Category: visual

The city of Los Angeles is undertaking a daunting task: “to make sense of — and give context to — a region that has often felt diffuse, imprecise and haphazardly imagined.” In other words, to uncover the “real” L.A., and “identify, catalog and ultimately protect not just its physical ‘built history’ but to provide a sharper portrait of Los Angeles and how it came to be.”

Art galleries are springing up everywhere on Dragon Street in Dallas’s Design District, drawn by low real estate prices and the allure of a hot new scene. Of course, gentrification doesn’t happen overnight. “Art connoisseurs new to the area might be surprised to find, as they enter Dragon Street from the south, that the pavement is bumpy and sports more than a few divots and potholes. As with fine art itself, Dragon Street at the moment is a work in progress.”

“What drove Morton Bartlett to create exquisitely realistic sculptures, dress them, and take pictures of them in evocatively staged scenes is a mystery. Since his death in 1992, though, the Boston-based photographer’s figures have been hailed as works of art.”

Officials sorting through the belongings of an elderly woman from Chicago have discovered a treasure trove of “watercolors, sketches, and oils on canvas and wood, all by American impressionist Alfred Juergens — an unprecedented and unexpected collection with a value that would start, conservatively, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“A garish painting of Berlin streetwalkers on the prowl, the subject of a bitter restitution case from the Nazi era, went on display at the museum that bought it for $38.1 million in frenzied bidding.” The painting, by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, was purchased by New York’s Neue Gallerie after having hung for more than two decades in a Berlin museum. In 2006, it was returned to the heirs of the family that owned it prior to World War II, and put up for auction.

“According to many, the emphasis is shifting to works of higher quality. The starkest example of this phenomenon was at Christie’s 14 June Russian sale, its first ever in the summer, when three paintings accounted for half the sale’s total value. While some works set records, more than one-third of the lots at both auction houses were unsold.”

Four of the six projects nominated for the Stirling prize, the most prestigious annual awards for British architecture, are for buildings overseas.

British museums took in £25.3 million worth of objects last year, donated in lieu of inheritance taxes. “Objects accepted last year include the collection of vintage boats assembled by the late George Pattinson on Lake Windermere; paintings by Gainsborough and Reynolds; a rare early work by Francis Bacon, who destroyed as much of his youthful output as he could get hold of; and a fairytale Cartier diamond tiara, once owned by Consuelo, Duchess of Manchester, the 19th-century American heiress.”

Charles Saumarez Smith resigned abruptly as director of Britain’s National Gallery of Art. “Since his resignation after just five years as director he has maintained a dignified silence. But rumours have abounded that his departure came after a period of behind the scenes tension which he felt made it difficult for him to continue.”

“If you wanted to illustrate the increasingly global nature of the money and influence driving the art world these days, you might invent a wealthy Belgian couple who live in, say, Switzerland, and plan to use the money they made selling a collection of English masterworks (Turner watercolors) to establish a center for contemporary art in Beijing, where one early show will probably feature a well-known German artist.”