Category: visual

“The Moorish-influenced Casa Vicens, commissioned by the stockbroker Manuel Vicens Montaner [as a residence] and built between 1882-88, was the architect’s first major project. … Fifteen lavishly decorated rooms by Gaudí have been restored with input from the descendants of its original tenants as well as extensive archival research.”

“[The Art Gallery of New South Wales’s] new wing, Sydney Modern, will step across the Cahill expressway and spill north down the Domain towards the harbour, under an ambitious plan to increase visits to the city’s pre-eminent gallery. But the latest plan, though more modest than the first version released in 2015, is still likely to spark a furious debate about the loss of open space in Sydney.”

One can be forgiven for initially overlooking another elephant in the room — the identity of the seller. When there’s this much money involved, though, it usually pays to follow it, and here the money leads directly back to the Russian billionaire Dmitry E. Rybolovlev.

“For more than a century art historical experts have labelled a painting Queen Victoria bought as a Christmas present for Prince Albert a 19th-century fake. But a new generation of art historians has discovered they were wrong. Victoria and her advisers were correct when they bought the painting in 1840. It is a genuine work by the German master Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop.”

“After 19 minutes of dueling, with four bidders on the telephone and one in the room, Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi sold on Wednesday night [at Christie’s] for $450.3 million with fees, shattering the high for any work of art sold at auction. It far surpassed Picasso’s Women of Algiers, which fetched $179.4 million at Christie’s in May 2015.”

“The dates have been set for the next Documenta, the pace-setting quinquennial German contemporary art exhibition, allaying fears that the future of the show was in doubt after this year’s edition ran over budget and caused a deficit expected to be €5.4m at the end of the year. The city of Kassel is able to shoulder the extra costs incurred by the 2017 extravaganza, the mayor says.”

“The art world’s most important business goes on in private and is hardly subject to public scrutiny. The art world is a largely unregulated industry in which the rich and powerful that dominate see themselves as being above the law. It’s a business that requires endless socializing, where deals are sealed over drinks, in expensive restaurants, swanky clubs and high-end hotels. Artists who want commercial success are supposed to humor and indulge their collectors — and that can include sitting in their laps when asked.”

“Not only does it look like a dreamed-up version of a missing da Vinci, various X-ray techniques show scratches and gouges in the work, paint missing, a warping board, a beard here and gone, and other parts of the painting obviously brushed up and corrected to make this probable copy look more like an original.”

“In a surprise announcement Tuesday, the Walker said [Olga] Viso, who has led the internationally known center since 2008” – with a considerable record of achievement, it must be said – “will leave by year end. Four sources close to the board characterized her resignation as the end result of a monthslong process fueled by unusually high turnover among Walker staff and demonstrations against the Scaffold sculpture that delayed the gala opening of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden last spring.”

“In a gesture of inclusiveness that is rare in the region, the workers who had built the Jean Nouvel-designed museum on Saadiyat Island were given their own party. … Yet questions remain over the welfare of these and other construction workers, mostly migrants from the Indian subcontinent, on the island.” Annual reports by PricewaterhouseCoopers note improvements, but the results are still – well, mixed.