Category: visual

Two cargo handlers at JFK airport have been charged with stealing a Lucien Freud painting from a cargo warehouse. “The pair allegedly broke into a carton at the United Airlines cargo building on Tuesday and removed the artwork. Police identified the two men after viewing airport security video with officials from United Airlines.”

Should the UK be spending vast sums to try to keep precious artworks in the country? Tate head Nicholas Serota thinks so. So what would be a good use for the £25 million that some are proposing to spend to keep a Raphael from being sold and taken to the US? Critics and artworld folk offer some suggestions.

The Seattle Art Museum shows off its expansion plans. “SAM’s downtown expansion is a unique, mutually beneficial partnership with Washington Mutual Bank that allows the museum to expand incrementally into its new 300,000-square-foot space. In the first phase, SAM will occupy about 95,000 square feet. The bank will lease the unused upper floors from the museum, allowing it to amortize the financing of the $63 million expansion. When SAM fully occupies its new building, it will triple its current size to 450,000 square feet.”

So the Tate mis-identified a portait in a painting last week. And it was embarrassing. And insulting. But “how do you identify portraits, anyway? The names often come down by tradition, and if a portrait was named as such and such a person in an inventory a hundred years after it was painted, historical fact is hard to separate from myth. The best mistakes have some plausibility, and some are inevitable, even poetic.”

The Ogden Museum of Southern Art opens in New Orleans. But just what counts as “southern” art? “I’m not aware that there is such a thing as Southern art, at least not if you’re defining it by technique. If there’s something distinct about it, it’s subject matter and also inner heritage. All Southerners who try to express themselves in art — whether it’s writing or painting or anything else — are very much aware that they are party to a defeat, which is something most other Americans didn’t feel until Vietnam.”

“After 10 years of digging, ‘Little Rome,’ as the great Roman orator Cicero called it, is coming to light near Naples, in what could be the most important discovery of an ancient Roman town since the excavation of lava-entombed Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18th century.”

“The Cleveland Museum of Art closed a major gap in its collection last night by bidding $1.9 million at auction at Christie’s in New York for a mural-sized painting by American Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner. The price is a record for the artist, who died in 1984 at age 76.”

A Quebec judge has issued a temporary injunction blocking a planned auction of several dozen works by the late artist Jean-Paul Riopelle, which was to be held tonight. In making the ruling, the judge granted a major victory to Riopelle’s three children, who claim that the hastily organized auction of so many works at once will diminish the artist’s legacy unnecessarily. “Left in the lurch are art collectors who were said to be flying in from around the world for the sale at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel – and Riopelle’s estate, which says it urgently needs to hold the auction to pay off mounting debts.”

“Winnipeg artists are collectively playing the numbers game. In the past, the city established a reputation for producing individual artists of singular talent — Ivan Eyre, Don Reichert, Wanda Koop, William Eakin and Eleanor Bond are all painters and photographers whose careers have been solo affairs. But recently, with the meteoric success of the seven-member Royal Art Lodge as an example, Winnipeg artists have been banding together to form associations in which their collective identity is as important as their individual one.”

The Tate has offended many Muslims with a Pre-Raphaelite painting in a current show. “First, the picture’s caption described it as depicting one of the wives of the prophet Mohammed. It was a concept that many Muslim visitors condemned as an act of blasphemy – since the Muslim faith prohibits human representations of the prophet, his wives or relatives.”