Category: visual

Last Wednesday, a single bidder at an art auction at Sotheby’s in New York spent a whopping $95.2 million for a Picasso portrait, and more than $102 million overall. This would be big news under any circumstances, but what really has the art world buzzing is the fact that no one seems to know who the buyer is, despite the fact that his photograph has been published worldwide. “Those who sat near him at the auction said that they were convinced that he sounded Russian. There were also clues to support that theory… Officially, Sotheby’s is declining to comment, but its executives were obviously caught off guard the night of the auction.”

Tate Modern has a new gallery devoted entirely to the work of Mark Rothko, and if there is a single element running through the room’s contents, it is raw, blistering anger. “The set of colossal canvases housed in Tate Modern’s Rothko Room originated, as every art-aware schoolboy knows, in a commission for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building on New York’s Park Avenue,” and the story behind the commission explains what exactly it was that made Rothko so angry.

Last year, glassblower Robert Kaindl found himself on the business end of a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement against well-known glass artist Dale Chihuly. Rather than settle the suit, Kaindl is countersuing, and his complaint takes some potentially devastating shots at Chihuly’s business practices, claiming that the artist is “not involved in conceiving, creating, designing or even signing a ‘substantial number’ of artworks that bear his name. Kaindl also maintains in his claim that Chihuly sometimes buys glasswork from other artists, removes their names and then puts his own trademarked name on it.”

“The biggest exhibition in half a century about the father of British art, Hans Holbein, will not include one of his most famous works because it is too fragile to travel the two miles from the National Gallery to Tate Britain. The Ambassadors, dated 1533, is… painted on wooden panels, which have thinned over the years during conservation.”

Greek police say they will charge former Getty curator marion True of illegal possession of 29 Greek artifacts found in her Greek villa earlier this spring. “This shouldn’t come as a surprise. None of these items were registered with local archaeological authorities as the law requires.” True says the antiquities were there when she bought the house.

“The New York-based Association of Art Museum Directors said this week that 73 percent of the 129 museums responding to its survey reported steady or increased attendance in 2005. That compared with 70 percent seeing such results in 2004. The survey also found that 84 percent of respondents said their total revenue had increased or was the same as in the previous year, up from 79 percent in 2004.”

The Getty Museum will meet with Greek authorities to discuss antiquities the Greeks say were looted and are now in the Getty collection. “The visit by museum Director Michael Brand, announced Wednesday by the J. Paul Getty Trust, comes as Greek authorities step up a criminal investigation aimed at securing the return of four Getty objects, including a 2,500-year-old solid gold funerary crown considered to be one of the museum’s antiquities masterpieces.”

In 1985 the LA County Museum acquired a Van Dyck painting with great fanfare. But “these days, ‘Andromeda’ is all but invisible. Although it probably cost about $1 million, it hasn’t been hung in a public area for several years, and the museum has never announced a reason. The answer is there, however, for those who dig into LACMA’s online collection database: In July 1998, the museum decided it wasn’t a Van Dyck after all.”

“The deal completes a 25-year campaign to return the artefact, known as the G’psgolox Totem after the chief who commissioned it, to a tribal site. The sculpted column was removed from Canadian territory in the 1920s by the then-Swedish consul, who had it chopped down and shipped to Stockholm.”

“The National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC, has admitted copyright infringement and agreed to pay two Edouard Vuillard scholars $37,500 for publishing a catalogue that uses their research without authorisation or acknowledgement.”