Fine Arts News

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Ionel Talpazan's "Fundamental UFO".

Ionel Talpazan thought he saw a UFO when he was a boy, and never stopped seeing them. Of course, he created them.
Ionel Talpazan was 60 years old when he died this week, of diabetes and stroke. He was a boy in a small village in Romania, given up by his parents and raised by a succession of foster parents. He told interviewers he escaped into the woods one night because he thought he would be beaten.

He saw a blue, beating light in the sky above, and was sure it was a spacecraft.

Ionel began to draw spacecraft; I'm not sure you can call them UFOs when an artist gives them such a vivid, colorful identify.
It is hard not to think that a lost, frightened little boy in the woods would dream and draw pictures of amazing machines to swoop down from the heavens and take him away.

But Ionel Talpazan had to make his own escape. As a young adult, he swam across the Danube River and into Yugoslavia, where he lived in a refugee camp before he could get to New York in the 1980s.

He had rough times in his new world, too. But Ionel continued to draw pictures of spacecraft he imagined, often thrown open to reveal innards as elaborate as schematics; but rarely people. He slept in a cardboard box near Columbus Circle and sold drawings, paintings, and small flying saucers that he made out of plaster and scavenged parts.

I don't know where life would have led Ionel Talpazan if he'd slept in a cardboard box on a corner of, say, Akron or Peoria. But in New York, a famous art figure named Henry Tobler saw an artist in his drawings, and wrote about him in scholarly journals. His pictures were included in Manhattan art galleries, and from the 1990s on, Ionel made his way in the world by his art.
By the time he died, his works had hung at the American Visionary Art Museum, and museums in San Franciso, London, Berlin, Madrid, and France. Talpazans were sold in fancy galleries from Soho to Chelsea. The man who had slept in a box moved to a New York apartment.

"My art shows spiritual technology, something beautiful and beyond human imagination, that comes from another galaxy," he once told the Western Folklore journal. "So, in relative way, this is like the God."
Ionel Talpazan imagined incredible things, and made them alive in the eyes of others. In a way, he did escape on his UFO.


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Alder branches form a bridge in a Dumfriesshire, Scotland, stream. (Jan. 17, 2014)

Andy Goldsworthy/ Abrams

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Curved sticks surround a river boulder in Woody Creek, Colo. (Sept. 16, 2006)


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British artist Andy Goldsworthy works in the fields and forests near his home in Scotland using natural elements as his media. His pieces have a tendency to collapse, decay and melt, but, as he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "It's not about art. It's just about life and the need to understand that a lot of things in life do not last."
The list of elements Goldsworthy has worked with includes ice, snow, mud, wind and the rising tide. In one piece, he used twigs to fashion a giant spider web hanging from a tree. In another, he decorated a stone wall with sheets of ice. He has also lain in the rain to create "rain shadows" in the shape of his body on city streets.

Goldsworthy refers to his creations as "ephemeral works." He says, "When I make an ephemeral work, when it's finished, that's the moment that it ends, in a way."
Though Goldsworthy has also worked with more enduring materials, he says that using temporal materials is a reflection of the world we live in. His materials, he says, "Come raw from the ground and have all the irregularities and peculiarities because of that."

But Goldsworthy's ephemeral creations aren't completely lost to audiences upon completion; a new book, Andy Goldsworthy: Ephemeral Works: 2004-2014, presents a collection of photographs of his work. There's also an exhibition of Goldsworthy's photos opening Oct. 22 at the Galerie Lelong in New York.

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You may have thought you used mountains of index cards while working on school research papers, but Tara Donovan shows you what mountains of index cards actually look like in her installation for the "Wonder" exhibit.

When you were a little kid, everyday objects could be amazing — twigs, bugs, old tires, there was potential in everything. And it's that sense of awe that the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery is trying to recapture in its new show, Wonder.

In the Renwick's newly renovated gallery in Washington, D.C., nine artists were each given free rein over a space to create inspiring installations. Tara Donovan used hundreds of thousands of index cards to create a mountain range. Gabriel Dawe made a rainbow out of some 60 miles of colored thread. Patrick Dougherty turned sticks into giant, swirling nests.

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Stick sculptor Patrick Dougherty creates nests in his 2015 work Shindig.

"I wanted people to be overwhelmed, to feel as if there's something in the world greater than yourself," says Renwick curator Nicholas Bell. He spent over a year reflecting on wonder — that feeling you get before mental clutter like "intellect" and "taste ... drown out the senses," as he puts it in the show's catalog.
The Renwick was closed for two years for renovations, and for its reopening, Bell looked for artists who would transform the building's spaces. Seattle-based artist John Grade told Bell he was going to "bring" him a tree. Bell wasn't entirely sure what Grade meant.

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Artist Maya Lin made a map of the Chesapeake Bay using blue-green marbles.

"I'm going to find a tree that is the same age as your building and I'm going to build it for you," Grade explained.
The Renwick was built more than 150 years ago, so Grade went to the Cascade Mountains and found a hemlock tree of a similar vintage and made a plaster cast of it.

"They rigged up ropes and they covered this whole tree with tin foil so that it would protect it, and they covered it with plaster," Bell says. "They popped these pieces of plaster off the tree and took them back to his studio. Then they used that as a mold. So they had hundreds of volunteers coming in off the street — people on their lunch hour, people coming in after work and on the weekend."

Those volunteers helped Grade rebuild the tree using a half a million small blocks of reclaimed wood from a bridge that was being torn down. At the Renwick Gallery, the tree is now suspended on its side, filling the entire room.

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John Grade modeled this tree on a 150-year-old hemlock he found in the Cascade Mountains.

The natural world is where most of these artists found their wonders.
Maya Lin created what she calls a "jewel-like map of the Chesapeake Bay," using clear, blue-green marbles. "If you look at each marble they're not precious," says Lin. "They were very functionally made. They're cracked. They have flaws. But the color to me is probably the closest I can get to capturing the shimmer and glimmer of water."

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One of the main attractions in "The Edible Monument" exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles is a nine-foot long sugar palace showing the Greek sorceress Circe meeting Odysseus' men.

Enter a Getty Center gallery in Los Angeles, and you'll be greeted by a nine-foot long sculpture of the Greek sorceress Circe transforming Odysseus's men into swine.

What's most remarkable about this piece is that every inch of it – from the ornamental balustrade to the fine pink, yellow and white sands in the miniature garden — is made of sugar.

The sugar palace might have been the centerpiece of an 18^th century French wedding table. Today, it's part of a Getty exhibit called "The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals" that runs until Mar. 16.

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At the end of the party, guests were often invited to break off pieces of sugar sculpture to eat or take home as souvenirs.

"These very elaborate centerpieces in the middle of tables were made for people to admire while they ate and then the food would be served around them," says the exhibition's curator Marcia Reed.

At the end of the party, guests were often invited to break off pieces of sugar sculpture to eat or take home as souvenirs.
What "The Edible Monument" shows us is that our love of party decorations goes way, way back, says Reed. Besides this sugar art, the show features extravagant serving vessels and scenes, such as silver tureens with sculpted rabbits and heads of cauliflower, colorful scrolls depicting 16^th century ox roasts and prints portraying triumphal arches made of bread, cheese and suckling pigs.

Sugar and pastry were two of the foods that moved out of the kitchen and into the artist studio during the Renaissance. The period's finest kitchens employed chefs and confectioners who knew how to handle sugar paste and turn it into sculpture. White sugar was prized by Europe's elite because it was pure, beautiful and exotic, having been imported from Africa and the Caribbean.

"Sugar is a great way of showing how skillful these past practitioners were because it is one of the few foodstuffs you can show in a museum without it decaying," says British culinary historian Ivan Day, who created the Circe sugar temple on display at the Getty with artist Tony Barton using sugar paste, molds and a 1749 French engraving. Day's latest sculpture should last a while; he says similar sculptures he made 30 years ago remain in good shape today.

It helps that when sugar is combined with gum and water, it becomes an extremely pliable paste that has the consistency of Play-Doh, according to Reed. She says the sugar paste used in the Renaissance period is comparable to wedding cake fondant we see today. When it hardens, this sugar paste has the color and substance of Necco Wafers.

Medieval sugar statues were the inspiration behind the sphinx artist Kara Walker installed in Brooklyn's Domino Sugar factory in 2014. "I was reading this book, Sweetness and Power [by anthropologist Sidney Mintz], and I came across these sugar sculptures called subtleties that they had at medieval banquets," Walker told the Guardian. "Up until that point, I had been thinking of finger-wagging doom-laden things about the history of slavery and sugar and America. It didn't take into account what people wanted to look at."
Day says sugar monuments may be stunning to behold but also have a dark history worth remembering.
"When these extraordinary self-indulgent masterpieces of edible art were being produced for European palaces ... poor human beings who harvested the raw material lived dreadful and tragic enslaved lives," he says.
Selected works from "The Edible Monument" exhibition can be viewed online. And several special events are still to come.
In January, Day will discuss the evolution of edible table art at the Getty and teach museum visitors how to make their own Twelfth Cakes and tazze from sugar paste and 18^th century molds. Then in February, art historian Joseph Imorde will discuss how the popularity of refined sugar led to an increase in tooth decay in Renaissance Europe. Sugar at that time was thought to have health benefits and was often taken as a digestive.


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Willem de Kooning's Woman — Ochre (oil on canvas, 1954-55) has been missing for 30 years.

Thirty years ago, one of the most valuable paintings of the 20th century vanished. It wasn't an accident and it wasn't some elaborate movie heist. It was a simple theft — and it's still a mystery.

It was the day after Thanksgiving in 1985. Staff at the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson were getting to work, just like any other day.
"It was almost 9 o'clock so the museum was gearing up to open the doors," says museum curator Olivia Miller. "The security guards opened the doors for one of the staff members, and two people followed behind."

It was close enough to opening time that the guards let the man and woman come in. They started climbing a flight of stairs to the second floor, and the guard followed. In the middle of the stairwell, the woman stopped and turned to chat with the guard. Her partner continued on up.
"A short time later the man came back down the stairs and he and the woman left," Miller says.

A little odd, the guard thought. Then he walked up to the second floor gallery to discover any guard's worst nightmare: an empty frame where one of the institution's most prized pieces had hung. Willem de Kooning's painting Woman — Ochre had been sliced out of its frame.

The painting is part of the abstract expressionist's celebrated "Woman" series. Another work in the series sold about a decade ago for more than $137 million. The museum estimates that today Ochre could be worth as much as $160 million. It was a huge loss.

University of Arizona police chief Brian Seastone, a campus cop 30 years ago, was one of the first investigators to arrive at the scene.

"It was almost a hollow experience because it was so empty," Seastone recalls. "Not only is this painting missing on this wall, it was just a very quiet scene."
To make matters worse, there were basically no leads: no fingerprints, no license plate from the getaway car, just a description of how the couple looked.
"The woman was a bit older," Miller says. "She had a scarf around her head, was wearing glasses. The man had dark hair, had a mustache."

That's all the cops had to work with, because it turns out, in 1985, the museum didn't have any security cameras. No one who was working at the museum that day wanted to be interviewed for this story. So the question remains: Where is the painting?

Irene Romano, a professor at the University of Arizona and an expert on art plunder, says in general, people who steal works like this are not art lovers.

"They're common thieves who are hired by others to do the dirty work, and then the works of art pass into the underworld and are traded for drugs and arms and cash," Romano says.

We'll always keep hope that the painting will come back. And at the same time we're always going to know that our collection isn't complete, and that's the sad part about it.

Curator Olivia Miller

So the University of Arizona's painting might have been sold on the black market and may be hidden away in a vault somewhere ... or it could even be hanging in someone's home.


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Watercolor Sunset

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Artist Hale Aspacio Woodruff was commissioned to paint the Amistad Murals in 1938.

Most Americans know little about the painter Hale Woodruff, but he had a profound influence on 20th century American art. Like many black artists in the 1920s, Woodruff left the country for Paris. He later studied in Mexico with Diego Rivera.
Today Woodruff is best-known for a set of murals at Talladega College in Alabama. After a national tour, those murals have made a final stop in Kansas City, where Woodruff's family has roots.

Shawn Hughes, Woodruff's great nephew, stands in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, surrounded by giant paintings in vivid colors with nearly life-sized figures. On one wall, a deck full of slaves is about to mutiny on the Amistad. On another wall, an urgent scene in the woods, as slaves are about to cross the Ohio River to freedom.

In the second mural, the trial of the Amistad mutineers, is a man in a green shirt in the crowd. It's a self-portrait of Hughes' great uncle, Hale Woodruff.

"He always puts his image in his works," Hughes says.

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In this 1939 mural, Woodruff depicts the trial of the Africans aboard the Amistad.

This exhibition was organized by the High Museum in Atlanta back in 2012. Hughes has been to see the murals in New York and Washington, D.C., as well. Woodruff died when Hughes was a young man.
"He was a very sophisticated man," Hughes says. "Our family was very outgoing and gregarious, but he was very reserved, very quiet. I mean, he had an awesome presence about him."

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At Atlanta University, Woodruff founded what was known as the Exhibition for African American artists.

Growing up in Kansas City, Hughes knew about the famous muralist Thomas Hart Benton, who lived and taught there. And he learned about the European painters in high school. But he didn't learn about his great uncle's importance until he went to Fisk University in Nashville.

"First day I walk into the library. And as I walk into the library I look to my right, and they had a huge exhibit on Uncle Hale," Hughes says. "I was so excited about it I ran back to the dorm, called my mother collect, and I said, 'Mom, Mom, they got an entire corner dedicated to Uncle Hale.' She said, 'Yeah, now I want you to get off this phone and go read every book, and learn not only about him but learn about Aaron Douglas and the many other great African-American artists that are in the world.'"

Woodruff was a pioneer, says David C. Driskell, a distinguished art professor emeritus at the University of Maryland-College Park. Woodruff was one of the major art teachers at historically black colleges and universities at a time when there weren't that many people in that discipline, says Driskell.

In 1942, when Woodruff was at Atlanta University, he founded what was known as the Exhibition for African American artists. It "was the only venue where people of color could exhibit on a national scale without the forces of segregation," Driskell explains.

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In his 1942 mural The Underground Railroad, Woodruff shows slaves about to cross the Ohio River to freedom.

This was a place where black artists could compete and have their work judged by a mixed jury of blacks and whites. Major artists like Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and many others considered Woodruff a mentor.

"By bringing subjects of importance relating to the African-American experience to the American art canon, he was very much bent on helping to tell the history of African-Americans by painting murals," Driskell says.
Hughes organized another exhibition across town in the art gallery at the American Jazz Museum. This exhibition includes black-and-white prints and Christmas cards Woodruff painted for his relatives, abstract paintings and some of his black and white prints. Curator Sonié Joi Thompson-Ruffin says Woodruff deserves two concurrent exhibitions.
"Now, you can't get enough black," she says. "Now, you can't get enough African-American art. We are now considered American artists. This is the man that paved the way."

By the time Woodruff died in 1980 he was recognized by his peers in the art world. But he had a warning for his great nephew and niece.

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Artist Rogan Brown's paper sculptures are many times larger than the organisms that inspire them. Magic Circle Variation 5 is approximately 39 inches wide by 39 inches tall in its entirety. Brown has created multiple versions of Magic Circle, the shape of which alludes to a petri dish and a microscope lens.

Do you remember cutting paper snowflakes in school? Artist Rogan Brown has elevated that simple seasonal art form and taken it to science class.

These large-scale paper sculptures may evoke snow, but actually trade on the forms of bacteria and other organisms. The patterns may feel familiar, but also a bit alien. You're not looking at a replica of a microbe, but an interpretation of one. And that distinction, Brown says, is important.

"Both art and science seek to represent truth but in different ways," the 49-year-old artist, who lives in France, tells Shots. "It's the difference between understanding a landscape by looking at a detailed relief map and understanding it by looking at a painting by Cezanne or Van Gogh."

Brown wants to you to feel something looking at these sculptures.

Last year, he met with a group of microbiologists to plan an exhibition on the human microbiome. He became fascinated by the hidden world of microbes and the strange shapes of pathogens. He was particularly interested in humans' fear of the invisible microbiological world. That meeting led him to spend four months creating Outbreak entirely by hand.

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Outbreak, which is approximately 58 inches long by 31 inches tall, was exhibited in London in 2014.

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Outbreak took four months to cut and build. Brown writes on his website that the slow process of cutting mimics the "long time-based processes that dominate nature: growth and decay."

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A detailed view of Outbreak shows the delicate forms Brown cut by hand. He says he works with paper because it "embodies the paradoxical qualities that we see in nature: its fragility and durability, its strength and delicacy."

He starts each construction by sketching detailed designs and then mocking them up in larger pen and ink drawings. Then he begins to think in 3-D. Each structure is composed of layers of paper, which are stacked using foam board spacers. This floating effect allows him to build a complex colony of organisms that appear to grow beyond the confines of their housing.

In Cut Microbe, that growth is chaotic. The whip-like appendages of the creature branch outward in an invasive way. Those legs, Brown writes on his website, were inspired by the flagella of Salmonella and E. coli, tiny appendages that help the bacteria move.

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Cut Microbe, left, was cut entirely by hand. The entire sculpture, right, measures approximately 44 inches tall by 35 inches wide. Brown says it was inspired by Salmonella and E. coli.

In Magic Circle, the architecture is more constructive, ordered — there are colonies of intricately shaped forms that evoke the collaborative, constructive network of a coral reef. It also evokes microbes and diatoms.

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Magic Circle borrows from the forms of bacteria, microbes, diatoms and coral. Brown needed a laser to cut some of the more intricately designed shapes.


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Over a decades-long career, Frank Stella has done sculptures, three-dimensional reliefs, brightly-colored geometric shapes and mostly black paintings that literally changed the way people looked at art. (Pictured here: Empress of India, 1965.)

Frank Stella does huge work — some of it 20 feet tall and twice as long — so he has a suitably supersized studio about an hour's drive north of New York City. With hundreds of artworks and tables strewn with ideas in progress, the studio is a museum in itself.

"This is a piece from 1970, that's a piece I guess from the '80s," Stella says, "and this is a very recent piece from about a year ago." He points to one of several free-standing organic forms — a matte black sculpture that looks kind of like the small, dried seedpods he has nearby, but not. It's different from anything he's done before.

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Frank Stella, Eskimo Curlew, 1976.

Stella is one of the most influential and respected artists of the 20th century, and at nearly 80 years old he's still pushing the possibilities of his art. Over a six-decade-long career, he has done sculptures, three-dimensional reliefs, brightly-colored geometric shapes and mostly black paintings that literally changed the way people looked at art in the late 1950s. All that and more is currently on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art's traveling retrospective of Stella's work, curated in partnership with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

"The integrity of being an artist for Frank means going into the unknown," says Adam Weinberg, director of the Whitney and co-curator of the retrospective. He says, "A great artist is somebody who's not scared to reinvent themselves and to start all over again. And some artists do it once, twice, three times in their career. He's done it probably a dozen times or more."

Stella has pretty much always painted, whether it was helping his father paint the house or his mother decorate clamshells at home in Massachusetts. "I'm more of a house painter," he says. "That's the way I work."

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Frank Stella, Chocorua IV, 1966.

Stella started painting seriously in high school, and even then he was ambitious. "I had to find a way to paint abstractly, which is what I wanted to do," he says. "And, you know, I couldn't forget [Wassily] Kandinsky and [Kazimir] Malevich and [Piet] Mondrian, I mean that was the basis. You know, and you couldn't forget [Pablo] Picasso, [Henri] Matisse and [Joan] Miro either. And it had to be, you know, at least as good or better."

But Stella didn't want to be like any of them. His goal was to not depict anything, something he notoriously achieved in 1958 with his black paintings. Co-curator Adam Weinberg says they changed everything.

"It's basically one color of paint," he says. "You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something — you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what he said famously: What you see is what you see."

Though, in this case, it took Stella some time to see it. He'd done a painting with red stripes (minimalist, geometric) and wasn't entirely happy, so he painted it over all black before he went to bed. In the morning, he considered what he'd done.

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Ellsworth Kelly, shown before one of his huge pieces at Peter Carlson Enterprises, Sun Valley, in 1996, has died at the age of 92.

Ellsworth Kelly, one of the greatest American artists of the past century, has died at 92.
Kelly died at his home in Spencertown, N.Y., says gallery owner Matthew Marks, who has represented the artist for two decades. Kelly is survived by his longtime partner Jack Shear.

For seven decades, Kelly created pure, strong shapes and colors, immersive and brilliant. His vivid geometric blocks, in sculpture and paintings, are displayed at modern art museums from Paris to Houston to Boston to Berlin.

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This platinum-engraved sapphire disk, part of a set illustrating Earth's biodiversity, will be housed in the Earth Chamber of the MoonArk. It's designed by Mark Baskinger with Matt Zywica, Maggie Banks, Christie Chong, Bettina Chou, Adella Guo, Natalie Harmon, Deborah Lee, Deniz Sokullu and Carolyn Zhou.

DNA from a genetically modified goat, a spritz of perfume, sculptures so small you need a microscope to see them.
They're all headed for the moon.

The MoonArk is a sort of eight-inch-tall portrait of humanity, with more than 200 artists and designers contributing to it. There's space reserved for it on one of the privately-funded Moon missions competing for the Google Lunar Xprize.

Lowry Burgess, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the MoonArk project lead, holds up one of his contributions, a vial full of red liquid. A drop will go in the Ark.

It's human blood — "all artists' blood," Burgess says.
Specifically, 33 artists' blood, all mixed together. Some of the artists are pretty famous, he says, but he won't namedrop.
He's doing the same thing with a mixture of water from some of the world's rivers.
All told, there are hundreds of items in the Ark. Burgess says each one is like a word in a poem.
"A poem is like a bell ... every word in a poem rings and makes all the rest of the other words ring," he says. "So in this, everything that's there is making something else ring. So the totality is meant to hum together."
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The MoonArk features four chambers — Earth, Metasphere, Moon and Ether — surrounded by an aluminum exoskeleton. Here, a 3-D rendering shows the Metasphere Chamber.

You may have realized that this is conceptual art, where the idea is more important than any traditional aesthetic.
Or you can think of it is as a time capsule, with its contents open to interpretation.
Burgess sees it as a cultural outpost in space waiting to be discovered.
"We're desperately hoping that whoever opens it is perhaps a little more evolved than we are," he says.
Unlike some earlier space art, like the Golden Records on the Voyager craft floating beyond the solar system, the Ark will stay in one place.
But Mark Baskinger, one of the artists on the project, says the point is not to conquer.
"We think it should be different than sticking a flag in the soil and claiming territory ... maybe we're leaving breadcrumbs for someone else to find their way back here," he says. "It's an attempt to communicate forward in time — it's an attempt to communicate outward."
Other artists are just interested in the collaboration — some don't even really care about space or who finds it.
And while some of the artists are prone to intellectualizing, others will let themselves get a little emotional.
Dylan Vitone's contribution includes ordinary text messages between him and his wife.

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One of the murals in the Metasphere Chamber, "Texts to Elaine," features personal photographs Dylan Vitone sent to his wife over a five-year period.

"Cynical me is critiquing the way we broadcast our life. The sentimental me is kind of celebrating this thing that's really important for me and trying to give it more meaning than it actually has," he says.
A copy of the Ark will stay here on Earth to be exhibited.
But in space, weight is money, so the team has had to be innovative with materials. The Ark's four chambers will weigh less than six ounces.
I pick up one of the aluminum outer shells. It's so light it almost feels flimsy, but it's designed to last hundreds of years.
"It's funny — you touch this and your fingerprints are on it," Vitone says. "Your fingerprints are going to the moon."
Suddenly, the moon is personal.



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Gustav Wentzel (Norwegian, 1859-1927)
From Vaga 1908

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On a typical day at the Capitoline Museum in Rome, a visitor might expect to see classical nude statues like this:

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A picture taken on Tuesday shows a visitor walking past an ancient Roman marble statue at Rome's Capitoline Museum. F

But this was the scene before Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani held a news conference this week at the museum:

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Wooden panels cover statues on Monday inside the Capitoline Museum. A decision to cover up nude statues to avoid offending Iran's visiting president is drawing ridicule.

Out of apparent concern about offending Rouhani, white wooden boxes covered up many of the collection's ancient nudes.
It's a mystery who made the decision to cover up the art. As NPR's Sylvia Poggioli tells our Newscast unit, "The question everyone's asking is, on whose orders?"

"Culture Minister Dario Franceschini said neither he nor Renzi authorized the cover-up, which he called 'incomprehensible,' " Sylvia adds.

Citing local media, Reuters reports that "the Iranian embassy had asked for the statues to be covered and officials in Renzi's office had agreed without consulting their bosses."

But Sylvia says that "Rouhani denied that specific requests had been made."

"I know that Italians are a very hospitable people, a people who try to do the most to put their guests at ease, and I thank you for this," Rouhani said during his trip, according to The Associated Press.

The visit comes days after the European Union and the United States lifted an array of sanctions against Iran, after Tehran reached certain benchmarks on shrinking its nuclear program.

The art cover-up is drawing outrage and ridicule from local publications. Here's what left-leaning daily La Repubblica had to say, according to Reuters: "Covering those nudes ... meant covering ourselves. Was it worth it, in order not to offend the Iranian president, to offend ourselves?"

The BBC says Italy also opted to not serve wine at official meals because of Iranian laws regarding the consumption of alcohol — "a gesture France, where Mr. Rouhani travels next, has refused to copy."

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Before it moved to the Museum of Fine Arts, Frida Kahlo's Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia) belonged to the family of American industrialist Jackson Cole Phillips, who purchased it from Kahlo in 1929.

Up until recently, there were only 12 works by celebrated Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in American public collections. Now, there's one more on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia) is the first painting Kahlo ever sold, and it's been in the same family ever since.

Kahlo is known for her fantastical self-portraits, but Dos Mujeres shows two other women.

"They were her maids [who] worked in her house during her childhood, we believe," says Rhona MacBeth, conservator of paintings at the MFA. "We're still finding out more about them."

They're indigenous Mexicans — one has olive skin and Indian features, and the other is paler with a gold hoop in her ear. They stand against dense, green foliage dotted with fruit and butterflies. According to MacBeth, this painting takes us back to the beginning of Kahlo's career, following a violent car crash that left her spine and pelvis permanently damaged.
"Her terrible accident was in 1925; this was only 1928," MacBeth says. "And she really only started painting seriously after the accident, so she's 21 years old at this point."

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Ahead of a press conference with Premier Matteo Renzi and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, wooden panels were erected around some Roman statues in Rome's Capitoline Museums.

Another cover-up is in the news.
Italy's Premier Matteo Renzi and Iran's President Hassan Rouhani held a press conference inside Rome's Capitoline Museum this week to announce $18 billion in new business between their countries, now that sanctions against Iran are ending.
But some of the celebrated ancient statues the presidents had to pass on their way to their press conference were boxed up, a little like dim-sum take-out, by large white panels. Inside those boxes were famous statues, including the Capitoline Venus, of gorgeous stone gods and goddesses who do not bother with earthbound clothing.

Someone - no one has claimed credit - ordered the nude figures to be covered so as not to risk offending the president of Iran, a country where women cannot risk showing so much as their ankles. Iranian women must walk around cloaked almost as completely as those statues.

It's not clear who ordered the concealing of the statuary. But outrage over the cloaking has brought about a rare coalition in Italy.
Gianluca Peciola, of a left-wing party, called it, "a shame and mortification for art and culture."
Luca Squeri from the center-right Forza Italia said, "This isn't respect, it's cancelling out differences and it's a kind of surrender."

The columnist Michele Serra wrote in La Repubblica, "The problem is that those statues — yes, those icons of classicism and models of humanism — are the foundation of European and Mediterranean culture and civilization ... To not offend the Iranian president," he wrote, "we offended ourselves."

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Pope Francis (L) welcomes Iranian President Hassan Rouhani for their private audience on January 26, 2016, at the Vatican.

Lots of people pointed out that Pope Francis didn't cover the Vatican's unclad angels and cherubs when he received President Rouhani.

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The Knoedler & Company art gallery, shown here in 2010, had been in business since before the Civil War. The gallery permanently closed its doors in 2011.

The New York art world was shocked when the city's oldest gallery abruptly closed its doors more than four years ago. A few days later, news broke that Knoedler & Company was accused of selling paintings it now admits were forgeries for millions of dollars each. The gallery and its former president face several lawsuits by angry collectors and the first trial began this week.

The forgeries at the center of the scandal look like masterpieces by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and other prominent abstract expressionists. They were good enough to fool experts, and even Ann Freedman, then-president of Knoedler & Company, says she was duped.

Her lawyer, Luke Nikas, says, "Ann Freedman believed in these paintings. She showed them to the whole art world. She showed them to experts. And she has piles and piles of letters from all of these experts informing her that the works are real."

Nikas says Freedman even bought some of the paintings for her own personal collection. But the plaintiffs in this case and other pending lawsuits say Freedman overlooked glaring problems with the paintings' backstories. The art dealer who sold the paintings to the gallery, a woman named Glafira Rosales, pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges in 2013. According to Freedman, Rosales told an elaborate story involving a European collector (known only as "Mr. X") who bought the paintings with cash in the 1950s, when he was having an affair with an assistant at two top New York galleries.

"It's quite a tale, and people bought it," says Amy Adler, who teaches art law at New York University. "I suppose the temptation would be there — not just for buyers, but, yes, even for sellers — to think they'd happened upon these magnificent, undisclosed masterpieces."

In the end, Rosales admitted to selling Knoedler 40 counterfeit paintings over more than a decade. The plaintiffs argue that Freedman knew — or at least should have known — that something was amiss. It's hardly the first time an art dealer has been accused of deliberately looking the other way.

Ken Perenyi is a professional art forger who wrote about his career in the book Caveat Emptor. "From over 30 years' experience with art dealers," he says, "I would say there most certainly are individuals out there in the trade that will turn a blind eye."

Perenyi faked thousands of 18th- and 19th- century paintings, and sold them to auction houses and art dealers. He says, "I've seen paintings of mine turn up in dealers' catalogues that they had to know about it and they chose to buy it and sell it anyway."

A lot of these people were very sophisticated business people ... but they bought art based on sort of magical, romantic stories. It's the kind of transaction they never would have engaged in had it been a regular business deal.

Amy Adler, professore of art law at New York University


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Singer-songwriter Walter Martin.

Walter Martin is best known for his music. He found success with the band The Walkmen, and before that, in the mid-1990s, he was with the group Jonathan Fire Eater.
But Martin wasn't always pursuing his music full-time. At one point, he'd been on track to be a fine arts buff — studying for an art history degree, working in a museum and holding down a handful of other odd jobs.
That past life helped inspire his new solo record, a concept album about his time in the museum world called Arts + Leisure.

---

Interview Highlights

On the difference between writing collectively for a band and writing for himself
When writing collaboratively, especially in a band, that's all your oldest friends and family. It's a very different thing because you're a gang and you're trying to create a collective personality. And so when you write words for that, that's not necessarily your soul you're expressing. You're creating something that you and your gang believe in. And when you do it on your own — or, at least, when I do it on my own — I just want to be myself. And I want to express things that I feel about anything — you know, art or love or whatever. Anything.
On how — as a kid — he fell in love with John Singleton Copley's 1778 painting Watson and the Shark, which inspired a song on the album

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John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark, a 1778 oil painting. It depicts the rescue of Brook Watson from a shark attack in Havana, Cuba.

On why he's not comfortable talking about fine art in a serious way
I remember, as a young person, feeling like art was definitely a little bit untouchable — that it was sort of something for museums or for teachers and professors. It took me a while to realize that it was sort of for everybody, you know? ...
The most important feelings that I have about art — it sounds kind of corny, but — are things that are inexpressible. And sometimes at a Christmas party, I'll have a couple of glasses of wine and feel like I can express those feelings — and I think I embarrass myself because I feel them very passionately.
But communicating them to someone else is, for some reason, tricky for me. And I'd rather have it sort of implied in the songs.


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"Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don't implement promises, but keep them." ~ C. S. Lewis

...indeed... "Looking out the Window" 1908 ~ Carl Vilhelm Holsoe

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"Market Symphony" is a new audio installation at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. The exhibition layers sound from a market in Lagos, Nigeria. The speakers are installed on enamelware trays which are often used in markets.

To people who live in big cities, the sound of honking, the whir of traffic, the howl of street vendors and the clang of construction can just be background noise.
But for Nigerian sound and video artist Emeka Ogboh, the city is his palette — his symphony of sound. And his compositions can whisk the listener to another time and place.

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Artist Emeka Ogboh was commissioned by the museum to create a site-specific audio installation.

"There are stories in the soundscape," he says. "There are stories from the city. You can tell more about the city from just listening to the soundscape. And that's what happened. I started finding it really interesting."
Ogboh recorded hours of sounds to pull a listener through the song of the bustling Balogun open-air market in the Nigerian megacity of Lagos.

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Saudi artist Abdulnasser Gharem poses in front of "Generation Kill," a piece made with rubber stamps, digital print and paint, at the opening night of his exhibition titled Al Sahwa (The Awakening) at Ayyam gallery in Dubai in 2014.

Abdulnasser Gharem doesn't have the background you might expect for a successful artist – let alone one famous for edgy work from Saudi Arabia. He was once a lieutenant colonel in the Saudi army. He went to high school with two of the 9/11 hijackers.

But his first major art work sold for a whopping $842,500 at a Christie's auction in Dubai. It's a glittering dome symbolizing the Dome of the Rock, set on its edge, capturing a dove.

In Saudi Arabia, a new generation of artists is pushing boundaries amid a growing art scene. Art galleries and daring visual artists, all unheard of just a few years ago, are thriving. Contemporary artists like Gharem have become a critical voice in the conservative kingdom, where open calls for reform are a criminal offense.

Gharem says he doesn't care about fame. "I must focus on my own mission," he says with an exasperated laugh at the suggestion that he is the highest selling artist in the region. "I want to play my own role in the society, which will make me happy, and I can see the result."

In his busy Riyadh workshop, musicians play traditional music in the kitchen; a photographer is arranging images on a white wall in the next room. Here, Gharem, 41, gives young artists the help and guidance he never got.
"When I was struggling as a kid, I want[ed] to see the museum, I want to see the real paintings, I want to talk to the artists, how they are thinking," he says.

The Internet opened him to the larger art world as a young artist. He started an art foundation in 2013 with the money he earned from his first sale. Gharem took more than a dozen young artists to London last year to display their work, and this year, he and a group of young Saudi artists will launch an art tour across the U.S.

There is plenty of talent in Saudi Arabia, he says. "But the problem is they don't know how to deal with it. They don't have a strategy, they don't have even the guidance, what to do? So, that's my mission, you know."


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The guards at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles aren't just here to protect the art — they're also expected to engage and educate. They're called visitor services associates, and they've gone through hours and hours of training to become ambassadors for contemporary art.

It's hard to imagine a more magical way to begin a museum visit than to step inside The Infinity Mirrored Room at The Broad Museum. Artist Yayoi Kusama has covered the walls, floor and ceiling with mirrors. LED lights hang from the ceiling and are reflected everywhere you look. The lights sometimes move with the closing of the door, and create a wonderland of infinite color.

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You can only spend about 45 seconds in Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room - The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away — but in that short time you'll find yourself transported.

The shimmering installation is absolutely transporting — but can only be viewed for 45 seconds. No more than two or three people at a time can enter this small space, and there's a long line of others outside, patiently waiting to get in. It's hard to be mad, though, because the guard who ushers you out is so knowledgeable and pleasant — and he's not an outlier.

At the 5-month-old Broad Museum, guards aren't just there to protect the beautiful and provocative art. They are there to engage with visitors — talking and teaching about the artworks.

Guard Sabrina Gizzo might easily be mistaken for a docent. She's talking with some visitors about Thomas Struth's huge color photograph of a crowd at a museum in Florence Italy. In the photo, tourists are dressed in summer clothes — shorts, T-shirts, caps, sneakers. Struth photographs the crowd facing us, looking up at something we can't see. As Los Angeles visitors to The Broad study Struth's photograph — a museum crowd looking at another museum crowd — one Broad visitor notices that a man in the photograph is wearing sunglasses clipped to the front of his shirt. Gizzo suggests that her guest take a very close look at the sunglasses.

Leon Jan Wyczolkowski (1852-1936)
Spring 1933
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A sandstone statue of Rishabhanata, from Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh, India, in the 10th century A.D., flanked by a pair of attendants. It is valued at approximately $150,000.

Two valuable Indian sandstone sculptures dating back to the eighth century were seized by federal agents just days before they were scheduled to be sold at Christie's, a New York auction house.

NPR's Hansi Lo Wang reports that together, the statues are valued at almost a half-million dollars.

"One dates back to eighth-century India and is a rare depiction of a Hindu god and his entourage on horseback.
"The other — believed to be made in the tenth century — shows a Hindu teacher flanked by two attendants.
"Together, they're valued at almost a half-million dollars."

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A sandstone panel depicting a very rare representation of the equestrian deity, Revanta, and his entourage, from India, in the 8th Century A.D. It is valued at approximately $300,000.

Agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations say the statues were recovered as part of an ongoing initiative called Operation Hidden Idol, which focuses on "activities surrounding the illicit cultural property trade in New York." Both stolen items came from a smuggler of looted antiquities. According to court documents, investigators found an unlabeled computer disc in a Manhattan storage facility in 2012, with a folder labeled "Shantoo" that contained images of stolen antiquities and names of dealers.

A person was charged in connection with the disc, and after pleading guilty to criminal possession of stolen property and related charges, that person became an informant for the investigation. An affidavit by a federal agent says the informant said "Shantoo" was a nickname for Ranjeet Kanwat, a "known smuggler" from India, and one of the main suppliers of stolen artifacts for Subhash Kapoor, who is currently awaiting extradition to New York in connection with more than $100 million in stolen antiquities.
Ambassador Riva Ganguly Das, consul general of India, praised the recovery of the ancient statues.
"My congratulations to all of the special agents of HSI New York, who have painstakingly and diligently undertaken these complex and time consuming investigations," he said.

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The late Harry Bertoia is most famous for the iconic chairs he designed in the 1950s, which are now coveted by collectors of mid-century modern furniture.

But that was only one part of his career. Bertoia was also a renowned sculptor. He spent the final decades of his life creating works that make sound. Now those pieces are getting a fresh appreciation with an upcoming museum exhibition in New York, and the release of Bertoia's personal recordings in an 11-CD collection called Sonambient: Recordings of Harry Bertoia.

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Bertoia was born in Italy in 1915 and moved to Michigan as a teenager. He's famous for the chairs he designed, but his real love was sculpture.

Bertoia's recording studio was an old wooden barn on his property in eastern Pennsylvania. It looks unremarkable from the outside. But when you step inside, it's equal parts art gallery and sanctuary.

"It was almost church-like, very private, almost sacred to enter to hear these sounds," says Val Bertoia, Harry's son. Val worked as his father's assistant, and helped build some of the sculptures that are still carefully arranged around the renovated barn.


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The Cartoon Kitchen, by Dylan Pommer.

Lindsey Kennedy/Courtesy of Meow Wolf

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The Parlor, by Matt King.

Lindsey Kennedy/Courtesy of Meow Wolf

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An interior view of the fictional Seligs' house, which was a collaboration of many artists. Here, in the kitchen, a portal — one of many — leads out of the house into the otherworldly beyond (aka Portals Bermuda, a future travel agency).

Lindsey Kennedy/Courtesy of Meow Wolf

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Fancy Town, by Matt King.

When you step into the House of Eternal Return, it feels a bit like walking into your family home — and finding yourself lost in a PeeWee's Playhouse on steroids. Or amphetamines. Or better yet, some undiscovered alien narcotic.
Set up in the industrial district of Santa Fe, N.M., the new permanent art exhibition is a far cry from the fine arts galleries and museums for which Santa Fe is known. Think of it instead as a kind of art amusement park, built by an arts collective called Meow Wolf and largely funded by a surprising benefactor: George R.R. Martin.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let's start with the tour: When I arrive around 10 the night before the exhibition opens, dozens of Meow Wolf's 135 artists are scrambling to put the finishing touches on their meticulously crafted installations.

One of those installations, a two-story Victorian house built from scratch, marks the entrance to the exhibition. All around it are uncanny reminders of the Seligs — the fictional family ostensibly lived here. I'm told the family has curiously disappeared after a break in the space-time continuum, and like all visitors, I'm set loose by the artists to explore the interdimensional mystery.

"It's not art that you stand back from and look at," says Chadney Everett, the painter and former film prop-maker who designed the house. "It's art that you interact with and you experience in a very visceral way."

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The Aquarium, by Matt King — with fish sculpted by Sarah Bradley.

Like most of the people I meet here, he's got a cultlike dedication to Meow Wolf's vision of immersive, interactive art — and to making it accessible to everyone. Despite suffering from a herniated disk, he's been putting in 14 hours a day to finish.

"It's been really hard, but it's so worth it. We're gonna be open in a couple days, and then I'll rest and fix my spine," he laughs.

I opt to crawl through the family fireplace into a series of prehistoric caves, with a glowing, 12-foot mastodon skeleton at their center. Sculptor Matt Crimmins turned its rib cage into a radiant makeshift marimba.
"We're still trying to work out the kinks, but it's getting there," he says.
The same could be said of Meow Wolf as a whole. Founding member Vince Kadlubek explains that when the collective started eight years ago, it was just a small band of creative 20-somethings who felt out of place in Santa Fe's high-brow art establishment.
"We kind of always felt like we were on the outside looking in."
So, they started their own DIY venue in a defunct barbershop. As the collective grew in size and popularity, Kadlubek says, their immersive shows grew more elaborate.
But they still didn't have a large space of their own.
"We all knew that it could work, but we just didn't have the heavy hitter," Kadlubek says. "We needed somebody to take a risk on us."

We needed somebody to take a risk on us.

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In Eugène Delacroix's 1827 lithograph, Mephistopheles Aloft, 1827, a demon flies over a dark city.

In the 19th century, French artists started getting creative with black materials— chalk, pastels, crayons and charcoal — some of them newly available. Now, a show called Noir at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles celebrates the dark.

"Black can be intense and dramatic," says Timothy Potts, director of the Getty. "I mean it's dark, it's the color of the night, of the unknown, of the scary."
Manet, Redon, Degas, Corot, Courbet, and lots of lesser-known painters began putting black on paper in lithographs, etchings, drawings. Of course it's not the first time black was used, but this was different because of Industrial Revolution technology and the times.

"Life was changing at a pace which it never had before," Potts explains. "And it wasn't all good — there was the poverty and the desperation of city life in a way that hadn't existed before."

"The air was terrible," adds Lee Hendrix, Noir's curator. "Urban violence was becoming a regular thing. The city — and especially the night city, and the city of Paris itself — began to take on life as a kind of demonic domain."

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It's raining black in Odilon Redon's charcoal work, Apparition.

Artists reflected these shadowy changes. In 1827 Eugène Delacroix drew a demon — Goethe's devil Mephistopheles. The lithograph shows him flying over a dark city, the incarnation of evil with his claw-like nails and his grinning leer.

"I think they are plumbing the depths of the frightening, unimagined evil in ways that had not happened before in art," Hendrix says.
In Odilon Redon's 1880 charcoal Apparition, it's actually raining black, in long, dark, slanting lines. A dreamlike ghostly presence emerges from the dark. There's a bit of light around him — artists rubbed squished-up bread onto the paper, to lift away the powdery charcoal.

There's also an unusual Degas in the show: La Toilette is a monotype from 1885 which brought out the artist's dark side. Usually Degas used vivid colors in his paintings and pastels of women bathing. But here he puts black ink on a metal plate — and wipes it off, to create a bather's arms.

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Edgar Degas created his monotype La Toilette circa 1885.

"[He's] wiping her arms as she's wiping her arms ... so the subject and the matter are married in that respect," says artist Alison Saar, who joined us at the Getty.

This Degas was a monotype — meaning there was only one copy of the work. But the Industrial Revolution brought ways to produce several copies of an artwork — mass-produced prints that were snapped up at art shows.
"These show were so well attended when you look at old engravings of them, they almost look like a department store," Hendrix says.
It was around this time that art got democratized — ordinary people could afford it. And that's something of a ray of sunshine piercing through the noir.


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Gardeners stand in for art collectors in Ramiro Gomez's riff on David Hockney's 1968 painting, American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman)
toggle caption © Ramiro Gomez/Courtesy of Abrams

Los Angeles is a city of extremes: There are neighborhoods so luxurious only millionaires can afford them and neighborhoods so poor that residents work several jobs to pay the rent. Now, a young LA painter is bringing these neighborhoods together on his canvases.

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Workers tend a garden in Gomez's 2015 Jardín no 1.

Ramiro Gomez paints modernist houses in Beverly Hills, perfectly appointed kitchens and exclusive shops on Melrose Avenue. His pictures have nothing, and everything, to do with his background. Gomez's mother is a janitor, and his father works the graveyard shift driving a truck. Workers like his Mexican immigrant parents show up in his paintings — part of the invisible landscape of luxury LA.
"Someone will always be working to keep it nice," Gomez says. "Whether it's a home in the Hollywood Hills or Beverly Hills or the Paramount Studios."
Gomez puts those "someones" on his canvases. He shows mostly Latino gardeners tending perfect lawns, maids cleaning tiles in gleaming bathrooms and nannies gathered in the park.

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Gomez takes ads for luxury products and imagines the individuals who make them possible. Above, his 2015 work, DVF.

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In 1997, Pablo Picasso's Women of Algiers (Version O) — shown here at Christie's in Hong Kong — was part of a groundbreaking art auction that sent prices soaring.

The so-called Panama Papers have shined a light on the hundreds of thousands of shell companies used to circulate assets around the world. One of those assets is fine art, and the leaked papers show how collectors and companies have secretly bought and sold famous works by artists like Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso, among others.

One event the papers illuminate is a famous 1997 Christie's auction featuring paintings from the collection of Victor and Sally Ganz. Some of the world's most important (and richest) collectors attended, and some bid unprecedented amounts of money. The auction is said to have launched the skyrocketing prices for modern art.

Jake Bernstein is a senior reporter with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which has the leaked documents. "This was a collection that Victor and Sally Ganz had accumulated over 50 years," he says, "and they had a lot of wonderful pieces — particularly a lot of Picassos — and it was a record sale."
Auctions are theatrical spectacles with a lot of scaffolding and engineering behind them.

Sarah Thornton, author of "Seven Days in the Art World"

The collection sold for more than $200 million, a terrific profit for the Ganz family — or so it seemed until the Panama Papers were released. According to the papers, the Ganz family had already sold the paintings months earlier to a subsidiary of Christie's for $168 million. That company then sold the collection to another company based on a small island in the South Pacific.

Bernstein says, "We figured out through the data exactly who was behind this offshore company and it turned out to be ... a British billionaire named Joe Lewis who was, at the time, the largest shareholder in Christie's."

The Panama Papers show that both Lewis and Christie's stood to share the profits if the auction brought in more than $168 million, which it did. The deal wasn't illegal, but it was secretive — and the auction's success resulted in an uptick in the price of art that's still in effect today.

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Joseph Mallord William Turner's "Self portrait, age 24," will grace the UK's £20 note.

Following a national nomination process, the Bank of England has announced the new face of the £20 bill: famed painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), known for his landscapes, seascapes and innovative depiction of light.
Turner will replace economist Adam Smith, the influential advocate of free market policies who came up with the notion of the "invisible hand."

After deciding that the figure on the bill would be from the visual arts field, the U.K. got the public involved by seeking nominations. The Bank of England says it received "29,701 nominations covering 590 eligible characters," and the bank's governor made the final decision.

"There were lots of very well-known names, but also I discovered artists I'd never heard of and their great contribution. ... So the real thing that surprised me was the sheer breadth of talent," Bank of England Chief Cashier Victoria Cleland said in a video about the decision.
The Bank of England has published a concept illustration of the new bill, which it says will enter circulation by 2020:

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The JMW Turner banknote concept released by the Bank of England.

Art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon said Turner "is to British art what Darwin is to British science or Churchill is to British politics." Here's more from Graham-Dixon:

"He is, I think, without doubt, the single most original British artist of all time – the one who's had the greatest influence on the art of Europe and indeed, the world. His breakthroughs, his obsession with the depiction of light, was a huge catalyst for that minor French movement known as Impressionism."

In addition to a Turner self-portrait, the note will feature his painting The Fighting Temeraire and a quote from him: "Light is therefore colour."

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"The Fighting Temeraire," Turner's 1839 painting which will appear on the new £20 bill.

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art photo by Stanislav Hricko

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Simon de Pury has been called both the Mick Jagger and the Peter Pan of auctions. Dealer, collector, curator, schmoozer, his clients include billionaires, rock stars and royalty. He dishes plenty about the art market in his new book, The Auctioneer, and he explains the rise and fall of his own auction house, Phillips de Pury.


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Sunrise above the Elbe
Photo by Tobias Richter

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The latest in African visual arts is now on display in Senegal's capital. Dakar is host to a month-long arts festival that's held every other year. NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton is taking it all in and has this report.

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OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON, BYLINE: The Senegalese capital is buzzing with a 12th edition of the Dak'Art Contemporary African Art Biennial and playing host to artists and art-lovers from across the continent and all over the world. Simon Njami from Cameroon is the artistic director of the Dak'Art festival titled Re-enchantments. He says Africa must learn to become re-enchanted with itself through art.

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Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, may be best known as King Louis XV's Chief Mistress. But she was also a highly educated tastemaker, a patron of the arts, and an artist in her own right.

When Louis XV, King of France, first met the woman who would become his chief mistress, she was dressed as a domino, and he was dressed as a plant. It was 1745, and Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, had been invited to a masked ball at Versailles. If this sounds like a chance meeting, it wasn't — her family had been strategizing to orchestrate this very moment for years.

"They envisioned her having this role when she was just a bourgeois young girl living in Paris, and they made it happen," explains Columbia University art historian Susan Wager.

Not long ago, Wager discovered a leather portfolio of etchings made by Pompadour. For over a century, the portfolio and the etchings inside had gone unrecognized. Wager discovered it at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Md., among a batch of items founder Henry Walters bought in 1895.
"I was so thrilled," she recalls. "When I pulled that out of the box in the manuscripts room, my heart started to pound. I could barely talk."

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In this etching, circa 1758, Pompadour captures her pet spaniel, mid-trot.

Wager curated an exhibit of those etchings and other works by Pompadour, which is now on view at The Walters.
"She was one of the smartest women ever associated with the French crown," says University of Pennsylvania professor Joan deJean, author of The Age of Comfort.

A well-educated tastemaker, she hung out with Enlightenment intellectuals like Voltaire and Diderot and she lobbied for the publication of France's first encyclopedia.
"She's a real brand name in the world of style," says deJean (just think of the name of Elvis Presley's haircut!) "She was like a minister of the arts."
Pompadour was a patron of artists — their chief customer — says Wager: "She would give them money to make paintings and have them put in her houses so people could see them there."
And Pompadour herself made art. "She brings the most talented gem carver to live with her at Versailles," Wager explains. "She buys a drilling machine — which is the tool that you need — puts that in her apartments, and has him come and live there and make gems for her."

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Antique dealer Alvin Barr was surprised when a piece of pottery he owned was appraised at as much as $50,000 on Antiques Roadshow. So too was the pot's creator, Betsy Soule.

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"The potter has used an impressive array of techniques to come up with this extraordinary texture," an Antiques Roadshow appraiser said of this piece — which turned out to be a high school art project.

It was the Antiques Roadshow dream: You show up with your weird-looking jug and explain that you paid $300 for it at an estate sale in Oregon. Then the expert announces ...

"It's bizarre and wonderful. You even see a little bit of, like, Pablo Picasso going on here. It's a little difficult to identify precisely when this was made, but I think it's probably late 19th or early 20th century. ...
"Probably its origin — it's coast of the United States, maybe Middle Atlantic states headed southward. Estimating its value is a little difficult. I think in a retail setting, somebody might well ask in the area of between $30,000 and $50,000 for this."

The owner, astonished, said, "What!?"
And also, "No!"
Which, as it turns out, was the right reaction. The "Grotesque Face Jug" wasn't a 100-year-old artifact, but the work of a creative high school student circa 1973.

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The artist Robert Cenedella, who is now 76 now, in his studio in the early in his career.

Robert Cenedella, the titular painter in the briskly entertaining new documentary Art Bastard, is a New York artist who has spent years battling the New York art establishment. To be clear, he is a bastard, in that he was born to parents who weren't married. But also in that he's an inveterate troublemaker — a mocker of other artists — who can be a thorn in the side of even people who are trying to help him.

A publisher, say, who once offered him an ad on an art magazine's back cover, only to have him submit an image of a faux Rothko with the word bulls*** scrawled across it. The publisher, who had thought he was doing Cenedella a kindness, suddenly found himself in a position of either censoring the ad or endorsing what amounted to an attack on another artist. He ended up publishing, but did so, he tells director Victor Kanefsky, with "annoyance."
Perhaps understandably, Cenedella has never been a fashionable artist. He says his heroes were 1920s and '30s activist painters like Ben Shahn and George Bellows, who painted bread lines and Depression scenes.

"They recorded history," he says admiringly. And they had "legitimacy" (a word that crops up a lot in this documentary) because their works were hanging in museums. But by the time Cenedella was hitting his stride, abstraction had taken over the art world — the poured and dripped paintings of Jackson Pollock, for instance, in which expressing a point of view was impossible. Quite apart from which, says Cenedella, "where people might say, 'well, that's a bad Hopper, or a bad El Greco,' I've never seen anyone say 'that's a bad Pollock.' Either they're all bad, or they're all good."

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The Oculus cake now being sold by the new caterer running the SFMOMA's upstairs cafe. The cake was inspired by the distinctive tower at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It is similar in design and spirit to a cake prepared by Caitlin Freeman and her baking team for a museum event several years ago. (See below.)

Connor Radnovich/ Courtesy of The San Francisco Chronicle

Where do you draw the line between inspiration and straight-up imitation when it comes to food?
A few years ago, we brought you the story of Caitlin Freeman, a pastry chef baking innovative, art-inspired cakes at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Using modern art as her muse, Freeman translated what she saw in the museum into edible form at the SFMOMA's upstairs café.

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Caitlin Freeman's Oculus cake, which she and her team first created for a museum event several years ago.

Her creations eventually filled a cookbook, Modern Art Desserts, and her most well-known dish, a cake composed of small, primary-colored blocks delicately cemented together with chocolate icing, graced its cover. Inspired by the geometric art of Piet Mondrian, it brought both Freeman and the café fame – and inspired many a home cook to tackle this masterpiece at home.

The museum closed for renovations in 2013. When it re-opened last month, the upstairs café was under new management, with a new baking team – but the art-themed desserts for sale looked suspiciously familiar to Freeman. Call it a case of copycake.

Blue Bottle, the coffeehouse chain own by Freeman's husband, James Freeman, used to run the SFMOMA's upstairs café, but it failed to win its bid to return after the renovations. Freeman was disappointed, but, as a lifelong art lover, she nonetheless felt compelled to take her infant daughter to check out the refurbished museum. She even stopped for a few moments to take in the scene at the new café, now run by a catering company that had previously operated the museum's downstairs café.

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Pittsburgh Penguins goalie Matt Murray (30) defends against San Jose Sharks' Joe Thornton (19) during the second period of Game 4 of the NHL Stanley Cup final on Monday in San Jose, Calif.

Maybe art's fair in love and war.

While the San Jose Sharks and the Pittsburgh Penguins compete in the Stanley Cup Finals this week, museums from each city are wagering pieces from their collection that their hockey team will come out on top.

It all started on May 27, when the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh challenged the San Jose Museum of Art to a friendly bet on Twitter.

Hey @sjmusart, how about a friendly little wager over this Lord Stanley thing that's about to go down?
— CMOA (@cmoa) May 27, 2016

If the Sharks win, the CMOA will loan "Measurement: Plant (Palm)," a 1969 conceptual work by Pittsburgh-born artist Mel Bochner. If the Penguins win, SJMA will have to relinquish "Mom Posing by Green Wall and Dad Watching T.V.," a 1984 photograph from the "Pictures from Home" series by California artist Larry Sultan.

#museumcup stakes are set! @penguins / @SanJoseSharks - SF Bay's Larry Sultan / #Pgh Mel Bochner @sjmusart pic.twitter.com/ok84PtZDDy
— CMOA (@cmoa) June 5, 2016

It's a bit of an uneven playing field: not only does the CMOA's collection of 30,000 pieces far exceed the SJMA's 2,500, but the Penguins are currently leading the Sharks 3-1 in the series.

This is just the latest artistic fun around a sports event. The Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots inspired a similar bet during the 2015 Super Bowl, wagering a pair of seascape paintings. When the Patriots took home the Vince Lombardi Trophy, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., took home the 1870 Albert Bierstadt painting "Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast," which it won for three months from the Seattle Art Museum.


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Man (Dreaming), by June Leaf, 1972. Acrylic, and brush and ink on paper, 24 3/4 × 39 3/4 in.
Alice Attie/June Leaf

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Mother/Ballroom, by June Leaf c. 1978. Pen and ink, fiber-tipped pen, graphite pencil, rubbing, and colored pencil on paper, 27 × 21 in. Collection of the artist.

June Leaf was trained in ballet, but she's been making visual art since she was a kid. That's a long time – she's 86 and the subject of a new retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
Much of Leaf's work tells stories, often about relationships, and especially her relationship with her husband, the renowned photographer Robert Frank — who's far better known than his wife. Now, the Whitney retrospective is the museum's way of saying: It's time to pay attention to June Leaf.

The exhibition is meant to be funky — less like a sterile gallery show, and more like Leaf's crowded studio in downtown Manhattan. But that's not really possible.

Leaf's studio is a jumble of work. A metal sculpture of a recumbent woman with wheels is plopped on top of a radiator, paintings and drawings lean against one another on the floor, and the walls are covered with more drawings and paintings like the overlapping handbills on a construction site barrier. Thin sculptures of hands stick out anywhere they can take hold.


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Sky paintings

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