise, and the fair man­agement reported that the number of Europeans registered for VIP cards was up 33%. European buy­ing was up significantly.”