Category: visual

A rare Picasso from the artist’s blue period sells at auction for $55 million. The price is a record for the artist at auction and the fifth highest price for any work at auction.” – New York Times

“Frescoes nearly 2,000 years old have been unearthed near Pompeii in the remains of what experts say may have been an ancient luxury hotel.” – Chicago Tribune (AP)

“Plans to rebury the skeleton of Giotto, the father of European painting, have been canceled in Florence, Italy, following objections by Pittsburgh archaeologist and art historian Franklin Toker, who argues Giotto’s supposed remains may be only ‘the bones of some fat butcher’.” – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago, with a collection valued at more than $100 million and works by many American masters, is woefully unknown to most Americans – art historians included. Now the museum’s board has been split by a venomous legal battle and the board has voted to sell off some of its prize portraits. – New York Times

Picasso’s portraits of his lovers consistently outsell work by almost every other artist who’s ever lived. In fact, four of the world’s most expensive paintings are of his mistresses, with another poised to join the list when “Femme au Bras Croisés” goes on the block at Christie’s in New York Wednesday. “Why are they wanted, Picasso’s women, at such vast sums? Are they simply rich men’s fantasies? Are their prices multi-million dollar love affairs – money without limit for sex without consent?” – The Times (UK)

A team of Japanese researchers plans to conduct the first ever DNA analysis of the 3,300-year-old mummy of Tutankhamen to try to the establish the long contested cause of his death. – Daily Yomiuri (Japan)

The fuss, in recent months, has been all about the British Museum’s use of the wrong kind of stone for its new portico. “Yet now the scaffolding has been removed, it is evident that the critics have simply latched on to one mistake and failed to perceive the greater glory of the whole. Norman Foster’s treatment of the Great Court wonderfully ennobles the austere Greek Revival architecture of Sir Robert Smirke.” – The Times (UK)

“The persistent fascination with Greenberg, who died in 1994, extends to his art collection, the acquisition of which was announced last month by the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. Comparing the Greenberg acquisition, the second- largest in the museum’s history, to “going from zero to 60 miles an hour,” museum director John Buchanan added, ‘I am a great believer that museum collections are built by collecting collections’.” – New York Times

A gallery called the Outrageous Art Gallery in Edinburgh claims “to have used a worldwide network of forgers to produce exact copies of works displayed in the Scottish Colourists exhibition” currently on display at Scotland’s National Gallery of Modern Art. Curators at the museum are not at all happy. – The Guardian

Two months ago a team of scientists in Italy announced they had reconstructed a skeleton found 30 years ago under the Florence Cathedral. It was Giotto, they said. Now an an American art historian who led excavations under the cathedral in the ’70s has written to the church’s cardinal to debunk the claim. “For heaven’s sake, your eminence, do not treat it as Giotto. You risk blessing and honouring the bones of a fat butcher.” – The Guardian