Category: visual

Former mayor Rob Ford led such an attack on graffiti that artists fought back with a fierce clarity – and city officials decided to start paying artists instead of fining them.

Brutalism inspires wide swings of emotion, especially in the UK, but, an expert says, “the loss of some of the most innovative buildings of the postwar period would create a black hole in architectural history.”

“Asking a veteran conservator or museum professional where they were when the Arno River burst its banks 50 years ago this month, submerging the historic centre of Florence under 18 billion gallons of filthy water, is akin to asking someone what they were doing when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.”

“Unlike Impressionism or Cubism, Abstract Expressionism was not a style or a movement. What the five pioneers had in common was not a shared aesthetic, a painting technique, or a manifesto but a sense of the overwhelming importance of art, a bedrock belief in the power of painting to address ideas and emotions at the deepest level. That sense of importance was there from the beginning.”

There was some concern among conservationists about this project, because the last two restorations of the painting didn’t work out so well.” But they went ahead because the work was “probably the most varnished painting in the Louvre’s [entire] collection.”

The owners of a house in Toulouse found it when they went up to fix a leak in the roof. Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera museum is now showing it alongside a different copy of the same image – Judith Beheading Holofernes – by Caravaggio disciple Louis Finson.

“The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s second, collection-based exhibition is due to open next March … The announcement comes amid speculation over the momentum of the much-delayed [museum] project, which was launched ten years ago, prompted by the recent departure of two key members [out of five] of its curatorial team.

The story goes that in 1496, when he was a young unknown, Michelangelo (or his dealer) took his new sculpture of Cupid, buried it to age it, and sold it to a Cardinal as an antiquity. He did get caught, but …

“Austria’s criminal intelligence service announced this week that it had uncovered a group selling forgeries of high-profile art, including fakes that had been attributed to Chagall and Picasso.” The ring’s stash in Slovenia included fake Klimts and Monets as well.

“Joan Miró painted many murals in his lifetime, but he designed only one made of glass and marble, for Wichita State University’s Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art. Personnages Oiseaux, or ‘Bird People,’ … adorned the building’s southern-facing wall from 1978 until 2011, when the museum removed it for an extensive, $2.2 million restoration project to repair the deteriorating mosaic. Last month – nearly exactly 38 years from its unveiling – the mural of colorful characters finally returned to its wall.”