Category: visual

The Iraq Museum has had one of its most valuable artworks returned. “The sacred Vase of Warka, a centrepiece of the Iraqi National Museum collection and feared to have been lost for ever after being looted, was returned yesterday. Three unidentified men brought it to the museum in the boot of a car.”

Philanthropist Eli Broad has agreed to fund a new building for contemporary art for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “In a memorandum of understanding with museum leaders, Broad has laid out plans to pay for ‘every penny’ of a new, 70,000-square-foot building, said LACMA board Chairman Wally Weisman. The new building, tentatively dubbed the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA and projected to cost roughly $50 million, would stand along Wilshire Boulevard just east of the former May Co. building now known as LACMA West.”

Norwegian authorities are calling the bold theft of a classic landscape painting from industrial concern Norsk Hydro “one of the biggest art heists in Norway since Edvard Munch’s ‘Scream’ was stolen in 1994. The thieves disabled security cameras and alarms to steal JC Dahl’s ‘Rjukanfoss’ landscape from 1830.”

William Morris, a 19th-century artist specializing in rich tapestries and wall coverings, is well-known even today for his designs, which often featured leafy green patterns and twisting vines. But according to a new scientific investigation, Morris used arsenic to derive the green pigments he needed for his work, and the deadly chemical sickened some of his clients, depite Morris’s protestations that arsenic was not toxic. In truth, the artist knew better: he was on the board of an arsenic mining company, where he had been told all about the dangers of exposure.

Experts have known that Van Gogh’s painting of a field of haystacks in Provence, France, was painted “sometime in the summer of 1889, toward the end of the most productive, but troubled, period of the artist’s life. However, the precise date of its creation has vexed art historians for many years. Now, Southwest Texas State University astronomers Russell Doescher and Donald Olson, along with Olson’s wife, Marilyn, an English professor, have determined that Van Gogh was working on the picture at 9:08 p.m. on July 13, 1889.”

Roger Kimball is amazed that journalists were so quick to denounce Americans for the looting of the Iraq Museum. “The story of nonlooting of the Iraqi museums gave us a glimpse into that heart of darkness. That tragedy has collapsed into farce.”

Curators at the Tate have discovered hundreds of missing Turner paintings after a search for a new catalog. “About 500 pieces were discovered when curators set about the task of documenting all of Turner’s works for a dedicated website. They were traced to private owners during a 14-month detective trail overseen by curators at the Tate Gallery. Some pictures had been stored away in cupboards or attics.”

For a long while beauty was a quality that lost favor in art. But slowly, beauty has begun to reassert itself, and a new book makes a case for its importance. “One submerged argument is that what we say about beauty can affect what we see of it, perhaps even its capacity to manifest itself. “

A long-lost Turner watercolor has turned up after more than a century. “It was owned by the eminent art critic and Turner fanatic John Ruskin, who displayed it with other gems from his private collection in public shows in 1878 and in 1900, the year he died. The painting was then sold to an unknown private collector and disappeared for more than a century.”

Damien Hirst is taking a religious turn. His next series of pieces are religion-themed. “In a series of sculptures inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, which will be seen in London this autumn, Hirst will depict Jesus and the apostles as 13 pingpong balls bobbing on spurting fountains of red wine. A washing bowl to bathe Christ’s feet will sit beneath their Formica table.”