Fine Arts News

This statue, in Sudbury, Ontario, was apparently vandalized about a year ago. A local artist volunteered to help replace Jesus' missing head, but not everyone appreciates her efforts.

Updated 7 p.m. ET with the replacement head being removed
The CBC reports that an odd-looking substitute for a stolen head of Jesus has itself now been removed from a statue. The church's priest said the replacement had to go because it was damaging the original statue.
But while the temporary head was in place, it inspired lots of joy on the Internet.

In this one, very particular, instance, maybe baby Jesus was better off headless.
A statue at a church in Canada was apparently vandalized last October, and the baby Jesus' head had been missing ever since.

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In his regular work, Christoph Niemann starts with a punch line and works backwards. But in his Sunday Sketching series, he does the opposite: "I begin by picking a starting position — a random object and the limits of a brush-and-ink drawing — and see where the story takes me," he writes.

A couple years ago, artist and illustrator Christoph Niemann felt like he needed to shake things up. "When you do any kind of creative job for a while, you become better ..." he says, "but I think you always become a little bit more predictable."

Niemann was plenty successful — his work appears in the New Yorker and he had a regular Sunday column in The New York Times Magazine. But he wanted to get out of his routine, so he decided to start a project called Sunday Sketching. Each week he took an object — say, a paperclip or a bunch of bananas — set that object on a sheet of paper and incorporated it into a sketch.



The bananas became the hindquarters of a horse. The paperclip became a beach chair. Half an avocado became a baseball glove at the end of an outstretched arm, with the pit landing in the center as the ball.

These drawings are whimsical and surprising, and Niemann has collected them along with more of his work in a new book called Sunday Sketching.

In one drawing, Niemann turns a tangled pair of Apple headphones into a mosquito. Inspiration for that one didn't come easily: "They're just like weird random white wires ... they looked like nothing," he tells NPR's Ari Shapiro.
Because Niemann usually knows where he's going with a drawing, he rarely laughs at his own visual jokes. But this sketch was different: "In this case it was like: Oh, wow, this actually looks like a mosquito," he recalls. "And that moment was fun."


Sunday Sketching is "an exercise in seeing," Niemann writes. "The greatest challenge is freeing myself from the actual function of the object."

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Emile Albert Gruppe (1896–1978)
Vermont Farm House

In the mid-1930s, Theodor Geisel was a fledgling author and artist, working as an illustrator for New York ad agencies. His father, superintendent of parks in Springfield, Mass., occasionally sent him antlers, bills and horns from deceased zoo animals. Geisel kept them in a box under his bed and used them to create whimsical sculptures. Above, a replica of Flaming Herring.

Decades before he became a best-selling children's book author, Dr. Seuss, a.k.a. Theodor Geisel, created a series of sculptures he called his "Unorthodox Taxidermy." Using real horns, beaks and antlers, he fashioned whimsical creatures which look like they jumped right out of his books:
A traveling show of replicas, called "If I Ran the Zoo", has landed at a gallery in Long Island. Today we bring you that story (how else?) in verse:




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Martin Luther painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1529.

Five centuries ago, Christians in Europe who hoped to go to heaven knew they might first have to spend a few thousand years in a fiery purgatory, where they would be purified of their outstanding sins.
It was not a pleasant thought, but the Catholic church offered some hope: A cash offering to the local priest could buy an "indulgence" certificate, entitling the believer to a shorter purgatory sentence.

In practice, the money often went into the pockets of corrupt church officials and their political allies. So in 1517 a German monk named Martin Luther decided to protest the practice. On or about Oct. 31 of that year, he publicly presented 95 handwritten "theses" against the sale of indulgences.


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The work of art is meant to honor the victims of the November 2015 terrorist attacks. Construction is already underway on Bouquet of Tulips — but not all Parisians are pleased with the gift.

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The Sackler Gallery's Ming dynasty dish dates back to 1430 China

This holiday season, the color red is the focus of a small exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian show finds links between a 15th-century Ming dynasty dish and a 20th-century painting by Mark Rothko.

The dish was made for an emperor in 1430, and it's rare — there are only about 35 of them left. It has simple lines and a rich color (red, of course). Curator Jan Stuart fell in love with the dish and set about adding it to her gallery's collection. She showed it to experts, the gallery's board and members of the National Commission of Fine Arts. According to Stuart, several had the same reaction: "Oh, I get it. It's like Rothko."

The gallery bought the dish, and a concept was born: Put it on view with a luminous Mark Rothko painting — one that layers tones of red into two vertical rectangles — borrowed from the National Gallery of Art. The result is a mini-show brought together by color.


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St. Jerome was previously thought to have been painted by a 16th century Italian artist. According to a complaint filed by Sotheby's auction house, it is actually a modern fake, painted in the 20th century.

Sotheby's says a 16th century Italian painting sold by the auction house for $842,500 in 2012 is actually a modern fake, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in New York on Tuesday.

The auction house is suing the collector who consigned the painting, arguing that he must pay back at least the $672,000 he personally made on the sale. Sotheby's says its contract with the man, Lionel de Saint Donat-Pourrieres, allows the company to rescind the sale if a painting turns out to be a counterfeit.

The painting, titled St. Jerome, had previously passed through the hands of an art dealer under investigation for allegedly trafficking multiple forged works.

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Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy once said, "Everything in the White House must have a reason for being there." So we looked behind the scenes to learn how art is chosen for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

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Monica Bill Barnes (left) and Anna Bass are offering literally breathtaking tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Seeing a great work of art might quicken your pulse, but now New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art is hoping you'll break a sweat, too. The Met is currently offering a "Museum Workout" — part performance, part workout, part art tour.

On a recent morning, 15 of us gather in The Great Hall before the museum opens. We line up behind two tour guide dancers — both wearing sparkly cocktail dresses and sneakers. A guy with a portable speaker stands nearby.

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