Category: visual

Sotheby’s has been forced to reimburse the fashion designer Jasper Conran £78,000 after a pair of portraits sold as 16th-century originals were revealed as 18th-century fakes.

“A 1903 Picasso painting, which was to have been auctioned by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, has been withdrawn at the last minute due to its Nazi-era history.”

“The Louvre will loan 276 works from its collection of artifacts, stretching from Egyptian times to the turn of the 20th century, to the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec.”

“The rush to architectural judgment is like a vice. It’s something you shouldn’t do — and an indulgence that’s hard to resist.” John King is reserving judgment on the Thom Mayne tower taking shape before the eyes of the public in San Francisco. But many of his readers have already formed strong opinions about it, demonstrating “that in an ever-more splintered world of self-defined tribes, the buildings around us are a shared experience — no matter how vividly at odds our reactions might be.”

“The World Trade Center Memorial Museum’s opening has been pushed back beyond the original target date of 2009, the Daily News has learned. Though the WTC Memorial, with two sunken pools marking where the twin towers stood, is still due to welcome its first visitors in 2009, the adjoining museum containing WTC artifacts won’t open until mid-2010. The delayed museum debut must await completion of a visitors center, which will provide access to the museum’s underground exhibition space.”

“The abstract, untitled painting from about 1957 was noticed missing from the stand of Salis & Vertes, a gallery with branches in Salzburg, Austria, and St. Moritz, Switzerland, as employees were packing up at the end of the fair.”

Pompeiian wall paintings colored with cinnabar have darkened since their excavation. “Art preservationists have been uncertain why the degradation occurs, but have suspected that sunlight causes the mercury sulfide to change crystalline phases, to a form called metacinnabar. But an analysis using the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, shows that there is no metacinnabar to be found. Instead, Marine Cotte of the synchrotron facility and colleagues found two other degradation processes at work, probably caused at least in part by chlorine.”

That’s what a judge rules. “The auction was halted after a German man claimed his ancestor was forced to sell the work during the 1930s.”

“Fiercely proud of both its architecture and its distinct neighborhoods, Chicago is losing entire tracts of older buildings. Many areas bordering downtown where immigrant communities flourished a century ago have experienced a rush of residential development, leading local preservationists … to worry that before long, the only architecture left in this inner ring of neighborhoods will be condominiums.”

“Even though a Manhattan judge dismissed an attempt to block the sale of a $60m Picasso belonging to Andrew Lloyd Webber, Christie’s looked set to withdraw the painting from auction on 8 November.”