Category: visual

A new 1000-foot tower is rising in Chicago. But “hardly anybody is talking about Waterview Tower, even though construction just started on the 82-story skyscraper at the southwest corner of Wacker Drive and Clark Street. The lack of buzz is enough to make you wonder: Is it because the design is good but kind of tame or because Chicagoans have become totally blase about great height? ‘Ho hum. Another tower taller than New York’s Chrysler Building. Who’s the next pol to get indicted at City Hall’?”

It’s been a year and a half since gun-toting thieves charged into Oslo’s Munch Museum and left with two masterpieces by the museum’s namesake. “Six men stand accused of the crime; their trial is set to begin tomorrow. But the laborious, complicated investigation has stumbled in a fundamental and profoundly frustrating way. The police may have the thieves, but they don’t have the paintings.”

“The United States returned three paintings stolen at the end of World War II to the mayor of the western German town that owned them. U.S. Ambassador William Timken handed over the 19th-century works by Heinrich Buerkel to the mayor of Pirmasens at a ceremony Friday in Berlin. Officials say the three paintings, now valued at $125,000, were among works believed stolen on March 22, 1945, as U.S. forces pushed into Germany. They were recovered after they turned up in an auction in the United States last year.”

“With a proposed settlement from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in hand, Italian authorities are escalating their demands for the return of allegedly looted antiquities from other American museums… Italian investigators say they have identified hundreds more allegedly looted objects at U.S. museums. An additional 10,000 objects mentioned in the records have not yet been located.” Italy is very serious about recovering as many of the objects as possible, and is willing to go to court if negotiations with the museums involved do not result in a satisfactory resolution.

Donald Trump’s new 92-story skyscraper is under construction in Chicago. “The heart beats faster at the prospect of Chicago reaching into the sky. Busting into the clouds is in the city’s blood. Nothing like this has happened since the boxy, black mass of the 1,450-foot Sears Tower, once the world’s tallest building and still the nation’s tallest, soared above the gritty Loop in 1974.”

Ronald Lauder is chairman emeritus of the Museum of Modern Art, former treasurer of the World Jewish Congress and, most important, a major advocate of Holocaust-era art restitution. But “despite his high-profile advocacy for openness — including testimony before Congress in 1998 — Lauder has never publicly listed the works in his own collection, many of which are by painters who were popular with Jewish collectors before the Holocaust. And a museum that he founded has failed to fulfill its pledge to post provenance information for its collection.”

Jan Herman points out that the last reporter who tangled with Lauder was David D’Arcy. “D’Arcy’s contract with National Public Radio “was terminated after a piece he did on Holocaust art theft and the Museum of Modern Art sent MoMA board chairman Ron Lauder so far around the bend that museum officials accused D’Arcy of ‘shabby reporting’ and pressured NPR to repudiate it.”

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation says that six Jackson Pollock paintings tested and spotted as frauds by physicist will be retested. “All of Jackson Pollock’s poured paintings analysed by my research group are composed of a highly specific and identifiable form of fractal patterning. Pollock’s specific fractal signature has not been found in the submitted paintings. The analysis has also revealed that the patterns vary between the paintings, indicating that they may have been painted by different hands.”

“Thomas J. Smart, director of collections and exhibitions at [Pittsburgh’s] Frick Art & Historical Center since July 1999, will leave the museum to become executive director of The McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Toronto, Ontario… The McMichael collection includes First Nations and Inuit artworks and is the foremost venue in Canada for paintings by the Group of Seven, landscape artists who were active in the first half of the last century.”

The science of art conservation is sort of like working a jigsaw puzzle without knowing for sure what the final picture is meant to look like. “Over and above conservators’ hands-on skills, scientists need to know the standard form of materials under study and be able to recognize what is novel or unusual about the composition of an object, whether sculpture, watercolor, painting or any combination of these.”