Fine Arts News

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In Chase's 1888 Hide and Seek, two young girls — sisters, perhaps — play on a vast shimmering hardwood floor, in a sparely-decorated room. A mysterious painting. Who is hiding? Who is seeking? Is it just a game? Or is the painting about growing up — the older girl approaching the door to adulthood, the younger one looking at her own future?

Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper and George Bellows were very different artists, but they did have at least one thing in common: They all studied with painter William Merritt Chase. Now, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., is marking the centennial of the artist's death with a retrospective.

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Chase used to paint fish during the classes he taught at the New York School of Art. He would buy fish at the market, paint them quickly, and return them before they went bad.

"You walk around these galleries and the paintings are gutsy and bold and scintillating and brilliant," says Dorothy Kosinski, director of the Phillips.

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Back in the 1950s and '60s, Carmen Herrera was making art, but her male counterparts were getting all of the attention. Now, at 101, she's still hard at work, and finally getting some long overdue recognition.

For most of her career, Carmen Herrera's paintings of brightly colored geometric shapes went unnoticed, while her male counterparts — Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella — got plenty of attention for similar work. Herrera finally made her first sale at 89. And now, at 101, it seems she's getting her due at last. The Cuban artist's work can be seen at the Tate in London, MoMA in New York, and she has an exhibition coming to the Whitney Whitney Museum of American Art in September.

Tears streamed down Herrera's face as she viewed her art on display at a recent show at the Lisson Gallery in Manhattan. The 13 paintings and one sculpture were her first solo exhibition in the U.S. in nearly 10 years.

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Carmen Herrera's recent exhibit at the Lisson Gallery was her first solo exhibition in the U.S. in nearly 10 years.

"It helps that they recognize you — that your work is not going to go to the garbage," Herrera says.


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A day after getting a phone call from Kanye West's camp, Vincent Desiderio was in Los Angeles for the premiere of the rapper's video "Famous," which Desiderio's painting Sleep partly inspired.

"It was very cryptic, and quite mysterious. I received a phone call and I was told that Kanye was an enormous fan of my work, and he would like to meet me."

That's how it started for painter Vincent Desiderio. The next day, he flew from New York to Los Angeles to meet Kanye West. When he arrived, he says, "It was as if I'd entered into a surprise party for me."

Desiderio sat down and was shown the music video for West's song "Famous," which was premiering that day. In the 10-minute,

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grainy close-ups move across what appear to be the naked bodies of Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Taylor Swift and other celebrities. Then, a wide shot from above: those 12 figures, lying side by side in a pile of rumpled sheets. Desiderio says it took him a few minutes to catch on.
"I said to them, 'You must have seen my painting? This looks an awful lot like a painting I did,'" he says. "And they were smiling, because this was the big buildup."

West's video is an homage to a painting by Desiderio called Sleep: a 24-foot wide, hyper-realistic image of a group of people lying in mostly nude slumber. NPR's Rachel Martin spoke to the artist to find out what he makes of "Famous" and of West's new album, The Life of Pablo. Hear the radio version at the audio link, and read more of their conversation below.

Rachel Martin: If you don't mind, since we are in the world of radio, how would you describe your painting?
Vincent Desiderio: The painting that I made is a kind of homage to Jackson Pollock's painting Mural that he painted for the apartment of Peggy Guggenheim, which involves a continuous and repetitive set of marks that calligraphically sort of move across a very wide canvas.
It's been described as an orgy, which is wrong. It represents a communal sleep — which in a larger sense might represent the sleep of our culture, the sleep of reason.

Let's talk about what I imagine has been a crazy few days for you. You got a call last week, asking if you could come attend an event that Kanye was holding the next day.
You know, when I got the first phone call they said "Kanye West," and I heard "Conde Nast." I thought, "Maybe they want to write an article?' It was very weird. Of course, when I told my children that Kanye West's office had just called me, they were freaking out. They said, "Dad, you gotta go!" So off I went.

So you get there and are ushered into a room. You meet Kanye West and he says, "Take a look at this"?
Kind of. I was welcomed with smiles, as if they had been waiting for me to arrive, and we exchanged a few words. "Pablo" refers to both Pablo Picasso and Pablo Escobar jointly, and so we talked about the criminality of art; I mentioned Degas' quote that the painting should be constructed like the perfect crime. And he smiled and said, "It's Saint Paul as well."
The minute he said that, I saw his face and I realized the depth that really was behind so much of what he has been attempting to do as an artist. And then he said, "Would you like to see what we've been working on?"

And you sit down and watch it for the first time. What was your reaction?
I was gobstruck, is the word. I was absolutely floored and honored, and I almost felt like crying. I think that Kanye and I embraced each other, and everyone else was sort of like that — they were all high-fiving me and hugging me. There are experiences like that in the arts where somebody actually gets what you're doing. Not that your goal is to communicate — it's more self-enlightenment. But at that moment I realized that Kanye and I were on the same page completely. He was an art student, and speaking to him was like speaking to the brightest of my peers.

Tell me what you mean when you say that he got you. The video he's made, while it more than echoes your painting with the imagery, he's saying something different: These are not anonymous people, these are famous people. And in his lyrics, he is taking aim at each of those individuals. He's saying something specific that I don't think your painting is saying, though you can tell me if I'm wrong.
One of the big similarities is that, as I was doing my painting, I wasn't feeling a tremendous amount of empathy for the people; I actually thought of them as slumbering idiots who really need to wake up to what's going on, to a different world. And yet, every time I worked on it, rather than taking the image to a highly critical point that's typical in the art world, jaded and cynical, I kept holding back. It was almost as if I began falling in love with the characters, even though at the beginning of my endeavor they were supposed to be people I didn't quite care for.
And so when I saw Kanye's video, I was also struck by [that]. A few these people are certainly repulsive to me, and everything in the habit of my intuitions would steer me to seeing this as a vicious attack on them. And yet, there was something in the execution of the piece that kept all of those thoughts at bay. I felt a spark of empathy — not really for them, it was for the world.

We should also just point out that Kanye himself is in the image, as is his wife, Kim Kardashian.
An incredibly important detail. An image like that is a mirror of the ridiculous cult of celebrity. I think Kanye, who I believe is very much like Andy Warhol in that he does not let his guard down about who he is, presents a mirror to people rather than he telling them how to think.

It sounds, to put it in very simple terms, like you were moved by the video.
What I like about it is, it's not a reproduction of my painting: It's a conversation with my painting. The discursive element of that is far more important than the simple idea of he stole the idea, he co-opted the idea, he did this to the idea. He quoted the idea and then brought something different to it, embedded in the strange thinking that went on in my head as I worked on the picture.

I probably don't have to tell you that Kanye West is a controversial guy. Part of his art is to be provocative, and he's married to a woman who made her name based on fame and the idea of garnering more fame — which some would say has led to this kind of "sleeping" of our larger culture. Are you at all uncomfortable that it has taken someone from the cultural mainstream to give you an amount of notoriety that you might not otherwise have garnered?
I think the people around me are a lot more excited about the notoriety — my kids, my wife, my friends — than I am. I saw this as a meeting of two artists. It represented a kind of tearing down of walls and an indication that even coming from both worlds, the world of the ultra-celebrity hip-hop scene, which I'm not part of, and the ultra-celebrity fine art scene. There's something going on beneath the surface of these things — a kind of undercurrent that is slowly, deliberately, and very consciously and undermining the obnoxiousness of those worlds.

You weren't a collaborator on this project, although it sounds like you're completely flattered by it. But can you imagine any actual collaboration with Kanye West in the future?
Yes, I can. As a matter of fact, we spoke of that.

Did he offer any kind of compensation?
No, I wouldn't have taken it. That would have cheapened the entire endeavor. Believe me, when I saw him, when they revealed this to me, it was a gift. The gift was not the gift of celebrity; the gift was that what I did had strains of ideas, of information in it, that he was able to access and redevelop and realize into a different kind of image. It was a communication of artists. Believe me, I get so many questions now — "Did he pay for you? He'd better be buying a painting" — and I'm saying, this is ridiculous. If art is always created in the service of the almighty dollar, we're really in trouble.

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The dining room for Wolvesmouth: Taxa, a pop-up dining experience as art installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art's Geffen Contemporary location.

Many chefs think of themselves as artists in the kitchen. Craig Thornton has taken it to another level: For the past five months, he's been serving up multi-course meals as part of a room-size installation at the prestigious Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Thornton, 34, is a cult figure in LA's booming food scene. And for this pop-up dining experiment, he whipped up a rococo menu. A typical dish — if typical is a word that even applies — might be a mélange of grilled rib-eye, creamed kimchi, beef tongue, Asian pear and crispy shallot arrayed under a surprisingly purple, squid-ink dumpling skin.

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Chef Craig Thornton, 34, is something of a cult figure in LA's food scene.

That was just one of nine elaborate dishes served within MOCA's Geffen Contemporary location, in what looked like the set of a dystopian Disney film — a space replete with taxidermied deer, wolves and peacocks arranged in a forest of cherry trees, some of them burnt. Wolvesmouth: Taxa, as this unorthodox eating experience was called, just closed after a five-month residency. It was the most recent iteration of a roving restaurant that Thornton has run for years — sometimes in warehouses, sometimes in apartments and usually with more amenities.
"We're cooking in the middle of a museum with no running water," Thornton said ruefully during a recent dinner. "I mean, we have to know how much water we're using." (The answer: 75 to 85 gallons per night.)

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Thornton's menu for Wolvesmouth: Taxa featured nine elaborate dishes. A typical dish might be a mélange of grilled rib-eye, creamed kimchi, beef tongue, Asian pear and crispy shallot arrayed under a surprisingly purple, squid-ink dumpling skin.

It's funny to think that for the past several months, Thornton — a chef behind some of the most coveted reservations in Los Angeles — has had to finish each night lugging and emptying gallons of water into a tiny painters' sink in the back of the museum.

Ordinarily, dining on Thornton's carefully curated meals means months of languishing on waitlists. But at MOCA — two seatings a night, three days a week — Angeleno foodies could pay $225 for a multisensory experience in which art and food were intended to be one seamless experience. For example, one massive sculpture, a 2,000-pound iceberg sculpted from Styrofoam, was planned to complement a dish of chili-seasoned shrimp — "the spice being this kind of metaphor for heat melting glaciers," Thornton explained.

Along with silverware and napkins, diners were furnished with a manifesto of sorts that laid out the chef's thoughts about greed, nature and decay. They were urged to contemplate what it means to consume, and to discuss those thoughts with each other and with the staff busily plating their dinners. Nearby, a sculpture depicts an oil spill and the taxidermied animals are depicted struggling in the muck.

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Diners were urged to contemplate what it means to consume. Near their dinner table, a sculpture depicts an oil spill — the taxidermied animals are depicted struggling in the muck.

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The Chalice of Love
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Mystery of Sleep. "Time is fluid. It's not fixed, rigid, like we like to think, and while we sleep, we lose our perception of time," says Dmitry Piterman, who amassed this collection of Dalí's work.

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Woman Aflame

Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí spent much of the 1940s in the U.S., avoiding World War II and its aftermath. He was a well-known fixture on the art scene in Monterey, Calif. — and that's where the largest collection of Dalí's work on the West Coast is now open to the public.
A week before opening day, everything was still in bubble wrap. But Dmitry Piterman knew where each piece was. The Ukrainian-born real estate developer has collected more than 570 etchings, lithographs, sculptures and tapestries, and he can speak with intimate detail about all of it, while ripping open one bubble-wrapped lithograph after another.

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"Some of the brushes he used had only one hair," Piterman says. "So imagine the meticulousness with which he painted and created his art. That's when jokester Dalí kind of disappeared. But burning giraffes and elephants on their frail little legs, all that is part of his work and part of kind of the provoking Dalí."

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A gold flower-and-myrtle-leaf wreath, thought to have belonged to one of Alexander the Great's stepmothers, is now on display at the National Geographic Museum.

The news out of Greece in the past several years has been pretty bad. An ongoing economic crisis has resulted in an unemployment rate that's hovering around 25 percent — currently, there's a major exodus of young, educated Greeks. And more than a million refugees and migrants have poured into the country in the past year and a half. So what is the Greek government doing in response? For one thing, it's sent a big art exhibition to Washington, D.C.

The show, which opened in June and runs through early October, is called "The Greeks: Agamemnon to Alexander the Great." It's a survey of 5,000 years of Greek art and artifacts. Most of the items have never left their homeland before. This stop in Washington is the last on a tour that also included the Field Museum and two stops in Canada: at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, near Ottowa, and the Pointe-à-Callière Montréal Archeology and History Complex in Montreal.

"We wanted, in the beginning of the economic crisis in Greece, to show really what Greece is, and really what Greeks are," says Maria Vlazaki. Vlazaki is the secretary general of Greece's Ministry of Culture and Sports. She's also an archaeologist, and she is one of the curators of this show; some of her finds are on display in "The Greeks."

Vlazaki has been planning this exhibition since 2010 — not long after the global financial meltdown began.

She points out the Greek government lends items all the time, and the National Geographic Museum originally suggested that they work together on an exhibition of ancient Greek artifacts. But she is also very straightforward about one of the reasons that this show of more than 500 objects is touring the U.S. right now: She wants to inspire tourists.

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Three figurines from the Cycladic islands, which are roughly 5,000 years old, are on display at the National Geographic Museum.

"They see so many masterpieces and also things of daily life, that I think they will be very interested to visit Greece, because they will see how Western civilization has been inspired by Greece," says Vlazaki.

Among the oldest items on display are mysterious, angular little figurines from roughly five thousand years ago, from the Cycladic islands.
"It looks like modern art," says archaeologist and National Geographic Fellow Fred Hiebert. Hiebert is the co-curator of "The Greeks," and he says that he is still stunned by how willing the Greek museums and archaeological sites were to lend out some of their most valuable treasures.

Hiebert and Vlazaki lead me through the show. "We're coming to a section here which is from a site museum that I never, ever thought we would ever borrow from," he explains, "because it's the royal burials of the kings of northern Greece at the time of Philip the Great and Alexander the Great."

We're standing by a case that contains a finely wrought wreath made of dozens of tiny, very delicate and detailed flowers and myrtle leaves, cut from thin sheets of gold. It was thought to be made for Queen Meda, one of Alexander the Great's stepmothers.
"When we were putting this in the case," he says, "it glimmered and jiggled with every slight breeze. It's absolutely the most amazing piece of work I've ever seen."

But will visitors who see these treasures then want to go to Greece on vacation? Could the show even help foreigners reframe their perceptions about this struggling country?

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A Jan Davidsz de Heem still life with ham, lobster and fruit, circa 1653

The table is set for dinner. Small cooked crabs and shrimp are laid out on the thick wooden tabletop next to succulent figs, grapes, pears and types of produce you can't even name. There's a citrus with a long coiling peel draped around it, and an entire roast of some animal's leg that's been cut down the middle — so you can see the thick layer of fat running around the edge. Just for good measure, a red lobster and ornate goblet of wine stand on a pedestal above it.

If this meal were laid out in 2016, you'd get out your phone and Instagram a perfectly filtered photo before digging in, #foodporn. But in the 1600s, when famous still life artist Jan Davidsz de Heem was eating, people showed off their meals with paintings instead.

A new study by Cornell's Food and Brand Lab found that capturing and showing off decadent and expensive meals is a decidedly old-fashioned practice. Brian Wansink, author of Slim by Design, and Andrew Weislogel, a curator at Cornell University's Johnson Museum of Art, studied 140 paintings of "family meals" from 1500 to 2000 and found that the majority of foods depicted were not part of the average fare. Some of the most likely foods to appear were shellfish, ham and artichoke. For the common classes during the time these paintings were made, Wansink says, more likely items to eat would have been chicken, bread and the odd foraged fruit.

People don't usually Instagram frozen foods they put in the microwave. Instead, the most successful #foodporn is often an item the photographer laboriously made in the kitchen or found in either an expensive or out-of-the-way restaurant. A recent top #foodporn on Instagram is a photo of seven elaborately decorated eclairs. In the caption the food blogger behind @dialaskitchen compares the Toronto-made pastries to some found a couple years ago, "while at L'atellier de l'éclair in Paris."

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Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874 – 1939)
The Hour of Tea

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Those sunset photos look awesome! I love the way the colors blend.

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A wealthy American living in Paris, Romaine Brooks had the freedom to paint whatever and however she wanted. Don't let her sober, 1923 Self-Portrait fool you — Smithsonian curator Virginia Mecklenburg says in the 1910s and 1920s, Brooks and her circle of friends had plenty of fun in Paris.

Twentieth century painter Romaine Brooks introduces herself in a 1923 self-portrait: She wears a narrowly cut, long, black riding jacket with a white blouse. She has short, cropped hair and her eyes are shadowed by a black high hat. There's the slightest smudge of maybe pink on her lips — otherwise the whole portrait is black and various shades of gray.

An American who lived in Paris, Brooks conveys loneliness, strength and vulnerability, says Joe Lucchesi, consulting curator an exhibit of Brooks' work at the Smithsonian — "a kind of care-worn but very strong presence all combined in one."

Brooks painted androgynous women and depicted nudes so melancholy they'd make Renoir's pinky ladies weep. She left most of her work to the American Art Museum, where her work is currently on view.
The women she paints share a severe palette and a certain mood. In their man-tailored jackets, their aesthetic sensibilities, their intense love relationships, Brooks' women moved in the artistic circles of 1920s Paris. Poets, novelists, socialites, photographers and painters, they were fashionable and rich. Their money helped insulate them from social constraints of their day.

In Brooks' case, money freed her to paint whatever and however she wanted — the unconventional, androgynous women, the limited, gloomy palette — and to ignore what her Big Guy contemporaries were doing — Picasso and Matisse, whose vivid and revolutionary canvases filled the homes of Gertrude Stein and family.

"She really painted as though Picasso and Matisse didn't exist," Lucchesi says.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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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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.

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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."

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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

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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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A major retrospective at Tate Britain showcases more than 60 years of Hockney's art. Above, is his 1972 work, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures).

Painter David Hockney once said, "It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work." On Thursday in London, a major retrospective at Tate Britain will give visitors the chance to see 60 years of the English artist's "doings."

Oils, acrylics, sketches, photographs, smartphone drawings — Hockney has worked in every medium. He's one of the best-known contemporary artists and his works sell for millions.

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Hockney's paintings are full of vivid, saturated colors. Above is his 2000 work, Going Up Garrowby Hill.

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A virtual reality installation allows visitors to experience a doll's perspective as she's poked and prodded by a lab assistant.
Susana Bates for Drew Altizer Photography/Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery

The musician and multimedia artist has co-created an immersive experience designed to make people aware of their implicit biases. It's called "The Institute Presents: Neurosociety."

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Willard Leroy Metcalf (1858-1925)
Havana Harbor

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The director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art resigned this week. His departure underscores financial difficulties the museum is facing.


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Students from Central Saint Martins art school in London work behind Gustav Metzger, after his worldwide call for a Day of Action to Remember Nature in 2015.

At the heart of Gustav Metzger's best-known work rests a seeming contradiction: The truest work of creation contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Working with acids and liquid crystals, Metzger often made his art to fall apart, break down or disappear entirely — and in doing so, better reflect the crumbling world around it.
Metzger, the inventor of "auto-destructive art," died Wednesday in London at the age of 90. But long before his final days, he regularly confronted the implications of death in both his art and ecological activism.

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Thomas Gainsborough's 1785 painting Mr and Mrs William Hallett (The Morning Walk) was attacked at The National Gallery in London on Saturday.

A man entered the National Gallery in London on Saturday afternoon, approached a painting by British master Thomas Gainsborough, and proceeded to attack it with a "sharp object."

A Metropolitan Police Service spokesman tells NPR that a 63-year-old man named Keith Gregory, "of no fixed abode," was charged with causing criminal damage to a National Gallery painting.

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For decades, the 61-year-old artist has depicted black lives on canvas. He says inclusion in museums must not be contingent on "whether somebody likes you ... or somebody's being generous to you."

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French artist Abraham Poincheval sits over real chicken eggs until they hatch at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

An artist is sitting on a chair in a Paris art museum over a dozen chicken eggs until they hatch. This is not an April Fools' joke.

"I will, broadly speaking, become a chicken," says Abraham Poincheval, a French performance artist who has recently also had himself encased inside a bear, where he ate worms and beetles, and then inside a limestone rock, where he thought, slept and slurped soup.

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The Charging Bull and Fearless Girl square off in New York City's financial district. Arturo Di Modica, the bull's sculptor, says the girl staring it down has changed the meaning of his work in an unwelcome way.

So far in her young life, New York City's Fearless Girl has drawn countless tourists, a metric ton of media coverage and its fair share of praise as a symbol of the fight for gender equity — so much, in fact, that the statue staring down the financial district's famous Charging Bull recently got a new lease on life, at least through 2018.
For at least one person, though, the Girl has offered less than welcome company.

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The Barmecide Feast, by Simon Birch and KplusK associates (which was co-founded by Paul Kember), recreates the bedroom from the final scene of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You really have to go out of your way to get to the 14th Factory, a new pop-up art space in the industrial area of Lincoln Heights, east of downtown Los Angeles. It's housed in an enormous building the size of a Costco warehouse and it sits across the street from an old, abandoned city jail.
The first of many gallery spaces you enter is almost pitch black. When your eyes adjust, you see giant metal shards that look like an asteroid has imploded. At the center, you step inside an almost blindingly bright white room and find yourself in the bedroom from the final scene of Stanley Kubrick's classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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"It's such a perfect symbol and metaphor for the entire project," says artist Simon Birch, the man responsible for the unusual, immersive experience that is the 14th Factory. Birch is a tall, lanky Brit and a big sci-fi fan. He says he always wanted to recreate that Kubrick set, but it took a stroke of luck to make it happen. All the models and props from 2001 had been destroyed under Kubrick's orders, so Birch asked his architect friend Paul Kember to rebuild the set for him.
"Paul got up from the table with a smile on his face," Birch recalls. "He says, 'I don't need to watch the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey to work out the dimensions of that room. I just need to call my uncle Tony.' He says, 'Well, my uncle Tony just happened to be Stanley Kubrick's chief draftsman/ set designer and built that original room.' "

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