Category: visual

For over six years, Stéphane Breitwieser, an ordinary Frenchman with an extraordinary love of art, trolled museums and private collections across Europe, helping himself to the pieces that caught his eye. He amassed a private collection of his own, to the tune of 239 pieces of art and priceless artifacts from 172 institutions totaling over a billion dollars. He was one of the most prolific art thieves in modern history.

“It’s not just because of my brain’s well-documented penchant for drawing outlandish parallels that I bring up sports here. As preposterous as it would have seemed to me when I was a disaffected art kid growing up in Midwestern (American) football country, professional sports at least offer food for thought, if not a full game plan, for how the gallery sector could claw its way out of this mess.”

It’s an ambitious, 50-state campaign by a group called For Freedoms, a campaign that intends to pay artists, enlist museums, run Kickstarters and do a lot more before the midterm elections in November. One of the founders of For Freedoms said, “We are hoping to bring art to the center of public life in the lead-up to the midterms, which is where we think art should belong.”

Almost 50 years after a Caravaggio was stolen, “the new lead on the whereabouts of the 17th-century painting – a depiction of the newborn Christ on a bed of straw, painted in the chiaroscuro technique – came from a former mobster-turned-informant, who revealed to Italian investigators that it had once been held by Gaetano Badalamenti, a Sicilian ‘boss of bosses’ who was known as one of the ringleaders of an infamous heroin trafficking network in the US called the Pizza Operation.”

Hi, red flag of European history: “At the time of the sale, Christie’s cited a provenance that included a gap between 1923, when the painting was listed as having been in the possession of someone only identified as M. Perdoux, and 1972, when it was sold by Wildenstein and Co. in Paris.”

The Museum of African American History and Culture is about to open a show that focuses on how Oprah became a go-to leader for political as well as cultural discussions. Some might have questions about this exhibit, however: “Winfrey donated $21 million to the $540 million museum, making her its largest individual benefactor (its theater is named in her honor). But her role as benefactor did not influence the exhibition, Bunch said.”

New murals are meant to make the site where the South Tower used to stand have “a more finished appearance” as 2 World Trade Center stands in wait for an anchor tenant. They’re not meant to be permanent, but it is serious work. “Selected artists each received $1,000 for paint and a $2,000 honorarium. They have been up on ladders and scissor lifts spraying and daubing paint in view of tourists and downtown office workers. Six murals are completed or nearly done; two more are expected. All the works will be on display for at least a year.”

“All major construction that intrudes on Italy’s underbelly requires the presence of an archaeologist. Mr. Turchetta said he’d been on the job for about a year but that very little had turned up until this tomb. It was worth the wait, he said.” Understatement of the month: The fourth century B.C. tomb contained several skeletons, coins, and enough plant and pollen samples to potentially reconstruct the ancient landscape.

A Rhode Island School of Design professor, along with several teaching assistants, are working for free to establish online art critiques as part of a free online art school. Impressive, and perhaps deserving of funding by … someone: “The overall goal of Lieu’s online art classes and critiques is to provide artists and hobbyists outside of major art hubs, schools, and communities with the opportunity to receive serious instruction and feedback that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to access.”

Although “there are 60-plus national pavilions in the exhibition — all exploring some facet of architecture related to ‘Freespace,’ the central theme established by biennale curators Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects in Ireland,” here’s a list of some of the most interesting among the throng.