Category: visual

“A recently discovered self-portrait by Francis Bacon has sold for £3.8m at a Christie’s auction in London. The triptych, titled Three Studies, had never been seen by the public until it came to light last month.”

Few figures have captivated humanity across the centuries like William Shakespeare. But as much as we know about the Bard, much remains murky. For one thing, what exactly did Shakespeare look like? “Since Shakespeare’s time, eight portraits have seemed to be genuine likenesses, but today only three of them stand up, and even those are not indisputable.”

Paris’s new Musée du Quai Branly was supposed to be former French President Jacques Chirac’s lasting cultural legacy. But Tom Dyckhoff says that Chirac doesn’t have much to be proud of. “This is a building that never quite resolves itself: not fusion food, but a stew of rich, mismatched ingredients. A saviour for the city? No chance. But, eccentric, incoherent and full of unresolved doubts, it’s the perfect epitaph for Chirac.”

“Germany reacted with dismay yesterday after a painting by the country’s most famous living artist, revealing his family’s tragic history under the Nazis, was sold to an overseas buyer. Gerhard Richter’s work, Aunt Marianne, went for £2.1m at auction… to a private Asian buyer at a Sotheby’s auction in London.”

According to a leading index tracking art sales, “over the last 50 years, stocks (as represented by the S&P 500) returned 10.9 percent annually, while the art index returned 10.5 percent per annum. And in the five years between 2001 and 2005, art trounced stocks. But not all art performs equally. In recent years, old masters haven’t done so well, while American art before 1950 has been soaring—up 25.2 percent in the last year alone. And across categories, masterpieces (like the Klimt that Lauder just bought) tend to underperform lower-priced paintings by a substantial margin.”

Zaha Hadid gets a lot of buzz these days as architect of the future. But Witold Rybczynski thinks she’s over-rated. “The urbanism is slightly frightening—a vision of the city that appears unrelated to either human use or occupation. Brasilia on speed. Walter Gropius once said that an architect should be able to design a city or a teacup. Whatever the merits of such a dubious claim, even Gropius wouldn’t have suggested that teacups and cities were interchangeable. In Zaha’s world, they are.”

“Beginning next month, the museum will do away with traditional departments like Egyptian art, African art and European painting and instead create two ‘teams,’ one for collections and one for exhibitions. Arnold L. Lehman, the museum’s director, said in an interview that the changes were intended to make the museum’s relatively small curatorial staff more efficient and to encourage curators to exchange ideas more freely. But some curators see the changes as a way of diminishing their traditional power to conceive, propose and organize exhibitions.”

The Getty has agreed to return dozens of antiquities in its collections to Italy. As part of the proposed deal, Italy will lend the Getty objects “of comparable visual beauty and historical importance,” according to a joint statement released late today. A final agreement, “which will include mutual collaboration, research and the exchange of important antiquities,” is expected to be concluded in early summer, the statement added.

“If ever a building deserved to be called sexy-ugly, it’s this one. Somehow sleek and ungainly at the same time, a brooding, preening pile of geometric forms that could hardly be less photogenic, particularly on the outside, the design manages to slide naturally into its industrial riverbank context and feel utterly up-to-date. Its completion caps off a mini-boom for the city’s cultural institutions, which began with a remarkable addition to the Walker Art Center by Herzog & de Meuron, which opened in April 2005, and has continued this spring with a pair of disappointing buildings: Cesar Pelli’s mall-like central library and an entirely forgettable new wing for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts by Michael Graves.”

The deal to buy a Klimt painting for $135 million this week took much negotiating between a motivated buyer and a shrewd seller. And what about the other four Klimts owned by Maria Altman? “Experts have speculated that the four Klimts, sold together or individually, could bring as much as $150 million collectively. Then again, after all the attention paid to the ‘gold portrait,’ they might be seen by some status-minded collectors as a consolation prize.”