Category: visual

“Its fund-raising has slipped, its days of operation have been slashed from six to four, and roughly a fifth of its staff was laid off this year.”

“The once-celebrated Knoedler & Company gallery has been closed for more than a year and a half but the lawsuits keep coming. Last week, the philanthropist and former ambassador to Romania, Nicholas F. Taubman, became the sixth former client to sue the gallery in federal court.”

“Stepping up the effort to strengthen its European art collection, the Getty Museum has acquired two major Old Masters paintings: an exuberant early self-portrait of Rembrandt from around 1628, and a classic scene of the Grand Canal in Venice by Canaletto from around 1738.”

“Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, the artists behind the famous 2005 Houston art piece Inversion have filed a copyright infringement suit against the Honda Motor Company and commercial directors for using their iconic inverted sculpture in a TV ad for their relaunch of the Honda CR-V.”

“In a board meeting on Thursday morning, the directors were told that a board committee had selected the architecture firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro to design the expansion and to help determine whether to keep any of the existing structure.”

“The first of the big spring auctions began Tuesday night at Sotheby’s, where paintings and sculptures by Cézanne, Braque and Léger topped expectations as bidders from 35 countries put money on their walls rather than in the shakier financial markets.”

“The National Portrait Gallery has spent £329,000 on a postcard-sized painting about which it knows almost nothing, except that it is more than 400 years old, exquisitely painted, and outrageously flattering. Elizabeth I was in her late 50s, and losing teeth and hair, when the image of a girlish round-faced queen, dazzling in cloth of gold and diamonds, was created.”

“A collection of artwork by aboriginal Australian children that was given to Colgate University in 1966 is being voluntarily returned to Australia. The upstate New York school said Tuesday that it would transfer 119 pieces from the collection to Curtin University in Perth in Western Australia.”

“The lightly sketched group of men – nude save for what appear to be feathered headdresses and posed as if dancing – emerged during the restoration of a fresco of the ‘Resurrection of Christ’ by the Renaissance artist Pinturicchio, painted in one of several rooms he decorated for Pope Alexander VI between 1492 and 1494.”