Category: visual

With France living through the rainiest January in years, the Seine’s water level is currently 17 feet, twice the normal level, and is expected to crest at around 20 feet by Friday. The Louvre has closed its Islamic art gallery and begun moving parts of its collection to higher floors, and the Musée d’Orsay and Orangerie have joined the Louvre in reducing some visiting hours.

The move makes some sense. Despite a fluctuating economy, Italy has a strong collecting tradition. François Chantala, a partner at Thomas Dane, says: “The scene in Italy has always been discreet, established and savvy—not dissimilar to Germany, Holland and Belgium in the 1960s and 70s.” But with little evidence the domestic market is expanding, does Italy have the critical mass of high-level collectors required to sustain these galleries, or is their arrival merely a symptom of the enduring appeal of la dolce vita?

Leonardo da Vinci was not a consummate painter. He was first and foremost a scientist, inventor and experimenter, with an excess of artistic talent to help pay the rent and a trove of notebooks to document his true obsessions. What I admire and envy about him is that thirst and drive to know everything, and his inventive imagination. I’d prefer to curl up with his codices, which is how I’d probably feel most at ease with him.

“[Former Bayeux Museum director] Isabelle Attard said moving such a ‘fragile, near-1,000-year-old roll of wool and linen’ even a few metres was risky, never mind transporting it overseas.” The curator directly responsible for the tapestry said that when he first heard news of the plan to loan the piece to Britain, he thought it was a hoax.

“In [an open] letter, the signees say that the work is symbolically inappropriate to its subject matter, that it will obstruct views of the Eiffel Tower, that erecting it would be financially irresponsible, that the pavement below couldn’t possibly support the 30-ton work, and that no open call was made for artists to submit plans for the monument.”

Completed the year after Wright passed away, the building opened first as a clinic before it became a bank in 1964. It was then used as law offices when the bank moved 16 years later. In 2012, the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, along with the only other surviving buildings by Wright in Montana: a cabin and a farmhouse, both on Alpine Meadows Ranch in Bitterroot Valley, which are available to rent as vacation homes.

Were his “fantasy portraits” actually a group of random people that he dressed in theatrical costumes? Are the dynamic canvases painted from memory instead of from life? “Fragonard’s drawing is a Rosetta stone whose implications are still to be fully interpreted and absorbed, despite the pioneering scholarship of several of the authors who have previously published on the series.”

Christopher Jordan says, “The whole idea is using public art and social media to connect the black diaspora. … I see my work as supporting communities of color that have been disconnected — to have opportunities to engage, collaborate and share.”

The statue was red, an angel with wings, but critics thought it was a depiction of Satan. “Protests against the 8-metre high sculpture called Phylax, which in Greek means ‘guardian’, have ranged from throwing white paint and spitting at it to attempting to exorcise it with a Greek priest sprinkling holy water.” Then a group of people decided to drag the entire column and statue down using a truck.