Category: visual

“For two centuries, the Amber Room – a chamber entirely panelled in amber – adorned the summer palace of the tsars near St Petersburg until in 1941, when the Germans invaded, it was stolen. Since the war, thousands of treasure hunters have pursued ever wilder theories in search of ‘the eighth wonder of the world’. Yet it is still missing.” Now, an exhaustive three-year investigation into the fate of the Amber Room has revealed the truth: the room was indeed taken by the Nazis and stored in Germany for a time. But a fire at the castle being used for the storage destroyed the room completely in 1945.

“Many of the assumptions of the world a century ago have been so overturned that you would think the paintings Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, produced between 1907 and the first world war, would make perfect sense today, and even appear a little naive. Yet their difficulty is not of a type that recedes with familiarity. Cubism is like a maths exam at the gateway to modern art. The paintings are uniquely unyielding… Art today is made from the building blocks of ordinary life. Cubism took these building blocks, or working premises, apart. Most art confirms our sense of who we are and how we live. Cubism suggests that our real existence eludes the images and stories we constantly make of it.”

Are New Zealanders ready to pony up serious money for its museum? “Make no mistake, Aucklanders admire their art gallery. They may not go inside too often, but they like the idea that the grand old building survives, up the hill from Queen St, nestled against Albert Park. But $75 million, largely from the public purse, to restore this storehouse of (mainly) old paintings? In a city fixated on solving its traffic problems, it could be viewed as the art scam of the century.”

Blake Gopnik argues that the addition of words almost never helps a piece of art or architecture. “In my work as an art critic, I often come across this imbalance between word and image. It’s almost never put there by the artists themselves, when they’re any good; it almost always comes when someone doesn’t believe that art can work without the help of text. When museums don’t really believe in the communicative power of a piece of art, however great and famous, they throw up words that are supposed to make it speak. The strange thing about the World War II memorial, I’d say, is that even the designers of this work of art don’t trust it to communicate alone.”

“What is London’s Royal Academy of Arts for, exactly? The question needs to be asked, because the Royal Academy is clearly not doing quite what it was set up to do…”

“Art and parties are a familiar twosome, particularly in these times of a faltering economy and deep cuts in arts funding. More and more galleries and museums are renting out their spaces to help pay the bills and to draw new audiences to their exhibitions. But they wind up telling real horror stories about damaged and stolen art, broken electronic equipment and messes left for gallery directors to clean up the morning after.”

An art dealer was “charged Friday with fraud in Milwaukee, accused of trying to sell fake artwork as originals by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Henri Matisse.Some were of such poor quality that an art expert described them as ‘a joke’ and ‘an insult,’ according to a complaint filed in Milwaukee County Circuit Court.”

In San Francisco, “the proposed Jewish and Mexican museums, once seen as ideal ways to embody San Francisco’s racial and ethnic mosaic, are in such financial trouble that City Hall and museum backers worry they may never get built.”

A Raphael previously unknown drawing by Raphael has been discovered amidst a bundle of other drawings brought to Sotheby’s in London for valuation. “It had apparently spent most of the 20th century tucked in a cardboard folder with the other drawings in a drawer in a private house in London. The sketch is now believed to date from 1505, and to be Raphael’s first known drawing in red chalk, made soon after he arrived in Florence and fell under the influence of Leonardo da Vinci.”

A small Cubist painting by Pablo Picasso has apparently been stolen from a workshop at Paris’s Pompidou Centre, where it was supposed to be restored. The disappearance was only noticed this past week, although no one has seen the painting since January 12. The still-life, entitled Nature morte à la charlotte, is valued at €2.5 million.