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Fine Arts News
Detroit Museum Not The First To Consider Selling Out
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Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Postman Roulin is part of the collection in the city-owned Detroit Institute of Arts. The financially troubled city of Detroit is eyeing the sale of its prized artworks.
aPic/Getty Images
Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Postman Roulin is part of the collection in the city-owned Detroit Institute of Arts. The financially troubled city of Detroit is eyeing the sale of its prized artworks.
aPic/Getty Images
Detroit doesn't have to wait for Antiques Roadshow to come to town to know the city owns priceless treasures. The city-owned Detroit Institute of Arts holds works by van Gogh, Matisse, Renoir and other artists that could bring in tens of millions of dollars each.
And they just might sell. With the city more than $15 billion in debt, Kevyn Orr, the state-appointed emergency manager trying to straighten out Detroit's finances, has asked the museum to inventory its works with an eye toward potentially selling them off.
It's a scenario that has people in the art world up in arms. When Edsel Ford commissioned Diego Rivera to paint murals for the museum back in 1932, he wasn't thinking they might be sold in 2013 to pay for pensions.
"To sell off artwork to pay for a city's general debt is unconscionable," says Kathleen Bernhardt, an art dealer in Chicago. "It's a short-term sell-off of a magnificent part of their heritage."
Museums sell works all the time, but typically not their best stuff. When they do sell, it's to get rid of pieces that don't suit the collection. They use the money to buy new works that are a better fit. They're not supposed to use the money to buy computers or pay down debt, according to industry standards.
But when museums aren't free-standing institutions, as is the case in Detroit, the larger entities that control them sometimes can't help but see dollar signs. The van Goghs are just hanging there, waiting to be put up for auction.
"A lot of institutions are gun-shy about trumpeting what the size of their assets [is], so that a trustee is not tempted to sell them off," says Kris Anderson, director of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington.
Some Universities Want To Sell
All museums have to inventory their works for insurance purposes. But Anderson says the bottom line has been more closely held information ever since Brandeis University talked about selling off the entire collection of its Rose Art Museum back in 2009.
"In the case of Brandeis, you had a truly visionary president who did so much good for the university, but got caught up in a very short-term temptation to look at an easy fix," says Michael Rush, who then served as Rose's director. "To our way of thinking, the university was really selling its birthright by even considering selling its collection."
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Brandeis University considered selling off the collection of its Rose Art Museum in 2009 but later decided against the move.
Essdras M. Suarez/Boston Globe via Getty Images
Brandeis University considered selling off the collection of its Rose Art Museum in 2009 but later decided against the move.
Essdras M. Suarez/Boston Globe via Getty Images
It was a common consideration during the depths of the recession. Faced with financial problems and endowments battered by the stock market plunge, a number of museums thought long and hard about selling off works.
The temptation was especially strong for universities, which aren't shy about selling off art galleries, campus radio stations or other assets they don't view as part of their prime mission.
In 2005, Fisk University began a seven-year legal battle to shed a number of its works, including a famous painting by Georgia O'Keeffe. In 2008, Randolph College in Virginia sold a Rufino Tamayo painting for $7.2 million and put three other major works in storage at the auction house Christie's, waiting for the market to improve.
But it's not just universities. The Field Museum in Chicago over the past decade has sold off numerous works by noted Western artist George Catlin. An internal report this year suggested that the museum's rare book collection might fetch $50 million on the open market.
Putting Money Over Sentiment
Last year, Fisk University reached an agreement with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, which was founded by Alice Walton, a Wal-Mart heiress. Crystal Bridges paid Fisk $30 million to share the rights to a collection of 101 pieces that had been donated by O'Keeffe back in 1949.
In essence, Crystal Bridges bought a time share. The museum will hold and display the works for two years out of four, while Fisk keeps them the other two years.
"We do think that we have the best of both worlds," says Edwina Harris Hamby, Fisk's vice president for institutional advancement. "We still have a 50 percent share in the collection and all of our students will have access to it."
She says many more people will be able to see the works, since they are also available for viewing at Crystal Bridges.
"Ironically, we did not have a lot of people coming to view the collection, before it became the great issue in court for seven years," Hamby says.
Selling Off Assets
It obviously hurts a museum's reputation when it sells off — or is forced to sell off — its greatest works. It's kind of like a baker who decides to sell off his oven to satisfy his debts. Once the oven is gone, what's left for the baker to do?
"Your collection is from a strategic point of view one of the most valuable resources you have to generate excitement among the public and among donors who will help support the museum," says Russell Lewis, executive vice president of the Chicago History Museum. "Once you go down that path of selling something that has a high value and is part of the legacy collection, you're going to have a hard time attracting donors."
And, once the van Gogh is gone, it can't help you sustain payments for staff salaries or medical care. "Overcoming budget problems by selling art collections seems all too easy, but it's all too shortsighted," says Rush, the former Brandeis museum director who now directs the Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University.
Still, he notes, in the case of Brandeis, preventing proposed sales really came down to the question of whether a state attorney general thinks the museum is violating donor intent or is somehow in breach of its tax-exempt status.
"The truth with Brandeis is the university would have gone on its merry way if the board hadn't brought suit and gotten sympathy from the attorney general," Rush says.
In the end, Brandeis settled a lawsuit and decided against selling its artwork.
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British Designer Ozwald Boateng's Dream To Dress Africa
Ozwald Boateng's Style
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Ozwald Boateng was the youngest and first black tailor to have a shop on London's prestigious Savile Row, a street renowned for its fine tailoring, where the world's royalty come for their attire.
Boateng also dresses athletic and Hollywood royalty. Actor Laurence Fishburne once said, "When you wear an Ozwald Boateng suit, you become a statesman of cool." Boateng is also a statesman for something else: the future development of Africa.
He joined Tell Me More host Michel Martin to talk about style and diplomacy.
Interview Highlights
On discovering his talent
"I fell in love in college with this really amazing girl who could paint and draw with both hands. And she is the reason why I design clothes. She basically pointed me in the direction to discovering my talent."
On dressing men
"I think men dress for women, definitely. But also they dress for themselves — if they understand that what they are wearing makes them feel better about themselves. I mean, the big thing for men is confidence. And so I like to believe that what I create enables men to be more confident about who they are."
On investment in Africa
"It's funny. So someone always asks me a question: 'So how did you get into this passionate place on infrastructure?' And it's, you know, quite simple: I just want to open shops back home."
On President Obama's upcoming trip to Africa
"I think Africa has always been very excited about Obama. You know, he just demonstrated the possibility and he allowed many Africans to dream. So bearing that in mind, and bearing in mind that he goes to Africa carrying that lantern of promise, he needs to use that. ... He needs to engage in Africa in really unlocking its potential. I think he should invest in Africa infrastructure the same way the Chinese are doing. And he needs to be more involved. And I actually think that if he can get Africa to a place where it's a proper partner for the world, I think the world will be in a much better place. So if we get it right in Africa, we get it right for everybody."
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The Art Of Life: Claes Oldenburg At MOMA
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Claes Oldenburg with his Floor Cone (1962) in front of Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, 1963.
Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio/Museum of Modern Art
Claes Oldenburg with his Floor Cone (1962) in front of Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, 1963.
Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio/Museum of Modern Art
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Oldenburg's fascination with simple, everyday objects often led him to food as a subject, as with Pastry Case, I, 1961-62.
Claes Oldenburg/Museum of Modern Art
Oldenburg's fascination with simple, everyday objects often led him to food as a subject, as with Pastry Case, I, 1961-62.
Claes Oldenburg/Museum of Modern Art
The sculptor Claes Oldenburg was born in Stockholm but grew up in Chicago, went to Yale and came to New York in 1956, where he became a key player in the pop art movement — the major counter-reaction to the abstract expressionism that dominated the 1950s. So much for art history.
Although Oldenburg is a serious artist, probably no artist in history ever created works that were more fun. In a new show at the Museum of Modern Art — really two shows — practically everyone, including myself, was walking through the galleries with a huge grin.
Though some of the images are unsettling: In the first and scarier part of the exhibit, the objects are from Oldenburg's 1960 shows called The Street — images inspired by his living on New York's Lower East Side. These are figures and objects, many of them suspended from the ceiling, made out of cardboard and burlap, nightmarish but also childlike, brown with black edges as if they were charred. There's a wall tag for a piece called Fire From a Window that took me a while to find, because it's a small board sticking out from the edge of a wall high up above the gallery — like a flame leaping out of a building.
The second and larger part of the exhibit is called The Store, and these include some of Oldenburg's most iconic images from the early '60s. And here's where the smiles begin to widen.
The objects are mostly plaster applied to chicken wire, or canvas stuffed with foam rubber — all sorts of things you can find in stores. Pants and shirts. Furniture. A whole lingerie counter with a mirrored top. And most deliciously, there's food. Glorious food. Succulent slices of pie and cake.
In an exhibition-catalog entry in 1961, Oldenburg made a famous manifesto: "I am for the art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper. I am for an art that is smoked, like a cigarette, smells, like a pair of shoes. I am for an art that flaps like a flag, or helps blow noses, like a handkerchief. I am for an art that is put on and taken off, like pants, which develops holes, like socks, which is eaten, like a piece of pie ... "
At the MoMA show, there's a huge 9-foot-long wedge of cake called Floor Cake sitting on the floor next to a 7-foot-wide hamburger, called Floor Burger, that you have to walk around. "I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs," Oldenburg wrote. "I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete." Lying near the gigantic hamburger is the 11-foot-long Floor Cone. I particularly loved the small burlap and plaster Baked Potato, with its pat of melting butter, and the Banana Sundae, with its accompanying spoon painted with drips of enamel ice cream.
An actor, Hamlet says, holds a mirror up to nature. Just so, Oldenburg's art reflects the lives we live. "I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life, that twists and extends impossibly and accumulates and spits and drips, and is sweet and stupid as life itself."
It's both high tragedy and low comedy that for most of us our lives are so ordinary, that everything in The Store is for sale, our daily commerce. But that's part of the joy and pain of this wonderful exhibit that makes us smile so hard at the idea that our ordinary lives are so completely surrounded by, and enmeshed in, potential works of art.
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A Paris Vacation For Nashville Millionaires' French Art
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Spencer and Marlene Hays' collection of French art usually adorns the walls of their Nashville home, an exact replica of a French palace. But for a few months, those pieces are back in their country of origin, on loan to the Musee d'Orsay.
John Schweikert/Courtesy Musee d'Orsay
Spencer and Marlene Hays' collection of French art usually adorns the walls of their Nashville home, an exact replica of a French palace. But for a few months, those pieces are back in their country of origin, on loan to the Musee d'Orsay.
John Schweikert/Courtesy Musee d'Orsay
To say that Nashvillean Spencer Hays is crazy for French art is an understatement. "French art just quickens our step, fires our spirit and touches our heart," he says.
Hays' passion began when he was in his 30s. By then he was already a millionaire; Forbes estimated his worth at $400 million in 1997, money earned from book-selling and clothing businesses. Hays had humble beginnings.
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In 1891, the artists and lifelong friends Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard created complementary portraits of each other. Here, Bonnard's portrait of Vuillard emphasizes the painter's red beard.
Courtesy Musee d'Orsay
"When Marlene and I grew up in a little old town in Texas, even visiting France was far beyond our expectations," Hays says. "But in 1971, we made our first trip to Paris, and our love affair with this wonderful country began. We've returned every year, and our passion has grown."
As the Hayses' love of France grew, so did their collection of French art. Some of their pieces have now made it back to their country of origin: created in France and brought to Tennessee, the Hays Collection is currently on display in Paris at the Musee d'Orsay. Guy Cogeval, the head of the museum, says he's impressed by Hays' passion. "Very, very rarely in my life," he says, "did I see a person so much in love with French art."
Cogeval says the Hayses' Francophilia shows in the home that they built in Nashville, Tennessee — "a real palace," Cogeval says. That's no exaggeration: Spencer Hays' house is an exact replica of a palace built in France in 1724.
"He wanted to use the limestone from Paris and he wanted every button, every opening, every faucet exactly to be French," Cogeval says. The Hayses raided French antique shops for the furniture and silverware to fill the house, and inside that Nashville palace they installed all the French art they'd been collecting.
Friends And 'Prophets'
Many of the works in their collection were made in the 1890s by artists called the Nabis — French for "prophets." These painters moved beyond impressionism, using flat colors and Japanese-inspired composition. Two of the Nabis — Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard — were lifelong friends.
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Vuillard's 1891 portrait of Bonnard is an intimate depiction of an artist at work. Both portraits are part of the Hays Collection, currently on display at the Musee d'Orsay.
Courtesy Musee d'Orsay
Vuillard's 1891 portrait of Bonnard is an intimate depiction of an artist at work. Both portraits are part of the Hays Collection, currently on display at the Musee d'Orsay.
Courtesy Musee d'Orsay
"We have a wonderful painting by Bonnard of Vuillard and then Vuillard of Bonnard," Hays says. "And they were in their 20s when they each did that of the other."
Bonnard's 1891 painting of Vuillard shows his friend in profile. "His beard is so red you can't believe it," Hays says. "The colors are so strong, and you can see the curls in his beard. And you can just tell the passion they had for each other and the movement."
Red-headed Vuillard, in the same year, paints Bonnard making art. Isabelle Cahn, curator of the Musee d'Orsay show, says Bonnard seems intent on the brush he's holding. "He doesn't look at us. He look[s] very carefully to his drawing or his painting," she says. "It is a very intimate portrait."
A Bright Portrait Of Infidelity
These are early works, not great ones. But Guy Cogeval says that a decade later Edouard Vuillard had developed a rather healthy ego. "In the year 1900 he's 32 years old, and he considers himself one of the greatest living artists and the savior of art," Cogeval says.
Fans of Vuillard, like the Hayses, would agree. And in this Musee d'Orsay show, you can see the eye of the artist, and his collectors, develop as the years go by. In 1895, Vuillard made a terrific painting, A table (Le Dejeuner), which curator Isabelle Cahn says depicts a scandal.
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A table (Le Dejeuner), a 1892 oil painting by Edouard Vuillard, appears to show a quiet domestic scene. But Isabelle Cahn, the curator of a new show at the Musee d'Orsay, says this painting actually depicts a scandal-ridden household.
Courtesy Musee d'Orsay
A table (Le Dejeuner), a 1892 oil painting by Edouard Vuillard, appears to show a quiet domestic scene. But Isabelle Cahn, the curator of a new show at the Musee d'Orsay, says this painting actually depicts a scandal-ridden household.
Courtesy Musee d'Orsay
"This scene is about infidelity," she says. At first glance, the painting seems to be depicting a nice family meal: An old lady, a bearded man and a young woman in a red, lace-trimmed blouse sit around a dining table. It seems benign enough. But the bearded fellow is in motion. "A lot of men I know, when they get angry at the table, they push back," Hays observes. "And that's what he's doing."
The woman in the red and lace blouse is Vuillard's sister Marie; she's married to the bearded table-pusher, Ker-Xavier Roussel, another Nabi, who's Vuillard's closest friend. Roussel is consistently unfaithful — he's cheating on his best friend's sister.
Cogeval says that the brothers-in-law remained best friends, even as Roussel kept up his scandalous behavior. "He did that for a very long time," Cogeval says. "During the '30s he was still bringing models, women models, into his atelier, and wished the family to go upstairs and leave him alone inside the atelier." Cogeval found the evidence of this family drama in letters and diaries — see how much fun art experts can have?
Financial Donations, Artistic Value
The owners of that Vuillard with the racy backstory, Marlene and Spencer Hays of Nashville, Tenn., have helped to launch the American Friends Musee d'Orsay. The group will attempt to bring American money to the great French museum at a time when national budgets are tight. Certainly a help to the Musee. Did it also help get the Hays Collection onto the walls of the Orsay?
"This is an amazing collection," curator Isabelle Cahn says. "When Spencer came before the opening of the exhibition, he told me that he was afraid that his collection was not at the same level as the paintings and the sculpture in the Musee d'Orsay. But now we know that it is the same level. It is why it is so beautiful, and we are so happy to have it."
Not all visitors may agree. But in Spencer Hays' view, the pictures he's collected over the years, especially the works of the Nabis, are indeed marvelous.
"Every night before I go to bed," he says. "I spend at least 45 minutes to an hour plus walking around looking at every painting. Because that's what's so wonderful about the Nabis — you can always discover something else."
More than 100 works of art from the Marlene and Spencer Hays Collection are on view at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris until mid-August. So for at least a little while, Spencer Hays might find his nighttime prowls a bit curtailed.
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At 90, Ellsworth Kelly Brings Joy With Colorful Canvases
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Ellsworth Kelly, Yellow Relief over Red, 2004. Oil on canvas, two joined panels, 80 x 83 x 2 3/4 inches. Private collection.
Jerry L. Thompson/Courtesy of Ellsworth Kelly
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Ellsworth Kelly, White Black Red, 2004. Oil on canvas, three joined panels, 81 3/8 x 40 1/2 inches. Private collection.
Jerry L. Thompson/Courtesy of Ellsworth Kelly
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Ellsworth Kelly, Black Diagonal, 2007. Oil on canvas, two joined panels, 103 1/4 x 56 5/8 x 2 3/4 inches. Private collection.
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Ellsworth Kelly, White Diagonal II, 2008. Oil on canvas, two joined panels, 66 1/2 x 91 x 2 5/8 inches. Private collection.
American artist Ellsworth Kelly turned 90 in May, and there's been much celebration. On Wednesday, President Obama presented Kelly with the National Medal of Arts. Meanwhile, museums around the country are showing his work: Kelly sculptures, prints and paintings are on view in New York, Philadelphia and Detroit. In Washington, D.C., the Phillips Collection is featuring his flat geometric canvases, layered to create wall sculptures.
These Kelly works seem baffling at first, maybe scoff-worthy — simple, solid canvases of color. But if you crouch and bend to inspect the shadows that the combinations of canvases cast on the gallery walls, you can start having fun with them.
At the Phillips Collection, museum director Dorothy Kosinski does exactly that. "With the shadows he introduces maybe another color, a gray, and certainly another dimension," Kosinski says. "It almost reads like a box."
The Phillips is showing seven Kelly works, each featuring multiple canvases painted in solid, bright colors. One piece has four separate panels in a row: a green rectangle, a blue rectangle, a black square, a red-orange square. Kosinski, who says Kelly is one of the major 20th century American painters, sees perfection in these panels.
"The entire wall becomes part of a very demanding, rigorous and yet terrifically exuberant composition," she says. "Isn't it exuberant?" Indeed, the gallery feels cheerful — and, at the same time, serene.
Kelly himself was not feeling so cheerful the day museum director Kosinski spoke of exuberance. He'd been at a Phillips dinner the night before, felt ill the next morning, and went back home to Spencertown, N.Y. He missed the 90th-birthday party the museum put together, with champagne, birthday cake and the obligatory birthday song.
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Artist Ellsworth Kelly, shown here in April at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, turned 90 this May.
Matt Rourke/AP
A week later, by phone, Kelly was reluctant to discuss his art: "I don't really talk about my work unless I'm with it," he says. But he agrees to discuss someone else's artwork — a famous Renoir, reproduced in a big Phillips Collection art book.
"I'm trying to find it," Kelly says. "It's after the Matisse, I think, isn't it? ... I have to put my glasses on."
Renoir's joyful, jubilant The Luncheon of the Boating Party, from 1881, is the Phillips Collection's best-loved work. In it, sun-dappled men and women finish off a delicious meal, and wine, on a riverside porch.
"The happiness that [Renoir] was able to get into the picture is very visible," Kelly says. "I don't know if Americans have painted a picture quite like this."
As a very young artist, Kelly tried painting like Renoir and others — real-life scenes, people, landscapes. In the 1950s he shifted to his crisp abstract shapes: no narratives, nothing going on but color.
"I learned my color in Europe," Kelly says. "I've always been a colorist, I think. I started when I was very young, being a bird-watcher, fascinated by the bird colors."
Kelly came back from studying in Paris with a series of flat, geometric panels in the color spectrum — the colors you see when light hits a prism.
"Each color had to have its own canvas. ... I feel that I like color in its strongest sense," Kelly says. "I don't like mixed colors that much, like plum color or deep, deep colors that are hard to define. I liked red, yellow, blue, black and white — [that] was what I started with."
And he's still at it. Kelly has been making his layered, flat-colored, geometric panels for 60 years now. When he began, other young artists were busy with abstract expressionism; Jackson Pollock, with his ropes of thick paint, was the man of the moment. Kelly — well, he was not.
"It was a very hard job doing it all myself, getting to where I am," he says. "And I'm still continuing that exploration of color and form."
Kelly didn't get attention until the 1960s, when pop artists like Andy Warhol[ and Roy Lichtenstein came along with their strong, clear colors. His persistence over the years has had a sweet goal: "I've always wanted ... I wanted to give people joy," he says.
His art gives him joy, too — when asked to name the best thing about being 90, he mentions his work. "I feel like I'm 20 in my head," he says. "My painting makes me feel good, but my body is not the same as it was when I was 20, 40 or 60. I just feel like I can live on. I hope I can reach 100. I think today if you just keep doing, keep working, that — maybe that's possible."
By the time the Phillips show closes in September, it's a good bet that in his upstate New York studio, Ellsworth Kelly will have produced more new — and often joy-giving — works.
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What Do Cameras And Combat Have In Common?
War/Photography is a genre-defining exhibition currently on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. And also the last place I wanted to find myself on a sunny midweek morning.
As a photojournalist and picture editor, I've consumed my fair share of conflict photography, essays and films. How could this exhibition possibly be any different from all the other shows I've seen in this vein?
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Training on the beach outside Barcelona, Spain, 1936
Gerda Taro/International Center of Photography
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A U.S. Marine Corps drill instructor delivers a severe reprimand to a recruit, Parris Island, S.C., 1970.
Thomas Hoepker/Magnum
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Boarding of the transport ship Ajana, Melbourne, Australia, 1916
Josiah Barnes
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Naked Or Nude? Wesselmann's Models Are A Little Bit Of Both
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Smoker #1, 1967. Oil on shaped canvas, in two parts, 9.87 x 7.1 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
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Great American Nude #35, 1962. Enamel, polymer, found materials on board, 48"H x 60"W, 121.92 cm x 152.4 cm. Gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis.
Travis Fullerton /Virginia Museum of Fine Arts/Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
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Sunset Nude, Floral Blanket, 2003. Oil on canvas, 91 x 120 in.
Jeffrey Sturges/Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
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Bedroom Painting #39, 1978. Oil on canvas, 96"H x 117½"W, 243.7 cm x 298.3 cm. Gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis.
Ron Jennings/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts/Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
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Study for Great American Nude #57, 1964. Pencil on paper, 8.875 x 11.875 in.
Mugrabi Collection/Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
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Sixties pop artist Tom Wesselmann liked women, and saluted them on his canvases — or, sometimes, just parts of them: perfect glossy red mouths with lips parted to reveal pink tongues; nipples, even on the oranges he paints. These are just a few of the images that might make you blush in a Wesselmann retrospective now on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.
"I don't think you could ask for a more literal interpretation of the objectification of parts of the female body," says curator Sarah Eckhardt.
Before these large works focusing only on closely observed individual body parts, Wesselmann painted a series of full nudes, sprawling indiscreetly against patriotic backgrounds with red, white and blue stripes, and some stars.
The Great American Nude series was Wesselmann's best-known work. Painted in the 1960s, the large canvases featured the colors of Old Glory, sprawly nudes, and on the walls behind them, pasted clippings from magazines: a portrait of George Washington, a photograph of JFK, a reproduction of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, the Mona Lisa. What's going on here?
Curator Sylvia Yount says Wesselmann was paying tribute to an artistic tradition: "[He was] putting himself into that larger pantheon of artists who are dealing with the mainstay of art history: the female nude."
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Nearly 100 years after Edouard Manet painted his scandalous 1863 Olympia, Tom Wesselmann created The Great American Nude #26.
And he was jockeying himself, as an American artist, into that pantheon. Some of Wesselmann's paintings are funny: Great American Nude #26 (he doesn't do fancy titles), which he painted in 1962, is a very pink figure, lying on what looks like a blue bedspread. On a table behind her, Wesselmann has pasted pictures of various objects cut out of magazines: a man's brimmed hat, a Siamese cat, liquor bottles, a half-eaten chocolate cake, a six-pack of Coke ...
It's a contrast to Manet's scandalous 1863 painting Olympia, in which a nude prostitute reclines on white sheets, ignoring the black maid behind her holding an enormous bouquet of flowers. Wesselmann's 1962 nude gets cake — different times, different tastes.
Now, in 2013, Wesselmann's tastes seem insulting to feminist eyes — seeing women only as sex objects. But curator Sarah Eckhardt says in the pre-feminist '60s (those Playboy and pinup days) women were objectified that way. And if these paintings shock us today, that's part of a long artistic tradition.
"If there's something to resist in Wesselmann, it's something that could be resisted in almost any of the nudes in art history," Eckhardt says.
In fine art, the female body is a nude. In not-so-fine art, she's naked. In Richmond, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art's Wesselmann show has a bit of both.
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Civil War's First African-American Infantry Remembered In Bronze
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Boston's Shaw Memorial sits at the corner of Beacon and Park Streets.
Andrea Shea/WBUR
Boston's Shaw Memorial sits at the corner of Beacon and Park Streets.
Andrea Shea/WBUR
The Shaw Memorial, by American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, stands 11 feet by 14 feet, like a giant bronze diorama, on the corner of Boston Common. In it, 40 or so black soldiers march to war alongside their white colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, on horseback.
The statue memorializes the first African-American volunteer infantry unit of the Civil War, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, which was crushed 150 years ago Thursday in a battle at Fort Wagner in South Carolina.
"It shows in their stance, in their eyes, their pride, and it shows them marching out of Boston for what they know is going to be a sea change in the history of their generation," says Beverly Morgan-Welch, executive director of the Museum of African-American History in Boston.
The Men Had To Be Part Of It
In the 1989 film Glory, Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew, abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Shaw's father introduce the watershed idea of a regiment of black soldiers. The Shaw Memorial is also cinematic — it has the kind of movement you'd expect to see in the frame of a movie, says Henry Duffy, curator of the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, N.H., where the 19th century artist lived and worked.
Another mammoth Shaw Memorial rises up from the estate's well-groomed grounds. In the front, the procession is led by a drummer, but half the drum is outside the frame of the picture. In the back, the last soldier's legs are cut off. It gives you a sense that there's more happening both in front and behind.
The meticulous Saint-Gaudens trained in Paris. He was already world famous when a committee in Boston commissioned him to make a monument in 1883.
"He was originally focusing just on Col. Shaw," Duffy says, "and it was Shaw's parents who told him, 'No, if you're going to do a monument to our son, you have to include his men, because he was dedicated to his men and the men have to be part of it.' "
A Haunting Sacrifice
Recruiting black soldiers was strategic and symbolic during the Civil War. The carnage was far worse than expected, and the Union needed more men. President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect in January 1863, enabled newly freed slaves to join. Shaw, the son of a wealthy Boston abolitionist, chose to fight with the 54th at Fort Wagner rather than command from the sidelines. Six hundred men stormed the fort; 272 died. Shaw, just 25 years old, was the first to fall, making him a hero to his surviving men and the rest of the Union.
Duffy says he thinks the colonel's sacrifice inspired Saint-Gaudens to the point of obsession. He was supposed to complete his commission in six months — instead he took 14 years.
"It haunted him," Duffy says. "I think he just couldn't get it out of his mind."
Even after installing the first sculpture in Boston, the artist continued to tinker with other versions for three more years. Finally, he stopped with the one at his home in New Hampshire.
"I think, like Shaw himself, Saint-Gaudens had his eyes opened," Duffy says. "He had never had much to do with black people, just like Shaw, so that when he had to do this he was faced with having to, for the first time in his life, I think, look at people and not stereotypes."
Saint-Gaudens sat for hours with black models in his studio. The realistic faces he captured have stirred people from the moment the Boston memorial was dedicated in 1897, including writer Henry James, poet Robert Lowell and composer Charles Ives.
"[The] Shaw Memorial is the first time black Americans were ever portrayed in a work of sculpture as heroic," says historian and Bostonian David McCullough, "otherwise they were background. But here they are the heroes who would, many of them, pay the ultimate price."
That's one reason the Boston's Black Heritage Trail walking tour starts at Saint-Gauden's memorial.
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For Judd Family, Home Is Where The (Rectilinear) Art Is
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Donald Judd's daughter, Rainer, says her father's bedroom is her favorite space in the house. (101 Spring Street, New York, 5th Floor, 2013.)
The former studio and home of artist Donald Judd is in what used to be called the Cast Iron District of Manhattan. He bought the five-story building in 1968, long before the Gucci store and Ivanka Trump Boutique moved into the neighborhood. When Judd died in 1994, the house stayed in the family, with much of his stuff exactly where he left it. Now, after a three-year renovation, the general public can tour the building and see firsthand how Judd thought art and architecture could work together.
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Donald Judd purchased his home on Spring Street in 1968 for $68 million. (101 Spring Street, New York, Exterior, 1972.)
Judd was one of the most important artists of the last half of the 20th century. His son, Flavin, 45, oversaw the restoration. He lived in the building until he was 8 years old, then again as a teenager and for most of his 20s. Before Judd died, he and Flavin talked about what to do with the building, which, Flavin discovered, had originally been painted cream. He asked his father if they should restore it. Judd's response was, "It's been gray a long time, we'll just let it stay gray."
Like 'Touching A Moon Rock'
The house's interior isn't all that colorful either; and it's sparse, just like Judd's work. The artist created boxes of straight lines and angled planes which others called "minimalist," a label Judd disdained. On the ground floor there are just a few pieces of art, including a wall of Judd's purple anodized aluminum rectangles and a pile of bricks by artist Carl Andre. It's meant as a kind of spiritual space for the work to be shown just as Judd intended.
"Don's art is very much about the sculpture as it existed in reality," Flavin says. "It's not referring to other things; it's not referring to other theories. It's very much about something that simply exists. The effect should be like, you know, touching a moon rock, or something just as big."
Judd believed that art had a relationship with the space around it and he placed things very specifically in the building.
"That's why it's so important to preserve this," says Rob Beyer, who also oversaw the restoration project, "because it's not necessarily preserving the work but it's preserving the work in an environment where it can be most appreciated."
There's art on all five floors. The second floor is where the family spent most of its time. It has furniture built by Judd and a puppet theater. Not far from the kitchen, there's a potbellied stove that was the only source of heat for a very long time. The third floor has the artist's studio, with Judd's drafting table overlooking the street. On the fourth floor, tucked into the corner, there are a couple of chairs, a small table Judd made, some smooth stones, a few cowboy hats and books, including the collected works of Gertrude Stein and Richmond Lattimore's translation of Homer's Odyssey.
Overall the effect is like Judd's sculptures — sparse, deliberate, rectilinear and non-organic. As he said in a 1965 interview for the Archives of American Art, "I don't want it descriptive or naturalistic in any way. So for the time being, I'm left with a fairly geometric sort of arrangement because that doesn't have any of these things."
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The potbellied stove on the second floor was once the only source of heat. (101 Spring Street, New York, 2nd Floor, 2013.)
Even the bedrooms reflect Judd's preference for clean lines. They're up on the fifth floor and Judd's daughter, Rainer, says it's her favorite space. Her father's bed is on a low platform that he built. Right next to the mattress, there's a work by Lucas Samaras — a box with knives sticking out of it.
"Somebody asked me my favorite artwork when I was a kid," Flavin says. "This is it."
Nearby is a work by Claes Oldenburg and a nearly wall-length sculpture of red and white neon lights by Dan Flavin, the artist Flavin Judd got his name from.
But there's one item missing. "Don bought his first TV in 1973 to watch the impeachment of Nixon. So the TV was across from the bed," Flavin says. "And of course, thereafter, it was used watch cartoons, but you know that wasn't its initial purpose."
A Labor Of Love
Judd bought the building for $68,000, and the restoration cost about $23 million. There was pressure to sell, but the siblings resisted.
"We're saving like every paint chip and every little splinter on the floor," Rainer says. "I think that's very sentimental. The whole reason this exists, in a way, is because we care about every little inch and, at the end of the day, because we were raised by somebody who was so generous to us and taught us so much that we want honor what he gave us and what he made in the world. So I think this whole project wouldn't exist unless we were, to be really cheesy, just full of love."
Given the way the neighborhood has changed, a bit of sentiment is kind of nice.
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Stories Of Race In America Captured On Quilt And Canvas
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In 1963, Faith Ringgold began a series of 20 paintings called "The American People." She she wanted to create images that would make people really look. "The more they look, the more they see," she says. Above, #18: The Flag Is Bleeding, 1967, oil on canvas.
Courtesy Faith Ringgold and ACA Galleries, New York
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As a black, female artist in the 1960s, Ringgold says there were "a lot of people trying to get in my way and keep me from doing what I was doing." Above, a 1965 self portrait.
Jim Frank/On loan from Elizabeth A. Sackler
As a black, female artist in the 1960s, Ringgold says there were "a lot of people trying to get in my way and keep me from doing what I was doing." Above, a 1965 self portrait.
Jim Frank/On loan from Elizabeth A. Sackler
Artist Faith Ringgold is best known for what she calls her story quilts — large canvases made in the 1980s, on which she painted scenes of African-American life: sunbathing on a tar roof, a mother and her children, a quilting bee. She frames the canvases in strips of quilted fabric, carrying out an old African, and African-American quilt-making tradition.
The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington is showing an earlier aspect of Ringgold's art: big, strong, vivid paintings from the 1960s that reflect the violence and social upheaval of that time.
Faith Ringgold is now 83 — and still stunning with her long braids and colorful beads. "[It] was important to be determined," she says of her time developing as an artist in the 1960s. The stop signs that appeared in the pop art movement spoke to her: "There were a lot of stop signs in my life. ... People telling you what to do, when to do it, and so on," she says.
In the '60s, those days of civil rights struffles and conflicts over equality of ther aces, Ringgold was making traditional art — painting landscapes primarily.
She showed her work to Ruth White, the owner of the popular Ruth White Gallery, who said Ringgold couldn't be black and simply paint landscapes during such a tumultuous time. "Some people might have been upset or hurt by it," she says. "But I was happy that she had the courage to tell me that. "
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"It was what was going on in America and I wanted [viewers] to look at these paintings and see themselves," Ringgold says. Above, American People Series #20: Die, 1967, oil on canvas.
Courtesy Faith Ringgold and ACA Galleries, New York
So Ringgold changed her work; gave up landscapes and began putting on her canvases the racial and political tumult of the '60s — and the rage she often felt. In 1963, she began a series of 20 paintings called "The American People," which depicted confrontations between white and black people. Her 1967 painting Die shows a violent street riot. White and black faces peer through bloodied stars and stripes in The Flag Is Bleeding. "It was what was going on in America and I wanted them to look at these paintings and see themselves. ... I wanted to create art that made people stop and look.You've got to get 'em and hold 'em: The more they look, the more they see."
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"People like stories," says Faith Ringgold. "I think I ... struck on a combination of imagery and politics that worked."
Courtesy Faith Ringgold
Ringgold wanted us to look at the realities of race in this country — the pain and brutality of it — but she found no ready audience. She says it's taken 50 years to get these tough paintings exhibited. Part of it, she thinks, is because she was showing "too damn much" back then. "You can get by very easily without saying quite so much," she says.
This led Ringgold to create the story quilts for which she became known. At first, she thought they wouldn't be embraced as art because quilts are traditionally thought of as a craft, but the opposite happened: "Paintings, people really don't understand. ... They don't really get paintings. Quilts they do understand because everybody has a quilt in their house." She thinks it had to do with the comfort and familiarity of the medium. "People like stories," she adds. "I think I had struck on a combination of imagery and politics that worked."
These days, Ringgold makes successful children's book and is working on a new project in which she turns Sudoku into art for smart phones. As for the emotion that inspired her earlier work, Ringgold says it wasn't really anger — it always came from a place of enlightenment.
"I don't think you can create art out of anger, it has to come out of some form of understanding," she says. "You have to feel good about who you are and that you could do something to change things. I would feel angry if I didn't do anything: If I wasn't aware, if I was trying to deny, if I had no opportunity. ... Anger will stifle you and stop you and make you so that you won't be able to move. ... I wouldn't allow anyone to do that to me. Because then they win, I lose. I want to win."
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Art In Context: Venice Biennale Looks Past Pop Culture
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The Angolan exhibit consists of tall stacks of large photographic posters by artist Edson Chagas. The country, which is exhibiting at Venice for the first time, won the Golden Lion award for best national pavilion.
Courtesy of Giovanna Tissi
The Angolan exhibit consists of tall stacks of large photographic posters by artist Edson Chagas. The country, which is exhibiting at Venice for the first time, won the Golden Lion award for best national pavilion.
Every two years for over a century, lovers of contemporary art convene in Venice for the oldest and largest non-commercial art exhibition in the world.
The Venice Biennale has none of the glitz and conspicuous consumption of art auctions in London and New York. Instead, it's a dizzying and eclectic array of sights by both celebrity artists and total unknowns.
This year's works are not just paintings, sculptures and installations, but also performances, videos and music.
The French Pavilion intriguingly combines the last two: two films of two different pianists playing Maurice Ravel's Concerto in D for the left hand.
Art And The Subconscious
The Biennale is divided into two sections – 88 national pavilions, each with its own curator, and a central exhibition that includes more than 150 artists, chosen by the Biennale's artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni.
The theme is an imaginary museum that houses all worldly knowledge. Gioni wants to focus on how art reveals the subconscious in a society permeated by pop culture.
"The encyclopedic palace is about the desire to know and understand everything, a desire that recurs throughout history of art," he says. "What I'm asking is, how do we give form to our interior images when we're more and more besieged by artificial and external images?"
One of the most intriguing works is by British-born Tino Sehgal — a mysterious and ever-changing live performance that won the Best Artist Prize. On a recent day, the performers are a young woman lying on the ground responding with movements and gestures to a young man improvising his own tune.
Other exhibits can be found scattered across the city, in palazzos and even churches.
Contrasting Exhibits
This year's Golden Lion award for best national pavilion went to Angola; the African country, long ravaged by war, is exhibiting here for the first time. Located in a palazzo rarely open to the public, the exhibit consists of tall stacks of large photographic posters, which visitors can take with them, by artist Edson Chagas.
The contrast inside the palazzo is striking — paintings by Botticelli and Piero della Francesca on the wall juxtaposed with Chagas' stylized photographs of found objects in the streets of the Angolan capital, Luanda.
The apparent serenity of the photos disturbs art critic Eurydice Trichon. She says she wants something that reflects nearly three decades of war, "something more expressive, something that accuse[s] ... humanity."
Giovanna Tissi, a spokeswoman for the pavilion, responds that African artists have had enough of war.
"They are really fed up with European culture that want[s] the African still talk and ... blood," she says. "We want them showing the blood, but they don't want [to]."
Another war-torn country being showcased for the first time is Iraq. The pavilion's British curator traveled all over the country to find the artists and bring their works here.
The most haunting is "Saddam is here," a series of photographs that captures ordinary people – a dentist, butcher, shepherd and a woman sitting on a couch — each holding a mask of the former Iraqi dictator over their face. Artist-photographer Jamal Penjweny says Saddam is still like a godfather in Iraq.
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American artist Lawrence Carroll's work was commissioned by the Vatican.
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Ruth Asawa Found Her Artistic Calling In An Internment Camp
Melissa Block talks to Paul Lanier, the son of artist Ruth Asawa, who died in her San Francisco home on Monday at the age of 87. She's known for many famous fountains in San Francisco and her intricate, abstract wire sculptures, which are in the collections of many major museums.
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Painter Created Million-Dollar Forgeries In Queens Garage, Officials Say
An anonymous painter in New York City created dozens of art forgeries, which sold for more than $80 million, according to prosecutors. The man isn't facing charges — but those who helped sell his Abstract Expressionist canvases as the work of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell are in trouble.
For NPR's Newscast unit, Joel Rose reports:"Prosecutors believe that one man created 63 expert forgeries at his garage studio in Queens over the course of 15 years. He was paid only a few thousand dollars each. But buyers at two Manhattan galleries paid millions for canvasses they thought were painted by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, among others.
"The man is not charged with a crime. Prosecutors have not released his name."
But, Joel says, officials have charged Long Island art dealer Glafira Rosales — with wire fraud and money laundering. She has pleaded not guilty to those charges. As for the gallery, he reports:"Knoedler and Company, the Upper East Side gallery that sold 40 of the counterfeit paintings, closed abruptly in 2011. Knoedler officials insist they thought the paintings were real."
According to The Art Newspaper, a federal indictment states that Rosales' boyfriend, who is alleged to be a co-conspirator in the case, had first discovered the unknown artist selling his work on the sidewalk in Manhattan.
Jack Flam, an expert in the art of Robert Motherwell who had been among the first to identify some of the works as frauds, spoke to The New York Times.
"It's impressive," Flam says. "Whoever did these paintings was very well-informed of the practices of the artists."
Saying that the works had been crafted to imitate how the legendary painters handled their frames and canvases, Flam adds that "the way we look at reality is highly influenced by the context it's presented to us."
In this case, the art forgeries were presented in the Knoedler gallery, which was more than 165 years old when it closed under a cloud of anger and suspicion.
The scandal, and the gallery's closing, was the subject of a feature in Vanity Fair last year, which reported that the art dealer, Rosales, claimed to be funneling prized works of art from an anonymous collector called "Mr. X Jr."
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'New' Van Gogh Painting Identified; Was In A Norwegian Attic
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Alex Ruger, director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, at the unveiling Monday of Vincent Van Gogh's Sunset at Montmajour.
Olaf Kraak /AFP/Getty Images
Alex Ruger, director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, at the unveiling Monday of Vincent Van Gogh's Sunset at Montmajour.
Olaf Kraak /AFP/Getty Images
A painting that had earlier been thought to be a fake and had been stored for decades in the attic of a Norwegian home has now been identified as a long-lost work by Vincent Van Gogh.
Sunset at Montmajour has been authenticated thanks to "extensive research into [its] style, technique, paint, canvas, the depiction, Van Gogh's letters and the provenance," Van Gogh Museum Director Axel Ruger says in a statement posted Monday by the Amsterdam museum.
The painting, writes The Associated Press, "depicts a dry landscape of oak trees, bushes and sky, painted with Van Gogh's familiar thick brush strokes. ... Ruger said the museum had itself rejected the painting's authenticity once in the 1990s, in part because it was not signed by the artist."
Among the reasons why researchers now say it's a real Van Gogh, the AP adds, is that "it can be dated to the exact day it was painted because Vincent described it in a letter to his brother, Theo, and said he painted it the previous day — July 4, 1888."
What's more, says The New York Times:"It was also painted on the same type of canvas, with the same type of underpainting he used for at least one other painting, The Rocks (owned by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston) of the same area at the same time, according to the museum. The work was also listed as part of Theo van Gogh's collection in 1890, and was sold in 1901."
The Times adds that:"Until 1901, it was in the family collection owned by Vincent's brother, Theo, said Marije Vellekoop, head of collections, research and presentation for the museum. It was exhibited in Paris and sold to a Paris art dealer, who then sold it to a Norwegian collector in 1908, she said. Shortly after that, Ms. Vellekoop added, 'it was declared a fake, or not an original' and the Norwegian collector banished it to his attic, where it stayed until the current owners purchased it from him. Ms. Vellekoop declined to give any more information about the date of purchase or the owners."
The setting for Sunset at Montmajour is near Arles, France, where Van Gogh was living in 1888.
Born in 1853 in Zundert, the Netherlands, Van Gogh, as the museum reminds visitors to its website, "was only active as an artist for a total of 10 years, from 1880 to his death in 1890." But in that period, "he produced more than 840 paintings and 1,000 drawings."
His masterpieces include The Sunflowers, The Yellow House and The Bedroom. As the AP says, "Van Gogh paintings are among the most valuable in the world, selling for tens of millions of dollars on the rare occasions one is sold at an auction."
Sunset at Montmajour will be on display to the public at the Van Gogh Museum, in Amsterdam, starting Sept. 24.
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Art Dealer Pleads Guilty To Selling Fraudulent Paintings
Glafira Rosales sold work she claimed was painted by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning to two Manhattan galleries. Host Scott Simon talks to New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz about the paintings, which were actually done by a Chinese artist living in Queens.
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Nigerian Bottle Cap Sculptor Taps Museum Staff's Inner Artists
Nigerian sculptor El Anatsui knows too well that when most people think of African art, they think of masks, something he would never ask his students to make.
"We don't even make masks in schools," he says.
Anatsui taught art for nearly 30 years in a remote Nigerian village before getting his first big break when his sculpture was shown at the 1990 Venice Biennale. His works consist of giant sheets of colorful metal that are so big he often doesn't even assemble them himself. Twelve of them are touring the U.S. through August 2014.
'Waking Up' Everyone's Inner Artist
According to Anatsui, contemporary African art has the same purpose as contemporary art everywhere — to make viewers look and think.
"In Africa, we do art for contemplation only," he says. "There is music that you don't dance to; you listen to it. There are people who appreciate the art for its own sake."
Still, he confesses to his own prejudice at the start of his career when it came to what sculpture could be made of.
"My stereotype of Western art was bronze or marble," he says. "It was later on that [I was] introduced to some African sculptures that used things like wood, feathers, leather and fabric."
In his own art, Anatsui uses hundreds of thousands of discarded whiskey, gin and rum bottle screw-tops that he finds, too easily, in mounds of detritus near his village. He sees rampant consumerism and waste in them, but he also says liquor is a legacy of colonialism and slavery: "It came with the Europeans when they first came to Africa to trade, initially, for other goods like gold. But eventually it was traded for people as well."
That dark story may not be obvious when you look at his huge, multi-colored, highly-textured, shimmering sheets. They are assembled by assistants who crush, crumple, twist and flatten the tiny bits of metal and thread them together. The artist then gives museum staff license to configure the work by bending, twisting, draping and shaping the flat sheets into forms when they hang the sculptures.
Ellen Rudolph curated the Anatsui show that ran at the Akron Art Museum in Ohio last year. She says she found the responsibility of deciding what the 12 sculptures should look like overwhelming at first: "How am I going to just have some kind of vision for what form it should take? How can I impose that on someone else's art? And then once we got the work here and unfolded it on the floor — because it arrives folded up like a blanket — we had to play with it and get a sense of how it moves and how it lays. And that's when we started to really understand that we could form and sculpt the work and it was incredibly exciting. It's an amazing gift that El gives the people who work on his installations."
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Anatsui's Gli (2010) was inspired by the artist's visit to three cities – Berlin, Jerusalem and Notse, Togo — whose histories have been shaped by walls. In the Ewe language, which is spoken in Togo, "gli" can mean "wall," "disrupt" or "story."
Andrew McAllister/Courtesy the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and the Akron Art Museum
Anatsui's Gli (2010) was inspired by the artist's visit to three cities – Berlin, Jerusalem and Notse, Togo — whose histories have been shaped by walls. In the Ewe language, which is spoken in Togo, "gli" can mean "wall," "disrupt" or "story."
Andrew McAllister/Courtesy the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and the Akron Art Museum
One of those people was Joe Walton, the museum's chief preparator. He says one work, called Gli, posed a particular challenge: It came in four giant sections.
"Three of those pieces actually hang from the ceiling," he says. "That's all custom-fabricated hanging hardware to support the piece ... so that it's suspended in the space. Some of the pieces we're dealing with are 12 feet high by 36 feet long, so there's special pulley-system rigging hardware that we're going to use to get them up on the wall safely. But this is probably one of the funnest installs we've had to work on."
The artist also gets something out of the collaboration. He says, "I think that the thing that I enjoy about giving people tasks to do with these works is that you go and see that they have even better ideas than you yourself, you know, and that's very uplifting."
Anatsui says he feels he also owes it to those who assemble, install and see his work to help awaken their creativity. "Every one of us has an artist in us," he says. "Really, some may be asleep and some are fully awake, you know. So I think I have a kind of commitment to waking up some people in whom it is asleep. Teaching — my work is still teaching."
Part Of The Larger, Contemporary Art Dialogue
According to Ellen Rudolph, the Akron Art Museum was the first U.S. institution of its kind to buy an Anatsui work.
"We purchased it at a time when many other museums were still looking at this artist as an African artist whose work belonged in the context of African collections," she says. "And we were looking at his work as something to add to the larger, contemporary art dialogue."
Most of the metal sculptures and tapestries in the Anatsui exhibition have never before been seen in the U.S., and they'll be seen differently in each city the tour takes them to.
The sculptures goon display at the Des Moines Arts Center in October.
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'Love' Is The Real Essence Of MacArthur Genius' Art
Visual artist Carrie Mae Weems has been celebrated for her art and activism for decades, and now she can add a MacArthur 'Genius' Grant to her collection. In a 'Wisdom Watch' conversation with host Michel Martin, Weems discusses life, love and turning sixty.
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Van Gogh Teaches Us How To Keep Life Interesting
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Vincent van Gogh, The Road Menders, 1889
Walter Larrimore/Courtesy of The Phillips Collection
Vincent van Gogh, The Road Menders, 1889
Walter Larrimore/Courtesy of The Phillips Collection
The two paintings are unmistakably by Vincent Van Gogh. Both show a street scene in the south of France, dominated by sturdy trees with limbs thrust upwards. Both show the same trees and the same houses and pedestrians — almost.
The Road Menders and The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Remy) were painted by Van Gogh in May 1889. They're so alike that they are sometimes called "copies." In fact, they're different: strikingly different in color, subtly different in detail.
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For MacArthur 'Genius,' 'Love' Is The Essence Of Her Art
Photographer and video artist Carrie Mae Weems was having a tough day at the studio last month when she learned that she had been named a MacArthur fellow.
"My assistants weren't doing some things they were supposed to be doing. And so I'm screaming at them, and just in the middle of my rant the phone rang," she tells NPR's Michel Martin. "I sunk into my chair, put my head down on my desk, and cried and laughed for about five minutes."
Weems says a MacArthur "genius" grant — and the $625,000 no-strings-attached prize that comes with it — was the last thing she thought would happen to her.
"I'm sort of a knucklehead, and not particularly smart," she says. "I'm very humbled because it takes a lot of people to agree that somebody deserves something."
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Carrie Mae Weems, a 2013 MacArthur Fellow.
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Carrie Mae Weems, a 2013 MacArthur Fellow.
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
For decades, Weems has been tackling issues of race, power and gender through her art. But she says her work is really about love.
"Love, I think, is that element in the universe — that illumination that allows us to see ourselves more clearly," she explains. "It's the real essence of the work, and it comes out in these other forms. ... But these are all things that really keep us apart, right? So we focus on the thing that keeps us apart, not necessarily the thing that brings us together."
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3-D Printing A Masterwork For Your Living Room
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Based on hundreds of photos, Cosmo Wenman generated this 3-D model of the Ares Borghese from the Basel Sculpture Hall. Wenman publishes the scans online, so that anyone can use them to 3-D print a replica of the masterpiece.
Based on hundreds of photos, Cosmo Wenman generated this 3-D model of the Ares Borghese from the Basel Sculpture Hall. Wenman publishes the scans online, so that anyone can use them to 3-D print a replica of the masterpiece.
You may never be able to get to Italy to see Michelangelo's David — but advances in 3-D printing technology are making it possible for you to create an almost perfect replica.
It's an idea that Cosmo Wenman is hoping will catch on. He's pushing the edges of how 3-D printing can be used to make classic works accessible.
I followed Wenman on an excursion the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. These days, a lot of museums let people take photos of art, and Wenman takes a lot of them.
"It gets a little exhausting and monotonous after the 500th photo," he says.
The Cantor has a large collection of Rodin's and Wenman is photographing "Bellona," a bronze bust of the Roman goddess of war.
Wenman needs a lot of photos because he wants to create what's called a 3-D scan, and that requires getting all the detail. Bellona has an engraved helmet with flaps that fall along the back of her neck like a horse's mane. She looks down her shoulder with an intense gaze, her taught neck muscles protruding.
Wenman's been making 3-D replicas of classic sculptures from museum collections around the world — including the Louvre, the British Museum and the Getty Villa.
"I'm trying to demonstrate what the regular consumer can do with consumer-grade photography and consumer-grade software and even consumer-grade 3-D printers to recreate artwork," he says.
After Wenman takes all the photos he needs, he will then process them with some free software from Autodesk and a $2,200 MakerBot 3-D printer. The software is able to bring together all of his photos and recreate an object with three dimensions.
Wenman recently started a partnership with Autodesk. After his visit to the Cantor he heads over to the company's office in San Francisco to do some 3-D printing. He stands by the printer and explains how it works.
"It's basically a hot glue gun attached to a printing armature," he says. "Instead of a printer just going back and forth spraying ink, this goes back and up and down."
The hot glue he's talking about is a type of biodegradable plastic that's good for printing large things — the printer builds up the object with the plastic, layer by layer, based on the software instructions. The result is an object that has all the contours, details and proportions of the sculpture he photographed.
As we wait for the Rodin to print, he shows me some small replicas he's made of a classic Greek torso from the Louvre with lots of rippling muscles. Part of Wenman's process also includes putting patinas on the sculpture to make it look like the original.
"And to my eye, this is worthy of display in the home," he says.
Wenman puts his art scans on the MakerBot-run website Thingiverse, so that other people can print them out at home or wherever there is a 3-D printer. Wenman sees all kinds of uses for his scans of classical works.
"Schools could use these for their instruction," he says. "They could make cheap reproductions in the classroom. Art lovers could use them for study. People could just print them and have them in their homes."
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These torsos were printed in layers of biodegradable plastic. The original sculptures reside at the Louvre in Paris.
Wenman got support from Autodesk after the company's Tatjana Dzambazova saw his work at a 3-D printing conference in London. She says most of the showcases were about 3-D printing iPhone cases and toys. But then she saw Wenman's work.
"I saw this gorgeous sculpture of a horse and I say ... 'Oh my God, what is this?' It didn't look like a 3-D print." She looked closer and met Wenman.
"He was trying to show that you can make art, or that you can save heritage," Dzambazova says.
So far, no museums have objected to what Wenman is doing. Still, Wenman says he doesn't ask permission to take his photos. He'd prefer to ask forgiveness. But when Cantor Director Connie Wolf sees him in the gallery, she actually seems excited, because a 3-D print is a lot more like experiencing the real object.
"The ability to see a sculpture as if you're walking around it is something so important," she says. "I'm very intrigued by it, but I don't know it."
Wolf says she sees great value in what Wenman is trying to do, as long as it's for the right reasons.
"You want to be sure that people recognize these are studying tools ... teaching tools, " she says. "These are opportunities to enjoy something that's a replica as opposed to a forgery."
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Banksy's Latest Work Takes On The Meat Industry ... With Puppets
Banksy NY/YouTube
Banksy, the mysterious British graffiti artist known for his satirical work, has been making mischief around New York City this month.
His latest artwork makes a statement about the meat industry, or lost innocence — or something like that. In any case, it'll certainly make you stop and look.
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Banksy's "Sirens of the Lambs" started its tour of New York City in — naturally — the Meatpacking District.
It's called "Sirens of the Lambs" and it features a bunch of cuddly puppet animals peeking out of a truck, squealing (or at least squeaking) with fear. The truck, labeled "Farm Fresh Meats," started its rounds in (what else?) the Meatpacking District, and it's set to tour the city for the next week and a half.
The piece is somehow hilarious and horrifying at the same time, like an episode of The Muppets gone terribly wrong.
One look into those animals' unblinking glass eyes will obliterate any fond childhood memories of playing with Teddy. And judging from the
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=WDIz7mEJOeA
posted on the artist's website, the installation has already been terrorizing children around the city (one kid is shown screaming as he runs away, and the closing shot is of an inconsolable baby).
But the
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-BluFK9S1I8
that accompanies the piece (accessed via an 800 number printed on the truck) seems to have a good sense of humor. The narrator starts off by saying, "This is a piece of sculpture art, and I know what you're thinking: Isn't it a bit — subtle."
The audio guide also explains that the animals are controlled by four mime artists, who sit inside the truck. Banksy apparently used to work at a butcher shop, which might have inspired the sculpture art.
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A Photographer Turns Her Lens On Men Who Catcall
Social media was abuzz this week with photographer Hannah Price's portraits of men who catcalled her on the street. We first saw the story on The Morning News, where Price was briefly interviewed. We wanted to indulge our curiosity about Price and her work, so we decided to give her a call.
Price's remarks from our interview are below, but first, some background.
Price moved to Philadelphia in 2009 from Colorado and noticed for the first time that she was getting catcalled. The photographer, who's currently working toward an MFA in photography at Yale, decided to turn the camera on the people who approached her on the Philly streets. This resulted in the series "City of Brotherly Love" (Philly's nickname).
Ambiguity might be one of this project's most prevalent themes. It's been mistakenly referred to as "My Harassers" on some blogs, which Price does not like. Her series doesn't take an aggressive stance on catcalling; it's not meant to incite social action, she says. Rather, it's an observation, a way to react behind the camera lens.
Price's portraits leave much to interpretation. Not only do we not know the situations in which she crossed paths with these men, but we also have no idea of their relationship. The photos are framed in a variety of ways; the lighting, composition and even positioning of the subjects themselves vary so much that viewers have plenty of freedom to interpret them.
Price also included a few scenes with no breathing human subjects in the frame, such as a photo of a Marian Anderson image and a beauty salon advertisement. The inclusion of these nonportraits heightens the ambiguity of the project. In a video interview, Price talks about her decision to include this imagery alongside the photos of the men.
"The nonportraits are more of how I would like to be approached. I would like to be approached in a respectable manner, or I would definitely like to fall in love," she says. "The nonportraits are more sort of how I envision a romantic encounter. I don't know if catcalling is necessarily romantic, it's more of like an instant in a situation."
In the video interview, she says she doesn't know how the project will affect the behavior of the men depicted: "I don't think it makes them re-think catcalling. 'Cause I'm just one person and we're all different people and we come from different places. I don't know in their experiences if they've had any luck with their catcalls. They probably have, depending on the person, so I don't think my one instance ... makes them re-think about what they're saying."
Price's process went like this: Someone — a man — would catcall her, and she would either snap their photo at that instant or she would ask to make their portrait.
Price says that taking photographs of the catcallers was a way to address and confront the people who catcalled her. "I'm in the photograph, but I'm not. Just turning the photograph on them kind of gives them a feel of what it's like to be in a vulnerable position — it's just a different dynamic," Price says. "But it's just another way of dealing with the experience, of trying to understand it."
The series also tracks with themes common in Price's work. The photographer, who is Mexican and black, gravitates toward photographing subjects whose ethnic identities overlap with hers.
Interview Highlights
On why she started making these portraits
It was just a reoccurring thing that I noticed, and that just threw me off guard, I just never really experienced it before. I just started reacting.
On what made her want to start documenting catcallers
I just started doing it. It was another way for me to just deal with it on another level besides avoiding it. Sometimes it's easier to ... just respond and confront people. And then just talking to people, you find out more about them than your initial [impression].
... It was more of like, "Here was a change in my life and it was something really apparent that I noticed."
On how she responded to catcallers before and during this project
Well, I mean the first initial response is avoiding [it], you don't want to. It's just an everyday thing to men and women, and it was just — yeah — one moment, I just started talking to people and I just realized that I could make their portraits and make something of it.
Some of them say "no" and if they say "no," I don't make their photo afterward. But most of them, the majority of them, respond quite well just 'cause I'm responding. Because usually it's expected of me to avoid them so I'm responding. They want a response, so usually they're pretty happy about it — about me talking to them. ...
I explain to them that I'm a photographer and I'm interested in making a portrait.
On how her multiracial identity informs her work
My background is I'm mixed-race. ... I'm Mexican and black, and I grew up in white suburbia and so I've photographed stereotypes of the black race and the majority [of the recent work has been] mostly about men.
It's just, I'm just trying to like ... bring all of these [ideas] of what a stereotype is and what people expect. It may or may not be true, that's the thing of what a stereotype is, is that they're true but they can also not be true. It's kind of like this thing that you base off what it looks like. What you perceive it to be.
In that case, even if women said they had a boyfriend, it's just an expression that they publicly feel comfortable expressing themselves, telling someone how they feel. ...
I do think that women are the most beautiful thing on the planet. Women are beautiful. I get it. Men are men. It's an attraction. ... It can be dangerous, but I don't think it can be something fully avoided and controlled. Just as long as people understand the dynamics of a public expression in that way.
I think, it's good and I think it's ... I've definitely had those feelings and those frustrations before. And I mean it just shows, it's just another example of the power dynamic of how men decide to express their attraction. ... She's just saying, "No, stop. You don't have a right."
There were moments when I decided not to approach someone, like if I felt uncomfortable, I would avoid them. I didn't want to put myself in any danger. So it's not like I respond to every single person. ... It depends on how I was feeling that day. If I felt like photographing or not, or if I felt like talking to this stranger. Sometimes you don't really feel like talking to people and sometimes I would have a really bad day.
On whether she ever felt threatened
There was one moment where I felt threatened but that was because my response was disrespectful.
On whether she finds catcalling disrespectful
I'm not sure. To an extent, it is disrespectful. It depends on the tone, yeah. It really depends on the expression, what they say to you. Sometimes people will say they want to do something to you — I feel like that's really disrespectful. I think it really depends on the phrase.
On whether she's taking a stand against catcalling
I'm not trying to stop catcalling. I think a given thing, especially for an urban community ... it's more just an experience that I had, and a way for me to deal with it. I ended up making a relationship; I ended up taking time to spend time with people who threw me off guard and ended up making something beautiful out of it.
I mean, it's uncomfortable, the act of catcalling. But I'm not trying to do some social thing. I'm just trying to — it's coming from a different place. I'm just trying to understand. ...
I mean, I think it's kind of de-humanizing. I wasn't trying to dehumanize anyone, it was just a response [to] an experience, and just because I'm ... just because I'm a black person or a minority, it's easier for me to talk about this subject or make those photographs. And I understand how other people may respond to it. I'm just trying to point out that ... I was just transitioning from a different place, I was just trying to .... point out that we're all human and all confused.
That's why it's the switch of the camera. I'm in the photograph, but I'm not. Just turning the photograph on them kind of gives them a feel of what it's like to be in a vulnerable position. ... It's a different dynamic — but it's just another way of dealing with the experience, of trying to understand it.
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Forget The Lottery; You Have Better Odds Of Winning This Picasso
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Pablo Picasso drew L'Homme au Gibus, or Man With Opera Hat, in 1914.
(c) Succession Picasso 2013
Pablo Picasso drew L'Homme au Gibus, or Man With Opera Hat, in 1914.
(c) Succession Picasso 2013
Imagine buying a genuine Pablo Picasso painting valued at $1 million — and paying only $135.
That's the prize if you win the "1 Picasso for 100 Euros" raffle Sotheby's is currently putting on. It's the first time a Picasso has been offered as a raffle prize, and while 100 euros (about $135) isn't cheap for a raffle ticket, at one in about 50,000, your chances of winning are a lot better than the megalotteries a lot of people enter.
Peri Cochin, a journalist and television producer in Paris, explains that the idea for an online raffle came about when she was faced with attending yet another gala charity dinner. She and her mother, who is Lebanese, plan fundraising events for the International Association to Save Tyre, an ancient Phoenician city in Lebanon. Tyre's monuments have suffered from Lebanon's civil wars, and the city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has been damaged by urban blight. When Cochin's mother suggested the charity gala, Cochin thought: Not again.
"All those gala dinners," she says. "You go there, you sit and you are really bored very quickly, and you look to your watch and hope that 11 o'clock will arrive quickly and you can go home and be quiet and forget about that dinner."
Cochin wanted to try something new. They came up with the idea for an online raffle that would intrigue people from all over the world, not just the usual suspects at a charity dinner. Cochin knows Olivier Picasso, grandson of Pablo Picasso, who is also a television producer in Paris. Together, they looked for a Picasso drawing, and found Man With Opera Hat. Olivier Picasso, who is writing a biography of his grandfather, says the painting is from 1914, "the peak of the cubism period of my grandfather. It's the second part of the cubism history, when Pablo was more studying how to symbolize things than just to draw them. "
Cochin says many people think the raffle is a joke, but "it's not a joke here," she says. "We're talking serious business."
According to Cochin, they had to work for almost two years to get official authorization. In France, raffles and lotteries are run by the state, so the French Finance Ministry will collect the money and supervise the raffle. The money will go to two projects of the International Association to Save Tyre, both focusing on Lebanese women in need. Cochin emphasizes that this raffle is not just for art aficionados or collectors.
"It's mostly people that are dreaming of something that is not possible to get," she says, "and, all of a sudden, yes, you can maybe have it."
Picasso adds, "You know, there are more chance[s] to win than when you play at the New York Lottery."
The raffle drawing is Dec. 18 at Sotheby's in Paris. If they sell 50,000 tickets, they'll make 5 million euros, or close to $7 million. Even if you take off $1 million for buying that Picasso, it's a pretty good haul for a charity event.
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Priceless Italian Treasure Is Shown Off In Rare Exhibition
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A necklace of Saint Januarius, in gold, silver and precious stones, is displayed in Rome. The riches are from a treasure trove in Naples that is said to be worth more than the British crown jewels.
Dazzling with diamonds, emeralds and gold, 70 pieces of treasure — said to be some of the most valuable in the world — have been transported from a vault in a Naples cathedral to a museum in Rome. They'll stay there until February, marking the first time they've ever been displayed outside of Naples.
The head of the foundation organizing the Treasure of San Gennaro exhibition tells the BBC the collection is "of incalculable worth, both historically and artistically, greater than that of the British crown jewels or the Russian imperial crown."
The collection officially began in 1526, when the city of Naples called upon its patron saint, fourth century bishop San Gennaro (known in English as Januarius), for help. The BBC reports: "In the 1520s, when Naples was beset by disease, war and the frequent eruption of the nearby Mount Vesuvius, Neapolitans pledged to build a chapel to San Gennaro and safeguard the donated treasure, in return for the saint's protection.
" 'The city was on its last legs, but the people of Naples knew which saint to turn to,' said the exhibition's curator Paolo Jorio. 'They voted that, if Saint Januarius helped them, they would dedicate a new treasure chapel to him.'"
Since then, it has acquired more than 21,000 pieces. One of the most elaborate acquisitions is a necklace made up of several pieces of jewelry and stones donated over centuries, such as a cross donated by Napoleon.
The exhibition in Rome shows off some of the collection's highlights, including:
- A golden chalice donated by Pope Pius IX in 1849.
- An elaborately bejeweled mitre — the ceremonial headdress of bishops — including more than 3,500 precious stones, created in 1713.
- Diamond earrings donated by a commoner in gratitude for surviving a plague in 1844 (Reuters calls them "relatively humble").
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The mitre of San Gennaro is made up of 3,300 diamonds and hundreds of rubies and emeralds.
Tony Gentile/Reuters/Landov
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Behind Rockwell's Idyllic America, There Were A Lot Of Therapy Bills
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American artist Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) looks up while seated at his drawing table, circa 1945.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
American artist Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) looks up while seated at his drawing table, circa 1945.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
In February 1959, the great illustrator and magazine artist Norman Rockwell was on Edward R. Murrow's celebrity interview show, Person to Person. For decades, Rockwell had painted scenes that told stories of wholesome, G-rated life in small-town America, and Murrow interviewed Rockwell at his home in just such a small town: Stockbridge, Mass.
Rockwell told Murrow how much he and his family loved living in Stockbridge, but what he didn't say was that Stockbridge was their home because it was also home to the psychiatric institute where his wife, Mary, who was depressive and alcoholic, had found treatment; nor did he say that he had entered therapy several years earlier at the same institute, with a psychoanalyst who went on to great renown.
"Stockbridge is known as a quintessential New England town," biographer Deborah Solomon tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "And in the '50s, it really was a center of psychoanalysis. And Rockwell moved there not for the peaceful countryside, but to be treated."
Solomon's new book, American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, takes a close look at Rockwell's relationship with his psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson. Erikson was a German Jewish refugee who went on to write Childhood and Society and Young Man Luther. He gave us the concept of the identity crisis and of life as a multistage process of social development.
A Therapeutic Influence
Rockwell found Erikson late in adulthood, after he'd already experienced a lifetime of depression, anxiety and severe insecurity.
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"Erikson was a fabulous listener, and their time together wasn't really psychoanalysis so much as counseling and support," she says. "Erikson was a great supporter of Rockwell, and Rockwell needed that."
Erikson also helped Rockwell connect with liberal politics, and that showed in his art, specifically his 1960s civil rights paintings.
"When he painted the Golden Rule, for instance, in 1959, he tried for what we now call multiculturalism, meaning bringing people from all different ethnicities and religions together," Solomon says. "The central figure is a rabbi who I see as a stand-in for Erik Erikson, who was the closest thing that Rockwell ever had to a spiritual leader."
But Rockwell's relationship with Erikson didn't come cheap. Some of his paintings — like his famous Kellogg's Corn Flakes magazine ads — were meant as bill payers to cover the enormous psychiatric tab he and his family had racked up in Stockbridge.
The Difference Between His Art And His Reality
Rockwell thought of his mother as a chronic hypochondriac, and his father as a drudge. His brother, meanwhile, was athletic and popular, nothing like his skinny, outsider kid brother, Norman.
"I think Rockwell experienced himself as sort of the classic younger brother, picked upon and bullied," Solomon says. "And art for him, of course, became a way to bulk himself up from what he saw as the very competitive world of male adolescence."
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Deborah Solomon's other books include Jackson Pollock: A Biography and Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell.
Christian Oth/Courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Deborah Solomon's other books include Jackson Pollock: A Biography and Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell.
Christian Oth/Courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Rockwell's own childhood doesn't appear in his work. He painted an idealized America where a boy's anxiety might be the vaccination he's about to receive, and the runaway is a young, comical kid who doesn't even make it out of town before he's stopped by a friendly cop.
"I think he painted a view of America as a caring, concerned place," Solomon says. "He certainly was not painting his own reality, but he was painting, I think, his longing."
Always An Outsider
In the heyday of abstract art, Rockwell was a gifted, commercially successful draftsman and representational artist, which meant he was often dismissed as a lightweight, or "culture polluter," as Solomon puts it. If that hurt him, he didn't let it show.
“ During his lifetime, many people suffered from the illusion that abstract painting was somehow more emotional just because it included drips and splashes and wide strokes.
- Author Deborah Solomon
"He loved illustration for its own sake, and it was very painful for him not to be acknowledged as a gifted artist. But he was committed to illustration," Solomon says. "Now, of course, we understand that realist painting can be as emotional as an abstract painting. But during his lifetime, many people suffered from the illusion that abstract painting was somehow more emotional just because it included drips and splashes and wide strokes."
In fact, Rockwell did once experiment with abstract art. His 1962 painting The Connoisseur shows a balding, middle-aged man from the back as he looks at a Jackson Pollock. To make The Connoisseur, Rockwell had to do his own version of a Pollock painting — and, according to abstract artist Willem de Kooning, it wasn't half bad.
Solomon says, "[De Kooning] saw Rockwell's Connoisseur, and he said to the owner of the gallery, 'That painting is better than anything Jackson could do.' ... But I'm not sure if he intended the comment as a compliment to Rockwell or a takedown of Pollock, his rival."
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Dead Bees, Nail Clippings And Priceless Art In Warhol's 'Time Capsules'
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Andy Warhol kept much of the ephemera of his daily life in boxes called Time Capsules, now at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. This correspondence addressed to Warhol at his studio, The Factory, comes from Time Capsule 10.
Lauren Ober/NPR
Andy Warhol kept much of the ephemera of his daily life in boxes called Time Capsules, now at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. This correspondence addressed to Warhol at his studio, The Factory, comes from Time Capsule 10.
Lauren Ober/NPR
Marie Elia likes to describe her job this way: She is the secretary to a dead man. As one of two catalogers for Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, it's her job to go through the 610 boxes he left after his death in 1987.
In one box she found a mysterious, small tin. "I opened it and it was full of fingernail clippings, dead bees and those little holes that come from a hole punch," she says. The fingernail clippings weren't Warhol's. They were sent to him by a fan. "I don't know why. Somebody mailed that to him. Somebody thought that he would like it."
Over the past six years, catalogers at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh have indexed more than 300,000 items, from a Tyvek suit covered in Jean-Michel Basquiat's scribblings to a box of Preparation H.
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Cataloger Marie Elia explains some of the contents of Time Capsule 10 to a visitor at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Lauren Ober/NPR
Cataloger Marie Elia explains some of the contents of Time Capsule 10 to a visitor at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Lauren Ober/NPR
"We work more with the intimate side of Warhol. His prescriptions, his shampoos, his acne medication, his letters from his family," says Erin Byrne, the Time Capsules' other cataloger. "These are things that blow people away."
Warhol began the project when he was moving the Factory, as his studio was called. But the artist didn't hire a moving company, says Matt Wrbican, the Warhol Museum's chief archivist. Warhol asked his staff to clean up the mess, and one of his assistants found a workaround.
"He suggested to Andy that they start putting everything in these boxes, and they could call them 'time capsules' and he could work on them forever. And he did. He thought that was a great idea," says Wrbican.
Warhol intended for the Time Capsules to eventually be sold as art, but they never went on the market. And it's certainly easy to balk at the idea that the stuff that wound up in the boxes is art. Warhol was a packrat. But that desire to collect helped inform his artistic point of view.
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Time Capsule 10 contained receipts, canceled checks, letters and other paper material that Andy Warhol saved from 1967 to 1969.
Lauren Ober/NPR
Time Capsule 10 contained receipts, canceled checks, letters and other paper material that Andy Warhol saved from 1967 to 1969.
Lauren Ober/NPR
"There's an interview Warhol gave pretty early in his days as a pop artist where he said that pop art is liking things," Wrbican says. "I can't think of a better expression of that idea than the Time Capsules. I mean, Warhol loved stuff."
Warhol also loved the spotlight and theatrics, so it is fitting that the museum has turned the Time Capsules into performance art by opening some of them on stage, in front of an audience. On a recent afternoon, catalogers Elia and Byrne prepared to open an unremarkable cardboard box marked simply with dates — 1967 to 1969.
Once open, the box was a bit of a disappointment. No previously unknown artworks, just papers: telegrams, art opening announcements and lots of correspondence. Elia opened one of the envelopes, addressed to Andy Warhol Films, and pulled out a photo of a nearly nude man. It was Paul Richard Shipman, a nude male model who wanted to be cast in Warhol's films. In his letter, he said he'd appeared in several nude magazines — and included all of his "physical details."
Sometimes Byrne feels like Elia finds all the good stuff. "I might be looking over at Marie's box and she's pulling out a Basquiat and Keith Haring underwear and all this great stuff and I'm still knee deep in junk mail," says Byrne. "It's total time capsule envy."
After sifting through 608 Time Capsules, plus a trunk and a filing cabinet that are also part of the work, Byrne and Elia definitely have a different picture of Warhol than the celebrity image he liked to project.
"The flotsam and jetsam that's left of his life is almost a little bit more truthful and faithful to the life he actually lived versus the life he put out there," Byrne says.
In that way, the Time Capsules serve as a kind of Warhol autobiography. Fingernail clippings, dead bees and all.
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If The Internet Is Your Canvas, You Paint In Zeros And Ones
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Ifnoyes.com sold at an art auction in New York for $3,500. The artist, Rafael Rozendaal, compares owning a website to owning a public sculpture in a park.
Rafael Rozendaal
That Benjamin Palmer dropped $3,500 at Phillips auction house in New York is not surprising. The 217-year-old company, headquartered on Park Avenue, regularly sells artwork for tens — and often hundreds — of thousands of dollars.
What is surprising, however, is that he took nothing home. He has nothing to put up on his wall or put on a pedestal in his living room. Physically, his acquisition lies among a hub of wires, and the likelihood is he will never touch it. But it lives virtually inside every computer, smartphone or tablet in the world.
Palmer's purchase was ifnoyes.com, a Web page with colorful geometric patterns that respond to the movement or click of a mouse.
"Being in such an old-school place and then just buying a website felt like a perfect thing to do," Palmer says. "It was like, this is what I should be doing."
That night, he did the virtual equivalent of hanging a painting up on his wall: He reposted a picture of it on Twitter.
Embracing The Virtual
Art and technology have been close bedfellows throughout history. Artists have employed advances in paint pigmentation, photography, pencils, video cameras, computers — basically anything since the invention of fire, says Steve Dietz, president of the Minnesota-based new media nonprofit Northern Lights.mn.
"Technology is anything that people can use to make something, and artists have always been looking at what are the new tools that are available," he says.
Digital art dates back to the mid-20th century: In 1968, an exhibition in London called Cybernetic Serendipity curated the work of computer-based artists and served as a sort of debutante ball for the field. Web-based art in particular has been growing since the advent of the Web in the mid-'90s.
But the event at Phillips — an art institution known for auctioning off Impressionist paintings and Andy Warhols — signals a widening acceptance of the digital field by the mainstream art world, Dietz says.
Phillips' digital product developer Megan Newcome says the auction in early October, called "Paddles ON," was the first to be dedicated entirely to new media.
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These landscape paintings of Yosemite National Part were made by renowned British artist David Hockney using an iPad.
Eric Risberg/AP
These landscape paintings of Yosemite National Part were made by renowned British artist David Hockney using an iPad.
"We continually position ourselves as contemporary, and every 50 years that changes," she says. "We just got this sense that what we were doing was, in a way, unprecedented."
The 20 works of digitally inspired art for sale spanned the spectrum from physical to virtual: a baroque chandelier with surveillance cameras instead of lights, a digital print with embedded touchscreen tablets, an 8-hour performance video by Tumblr sensation Molly Soda, an animated GIF.
Newcome says collectors were initially drawn to the things that "they can wrap their minds around" — the more traditional tangible pieces. But the event, she says, helped some collectors realize that digital works are now part of mainstream contemporary art.
"The fact that this was an exhibition and a panel discussion and a party, this real celebration of digital art ... we were really able to give it some muscle," Newcome says.
And it's not the only art establishment to begin embracing the virtual side. The American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., had an exhibit dedicated to video games last year. In August, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York acquired its first piece of code — an iPad application.
And David Hockney, whom the Associated Press calls "one of Britain's most celebrated living artists," brought mainstream attention to digital art when he began drawing on his iPhone and iPad about five years ago. His digital drawings are now being shown in San Francisco's de Young Museum.
Hockney told the BBC in 2010 that he was drawn to the responsiveness and immediacy of the medium. "Who wouldn't want [an iPad]? Picasso or Van Gogh would have snapped one up," he said.
Creating Market Value
But Picasso and Van Gogh created unique, irreplaceable paintings worth millions of dollars. What's the incentive to invest in art whose very nature is reproducible?
A Verge article about the Phillips auction talked about the challenges of marketing art that lives in a virtual space:
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The source code of ifnoyes.com shows the new owners' names and a signature, of sorts, from the artist.
"The question of ownership — and how you get someone to pay notoriously high art-market prices for something as relatively immaterial as Molly's webcam video or a 24-second YouTube clip — is still unsolved, and what the organizers of Paddles ON repeatedly called 'the elephant in the room.' "
The creator of ifnoyes.com, Dutch-Brazilian artist Rafaël Rozendaal, points out that websites do have intrinsic worth: In the Internet realm, domain names are financially valuable. No one but Palmer and his wife own the URL "ifnoyes.com," even though everyone can access it.
Rozendaal even made Palmer sign a contract to keep the website free and accessible to the public. "My work is public by nature," Rozendaal says. "I want to keep it that way."
It's the virtual equivalent of owning a sculpture in a public park, he says. There's a point of pride of being the one who commissioned or paid for it. And the site still identifies the owner: The title of ifnoyes.com says it's a "Collection of Benjamin Palmer & Elizabeth Valleau."
It seems to be working for Rozendaal: Of the 85 websites he has designed — all of which were coded by an independent programmer — he has sold about a third. He says this one is the first website ever to be sold at an art auction.
For Palmer, the medium is appealing because he can share his acquisition easily. He doesn't have to invite people to his living room to see a painting; they can just take out their phone. "I think it's pretty exciting to kind of have it with you all the time," he says. "I like the idea that it's for everyone."
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Nazi Art Trove Includes Previously Unknown Matisse, Chagall Works
Nazi Art Trove Found In German Apartment
Please note: The image quality in this gallery was degraded by the light used to display the work at a news conference in Germany. We're including the photos to impart a general idea of the range of works in question.
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A picture of a painting by German artist Franz Marc titled "Horses in Landscape" is projected on a wall during a press conference on the spectacular art find of nearly 1,500 works in Munich, Germany. Officials say they face a long investigation into the hoard of looted Nazi art.
The revelation Monday that nearly 1,500 paintings and prints seized by the Nazis during World War II were found in a Munich apartment has set off excitement in the art world and spurred anger among Jewish groups that German officials didn't publicize the discovery when it was first made.
With a potential value of $1.35 billion, the trove of art contains previously unknown works by Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall; other artists represented include Pablo Picasso, Auguste Renoir, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
The stash of art was reported by Germany's Focus magazine Monday, under the headline "The Nazi Treasure" (Der Nazi-Schatz). Tax officials discovered the cache when they visited the cluttered Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, a descendant of man who acted as an official in wartime Germany.
Of nearly 1,400 oil paintings, prints, and other works, 1,285 had been stacked in a drawer, unframed. They include work by German Expressionists such as Franz Marc and Max Beckmann, in addition to a previously unknown self-portrait by Otto Dix. The trove also includes Albrecht Dürer and Canaletto, who worked in earlier centuries — a detail that could make the collection's origins even more difficult to explain.
Some of the works were almost certainly looted by the Nazis; others were sold by Jewish collectors who were under extreme duress. And some works were culled from German museums for being "degenerate art" that didn't conform with Nazi ideology.
German officials have asked art historian Meike Hoffmann to examine the works — and perhaps provide clarity for their clouded history.
"All these paintings and prints are in a very good condition," Hoffmann said Tuesday, according to The New York Times. She said it's not possible to put a price on the collection, saying, "Of course it is of a very high value for art historians."
Hoffmann says it could take years to trace the works' origins. She added that there are no signs that any of the art was forged — and that they had a powerful effect when she was confronted with them.
"It was very emotional for me to see all these works and to realize they still exist," Hoffmann said, according to Agence France-Presse.
"This case shows the extent of organized art looting which occurred in museums and private collections," Ruediger Mahlo, the German representative of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, tells Reuters.
"We demand the paintings be returned to their original owners," he said. "It cannot be, as in this case, that what amounts morally to the concealment of stolen goods continues."
Officials say they found the art in early 2012, contradicting the Focus report that the discovery occurred in 2011. But they confirmed that officials in Berlin have known of the find for months.
To a large extent, the works' convoluted history mirrors that of the Gurlitt family, as Reuters reports:"Cornelius's father Hildebrand Gurlitt was from 1920 a specialist collector of the modern art of the early 20th century that the Nazis branded as un-German or 'degenerate' and removed from show in state museums.
"Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels recruited Gurlitt to sell the 'degenerate art' abroad to try to earn cash for the state. Gurlitt bought some for himself and also independently bought art from desperate Jewish dealers forced to sell.
"After the war he persuaded the Americans that, as he had a Jewish grandmother, he himself had been persecuted. He continued working as a dealer and died in a traffic accident in 1956."
As Der Spiegel reports, the elder Gurlitt also said his collection had been destroyed in the 1945 firebombing of Dresden.
On Tuesday, officials said that Cornelius Gurlitt, 76, first attracted the suspicion of tax investigators in 2010, when a routine check on a train from Zurich to Munich revealed that he was carrying thousands of dollars' worth of cash.
An attorney for the heirs of Jewish art collector Alfred Flechtheim says the family will look into the find for possible ties to his estate, reports Der Spiegel. The magazine says that any art transactions that took place after 1933 are susceptible to review as possible Nazi plunder.
News of the discovery is also coming out as Jewish and historical groups prepare to observe the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, a series of coordinated attacks in which tens of thousands of Jews were beaten or arrested between Nov. 9 and 10, 1938.
Thousands of Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues were ransacked or destroyed in that event, widely seen as a turning point in Nazi Germany's attempts to destroy Jews and their culture.
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Art Revolution Blooms After Arab Spring
From The "Creative Dissent" Exhibit
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This mural depicts Moammar Gadhafi as a rat fleeing the February 17 revolution in Tripoli, Libya.
Jill Dougherty
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In the U.S., graffiti is often condemned as vandalism. But during the Arab Spring, artists say city walls were often the only places where they could talk back to tyrants.
Street art can be found across the Middle East and North Africa, and the Arab Spring protests inspired an artistic revolution. The "Creative Dissent" exhibit at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan is putting that art on display.
Tell Me More guest host Celeste Headlee spoke to guest curator Christiane Gruber, an Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Visual Culture at the University of Michigan, and Nazeer, an Egyptian street artist featured in the show.
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In 1913, A New York Armory Filled With Art Stunned The Nation
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The 69th Regiment Armory on East 25th Street may have seemed like an odd venue, but it was big enough to hold the 1,400-work exhibition. "There were lots of comparisons in 1913 of the Armory Show being a bomb from the blue, so the Armory is not inappropriate," says curator Kimberly Orcutt.
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
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Marcel Duchamp's Cubist-inspired Nude Descending a Staircase was famously described by one critic as "an explosion in a shingle factory."
Philadelphia Museum of Ar/2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp
One hundred years ago in New York City, nearly 90,000 people came to see the future of art. The 1913 Armory Show gave America its first look at what avant-garde artists in Europe were doing. Today these artists are in major museums around the world, but in 1913, they were mostly unknown in America.
Boasting 1,400 works — from artists such as George Braque, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, and many, many more — it was the biggest art show New York had ever seen. Today, the New York Historical Society is celebrating the Armory centennial with artworks from the original exhibition.
Normally used to store arms and train troops, the 69th Regiment Armory on East 25th Street was an odd venue, but it was big enough to hold it all. "There were lots of comparisons in 1913 of the Armory Show being a bomb from the blue, so the Armory is not inappropriate," says curator Kimberly Orcutt.
The avant-garde show raised hackles. The most controversial work was Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. Everyone had an opinion about it, including former President Theodore Roosevelt, who compared it to a Navajo rug he had in his bathroom.
Americans were not used to looking at abstract art. And the Duchamp — painted in ochres and browns a year before the Armory Show, was Cubist — splintering a profile figure so it seems to be in motion. The painting provoked critiques of all sorts, including cartoons and poems.
"It was called a bundle of slats, an explosion in a shingle factory," says curator Marilyn Kushner.
Viewers were puzzled; with all those fragments, where was the nude? But they lined up to see it, and the other avant-garde works. Some 87,000 people came to the Armory show. Rich collectors and dealers had seen such art in Europe, but this was the first time the masses got to see — and react to — the new ideas.
If the Duchamp made visitors puzzled, Orcutt says Matisse's 1907 Blue Nude made people mad. The reclining female nude was a traditional subject, says Orcutt, but it was presented in a "distorted" way: "With blue shadows, with colors that didn't have to do with the representation of nature. And some people considered this sort of a backwards step in cultural progress ... to challenge the very foundations of western civilization. ... She was seen as being very primitive, a threat to the progress they felt that they were making here in the United States."
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Henri Matisse angered viewers with his "distorted" Blue Nude, a 1907 oil on canvas.
The Baltimore Museum of Art/2013 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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Robert Henri's 1913 Figure in Motion was a realistic, but bold response to Matisse and Duchamp's nudes.
Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Ill.
Some American artists were threatened by what they saw at the Armory.
"They were afraid ... that these new styles, Cubism, Fauvism, and so on, would become a fashion, would become a new orthodoxy," Orcutt explains. "A style you had to adopt in order to be modern."
American artists had organized the Armory show — they had chosen the European pictures, and negotiated with dealers and lenders. Almost half the exhibit was made up of American art. So when all the press attention went to Duchamp, Matisse and other controversial foreigners, the Americans were unhappy.
Robert Henri, a leader of the Ashcan school of American artists, had a nude painting in the show called Figure in Motion — and it was a response to the Matisse and Duchamp. The larger-than-life-size woman seems to be stepping toward us. Her image is realistic — not splintered — but still daring, in its way. "She faces the viewer very brashly, with all of her nakedness showing," Kushner says.
American realist John Sloan helped organize the Armory show, and had several works in it. His 1912 McSorley's Bar is a slice-of-New-York-life scene of relaxation and libation.
"The interesting thing also about this is that you only see males in this bar," Kushner says. "But this is the time period in New York when women started venturing out on their own and going into these restaurants — perhaps not bars — but dancehalls and restaurants by themselves."
In 1913, women took to the streets, too — with political and social causes.
"Women are marching in the streets not only for the right to vote, but also for the right of open marriages, contraception, the right to have a child without being married to the father," Kushner says. "... This was 1913, right! I mean we all thought this happened later, didn't we?"
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McSorley's Bar by American realist John Sloan is a 1912 slice-of-New-York-life scene of relaxation and libation.
Delaware Art Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
As this New York Historical Society salute makes clear, the city was in a bustle 100 ago. On the streets were horse-drawn carriages and automobiles. The Woolworth Building had just been completed, making it the tallest building in town. Electric trains pulled out of Grand Central Station for the first time and new residents arrived in hordes.
"Thousands of immigrants are flooding into the city so you have a cacophony of many, many different languages," Kushner says. "... This was when Europe sort of sat up and said, 'Oh, New York, it's not that backwater. New York is the place of the new and the fresh and the modern.'"
In that exploding city on the Hudson, in addition to the nudes and the cubes, the radical visions and subjects and colors, more than anything else the Armory Show of 1913 was a show about freedom: New ways of thinking and seeing, and expressing yourself. Given the time and the place, Kushner says it was the perfect exhibition:
"The question should not be 'Why did the Armory Show happen?' ... All of this talk about freedom was going on in New York at the time. If the Armory Show hadn't happened, I think the more apt question would have been, 'Why didn't it happen?'"
It's still happening. And if you're in the city before late February 2014 you can see the new and the old at the New York Historical Society's celebration of The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution.
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How About A Coke? Warhol Painting Up For Grabs
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Coca-Cola (3) was one of many of Warhol's pop art pieces, which celebrated popular culture and consumerism in post-World War II America.
Courtesy of Christie's
Coca-Cola (3) was one of many of Warhol's pop art pieces, which celebrated popular culture and consumerism in post-World War II America.
Courtesy of Christie's
On Tuesday, artist Andy Warhol's oversized and iconic Coca-Cola (3) will hit the auction block at Christie's, and to borrow an old slogan from the company, It's The Real Thing.
Warhol painted the 6-foot-tall black-and-white canvas in 1962 as part of a series of four Coke bottle paintings. According to Ted Ryan, archivist and historian at the Coca-Cola Co., Warhol had the paintings in his studio and invited his friend, Emile de Antonio, to come by and give him feedback.
"I think he was told No. 3 is it — just throw away No. 1," says Ryan, who added that Warhol had been struggling with different art styles at the time. "It wasn't until he did the series of Coke bottles and got the feedback ... that he found his genre."
Ryan says the artist chose the Coke bottle because of its ubiquity, pointing to a quote from Warhol himself:"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke ... All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it ... and you know it."
The artist later went on to depict other American brands, including Brillo, Campbell's Soup, General Electric, Heinz and Kellogg.
The Coke painting, which has been part of a private collection since 1995, could sell for more than $40 million — another Warhol piece, Coke Bottle (4), sold for $35.4 million a couple of years ago.
Coca-Cola itself holds more than 20 pieces of Warhol art. Ryan says the company never sent a cease-and-desist order to the artist asking him to stop using the company's logo and other trademarks, but rather they "acknowledged each other from afar."
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How To Love A Fake
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Museum director Alex Rueger (L) and Dutch artist Jeroen Krabbe stand in front of Vincent van Gogh's long-lost Sunset at Montmajour at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The 1888 landscape painting from the height of the Dutch master's career had been abandoned for years in a Norwegian attic on the belief that it was a forgery.
Art has been in the news a lot lately.
This past week a painting by Francis Bacon sold at Christie's for more than $142 million. This is the most money ever paid for a single artwork at auction. Last summer we learned that the venerable and now defunct New York art dealer Knoedler and Company had sold 40 paintings purporting to be by Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning and others that were actually counterfeits made by a man in a Queens garage studio. Last week a trove of art looted by the Nazis — hundreds of paintings — was found in an apartment in Munich.
We sometimes think of paintings as like autographs. It's only Mick Jagger's autograph if he signed it, with his very hand. And it's only a Vermeer, say, or a Rothko, if Vermeer or Rothko themselves actually made the pictures.
This makes good sense when it comes to autographs. A signature is a person's mark. By affixing our mark, we sign the deal; we make the commitment; we write the check. An autograph matters because it certifies.
But none of this is true of paintings.
We value paintings for their own qualities. If we also admire the painter, this is only because he or she managed to make objects whose value is otherwise manifest.
Perhaps, then, we should think of painting, not on the autograph model, but on what I'll call the architecture model.
Le Corbusier doesn't have to have built the structure for it to be an expression of his artistic accomplishment. And so with painters. It isn't the dubious magic of the artist's touch that is significant. What matters, rather, is the distinct achievement of the artist's conception, a conception than can be realized in different ways.
This idea shouldn't be too strange. It is widely known that Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens and other Great Masters ran workshops (factories) where assistants did significant portions of the actual labor. And no one seriously expects that Jeff Koons actually made the stainless steel "Balloon Dog Orange," which this week sold at auction for close to $60 million.
But there are borderline cases. Several months ago I discussed art historian Benjamin Binstock's remarkable proposal that a number of Vermeer's paintings were probably made by his daughter, who had labored, for a time, as his apprentice. Let us suppose that Binstock is right. Does this mean that these Vermeers are not Vermeers, that they are fakes? Well, it means that they were not painted by him; he did not apply the paint to the canvass. On the autograph conception, they aren't Vermeers. But on the architectural conception, quite possibly (not necessarily), they are. Maybe Vermeer found a new way to make paintings, a new method? He used his daughter!
This proposal has been advanced by the art critic Blake Gopnik. From Gopnik's standpoint, Vermeer's daughter's paintings are his paintings — making a host of assumptions about the facts of the case — because they are the realization and working out of the father's project.
It is an overly narrow and parochial conception of authorship — something like the autograph conception — that gets in the way of our appreciating that artists can do things, and make things, without actually doing them and making them.
Gopnik pushes this argument to its extreme in his recent NYT essay "In Praise of Art Forgeries." Forgers, Gopnik proposes, can be an art lover's friend. Sometimes, they give us works that great artists simply didn't get around to making. If a fake is good enough to fool experts, then it's good enough to give the rest of us pleasure, even insight.
Why suppose that a work is a fake or a copy just because the artist himself didn't actually make it? What makes a fake a good one is that it realizes, or investigates, or approximates, an artist's contribution. It makes a move in a space of possibilities opened up by him or her. It is the very fact of the forgery's success that ensures that what the forger is doing is relevant and, potentially, a contribution to the original artist's work.
Gopnik invites us to think of the faker as a kind of faithful assistant who just happened to arrive after the artist's death, or who set himself to work without the artist's explicit permission.
This idea is an important one. It applies pressure to the idea that we know what it is for a painting to be a Vermeer or a Koons. Authorship, like the wider notion of agency itself, is fraught and delicate. And it is one of art's jobs to explore this.
Nevertheless, it is important to remember that, in the real world, we do not ever come up against forgeries that duplicate the qualities of their originals; we only ever come up against forgeries that seem to do this.
Yes, they may fool the experts, as Gopnik says. But only for now.
I don't mean to suggest that the experts will always get it right eventually, thanks to a kind of infallibility of expertise. Although there is actually something to this. Not because experts are so smart, but rather because forgers usually deploy devices that are only designed to pull the wool over the contemporary crowd; in the passage of time, significant stylistic difference emerges. (This familiar point was noted by Peter Schjeldahl, in his somewhat unfriendly response to Gopnik in The New Yorker).
No, the deeper point is that we need to guard against misunderstanding what it means for an expert, or anyone else, to get it right.
Judgments in matters of art are themselves only ever works in progress, revising themselves in light not only of an ongoing engagement with the work, but also a continuing dialogue with other artists and thinkers, past and present. What the art historian Meyer Schaprio called "critical seeing" is something we cultivate, spread out in time. From that standpoint, getting fooled about what you are seeing, needn't be a failure at all; it is, rather, a moment in an ongoing process.
Which takes us back to Gopnik's insight. He's right that our engagement with a forgery can enable us to achieve insight into the work and conceptions of the artist who has been copied. But not because it fools the experts. But precisely because, in time, it can't.
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Kiefer's Bleak Horrors Of War Fill An Entire Building
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Anselm Kiefer's Velimir Chlebnikov, a series of 30 paintings devoted to the Russian philosopher who posited that war is inevitable, is on display at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
MASS MoCA
Anselm Kiefer's Velimir Chlebnikov, a series of 30 paintings devoted to the Russian philosopher who posited that war is inevitable, is on display at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
MASS MoCA
Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945, in the Black Forest of southwest Germany, just as the Third Reich was collapsing.
"I was born in ruins, and for me, ruins are something positive," Kiefer says. "Because what you see as a child is positive, you know? And they are positive because they are the beginning of something new."
That history is always present in Kiefer's sculptures and paintings. One of the major figures in post-World War II German art, Kiefer has works in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Australia, among many others.
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Narrow are the Vessels is made of concrete, rebar and rubble. Neighbors objected to the work when the owners, Andy and Christine Hall, displayed it in their front yard.
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What Do We Mean When We Talk About 'Latino Art'?
When the Whitney Museum of American Art announced the artists for its 2014 biennial, people took to the Internet to chime in about who's been included and who's been left out; the last biennial had been blasted for ignoring Latino artists. But when a new show opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum featuring only Latino artists — "Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art" — it was blasted for other reasons.
"Meaningless," wrote critic Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. In a review of the Smithsonian show, Kennicott was referring to the label "Latino art." (Yes, his word choice ticked off a lot of people, but more on that shortly.) Kennicott's point was that by grouping art by ethnicity, throwing together works by artists of different styles, periods and backgrounds, "you get a big mess."
Speaking to NPR, Kennicott defended his critique of the Smithsonian show:"If we look at the art included in this exhibition, it includes everything from a Cuban exile who spent a lot of time in Paris and worked in a very cool, lovely, abstract style to Mexican-American artists who were doing a very political kind of art in Los Angeles. And one begins to wonder if there is, in fact, a lot in common between what they're doing."
So is there such a thing as "Latino art" or "Asian art" or "African-American art"? Are they "racial hang-ups," as African-American artist Raymond Saunders put it in his 1967 essay "Black is a color"? Or are they necessary categories that force white-run museums, publishers and concert halls to recognize artists of color?
These questions are at the heart of the debate ignited by Kennicott's word "meaningless."
"I was pretty stunned," says New York-based artist and filmmaker Alex Rivera. So he posted some angry comments about Kennicott's review on his Facebook page. Rivera told NPR that he and other artists have seen these reviews before. "Every so often there's a show, kind of like the one at the Smithsonian, that gathers our work together and gives it a venue," Rivera says. "And every time that happens, there's a review that says putting our work together is a bad way to organize art." Yet, Rivera says, critics rarely review the work itself. Rivera also notes that critics do not question such equally broad categories as "American" or "European" art.
It was a lively Facebook thread with several people in the Latino arts community chiming in. Artist Judithe Hernández wrote, for example: "When was the last time the Guggenheim, Whitney or MOMA, exhibited contemporary Latino American artists?"
Even Kennicott chimed in. "I was kind of the skunk at the party in those discussions," he says. "But I was interested because it was a good conversation." Kennicott was so interested, he invited Rivera to square off with him in The Washington Post.
Someone who didn't weigh in on the volatile discussion was Smithsonian curator Carmen Ramos. It took her three years to put together "Our America." With 92 artworks by 72 artists who have roots throughout Latin America, it's an extensive survey that covers the period from the mid-20th century to the present.
Ramos fully agrees the term "Latino art" is extremely broad. It's also extremely rich, she says, yet many of the artists in the Smithsonian show — regardless of style — have been ignored by mainstream museums. "We use the term 'Latino art' as a construct, as a handle, really, to talk about an absence in the way that we think about American art and culture. That's why the word 'presence' is in the subtitle. Presence is the opposite of absence," Ramos says.
But that brings up a larger issue: Are museums doing an artist a favor or a disservice when they group shows together around ethnicity or gender rather than aesthetics? Adrian Piper believes it's a disservice. She's a conceptual artist whose work is in the collections of major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She recently demanded that a film of hers be removed from a show of black performance art. Piper preferred not to be interviewed, but she sent NPR the email she sent to the show's curator. In it she wrote that "as a matter of principle," she does not allow her work to be exhibited in "all-black shows," because she believes these shows "perpetuate the segregation of African-American artists from the mainstream contemporary art world."
“ I would love to be in a universe where we don't need to have culturally specific museums because we do have a diverse museum world that represents all of us. ... But I don't live in that society right now.
- Arlene Davila, New York University
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Art Thieves Sentenced To 6 Years For Dutch Museum Heist
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Eugen Darie has admitted to being part of a Romanian gang that stole seven works by masters including Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse from a Rotterdam museum last October.
After admitting to one of the most surprising art thefts in recent history, two men have been sentenced to 6 years and 8 months in prison. They are part of a Romanian gang that stole seven works by masters including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin from a Rotterdam museum last autumn.
The value of the stolen art was estimated at more than $24 million when officials obtained insurance for the paintings. The thieves tripped the Kunstahl museum's alarm, but the thieves worked quickly and escaped before police arrived. The works have not been recovered; some were destroyed, officials say.
A Romanian court issued prison sentences Tuesday for Radu Dogaru and Eugen Darie, who pleaded guilty to the theft last month. Other charges and court cases are ongoing — including an effort to hold Dogaru's mother, Olga responsible for burning several of the paintings. She had apparently become worried that police were closing in on her son.
From Reuters: "The works stolen were Picasso's Tête d'Arlequin, Matisse's La Liseuse en Blanc et Jaune, Monet's Waterloo Bridge, London and Charing Cross Bridge, London, Gauguin's Femme devant une fenêtre ouverte, Meijer De Haan's Autoportrait and Lucian Freud's Woman with Eyes Closed.
Romanian experts believe that three out of the seven paintings have been destroyed by fire. They said nails used to fasten the canvases to their wooden frames, recovered from the ashes in Dogaru's house, had been a crucial piece of evidence."
The idea of a thief destroying valuable art is "not surprising," as Robert Wittman, the former head of the FBI Art Crimes Team, told NPR this summer.
"And the reason that is," Wittman told NPR's Jacki Lyden, "is because, usually, the gangs that are involved in these things are not art thieves. They're just basically common criminals. They're good thieves, but they're terrible businessmen. And so they don't know what to do with the material after they steal it."
Wittman also noted that if the authorities' version of events is correct, Dogaru's mother isn't the first thief-mama to get antsy and destroy her son's loot. He cites the case of Stephane Breitwieser, who in 2002 was accused of stealing more than 200 pieces of art from European museums.
"As the French police closed in" in 2002, Wittman says, "his mother became upset, took all the material and threw it into a canal."
She also cut and hacked apart the art — in some cases forcing the remains down her kitchen sink's disposal.
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Trove Of Artifacts Trumpets African-American Triumphs
Seventeen-year-old Tonisha Owens stared wide-eyed at the faded script on an 1854 letter. It was once carried by another 17-year-old — a slave named Frances. The letter was written by a plantation owner's wife to a slave dealer, saying that she needed to sell her chambermaid to pay for horses. But Frances didn't know how to read or write, and didn't know what she carried.
"She does not know she is to be sold. I couldn't tell her," the letter reads. "I own all her family and the leave taking would be so distressing that I could not."
That letter is among hundreds of documents, artifacts and artworks that make up the Kinsey Collection, which covers 400 years of African-American triumphs and tragedies. Bernard Kinsey and his wife, Shirley, began acquiring pieces more than 35 years ago and have said that Frances' letter speaks to the reality and greed of slavery.
Owens, a junior at Reginald F. Lewis High School, says it sent her a powerful message about the things African-Americans can do, sometimes under extreme duress.
"We accomplish so many things," Owens marveled. "They went through slavery and still accomplished. So we can't say, 'I'm tired, I don't feel like doing this.' That's not an excuse."
Owens was among a group of students touring an exhibition of the collection at Baltimore's Reginald F. Lewis Museum. The collection has made its way around the country, including a stint at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. A small portion of it is currently on display at the Epcot Center at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla.
Skipp Sanders, executive director at the Lewis Museum, says he has a particular interest in students seeing the exhibition. He also thinks it is important for people, especially African-Americans, to understand that the legacy of what black people have done is part of the fabric of American history.
"We've all, I think, even currently, gotten a sort of distorted picture of what American history is and how this contribution has to be woven in and through it," Sanders says.
He says he gets emotional viewing the original documents on display here, including the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case. There's also a final page, complete with the different-colored signatures of the Supreme Court justices, from the decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. But one of his favorite pieces is a letter written in 1942 by Zora Neale Hurston in which she decisively rejects an unwanted suitor.
"If you will be decent enough to die," Hurston writes, "I will buy me a red dress, send myself some flowers of congratulation and come to your funeral."
Bernard and Shirley Kinsey, along with their son Khalil, have chosen to share their collection because they say it spotlights not black pain, but the strength and resilience of African-Americans. Bernard Kinsey says he wants to end what he calls the "myth of absence," where the accomplishments of African-Americans aren't acknowledged.
"What we're saying," he told a group of journalists and admirers in Orlando, "is we want to put African-Americans in the dialogue, put us in the stories, 'cause if you get used to not seeing us, you start thinking that's OK, when it really isn't OK."
The Kinsey family is also very focused on what the collection means to young people who aren't learning about this history in school. Alexander Bullock, 17, says the exhibition changed his mind about a lot of things.
"It shows more of the people you don't hear about, or you don't really read about, or that the teachers don't talk about," Bullock says. "Everybody talks about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. .... But you don't really hear about the people they don't talk about, who didn't really get their names out there."
Bullock's classmate Dominic Gilliam, 16, was both stunned and inspired by the things he learned.
"When you just look at all these things, we have just as much power as anybody else," Gilliam said.
The Kinsey Collection is on display at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore through March 2014.
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Designer B Michael On Bringing Color To The Runway
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Courtesy of b micheal America
After a brief career on Wall Street, veteran designer B Michael followed his calling to the world of fashion. He got his start as a millinery designer for the '80s soap opera Dynasty. Soon after, he began designing couture gowns leading him to work with an extensive client list that includes Cicely Tyson, Angela Basset, Lena Horne, Whitney Houston, and Cate Blanchett — to name a few.
After spending decades in the business B Michael says, "Every successful story will tell you they've had to reinvent themselves."
He sat down with NPR's Michel Martin to share the wisdom he's gathered over the years and what it takes to break into the fashion industry as a person of color.
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For Miami, A New Art Project, Complete With Drama
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The boats of For Those in Peril on the Sea, by artist Hew Locke, hang in the entrance hall of the Perez Art Museum Miami, which opens this week.
Daniel Azoulay/Perez Art Museum Miami
Outside the glittering new Perez Art Museum Miami, finishing touches were still being applied late last month to the spacious plazas and gardens surrounding the $220 million building. Next door to the art museum, a new science museum is also going up. When it's all complete, the 29-acre Museum Park will provide a focus and a gathering spot on Biscayne Bay for those who live in, work in and visit downtown Miami.
The Perez building, designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, has been described, and often, as stunning. It's notable for its spare, rectangular lines and expanse of glass windows — the largest hurricane-impact-resistant glass windows in the world — and for the 70 hydroponic gardens hanging from every side. They were designed by French landscape artist Patrick Blanc, and they're self-watering.
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The distinctive museum building, designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, has already been hailed as a success for the city.
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Norman Rockwell's 'Saying Grace' Sells For $46 Million At Auction
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Norman Rockwell's 1951 painting Saying Grace sold for $46 million Wednesday — a record for the artist.
Three Norman Rockwell paintings sold for a combined total of nearly $58 million at a Sotheby's auction Wednesday. The three paintings, which had long been displayed in a Massachusetts museum named for the artist, were among 10 Rockwell works sold at auction today.
By far, the star of the bunch was the 1951 masterpiece Saying Grace, which sold for $46 million — a record for Rockwell's art. The price includes a buyer's premium. The AP says the artist's previous record of $15 million had been set by Breaking Home Ties at a 2006 Sotheby's auction.
The famous Saying Grace depicts a woman and boy bowing their heads in prayer at a table in a bustling restaurant, as other patrons pause for a moment to look on.
Before the auction, Saying Grace had been expected to garner between $15 million and $20 million. The painting by the beloved Saturday Evening Post illustrator has been exhibited in more than a dozen museums around America.
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Rockwell's The Gossips, seen here in a detail view, sold for nearly $8.5 million Wednesday. To see the full painting, click the image.
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'Pearl Earring' Is The Crown Jewel Of The Frick's Dutch Exhibit
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Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring is one of 15 17th century Dutch paintings on view at New York's Frick Collection through early 2014.
Some years ago, I wrote a poem called "Why I Love Vermeer," which ends "I've never lived in a city without a Vermeer." I could say that until 1990, when Vermeer's exquisite painting The Concert was one of the masterpieces stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It's still missing. The French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, who loved that Vermeer, put together a show called Last Seen, a series of photographs of the empty frames of the stolen paintings, combined with comments on the paintings by people who worked at the museum. It's a haunting and elegant show, though seeing this exhibit, which is now on view at the Gardner, then walking through the rooms with the empty frames still in place, made me feel more melancholy and hopeless than ever about this enormous loss.
One consolation for me is to see all the other Vermeers I can. No city in the world has more of them — eight — than New York. But right now there's even one more. Through Jan. 19, at the Frick Collection — my favorite museum in New York, partly because of its own three Vermeers — there's a show of 15 paintings on loan from the Mauritshuis, the great Dutch museum in The Hague. The centerpiece of the show is one of the world's most beloved paintings: Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring. Cleaned and restored since I first saw it, it's even more breathtaking than I remembered.
“ The young girl, wearing a blue and yellow silk turban, is just turning her face to watch you entering the room. She may even be slightly distracted by someone else a little off to your right, maybe someone she knows better than you.
- Lloyd Schwartz
At the Frick, it gets a room all to itself. The young girl, wearing a blue and yellow silk turban, is just turning her face to watch you entering the room. She may even be slightly distracted by someone else a little off to your right, maybe someone she knows better than you. Her mouth is slightly open, as if she's just taking a breath and is about to say something. The light falling on her is reflected not only on her earring but in her large shining eyes ("Those are pearls that were his eyes," Shakespeare's Ariel sings in The Tempest) and on her moist lips. There's even a little spot of moisture in one corner of her mouth.
Art historians tell us that this painting was not intended as a portrait, but was a type of painting — a study of a figure in an exotic costume. But there's something so particular about this girl's beauty and expression, she seems much more than just a model. Her presence is totally palpable. She's right there, in the room with you and radiating unique and individual life.
In the next room are 14 more paintings from The Hague, including Carel Fabritius' magical little goldfinch, the painting from which Donna Tartt gets the name of her latest novel, and Jacob van Ruisdael's small but expansive landscape of the bleaching fields outside the city of Haarlem (a sublime picture that's more than two-thirds sky), plus four marvelous Rembrandts. But there's really only one reason so many people are lining up to see this show.
You can also see the Frick's own Vermeers. This is a rare occasion when all three are exhibited together, on a wall that allows you to see them more closely and in better light than in their usual locations. The poignant Officer and Laughing Girl is my personal favorite, but so is the ravishing Mistress and Maid, in which a woman wearing another pearl earring, writing a letter, is interrupted by her maid handing a letter to her — maybe from the same person she's just been writing to?
I still needed to see more Vermeers, and there are five more at the Metropolitan Museum, half a mile up Fifth Avenue. For the first time all of them, including another painting of a young woman with a huge pearl earring, have also been gathered into the same room. It's a rare chance to see so many Vermeers together, to compare the subtle and sometimes dramatic differences.
One more thing: the scholarship on Girl with a Pearl Earring reveals that the pearl isn't really a pearl. No pearl that big has ever come to light. No oyster could be big enough. So the famous pearl is probably just glass painted to look like a pearl. But of course the pearl — the pearl of great price, perhaps — is a visual metaphor for the girl wearing it: glistening, radiant, a creature brought to life by light itself. Or if not the girl, then Vermeer's painting of her.
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