Category: visual

Charles Glass: “Within the grounds of the ancient city, nothing was as I recalled it from thirty years before. The triumphal arch was gone, its plinths silhouetted against the bare sky. The Temple of Bel had become a sea of broken stone that archaeologists believe will take a generation to piece together. The agora was unrecognisable.”

The Bode Museum in Berlin is using a Siemens Art Foundation grant to repair Old Master works that were damaged in a 1945 fire and then looted by the Red Army. Says the Siemens foundation’s general secretary, “Restoration is more important than acquisitions. If we were to buy works of this quality on the art market, then we would have to pay several times more than the amount we are investing in restoration – if they were even available.”

Although it was the highest auction price ever for a work sold at Sotheby’s, equally noteworthy is that the painting also carried the highest guarantee ever given by the company. This meant that the auction house was willing to assure a minimum price to the owner, potentially risking millions. Sotheby’s was able to offload that risk to a third party, who became the buyer at the auction.

“It’s the art world’s equivalent of a man struck twice by lightning. On Friday, the 1943 Pablo Picasso painting Le Marin (‘The Sailor’), valued at $70 million, was ‘accidentally damaged’ at the presale exhibition of Christie’s Tuesday evening auction of Impressionist and Modern art.” Christie’s won’t say so publicly, but the owner of the painting is reportedly former casino magnate Steve Wynn, who made headlines when he stuck his elbow through Picasso’s Le Rêve back in 2006.

While there was praise for the faculty (and sympathy for their heavy workloads), there was blistering criticism of administration and, especially, of the decrepit physical plant. Said one grad of her damaged studio, “Facilities entered the space after it flooded, and cut into the walls with my ceramic sculptures still on the shelves. I returned to my studio to find a pile of my broken artwork on the ground, with no forewarning. I spent more money than I have to have my most valuable possessions destroyed.”

“Almost 9,000 pieces [out of nearly 11,000] will go to the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, with others headed to 10 Smithsonian Institution museums, several universities and the U.S. Supreme Court. The distribution marks the final stage of the dismantling of the famed Washington institution. Under a controversial 2014 deal, the National Gallery of Art had first dibs on the entire collection and ended up acquiring about 40 percent of the 19,493 works.”

Originally, the museum had said it might sell one of Abe’s stovepipe hats, but now it’s decided to sell a trove of other artifacts that it purchased together with the hat and some Lincoln-worn gloves. Will that be enough to help finance its $9.7 million debt?

“It’s an intensely personal vision that begins with [artist Trenton Doyle] Hancock’s youth. When you walk into Moundverse Infants, you’re overwhelmed by bright reds, greens and yellows meant to evoke both a toy store and the tile in Hancock’s grandma’s bathroom. ‘I’m obsessed with my own childhood,’ Hancock says. ‘I’ve actually tried to turn that into a superpower.'”

Author Olivia Laing, who’s being painted by artist Chantal Joffe: “How do you catch reality, the actual minute? I wanted to see what would happen if I wrote about her while she was painting me, if we could survey each other at the same time in an act of simultaneous witnessing.”