Category: visual

“A private art collection, billed as the most impressive of Scottish colourists in a generation, goes under the hammer this week to help save a historic castle estate. The Hunter Blair collection, housed at Blairquhan Castle in Ayrshire, which was used as a setting in the Oscar-winning movie The Queen, is estimated to fetch £1m.”

“The biggest cash prize in [UK] arts, the £100,000 Gulbenkian prize for museums and galleries, is to be taken over next year by the Art Fund charity. The announcement, which will be made formally next week, will come as a great relief to the museums sector, which had been anxious for news that the prize would continue. It was established to emulate the glamour and the buzz of the Turner and Booker prizes for the beleaguered museums, but its funding was guaranteed for only five years.”

“Fire today ravaged the Cutty Sark, causing extensive damage to the world’s last remaining tea clipper and one of Britain’s most important maritime treasures… Despite the apparent damage, experts overseeing the broad restoration project on the 138-year-old ship said an initial inspection indicated a section of its structure remained intact and it could perhaps be restored.” Arson is suspected to have been the cause of the fire.

“A painting by Renaissance artist Raphael is expected to fetch £15m when it is sold in London later this summer. The portrait, of Florentine ruler Lorenzo de’ Medici, has not been seen in public for 40 years – but will be displayed at Christie’s from 30 June. The auctioneer describes the work as the most important Renaissance portrait to be sold at auction for a generation.”

Two rare, century-old color photos taken by Edward Steichen have been unearthed in upstate New York. “Almost as intriguing as the pictures themselves, however, is the story of how they recently made their way from a house in Buffalo, where they apparently sat unseen for decades, to the collection of the George Eastman House in Rochester, one of the world’s leading photography museums.”

“The actress bought Vue de l’Asile et de la Chapelle de Saint-Remy, estimated to be worth $10-15m (£5-8m), in 1963. But the family of a previous owner said it had been looted and wanted it back. The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a decision made by a lower court in 2005 that the heirs waited too long to take action.”

Identifying fake art is somewhat of an art itself. But perhaps computers could make the ID more of a scientific process? Art historians, scientists and engineers gather to tackle the problem.

“Not only are the leaders of the Nelson-Atkins unveiling a $196 million project by a controversial architect, they’re doing it at a moment of reaction in the museum design world. Stung by criticism that high-concept museums such as Frank Gehry’s in Bilbao, Spain, or Daniel Libeskind’s new space in Denver are ill-serving the art they are meant to showcase, the museum world is thinking hard about the virtues of celebrity architecture. But as Nelson-Atkins curators rush to install art in the new space, it’s clear that they have received exactly what they hoped for when they chose Steven Holl over five other architects in a 1999 competition.”

Marc Quinn’s statue of the disabled artist Alison Lapper naked and eight months pregnant, was installed in Trafalgar Square in September 2005. It exemplifies what’s wrong in modern Britain, writes Brendan O’Neill. “It shows that we value people for what they are rather than what they achieve. In our era of the politics of identity we seem more interested in celebrating individuals’ fixed and quite accidental attributes – their ethnicity, cultural heritage or in Lapper’s case, her disability – rather than what they have discovered or done in the world outside of their bodies. We prefer victims to heroes.”

This week’s record sale prices for Andy Warhol paintings may be good news for a Pittsburgh museum devoted to the artist. “Already an internationally known commodity, Warhol’s art is getting increasing attention from Asian art collectors and museum visitors attending shows the museum tours there.”