Art Photos mixed

Plenty of the world’s most famous artists started their careers when they were still young whippersnappers — Dalí created his first work at six years old (although, ironically, it was more Realist than his later works), Michelangelo was painting intricate masterpieces from his early teens and Picasso’s artist father gave up his artistic dreams when he realised that, at 13, his son’s skills surpassed his own.

Now, a new competition to find today’s creative child prodigies will give ten young artists the chance to have their work shown on billboards across the UK this September. Launched by BIC® KIDS, in partnership with Mumsnet, the contest is open to children from the age of five to eleven.

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Harold Marvin Williams, the founding president and chief executive of the Los Angeles-based J. Paul Getty Trust, died on Sunday, 30 July, aged 89. Williams—a businessman who had also served as the dean of the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles and the chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission—became the president and chief executive of the Getty Museum in 1981. He took up the reins as the president and chief executive of Getty Trust when it was established that same year, and held this position until 1998 (retiring on 5 January, his 70th birthday).

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Human Flow, Ai Weiwei’s first feature film about the global refugee crisis which premieres at the Venice International Film Festival at the end of this month, is due to be released in American theatres this autumn. The US distribution rights to the film have been acquired by Amazon Studios, the media production arm of the online retailer giant owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, so fans of the Chinese artist-activist could soon expect to stream the documentary at home.

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The Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and Garage Magazine founder Dasha Zhukova—one of the contemporary art scene’s biggest power couples—have split. In a statement released to the media on Monday, the couple said: “We are committed to jointly raising our two children. We will also continue to work together as co-founders of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and the New Holland Island cultural centre in Saint Petersburg.”Abramovich, the owner of England’s Chelsea Football Club, is ranked 12th on the 2017 Forbes list of Russian billionaires, with a fortune estimated at $9.1 billion. Zhukova, who sits on the boards of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was ranked 98th on ArtReview magazine’s 2016 Power 100 list of “most influential people in the contemporary art world”.

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13 August: American Furniture & Decorative Arts
Pair of Portraits of Deacon Benjamin Titcomb and his wife Anne Pearson Titcomb (1798) by John Brewster
Est. $30,000-$50,000

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As daylight grows shorter this winter, Madison Square Park’s central Oval Lawn will be blanketed by a small blizzard of incandescent light when the Austrian-born artist Erwin Redl installs his public art work Whiteout (13 November-18 April 2018).

Commissioned by the park’s non-profit group Mad Sq Arts, the installation will be made up of hundreds of white spheres embedded with LED lights and suspended from steel poles. The projects aims to evoke “the phenomenon of a whiteout that, in nature, disorients the viewer by compromising our perception”, Redl told The Art Newspaper.

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The National Gallery’s engagement with contemporary art will take an immersive turn when Olafur Eliasson’s Room for one colour (1997) is installed in its Sainsbury’s Wing as an “epilogue” to Monochrome, a show about the artist’s decision to paint and draw in black, shades of grey or other single colours since the Middle Ages (30 October-18 February 2018). The room, which is illuminated by yellow mono-frequency lamps like those that bathed Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall during Eliasson’s The Weather Project in 2003-04, will transport visitors into a monochrome world. In the white room bathed with yellow light viewers' spectral range is limited to yellow and black.

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The Centre for Fine Arts (Bozar) in Brussels had a colourful day on Wednesday (16 August) when a visitor trod upon on and damaged a work in the Yves Klein exhibition, Theatre of the Void (closed 20 August). While approaching another work across a gallery space, the visitor inadvertently walked on Pigment bleu sec (Dry Blue Pigment), a shallow wood basin spread with sand and the artist’s signature matte pigment, International Klein Blue (IKB), leaving white footprints on the work and blue material on the floor.

“Even though we have several safety measures (warning signs, a partial barrier and a guard), the man was too fascinated [with the other work] to notice all of that,” a museum spokeswoman tells The Art Newspaper. Bozar employees fully restored the work in-situ the same day, re-arranging the sand and adding more IKB. Dry Blue Pigment, first conceived in 1957, must be re-installed with new sand and pigment each time it is shown, the spokeswoman adds, “so it’s not the same as damage to a ‘unique piece’”.

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'Reflection Of Mount Rainer In Calm Lake'
Photography by Bill Hinton

A forgery scam that poses a “significant threat” to unsuspecting art buyers has been uncovered by the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), which has identified four fakes purportedly by Jackson Pollock that were brought to it for authentication by three different owners. All the works surfaced starting in 2013, and are said to have come from the collection of James Brennerman, who, as far as IFAR can determine, is a fictitious identity.

The organisation, which has helped authenticate works by the artist since the Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board was disbanded in 1995, outlined its investigation into the forgeries in the most recent issue of its IFAR Journal. It has seen photographs of ten other fake Pollocks and spotted another one online, all apparently from the same cache. To date IFAR is aware of less than two dozen possible fakes, but it fears there may be many more, since the paintings submitted to it were accompanied by a hefty dossier of documents referring to Brennerman’s collection of more than 700 works by Pollock. Those documents also refer to paintings by artists including Kline, De Kooning, Renoir, Monet, Hassam, Rothko, Manet, Hopper, Motherwell and Gorky, which Brennerman envisioned would “eventually form the core of his own art museum”, the IFAR Journal reports.


A photo from the Brennerman dossier said to depict the collector as a young man (Photo courtesy International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR))

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