Category: visual

The owner of three paintings he says are by Jackson Pollock is disputing a scientific analysis of the works that suggests they are not. “The authentication of works of art is still more art than science. The point is that the science of attribution is still in flux, and no scientific test is definitive in the absence of traditional, time-tested art historical research.”

The auction house says it needs to “stay competitive.” “Buyers at Christie’s will pay 20 percent on the first 250,000 pounds ($500,000) of the hammer price and 12 percent on the rest, the London-based auction house said in an e-mailed statement. Currently, Christie’s charges 20 percent on the first 100,000 pounds and 12 percent on the rest.”

“One of the three Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the Puget Sound area is on the market, a perfect time to wander through it and wonder why its ideas are being neglected in this century’s thirst for reasonably priced, modestly scaled homes. … Wright remains conspicuously alone among A-list architects who actually have tried to improve the state of middle-class single-family homes.”

As world-class architects vie to design San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal tower, John King urges them to remember that “San Francisco doesn’t need an exclamation point. It needs a supple and subtle vision — on the ground as well as the sky — that stands as a symbol of what sustainable, elegant urbanity can be.”

A Harvard study casts more doubt on the authenticity of three Jackson Pollock paintings. “The yearlong study found that a pigment in one of the paintings wasn’t introduced as artists’ paint until 1996, and a pigment on a second work has been available only since 1971. Pollock died in 1956, having completed his most famous works from 1947 to 1950.”

The Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia has “accused its former president yesterday of defrauding it of $2.4 million to pay for a ‘lavish lifestyle’ that included trips to France and New Zealand and freewheeling spending on paintings, high-end furniture and expensive boats.”

“Everyone knows that our big museums are our most conservative cultural institutions. And feminism, routinely mocked by the public media for 35 years as indissolubly linked with radicalism and bad art, has been a hard sell. But curators and critics have increasingly come to see that feminism has generated the most influential art impulses of the late 20th and early 21st century.”

The Seattle Art Museum is chasing touchers. Many of the 40,000 who have come to the museum’s new sculpture park have an inclination to touch the sculptures. The museum says no. “We want to be friendly and positive but we’re encouraging people to think before they touch, as touching art has consequences.”

Frank Gehry’s contribution to the planned revitalization of downtown Los Angeles is going well beyond his much-heralded Disney Concert Hall, as the starchitect unveils plans for a retail and entertainment complex across from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But “can the bottom-line world of mainstream development produce something of architectural value at enormous scale? Or is Mr. Gehry simply there to provide a veneer of cultural pretension?”

“No one is claiming that the French actually invented erotic art. It existed in Egyptian, Roman, pre-Columbian, Indian and African cultures. There is no shortage of sexual charge in paintings by, say, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens or Velázquez. Even religious art was frequently sensual as well as solemn. The case for 18th-century France is that the death of Louis XIV in 1715 set in motion a social revolution marked initially by licentiousness and then by intellectual liberation and philosophical inquiry. And it was in this context that love — and, yes, sex — came to be closely re-examined in art and literature.”