Category: visual

The Getty doesn’t report how much it paid for art. But the London Telegraph last week reported that the Getty paid $70 million for a Titian in November. “If the report was accurate, the Titian is also the second most expensive Old Master painting ever sold, topped only by Rubens’ ‘The Massacre of the Innocents,’ sold to Lord Thomson of Fleet for $76.7 million at a 2002 auction.”

John Opit says art worth $67 million was stolen from his home in New South Wales. And he says one of the paintings stolen was a Cezanne worth $50 million. “None were insured. The claim has sent the art world into an understandably cynical spin. Some of the nation’s leading art experts say there is no record of the Cezanne painting and question its authenticity. They claim there are only five known Cezannes in the country and it is not one of them.”

“Art experts have been unable to find a record of the missing Cezanne, but Mr Opit defended the painting’s authenticity to the Murwillumbah-based Daily News, saying it had been examined under ultraviolet light and had the artist’s signature all over it. He said the painting had been in a private London collection before coming to Australia.”

“Whatever else happens at the Athens Olympics this summer, one way or another the games are going to make Santiago Calatrava the most famous architect in the world, pushing aside Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind. If the Greeks get his extraordinary design for the main stadium finished on time, his blue glass dome will be the most spectacular setting for the games in three decades…”

Attendance at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in the past two years was down more than 30 percent from a record 636,000 visitors in 2001. It’s a dismaying trend, but then, the Walker still outdraws other museums of similar size in other cities…

An art collector in New South Wales claims that “$67 million worth of art, including a previously unheralded painting by the French impressionist Paul Cezanne, worth $50 million, were stolen from his studio in the tiny town of Limpinwood. “Reports of the theft and in particular the Cezanne, supposedly painted in 1873 and titled Cezanne’s Son in a High Chair, were greeted with scepticism in the higher echelons of the Australian art world. The art historian and publisher Lou Klepac described it as like ‘finding a crocodile in the Antarctic’.”

The Guggenheim has commissioned Richard Serra to “create a room-size installation of monumental steel sculptures, including seven new ones” for the museum’s Bibao Museum. “The region’s Basque government, which covers the museum’s operating costs and pays for its acquisitions, has spent about $20 million on the commission. The installation, expected to take 17 months to produce and install, is scheduled for completion in June 2005.”

A group of nine Giorgione paintings have been examined with new scientific techniques reveal much about how the artist worked. “What has become clear with the infra-red discoveries is that Giorgione was a radical modernist when he drew. Giorgione doodled as he worked out compositions, just like 20th-century artists. But why did Giorgione, ‘the modernist’, paint such free and fanciful images only to delete them or adapt them into more restrained ones?

The US Supreme court is taking up the case of an American woman trying to sue Austria for paintings stolen from her family by the Nazis. “The court will decide by summer if she can sue the Austrian government to recover six paintings, worth an estimated $150 million, in federal court in California.”

Florence plans to double the size of the Uffizi Gallery, and Italy’s culture minister boasts the new gallery will rival the size of the Louvre. “By the time work is completed, visitors to the extensively remodelled Uffizi will be able to see 800 new works, including many now confined to the gallery’s storerooms for lack of space.”