Casino mogul Steve Wynn poked a hole in a Picasso he was selling for $139 million. He sought $54 million in damages, but the insurer demurs. Now Wynn is “seeking documents related to the insurer’s appraisal of the work, worth $139 million before it was damaged Sept. 30. A restorer said the repaired painting is worth $85 million, a complaint filed yesterday in Manhattan federal court said.”
Category: visual
Art Gallery Of Ontario Gets A Bernini Bronze
“Given to the Toronto gallery by the family of real estate developer and AGO board member Murray Frum, the bronze masterwork is entitled Corpus and is said to be worth $50 million.”
Another Acquisition For LACMA
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has unveiled a newly acquired sculpture – “‘Saint John Capistran,’ a 450-year-old work in glazed terra cotta by the Italian artist Santi Buglioni – that it purchased last year from a New York art dealer. The unveiling caps a big year of acquisitions for the museum.
Dinosaur Museum Loses Director To Phoenix
Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History is losing its director to a new museum in Arizona. Billie DeWalt’s “departure comes just as the Carnegie is completing its $36 million “Dinosaurs in Their World” exhibition. Set to open in November, it will display the world’s third-largest collection of dinosaur fossils, many of them purchased by Andrew Carnegie himself.”
Toscanini’s Art (The Kind You Can See)
“He was the maestro di maestri of music, but few people knew of Arturo Toscanini’s passion for collecting art. Now, as the 50th anniversary of Toscanini’s death approaches, part of his private collection is going on display for the first time.”
Louvre Gets Money For New Islamic Wing
“The Emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah Al-Sabah, has donated €5m ($6.5m) towards the establishment of a new Islamic wing at the Louvre, to open in 2009 at a cost of €56m ($68m). This follows another donation made early last year by the Saudi Prince Al-Walid Bin Talal of €17m ($21m) to the Paris museum.”
Architecture Foundation Gets New Exec
“Seeking to fill the void left by the departure of its first full-time curator, the Chicago Architecture Foundation has named Gregory K. Dreicer as vice president of exhibitions and programs. Dreicer, the founder and director of a New York City-based exhibition design firm called Chicken & Egg Public Projects, starts next Monday.”
Monster Malls
Enormous new shopping malls are rising in English town centers. “They call it urban renaissance, retail-led regeneration. I call it the biggest destruction of city centres since the Sixties. Then the bright hopes of postwar regeneration mostly dissolved into a developer’s free-for-all, as town centre after town centre was refitted with that new invention imported from America, a mall, with car park and ring road attached.”
Looting Continues In Iraq
“At the root of the problem is the lack of trained security guards at each site. According to Donny George, former head of Iraq’s SBAH, which oversaw the archaeological sites, looting decreased by 90 percent at sites that were guarded. For the last two years, the Iraqi government provided funds for guards for the sites. In early 2006, the funding was increased to allow for 1,500 guards, but that money ran out in August.”
Still Anarchic, ‘Les Demoiselles’ Turns 100
Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is a century old. “It’s not just 100 years in the life of a painting, but 100 years of modernism. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is the rift, the break that divides past and future. Culturally, the 20th century began in 1907. Consider the dates of other works of high modernism. In music, Schoenberg’s Erwartung was composed in 1909 and Stravinsky began The Rite of Spring in 1910. James Joyce didn’t get started on Ulysses until 1914, by which time Picasso was into the final stages of cubism.”