Category: visual

“Cities are both real and imagined places. What’s interesting about Winnipeg and the reputation of its visual artists — both those who have left and those who continue to live here — is that the real and the imaginary have become indistinguishable. Because of the emergence on the international art scene of a group of artists… Winnipeg is now viewed in New York, Los Angeles and London as a place that has produced an inexplicable number of good artists… What is unquestionably true, however, is that Winnipeg has developed a keen sense of itself as an art city, and the success of their peers is a model on which the current crop of artists can imagine how they might flourish in the rough-and-tumble art world.”

An heiress to the Ford Motor Co. fortune has bequeathed a $15 million collection of classic paintings to the Detroit Institute of Arts. Included in the collection are works by Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, and Degas.

Chicago’s downtown Loop has been undergoing a dramatic revitalization in recent years, capped by the unveiling of the lakefront Millenium Park and Frank Gehry’s towering bandshell. But the latest architectural addition to the Loop has some observers profoundly unhappy. The perpetrator is Chicago’s WLS-TV, which has constructed a 42-foot monolith that it says mimics some of the art found in Millenium Park. Alan Artner begs to differ. “[WLS’s creation] takes back the language into advertising and plays with it to pretend it, too, is art. But it’s not. It’s pollution that along with the rest of the frills added to the exterior of the building brings the sensory irritation of ABC studios in Times Square to North State Street.”

A major find of 19 watercolors is about to be broken up and sold at auction. “The watercolors — illustrations created in 1805 by the poet and artist William Blake for a 1743 poem — are being heralded by scholars as the most important Blake discovery in a century,” and experts are upset at the prospect of the sale.

The Metropolitan Museum hopes to get the major part of Shelby White’s collection of antiquities. But an Italian “investigation into Ms. White’s collection seems to keep expanding. The stock of old evidence that Italian investigators are using becomes more dangerous to Ms. White’s collection as more of her pieces receive widespread notice. That is sure to happen as more than a dozen pieces in her collection—which has been admired by curators as one of the most impressive in the world, even as it has been disparaged by archaeologists as plundered treasure without provenance—are displayed at the Met, where she is a trustee.”

Auction watchers are predicting a record price for a JWM Turner when it comes up for sale this week. “The Blue Rigi: Lake of Lucerne, Sunrise, is predicted to fetch more than £2m when it goes under the hammer at Christie’s auction house on 5 June. The current record for a Turner watercolour on paper is £2.04m, set in 2001 by Heidelberg with a Rainbow.”

Allegations have surfaced that the St Louis Art Museum has an ancient Egyptian mask in its collection that was stolen from a warehouse in Saqqara, Egypt in the 1980s.

The St. Louis mask was the subject of accusations as recently as Jan. 19, when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s David Bonetti reported that a “one-time forger and art smuggler” named Michel Van Rijn claimed that the mask was stolen in the 1990s.

Three years ago, Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center opened a new building designed by star Zaha Hadid. There were crowds and there was lots of attention. But now the crowds have gone and the attention has faded. “This would-be icon stands as a cautionary tale: In an age when celebrity architects are courted by cities and institutions desperate to make a splash, brand-name buzz can fade quicker than a fresh coat of paint.”

Are depictions of Muhammad strictly prohibited? “Art’s history disputes this. True, that strict taboo today is honored now by almost all Muslims, but old paintings of the prophet — finely brushed expensive ones, made carefully and piously by Muslims and for them — are well known to most curators of Islamic art.”