“The ruling came after a decade-long dispute over ownership of the 1897 canvas, Saint-Honoré, Après-midi, Effet de Pluie, a Paris street scene by Pissarro, which is in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.” In 1939, the work’s owner, a Jewish woman, was forced to sell it to a Nazi art appraiser for the equivalent of $360.
Category: visual
Egypt’s New History Museum Isn’t Even Open Yet, And Already Staffers Have Been Caught Stealing Objects
Two curators at the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation “were arrested while replacing a pharaonic statue of (fourth dynasty) King Menkaure, discovered in Luxor’s Karnak temple, and an ancient Islamic lantern with fake ones.”
First It Was A Rembrandt, Then It Wasn’t. Now It’s A Rembrandt Again
“The painting was sliced down the middle and straight through its center in the 19th century, probably to be sold as two Rembrandt portraits. At some point in the next 40 years, it was sutured back together with pieces of an entirely different canvas, and layered with paint to cover up its scars.”
It’s Another Simple, Abstract, Perfectly Shaped Anish Kapoor Sculpture – Why Is All France Arguing About It?
Because Kapoor is cheerfully describing it – Dirty Corner – as “the vagina of the queen” taking power, and it’s installed at Versailles.
Here’s Who Bought The Most Expensive Sculpture Ever Auctioned
Shortly after Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger distracted us all by selling for $179 million, an anonymous bidder paid $141.3 million for Giacometti’s L’homme au doigts (Pointing Man). Who was he? One of the likeliest suspects, as it happens.
The Onion’s Newest Spinoff ‘Is Producing Some Of The Best Video Art On The Internet’
“Recently, Clickhole ventured into self-reflexive territory pioneered by Douglas Gordon in his installation 24 Hour Psycho with the maddeningly jumpy Sorry, We Slowed Down This Video Of A Hummingbird Too Much. There are even nods to Andy Warhol’s appropriations of advertising and mass-produced packaging in Clickhole videos like Don’t Believe The Hype: This Can Has No Peas In It and Yes! Ham Goes Up An Escalator.”
Why Would A Museum With A $1 Billion Endowment Cut Staff Health-Care Benefits? Inside The Ongoing MoMA Labor Dispute
“Management is saying that health-care costs are going up in the double digits. Management also said something really crazy; they told us, ‘You really like that health care,’ like, you use it, like, are we supposed to not use it? And they want us to share the burden; however MoMA’s endowment topped a billion dollars last month … We had the Matisse cutouts show this year, which was a blockbuster. The museum is doing better than it has ever done.”
‘A Cross Between The New Criterion And Mad Magazine’: Half Of Komar And Melamid Launches New Art Mag
“As the artist-provocateur Alexander Melamid sees it, modern art is deathly ill, but he thinks he has the cure. It is Artenol, his new quarterly magazine, described on its website as ‘a purgative for an ailing art world, a palliative for afflicted aesthetes.'”
Jerry Saltz Says This Artist Is ‘Like A Badger Of Painting’
“[Albert] Oehlen is like a badger of painting, a cross between a weasel and a small bear, fearlessly scouring painting’s possibilities, implications, and metaprograms, scavenging for sweet spots, weaknesses, ways to decode, remap, and break down the medium … I love his work, but I am not even sure that I actually like it.”
The First Civilian Artist In Space
“Najjar was inspired to reach space after climbing Mount Aconcagua, the world’s second-highest peak. ‘I was looking out over the whole sweeping range of the Andes, when suddenly a Swiss Air Boeing 747 from Santiago passed just over my head and moved on its way through the deep blue sky,’ Najjar writes in his photo book. ‘It was completely surreal. And at this moment I thought, you’ve gotta go one step further; you’ve gotta go into space.'”