Category: visual

It went to an anonymous bidder at Sotheby’s New York. “The price approaches but does not surpass the artist’s previous auction record of $28.7 million, set at Christie’s London in 2000. Only two parties vied for the work, painted in 1661. Proceeds will benefit the seller, the U.S.-based Shippy Foundation, a nonprofit charitable organization.”

“One of Britain’s greatest privately-owned Rembrandts is likely to be sold to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The museum is negotiating to acquire Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet from Penrhyn Castle, for a price of around £40m. This is more than double any Rembrandt sold at auction.”

Dubai is building some of the largest, most fantastical buildings on earth. The city’s new skyline is like a fantasy model.

A documentary focusing on a prodigiously gifted 4-year-old painter whose work has been called into question by journalists who believe her father helped her create her art is screening at Sundance, and it delves deeply (and disturbingly) into issues of both artistic and journalistic ethics. “The documentary gradually became a meditation on truth instead, one that manages to explore and sometimes indict the motives of all the adults who have swirled around Marla.”

“The Italian government said yesterday that police investigators had tracked down a rare group of first century B.C. marble panels that had been illegally excavated and offered to museums and private collectors. The 12 panels depict gladiators in combat and were found about two weeks ago in the garden of a private home 25 miles north of Rome.”

The Tate Museum is mounting a campaign to raise money to buy a Turner it wants. “Nicholas Serota, the Tate’s director, described the painting as an extraordinary work of ineffable beauty, which would be of lasting benefit to scholars and visitors if they could secure it for the gallery. Ian Warrell, a curator and Turner expert, added: ‘In terms of the Turners that we would ever want, this is right at the very, very top. This has always been on the list’.”

Analysis of art on stucco fragments painted in Iraq in th 9th Century shows they were laced with arsenic. “People died young until a couple of centuries ago, and I guess other illnesses were causing artists to die before they got poisoned to death by the materials they were using. What happened to their apprentices, who ground and prepared the pigments on a routine basis, I don’t know.”

A Russian court hears about how an Hermitage employee and her husband stole 77 pieces of art from the museum and sold them to buy medicine. “According to prosecutors, the couple made off with icons, a Swiss pocket watch, and a gold-encrusted saltcellar. Mrs Zavadskaya, who died in 2005, simply walked out of the staff exit, apparently unchallenged by security guards.”

“Greece asked Christie’s International, the world’s largest art seller, to stop an auction of heirlooms belonging to the former Greek royal family, saying the origins of some of the objects were questionable. Culture Minister George Voulgarakis sent a letter to the auction house yesterday requesting it to cancel the sale, scheduled to begin tomorrow, and to prove the provenance of the items….”