Category: visual

Pasadena, California, is on the verge of a building boom, and fans of daring architecture will likely be pleased by what is to come. “But what’s avant-garde to some could be an assault to others… It’s either a step into the future, or the early stages of an aesthetic identity crisis.”

That the residents of the Italian town of Marcialla have long believed that a fresco in their local church was painted by a young Michelangelo would come as no surprise to many scholars in the art world. That the villagers may be right, however, is a shock of the highest order. “At the end of last year, a stone slab forming part of the altar was heaved aside to reveal the first visible evidence for the claim: a monogram with the letters M, B and F intertwined.”

“Gunmen overpowered security guards and stole paintings by Picasso, Dali, Matisse and Monet from a Rio museum Friday, using the cover of a Carnival crowd to make their getaway, Brazilian authorities said. The thieves entered the Chacara do Ceu museum as a samba band performed on the street outside and stole Pablo Picasso’s The Dance, Salvador Dali’s The Two Balconies, Henri Matisse’s Luxemburg Garden and Claude Monet’s Marine. The paintings were considered the most valuable pieces at the museum.”

“Over the last decade the benign image of the antiquities collector has given way to a far more sinister one. Once cast as generous lenders and donors — the lifeblood of American museums — such collectors are now seen as central cogs in a conspiracy to move artifacts looted from foreign soil into museum display cases… Museum officials argue that the public has forgotten why collectors are so important and, by implication, what museums are all about. To make their position clear, they have drawn up new ethical guidelines for loans of antiquities that vigorously defend the museum-collector relationship.”

Museums are falling all over themselves to tell the world that, while they may have been taken by surprise when the rules surrounding antiquities acquistion changed recently, they are more than willing to adapt. The truth, says Guy Dammann, is that the rules haven’t changed at all. “What has changed [is] the willingness of the museum to follow them.”

An arbitration panel ruled against the so-called “Painter of Light.” “The dealers and other ex-dealers allege that Kinkade used his religious beliefs — and manipulated theirs — to induce them to invest in Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries, independently owned stores licensed to deal exclusively in his work. They also allege that they were stuck with unsalable inventory, forced to open additional stores in markets that could not sustain them and undercut by discounters that sold Kinkade prints at prices they were forbidden to match. And they accuse the artist of scheming to devalue Media Arts Group before he took the company private for $32.7 million in early 2004, renaming it Thomas Kinkade Co.”

In 1994 in Grozny, Chechnya, the city’s Museum of Fine Art was obliterated during the war. The destruction “has gone unreported, despite the fact that it is the first museum in Europe to be destroyed since 1945. A delegation found that about 90% of buildings in the city, once home to 500,000, have been partially or totally destroyed, mostly as a result of Russian bombing. The Museum of Fine Arts, which housed a collection of more than 500,000 artefacts and works of art, was one of them.”

New York’s Metropolitan Museum is returning 21 works of art to Italy. But “while Italy secured a victory in this instance, the Met remains enmeshed in a broader tangle of donors, trustees and curators, some of whom have dealt in illicit antiquities, according to Italian and U.S. court decisions. At least three members of the Met’s board or its curator- appointed committees have bought smuggled artifacts for their personal collections, according to rulings in three Italian and U.S. cases since 1999.”

Encouraged by their success in getting the Metropolitan Museum of Art to return art treasures, “Italian police will travel to Boston next month aiming to persuade the Museum of Fine Arts to return at least two dozen objects they contend were stolen.”

Is the fresco on a wall of a church in Chianti, Italy a lost Michelangelo? “Stylistic verification of the claim will be difficult because the central part of the fresco was damaged by damp and painted over. But at least one scholar has said there is something of Michelangelo in the muscularity of the thief who stands on the right of the painting.”