Last summer David Hockney sat for a portrait by Lucien Freud. “Britain’s two greatest living painters spent 3 months in each other’s company, Freud sitting for Hockney for four hours before he became the subject of Freud’s gimlet eye for considerably longer: 120 hours.”
Category: visual
A Fake Van Gogh In Oslo Museum?
Is a famous Van Gogh self-portrait in Oslo’s National Museum a fake? One expert says he can prove it. “The main arguments for it not being a Van Gogh are, first, it does not resemble other of his self-portraits and an x-ray examination has shown there is another painting beneath it – though this is not very unusual, and proves little.”
Morant Collection Goes To Banff
The Whyte Museum in Banff, Alberta, “is thrilled by the generous donation it has received of one of Canada’s most prized photographic collections. Thousands of personal photos taken by world-famous photographer Nicholas Morant, who died in 1999, were recently donated by Morant’s widow, Margaret E. Morant, to the prestigious museum in the Canadian Rockies… The ‘generous gift’ includes 23,000 photographs and three metres of textual material. There are also sound recordings and hundreds of items related to Morant’s photographic equipment, including virtually all of his cameras.”
End Of A Historical Line
Art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich was “the last member of a formidable dynasty of philosophers and historians who, beginning in central Europe during the nineteenth century, devoted themselves to discovering the deep structures of human culture.” Gombrich’s narratives describe “the progress of art as a slow, successful conquest of the difficulties of perception. The problem with this view is that the tide of taste runs in absolutely the opposite direction…”
Hell, No, We Won’t Go! (But We’ll Draw A Bit, If You Like)
Where there is war, or the threat of war, there will always be anti-war protest, and a new exhibit examines the movement from an artistic perspective. From Vietnam-era posters depicting the My Lai massacre to T-shirts decrying the Bush administration’s current Iraq policy, visitors can trace not only the recent history of American political demonstration, but the way in which contemporary sensibility informs the art of such protest. In Vietnam, shock value was front and center, but today’s anti-war movement seems to rely as much as anything on the cynical humor often ascribed to Generation X.
The Archaeological Cost Of War
One unintended casualty of the US government’s preparations for war in the Middle East appears to be an extensive list of archaeological excavations scheduled for the region. “In any normal summer, dozens of excavations are conducted in Israel, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Yemen and elsewhere, tempting thousands of professionals and volunteers with the exotic mysteries of antiquity and the prospect of significant discovery.” And it’s not just the timing of the digs which are at risk: archeologists fear that a war could irreparably damage countless artifacts, just as the 1991 Gulf War did.
Take That, New York!
And the winner of the heated competition to be the only American city to be allowed to exhibit the Dead Sea Scrolls this year is… drum roll… Grand Rapids, Michigan? As a matter of fact, yes, and it may be more appropriate than you think. Grand Rapids, while certainly far from being a bustling metropolis, is a deeply religious community, and the exhibition, which will bring fragments of 12 manuscripts from the famous Scrolls to a local museum, is expected to draw visitors from all over the Rust Belt area of the Midwest. Curators hope that their coup will be a reminder to the arts world that people everywhere can appreciate art and artifacts – even people who don’t live in New York or Chicago.
Vying For The Richest Museum Prize
Museums big and small across the UK are battling for the first £100,000 Gulbenkian prize. “The prize is worth almost £40,000 more than any other. It was intended to create a buzz in the museum world on a par with the Turner and the Booker prizes in visual arts and literature. The list is scrupulously balanced in scale and geography from Cornwall to Dundee.”
The Art World’s Most Powerful – A List
The British magazine ArtReview has made a list of the 100 most powerful people in the art world. “British collector Charles Saatchi is No. 1; Ronald Lauder, who just opened his own museum in New York, is No. 3; and No. 9 is former Sotheby’s chairman and major stockholder Alfred Taubman, who is spending an enforced vacation at Uncle Sam’s spa, convicted of price fixing.” Only one artist cracks the top ten…
Trials For SF Jewish Museum
Facing fundraising obstacles and internal disagreements, San Francisco’s Jewish Museum is looking at scaling back a design for a dramatic Daniel Libeskind museum. “We had become too ambitious in our planning for the new museum. The idea was to expose Jewish culture and thought to a wider public in ‘an architectural gem’ in the heart of the city’s cultural district. Now we’re thinking about a smaller building with a smaller operating budget. How that smaller building will look, I don’t know. It’s unlikely that it will be the Libeskind design as we know it.”