Fine Arts News

I do love this paintings posted above: A table (Le Dejeuner), a 1892 oil painting by Edouard Vuillard. The painter was a French painter and print maker associated with the Nabis. The scene is about infidelity, although At first glance, the painting seems to tell about a nice family meal.

Usually when there's a question about who created a piece of art, the artist is dead and can't speak for himself — he can't say, "Hey, I made that," or "Nope, not mine." But this is a story about a living artist who has gone to court to prove that a painting in fact is not his.
The painting in question is a desert landscape. There's blue sky at the top, red rocks and green cacti. It's owned by Robert Fletcher, a 62-year-old former corrections officer living in the Canadian city of Sault Ste. Marie. Here's how Fletcher says he got the painting: In 1976, he was working in Ontario's Thunder Bay Correctional Centre when he hit it off with an inmate named Peter Doige, who was in for LSD possession. Doige was going through some rough times, but he had this painting he had made in art class.

"I said, 'That painting you did inside, that desert scene, I absolutely love it,' " Fletcher remembers. "He said, 'Would you give me $100 for it?' " Fletcher said yes.
A couple of decades later, a buddy of Fletcher's is over at his house and sees the painting. He tells Fletcher that it's by a famous artist — Peter Doig. They look him up online and Fletcher recognizes him. "We watched some videos online of him being interviewed and the first thing I remember noticing is his body language — you know, some facial expressions and his use of his hands," Fletcher says.

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About Gabriel Barcia-Colombo's TED Talk



Early in his career, video artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo noticed the way people breeze past works of art. He describes how his deliberate, slow-moving installations encourage people to stop and think.

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The Chichu Art Museum, designed by celebrated Japanese architect Tadao Anda, is built mostly underground. Open courtyards and skylights bring in natural light. The island is internationally known for its works of modern art and architecture.

Art can enlighten, soothe, challenge and provoke. Sometimes it can transform a community.
Case in point: a 5.5-square-mile island called Naoshima in Japan's Seto Inland Sea.

Once upon a time, the biggest employer on Naoshima was a Mitsubishi metals processing plant. Actually, it's still the biggest employer, just not nearly as big as it once was.

Blame automation. The population of the island has dropped from around 8,000 in the 1950s and 1960s to a little over 3,000 now.

In Japan, this is not that strange. Populations of small towns are declining all over the country. Some towns are disappearing altogether. The reasons are a combination of the country's overall shrinking population and an increase in the number of people moving from rural areas to big cities.



Hiroshi Sugimoto's Time Exposed seascape is exhibited at the Benesse House Museum.

Naoshima might have been headed for the same relentless decline.

Enter Benesse Holdings, an education and publishing conglomerate based in the nearby city of Okayama. Its best-known brand is Berlitz, the language school company. Benesse's other claim to fame is its world-class modern art collection, including paintings by Claude Monet, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, as well as many Japanese artists less famous in the U.S.

The former head of Benesse Holdings, Soichiro Fukutake, wanted a special home for the collection, someplace where it would have a local impact and could also be shared with the wider world.

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Artist Noah Davis founded The Underground Museum to bring world-class art to a neighborhood in Los Angeles — for free. He was just 32 years old when he died from cancer in 2015.

It's a sweltering night in July and Los Angeles' Underground Museum is packed. "It's crowded and hot, but it feels really good," says vistor Jazzi McGilbert. Like much of the crowd, McGilbert is young, creative and African-American. She drove across town to this unassuming, bunkerlike storefront for an event that combines art and activism. The museum is one of her favorite spots in Los Angeles. "I like what it stands for," McGilbert says. "... And the art is incredible."



David Hammons made his 1993/2016 work In the Hood out of a found sweatshirt and fishing wire. The Underground Museum

The Underground Museum aims to promote cutting-edge African-American art, but inclusiveness is also part of its mission. "This is a black space," a message on the museum door reads, "but all are welcome."

When artist Noah Davis founded the museum, he wanted to do two things: sidestep the existing gallery system, with its rigid hierarchies and gatekeepers, and bring world-class art to a neighborhood he likened to a food desert, meaning no grocery stores or museums. Davis died a year ago Monday of a rare form of cancer.

A beyond audacious request

When Davis began working on the museum, he was a rising art world star with powerful friends, like Helen Molesworth, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Molesworth remembers when Davis first asked for her help.

"He wasn't asking for, you know, someone to help him with the marketing ... he was asking us for the art," she says. In other words, he was asking the museum to lend him whatever he wanted from its valuable collection — a beyond audacious request.
"No one had ever asked like that before," Molesworth says. She was intrigued by the idea that an institution like hers could help bring art to people who might not otherwise see it. But she didn't just hand over MOCA's art — first she helped Davis upgrade the Underground Museum's security and HVAC system to protect the art. Then she left it alone.

"I know how to make a museum," Molesworth says. "I don't know how to make an underground museum."

Noah Davis did. When he died from cancer, he was only 32 years old. He left instructions for the next 18 shows, but they're mostly just concepts, titles and lists of the works he wanted to display. In the wake of his death, Megan Steinman joined as the museum's director. She understood their goal of challenging what museums can be.



The three faces that appear in Kerry James Marshall's 2002 Heirlooms and Accessories are taken from a 1930 photograph of a double lynching in Marion, Ind. You can hear Marshall talk about this work



The Underground Museum

"Museums are gorgeous," Steinman says, "but they also come with this idea of how you're supposed to be and how you're supposed to stand and how loud you're supposed to be and if you can talk or not." Also: whether you can afford the entrance fee and how hard it is to get there. "And then you get there and it's like massive walls and these cavernous spaces," she says, "and it's like all these things that are telling your mind how to think before you even get to the artwork itself."

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Maurizio Cattelan's America goes on display Friday at the Guggenheim in New York. The artist says it is "one-percent art for the ninety-nine percent."
Cris McKay/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Museum-goers, prepare yourselves for "unprecedented intimacy with a work of art."

Starting Friday, visitors to the Guggenheim are encouraged to relieve themselves in a fully functional toilet cast in 18-karat gold. The installation by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan replaced the toilet in a small museum restroom with a far flashier model.

Called America, the golden throne "offers a wink to the excesses of the art market but also evokes the American dream of opportunity for all — its utility ultimately reminding us of the inescapable physical realities of our shared humanity," the museum wrote.

Cattelan has jokingly termed it the "Guggen-head," according to the museum, and says it is "one-percent art for the ninety-nine percent."
But he says he prefers for visitors to draw their own conclusions about the message. "Come spend a little alone time with 'America,' and you can ponder that meaning for yourself," the museum said in a blog post.

It's not clear how much the opulent toilet cost to make.
A gold toilet presents its share of logistical challenges. As The New Yorker reports, "a uniformed guard will be standing by the door to answer questions, and also, shall we say, to discourage souvenir takers."

And the piece will also require a lot of maintenance, as Nathan Otterson, the Guggenheim's senior conservator of objects, told the magazine:

"[W]e're changing the cleaning materials we use normally. Someone from our regular cleaning staff will come by every fifteen minutes, and they'll use special wipes, like medical wipes, that don't have any fragrance or color or oxidizers. And we have a steam cleaner that we'll use periodically. The color is going to change, and we'll probably be brightening the toilet up with polish along the way."

Cattelan has been described as a "provocateur, prankster, and tragic poet of our times." One of his most famous pieces, La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), depicts Pope John Paul II lying on the floor after being struck by a meteor.




America will likely have a warmer welcome than another famous toilet-shaped piece of art: Marcel Duchamp's 1917 iconic Fountain. The standard urinal produced by a sanitary ware supplier and signed "R. Mutt, 1917" shocked the art world. Duchamp was suggesting that an everyday item could be considered art if an artist presented it as such — kicking off a century of debate.

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Tomasz Alen Kopera was born in 1976 in Kożuchów, Poland. He attended the University of Technology in Wrocław, where he gained a degree in construction engineering. His artistic talent came to light already in early childhood. Tomasz paints in oil on canvas. Human nature and the mysteries of the Universe are his inspiration. His paintings permeate with symbols that often relate to human psyche and man’s relation with the surrounding world. His paintings are dark and mysterious. The technique, developed over many years, testifies to the artist’s great sensitivity and talent. Tomasz is celebrated for his acute attention to detail and mastery of colour. “In my work I try to reach to the subconscious. I want to keep the viewer’s attention for a longer moment. Make him want to reflect, contemplate.”

Van Gogh's Seascape at Scheveningen, 1882, was stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2002.

Anti-mafia police in Naples, Italy, have recovered two paintings by Vincent van Gogh that were stolen from a museum in Amsterdam more than a decade ago.

The Van Gogh Museum announced Friday that a curator inspected the two works, at the request of Italian authorities, and "drew a firm conclusion: 'They are the real paintings!' "

The two canvases, a seascape and a painting of a church, were stolen from the museum in 2002 in a widely publicized heist. They've been missing ever since.

The director of the Van Gogh Museum, Axel Rüger, said the museum owed a debt of gratitude to Dutch and Italian authorities.
"The paintings have been found!" he said in a statement. "That I would be able to ever pronounce these words is something I had no longer dared to hope for."

The Associated Press reports that the paintings were found during a raid of the Camorra crime clan as part of a crackdown targeting cocaine trafficking. The "priceless" paintings and tens of millions of euros worth of property were seized by police.

The paintings had suffered some damage but appear to be in "relatively good condition," the Van Gogh Museum said.

The paintings were stolen in 2002. A report in London's The Independent that week described a bold theft — burglars climbing a ladder to access the roof, smashing a reinforced glass window with a hammer or an ax and dropping into the heavily secured museum shortly before 8 a.m.



Van Gogh's Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen, 1884-1885, was one of two paintings recovered by Italian anti-mafia police, the Van Gogh Museum announced Friday.

An alarm went off as soon as the window was broken, but the thieves snagged the paintings and shimmied down a rope to the street before security could reach them.

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Departure (1932-1933), by Max Beckmann.

One late December day in 1950, Max Beckmann was standing on a street corner near Central Park in New York City. The German expressionist painter had been on his way to see an exhibition featuring his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Called "American Painting Today," the show was displaying his Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket.
It would turn out to be his last self-portrait.

"Unfortunately he never made it to the Metropolitan Museum," says the Met's Sabine Rewald. "On the corner of Central Park West and 69th Street, on the side of the park where there is an entrance, he had a heart attack and he died."
Now, Rewald is helping Beckmann return to Manhattan. She's curating a show called "Max Beckmann in New York," which features 39 paintings from the artist. And, as Rewald tells NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, that includes the very self-portrait Beckmann had been on his way to see on the day of his death.

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The Reading Prison was immortalized in Oscar Wilde's 1897 poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." Built in the mid 1800s, it remained operational until 2013.

Beneath Gothic arches and metal walkways, a place of torment has been reclaimed as a place of creative ferment. In 1895, celebrated writer Oscar Wilde — author of The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray — was convicted of homosexual activity and sentenced to two years in the infamous Reading Gaol.

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