Category: visual

When Paris’s Musée de l’Orangerie reopened earlier this year, it marked “a kind of Second Coming in the art world, 80 years after [Claude] Monet, near the end of his days, donated his supreme achievement to the people of France.” Monet’s Water Lilies series, among the painter’s best-loved works, are again viewable at the museum following a hellish 6-year renovation that “turned into a complicated nightmare involving the subterranean world of Paris.”

Many artists have conflicted feelings about notoriety. Why? “I make no bones about enjoying attention, but I resent it when it is implied that being media-friendly devalues my work.”

“A chance find by a peat cutter last summer in County Tipperary, southern Ireland, turned out to be a psalter, which has been dated to around 800 AD. The discovery has been described as the Irish equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

Almost every other week there are stories about new record sales prices for art. But “how reliable are these ‘reported’ or ‘undisclosed’ prices? None of the interested parties is prepared to talk, so the information is based on rumour and reports published in other newspapers. The truth is we don’t really know.”

London-based Christie’s, which is owned by the French billionaire Francois Pinault, had a great year in 2006. The world’s largest auction house “sold $1.26 billion of impressionist and modern-art pictures in 2006, including four Gustav Klimt paintings recovered by Nazi victims’ heirs. Postwar and contemporary auctions rose 59 percent, to $829 million. Worldwide, auctions rose ‘more than 30 percent’ from last year’s $3.2 billion, though final totals aren’t yet available.”

“With art, money talks. Now it’s talking again, with perhaps [Philadelphia’s] greatest work of American art, Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic, sold Nov. 10 by Thomas Jefferson University for $68 million. In the midst of the controversy over the sale and the local effort to raise $68 million by next Tuesday to match the price being paid by an Arkansas museum and the National Gallery, the questions are again being raised: What other works of art are at risk of sale or removal? What, if anything, can be done to stanch an outflow?”

“The once-controversial Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, designed by Maya Lin, will receive the Twenty-five Year Award from the American Institute of Architects, bestowed on a design that has stood the test of time for 25 years, the AIA announced Monday.”

“What strikes you about Jaume Plensa’s twin glass towers at Millennium Park are the faces, as big as JumboTrons, that appear to be looking at you. And since late November, they actually have been. A $52 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security bought the Chicago area a host of public safety improvements–including an obvious and ungainly camera atop each of Plensa’s giant glass towers.” The move has not been a hit with the aesthetically inclined.

The “efforts of Allied officers and soldiers … to save and repatriate stolen treasures during and after the war is a chapter of World War II history still not particularly well known. Even during the war their work — when compared with saving lives and preserving ways of life — was sometimes discounted. Some members of the military referred to these soldiers as ‘Venus fixers,’ a term with more than a hint of the effete. But the accomplishments of these soldiers, better known as the Monuments Men, are finally starting to come into sharper focus.”