Category: visual

It’s been only a year since Paris declined to build a new museum to house billionaire collector François Pinault’s art collection. Now the collection’s first show is in Venice. “In this astonishingly short span of time, the interior of the palace has been sensitively remodeled, again to a design by Tadao Ando. Alison Gingeras, a brilliant young curator on the staff of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, has put together a breathtaking array of works from Pinault’s collection, a selection that ranges chronologically from Mark Rothko to Jeff Koons. The result is likely to upstage the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, a museum that has long dominated the field of modern art in Venice.”

“There’s recent news that a handful of sculptures at [San Francisco’s] M.H. de Young Memorial Museum may be the ‘national cultural property’ of Papua New Guinea, and if so, probably were exported illegally. Whether or not that turns out to be true — an official from the Port Morseby museum who was here last month thinks three of the pieces are on the list — San Francisco museum officials say this issue shouldn’t be compared to the controversial Met and Getty situations.”

A Picasso was sold for $95 million Wednesday night, the second-highest price ever paid for a painting. “The image of Maar, one of Picasso’s mistresses, was sold on the second night of the important spring auctions. “Boy With a Pipe” (1905) holds the record price for a Picasso. That painting sold for $104.2 million in May 2004.”

Police in Florida recover a truck full of art that had been missing for tqo weeks. the driver, Patrick McIntosh, 36, had “been missing since April 17, when he and his 24-foot Budget rental truck pulled out of Boca Raton with millions of dollars worth of art, including seven canvasses by the Abstract Expressionist painter Milton Avery. He had been hired by David Jones Fine Art Services to deliver the art from private dealers and collectors — and at least one museum — in Boca Raton to a series of homes and galleries in New York.”

Thirty years of war has decimated Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. And reconstruction money has been spent on rebuilding the country’s infrastructure rather than recovering or restoring damaged treasures…

Architect Richard Rogers will design one of the towers on the World Trade Center site. “Tower 3 is Lord Rogers’s fourth major commission in New York. In addition to the Javits Center, which he is designing with FX Fowle, he is involved in a $200 million project to transform a two-mile stretch of the Lower Manhattan waterfront and a $1 billion expansion of Silvercup Studios in Long Island City, Queens.”

“Stokes’ winning entry, Long After Tonight, is a seven-minute recording of a group of ‘soulies’ – members of the Northern Soul music phenomena in the Sixties and Seventies – collecting obscure North American soul music, and meeting in venues across the north of England. They are shown dancing hypnotically to a soundtrack as the camera occasionally cuts to ornate religious iconography in a Gothic revivalist church in Dundee.”

The painting sold at auction in New York Thursday night.. “L’Arlesienne, Madame Ginoux commanded the fourth highest price on record for a work by the renowned Dutch artist. The 1890 painting was one in a series of five created in homage to Van Gogh’s friend, the artist Paul Gaugin.”

“The Broad Art Foundation has purchased 570 works by the late German artist Joseph Beuys, an influential thinker and socially conscious force in avant-garde 20th century art. The acquisition comprises a nearly complete collection of the artist’s ‘multiples’ — groups of mostly three-dimensional works produced in more than one edition to make them widely available. These works are regarded as the essence of his production.”

Nineteen rare watercolors by William Blake were auctioned Tuesday in New York. “The works, illustrations for “The Grave,” a 1743 poem by the Scottish writer Robert Blair, were discovered five years ago by two British booksellers. At the time, experts heralded them as the most important Blake discovery in a century and said the illustrations should stay together. It appeared that the public agreed; some in the audience spoke of the breakup of the collection as a criminal procedure.”