Category: visual

Christie’s will auction the remaining four Gustav Klimt paintings returned earlier this year after being looted by Nazis in World War II. “The four works, which are together valued at nearly $100 million, include ‘Adele Bloch-Bauer II,’ a 1912 portrait of Mrs. Bloch-Bauer in fashionable street clothes and a wide-brimmed hat. Christie’s estimates that it could fetch $40 million to $60 million.”

The recent war between Israel and Lebanon damaged some important buildings in Lebanon. “A Roman tomb in Tyre and a medieval tower in Byblos have been significantly damaged by the war, the official leading a survey of Lebanese archaeological sites told The Observer late last week.”

The Denver Art Museum has always been underappreciated, writes Kyle McMillan. “Unlike some Eastern and Midwestern art institutions, which established their reputations in the 1920s and ’30s, many of the Denver Art Museum’s top collections did not come together until decades later. Its standing consequently has suffered. All that will soon change” with the opening of the museum’s new Daniel Libeskind-designed building.

“The paradox of a contemporary museum becomes most overt when an institution that deals in established status enters a realm where doubt is both inevitable and essential. It isn’t clear that the museum is the best place for new objects to be tested. With so much invested-financially, culturally, and even politically-in these institutions, their tendency is to cover up the vital uncertainty of the moment (everything from the quality of the work to its meaning and eventual role in history) with a wealth of supporting material.”

Simon Schama writes that Bernini “used the power of art to achieve the most difficult thing in the world: the visualisation of bliss… Before Bernini, sculpture’s preoccupation had been with immortality. When modern sculptors looked at, and learned from, antiquity, what they saw was the translation of mortal humanity into something purer, chillier and more enduring: gods and heroes.”

British “guerrilla” artist Banksy hits Los Angeles. “Somehow, despite his mainstream appeal, Banksy has lost none of the respect of his more ‘underground’ British peers. When people talk about graffiti they talk about Banksy. Famous people have always come to his exhibitions because his stuff is easy to read.”

Ambroise “Vollard was a classic example of right place, right time. Important artists were in and out of his gallery buying, selling and trading paintings, and collectors followed. He never spoke a foreign language… yet he soon attracted an important international crowd of Russians, Germans, Americans and other collectors.”

The Museum of Modern Art takes its latest stab at retelling the story of modern art. Peter Schjeldahl writes that “the show crystallizes a recurrent suspicion that, at present, high culture inhabits an interminable aftermath of lost or broken purposes. The poetic tone of today’s most vital art tilts toward elegy.”

Forty years ago Jasper Johns made a plaster cast of Barbara Rose’s leg and included it in one of his works. Eventually it ended up in Iran. But when a collection of major Western art went on display last year in the Tehran Museum, the work was missing. Where, wonders Rose, might it have ended up?

“Public sculpture used to have a code. There was a given iconography written into the way we worshiped our heroes. Public sculpture had to do with the depiction of a historical time or event. Once the work came down from its pedestal and became organized in relation to its present time and space, it began to challenge architecture in a way that it hadn’t before.”