Category: visual

The prehistoric caves at Lascaux have pictures painted 17,000 years ago. “Because the cave had been naturally sealed for millennia, the paintings were freshly preserved in vivid yellows, reds, and blacks. But in its April issue, the respected French science magazine La Recherche sounded an alarm, announcing that thanks to bureaucratic incompetence a good part of Lascaux may be permanently destroyed. In a story headlined ‘Lascaux, the big mess,’ it reported that the site has been suffering devastating damage from a reinfestation of fungi and bacteria for almost two years – since September 2001. One hundred fifty of the world-famous paintings have developed mold.

“Most of the ancient artwork carved and painted into the rock walls and boulders of America’s West survived for thousands of years in quiet obscurity. But technology has changed that. These days, art that once took years for a person to stumble upon can be quickly pinpointed with a GPS, and discoverers can post the coordinates on the Internet. That leaves the ancient, priceless art vulnerable to what the Bureau of Land Management calls ‘digital vandalism.’ A quick peek at the Internet auction site eBay confirms the sites are being plundered and sold piecemeal.”

American investigators who compiled an inventory over the weekend of the ransacked galleries have concluded that 38 pieces of art are missing from Iraq’s National Museum, not the 170,000 that had been reported stolen or broken. “The inventory, compiled by a military and civilian team headed by Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos, rejects reports that Iraq’s renowned treasures of civilization – up to 170,000 artifacts – had been lost during the U.S.-led war against Iraq. It also raises questions about why any of the artifacts were reported missing.”

The Tate Museum put up a website Friday that it claimed would “let internet users around the world see the entire permanent collection from its London gallery plus loaned exhibits. But just hours after it was launched with a fanfare by comedian Michael Palin, almost four out of 10 pictures were replaced with a message saying they were unavailable for copyright reasons.”

“Using digital technology, the Louvre Museum is making [Leonardo] da Vinci accessible as never before, photographing 12 of his notebooks – which have not been exhibited together for 50 years – so visitors can flip through them with the click of a mouse. The effect is breathtaking – like touring the great genius’s mind. Normally kept in a Bank of France vault, each yellowing sheet testifies to the insatiable curiosity of the artist, architect, engineer, inventor, theorist, scientist and musician some describe as the ultimate embodiment of a universal man.”

Edward Sozanski considers the Barnes Collection’s desire to move to downtown Philadelphia. The move might improve the art collection’s financial condition, but the Barnes unique character would be destroyed. “The collection might survive the eight-mile trip from Merion to the Parkway intact, but the ineffable spirit of the Barnes, the quality that makes it a special place, will not. That would be a tragedy, pure and simple.”

The drama over the Barnes Foundation’s future is about to get publicly nasty again. “A potentially explosive internal investigative audit of the Barnes’s finances in the 1990’s, long withheld by the foundation, was turned over late Friday to a judge, who may decide to make it public. And a new book, “Art Held Hostage,” published today by W. W. Norton, casts an unflattering light on machinations at the Barnes and its estranged partner, Lincoln University, that are drawing comparisons to the litigious mire of Dickens’s ‘Bleak House’.”

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is after a painting – it won’t say which, but it’s rumored to be a major Degas – that would be one of the biggest purchases made by an American museum in years. To finance the deal, the MFA is hoping to sell off two Degas and a Renoir at auction, expecting to take in $17 million…

“Exactly 100 years ago next Thursday, Paul Gauguin died alone and in agonising pain in his shack on the Marquesas Islands near Tahiti. He was 54, heavily in debt, his paintings were almost universally derided and he was addicted to morphine ? he may even have been killed by an overdose of the drug, which he took for the suppurating syphilis sores on his legs…”

David Hockney says photographs misrepresent war. “For a New York exhibition, Hockney has made a watercolour based on Picasso’s painting ‘Massacre in Korea’. He has called it ‘Problems of Depiction’ and added a note which suggests that both the Picasso and this new spin on it are ‘a painter’s response to the limitations of photography, limitations that are still with us, and need some debate today’.”