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Dubious $4.3-Million Michelangelo Becomes an Icon of Government Waste in Italy

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:30:49 +0100

Newspapers are calling it the case of the “Millionaire Crucifix.” In a year in which the Italian government hopes to sustain an unprecedented level of fiscal discipline, members of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MIBAC) have been slammed by a barrage of criticism about the purchase of a sculpture attributed to Michelangelo.

Even as a handful of state agents insist that the piece was worth the massive purchase price of €3.2 million ($4.2 million), a high court has found that it was merely from Michelangelo’s workshop, placing the value closer to €700,000 ($927,850). The statue was intended for the state-funded Museo del Bargello in Florence.

Most of the outcry has been directed at Roberto Cecchi, an architect who was undersecretary of MIBAC when the sculpture was purchased in the fall of 2008. Along with a handful of his colleagues, including Museums of Florence superintendent Cristina Acidini, Cecchi is now the subject of a major investigation for the loss of revenue resulting from his alleged mistake. “We will demonstrate ourselves to have acted in the public interest and with the highest level of propriety,” he told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. “There are some who might believe that a director at the ministry might wake up one morning and buy what he pleases. Fortunately, this is not the case.”

Cecchi has cited numerous professional opinions in support of his decision as undersecretary. These include a comment by Federico Zeri, a contributor to the Giornale dell’Arte, who opined glowingly: “If it is not Michelangelo, it is God.” Cecchi has also defended himself by citing a November 18, 2008, email from Salvatore Settis, then presiding over MIBAC High Council, who wrote regarding the purchase, “Dear Roberto, it seems to me to be an excellent decision.”

On view for the first time since restoration, 'Mona Lisa' copy draws crowds at the Prado

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:20:48 +0100

Crowds are gathering at Madrid's Prado Museum to view a copy of the "Mona Lisa" for the first time since a restoration revealed it was almost certainly painted by one of Leonardo da Vinci's apprentices as he worked on the original.

The painting was put on display at the museum on Tuesday, where it will stay until it moves to Paris' Louvre museum next month to hang alongside the original as part of an exhibition on da Vinci's work.

Although the precise author of the copy has not been determined, both the Prado and Louvre believe it is probably the earliest known copy of "La Gioconda."

The copy has been part of Spain's art collection for hundreds of years. It had previously been on display in the Prado but no one paid much attention as it was considered a mediocre copy.

La Gioconda was painted by a pupil or follower of the artist at the same time as the original. The importance of this discovery, which was made during the study and restoration of the painting at the Prado for its inclusion in the exhibition at the Louvre on Leonardo that opens on 29 March, lies in the fact that as a contemporary and perfectly preserved copy, it contributes important information on both the landscape background and on numerous details of the mysterious sitter. The latter include the shape of the chair, the ornamentation of the cloth covering her breast and the semi-transparent veil around her shoulders.

Olympia theft worse than originally reported; 77 artifacts were stolen by armed robbers

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:58:25 +0100

Police in Greece say 77 artifacts were stolen by armed robbers last week at a small museum in Ancient Olympia — the birthplace of the ancient games — revealing that the extent of the theft was worse than originally reported.

Police and the Culture Ministry had initially estimated that some 65 objects up to 3,200 years old were taken in Friday's raid, when two masked gunmen tied up a museum guard and used a sledgehammer to smash display cabinets at the southern Greek museum.

Munch’s ‘Scream’ May Fetch $80M at Sotheby’s

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:12:03 +0100

One of the best-known images in the history of art, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” is being sold at a New York auction in May.

The 1895 work by the Norwegian artist, one of four versions of the screaming figure, will be included in Sotheby’s May 2 sale of Impressionist and modern works. It carries a value of at least $80 million, the auction house said in an e-mailed release today.

Masterpieces by big-name Impressionist and modern artists have been fetching exceptional prices in recent years. Sotheby’s “Scream” is the only one left in private hands. It is being offered by the Norwegian businessman Petter Olsen, whose father Thomas was a friend and patron of the artist. The pastel-on- board composition has been in the Olsen family for more than 70 years. The primary version of the work, in tempera and crayon on board and dating from 1893, is in the National Gallery of Norway.

“I have lived with this work all my life, and its power and energy have only increased with time,” Olsen said in an e-mailed statement. “Now however, I feel the moment has come to offer the rest of the world a chance to own and appreciate this remarkable work.” Munch Museum

Proceeds from the sale will go toward the establishment of a new museum, art center and hotel on Olsen’s farm, Ramme Gaard at Hvitsten, Norway. It will open next year in connection with the Munch 150th anniversary, and will be dedicated to the artist’s work and time there.

The primary version of “The Scream” was stolen from the National Gallery in 1994 and recovered several months later. Another was taken from the Munch Museum in Norway in 2004 and recovered after two years.

The image, evoking a moment when the artist was seized with anxiety while walking along a road near Oslo, was to be the central element in his “Frieze of Life” series.

Of the variants, this Sotheby’s (BID) version is closest in composition to the one in Norway’s National Gallery. The pre- auction view in New York will be the first time it has been exhibited in the U.S. for decades, said Sotheby’s. It is also notable for having a hand-painted inscription by Munch on the frame, explaining the genesis of the work.

Antonio Banderas To Play Pablo Picasso

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:57:02 +0100

Antonio Banderas will play legendary artist Pablo Picasso for the upcoming film 33 dias (33 days).

The 51-year-old Spanish actor will star in the biopic about the famous artist and his emotional struggle while working on his masterpiece ‘Guernica’, according to Variety.

The film, directed by Carlos Saura, will also include Picasso‘s relationship with French artist and lover Dora Maar.

Aronson Antiquairs to showcase the world's most important examples of 17th and 18th century Dutch Delftware

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:26:13 +0100

Some of the world’s most sought-after examples of rare Dutch Delftware will be on sale at The 25th Annual European Fine Art Fair, TEFAF in Maastricht March 16 - 25.

In fact, Robert Aronson of Aronson Antiquairs of Amsterdam, is bringing “A wonderful and diverse collection of Dutch Delftware, accompanied by a new publication, sure to appeal to Delft collectors, new and old.”

Among Aronson’s favorites is a Unique Pair of Massive Cashmire Palette Flower Vases that, “I am doubly delighted to have now as they had been on the ‘wish list’ of my late Father, Dave Aronson, who died in 2007. In fact, we had eagerly sought to acquire them in the mid-90s. Now they are here and we are thrilled to be able to offer them at TEFAF.”

Dave Aronson headed the now 130 year old Aronson firm since his own Father died in 1990. He also was chairman of the Executive Committee of The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht from 1999 through his passing in 2007. His son, Robert, joined the firm twenty two years ago, following a tradition that began with his great-great grandfather, Leon, who founded the specialist firm in 1881. Robert Aronson is both a member of the Executive Committee of TEFAF and Chairman of the Dutch Antique Dealers Association.

Robert says that the 17 years he spent working side by side with his Father gave him both his passion for Dutch Delftware and a deep appreciation of the great collectors who became good friends to the Aronson family during those years. Now the younger Aronson has added a modern twist to a business that has served generations of the world’s most esteemed connoisseurs and curators. In fact, Robert Aronson is overseeing a truly 21st century business that has embraced technology and e-commerce in ways his forebears could never have imagined.

“I’ve given Aronson Antiquairs a contemporary outlook that best serves both new collectors and old, using the latest tools, from Facebook and Twitter to You Tube video. Now, in whatever way that is most convenient for them, they can learn about Dutch Delft, examine our unrivaled collections, and come to understand the unique qualities of Delftware -- more easily than at any time in our company’s 130 year history.”

Robert Aronson says the excitement of a TEFAF opening day still gives him a moment of pause. “I know I am going to see the most sophisticated and knowledgeable collectors, curators and dealers enjoying the finest artworks on the planet.”

“Plus - You never lose the thrill of showing a truly rare or previously unknown object to a true Delft connoisseur,” he says.

One stunning example on the Aronson stand at TEFAF is a Monumental Flower Vase with Tiered Bowls and Covers that Robert Aronson says, “Is currently the only known example of this shape. This Oval Flower Vase is extraordinary not only for its size but for its unusual stag-head spouts, which suggest it must have been a special commission. It is strikingly similar to the decoration of a similarly serpent-handled vase in the collection of Hampton Court.” The pattern itself is a Chinese export porcelain design from the Kangxi period and it was made by the De Grieksche A Factory, owned by Adrianus Kocx.”

A new addition to the ARONSON ANTIQUAIRS exhibition at TEFAF is a Rare and Important Pair of c1735-45 Dutch Delftware ʻPetit Feuʼ Polychrome and Gilded Royal Portrait Plaques. “One depicts Princess Anne elaborately coifed and wearing an ermine-lined cloak over a lavish gown and the other depicts Prince William IV wearing a voluminous periwig, a blue sash and the Order of the Garter on his embroidered and tasseled uniform,” Robert Aronson says. Also showcased is a collection of Six “Haarlem Yellow” Plates attributed to Willem Jansz, Verstraeten, circa 1650-60.

“Haarlem wares were seen even before Delft existed. This type of decoration traditionally has been called ‘Grotesques à la Patanazzi’, referring to the similar maiolica dishes made in Urbino by the Patanazzi family of potters, circa 1515. However, Scholten, (1993, pp. 99, 101 and 103, nos. 87-89, 91 and 92) illustrates three very similar, if slightly larger, dishes and comments that “lobed dishes of this type, the Raphaelesque decoration of which is based on Italian majolica mainly from the workshop of Orazio Fontana (1510-71) at Urbino, are attributed by Van Dam on good grounds to Willem Jansz. In a lawsuit Willem Jansz Verstraeten brought against his son, Gerrit, regarding the production of earthenware, mention is made in 1650 of ‘new inventions’, by which may be meant these grotesque dishes.”

Another striking piece at Aronson’s stand at TEFAF is a c1695-1705 Blue and White Delft Rijstaffel ‘sweet meat’ set with a stunning eight-pointed star-shaped dish and eight surrounding dishes of elaborate spade-shape.

“This is the kind of focal point piece everyone appreciates in their collection,” Aronson says. “It was likely modeled on the small dishes of fanciful and ingenious shapes which were employed in Japan for the tea ceremony and which reached Europe around 1670.”

“TEFAF offers visitors a unique experience. Besides the amazing connoisseurship you’ll see here, there’s no fair in the world where as rigorous investigation of each item’s quality, condition and authenticity takes place. The dealers demonstrate respect both for their profession as well as their clients by bringing to TEFAF the absolutely best examples on the market today.”

Aronson Antiquairs numbers among its clients the world’ leading connoisseurs as well as major museums incuding The Wadsworth Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The British Museum and Holland’s own Rijksmuseum.

Is Bart Simpson the New Mr. Brainwash?: Shepard Fairey to Guest-star on 'The Simpsons'

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:56:25 +0100

“The Simpsons” has a long respected history of celebrity guest-spots, having turned everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to Julian Assange into yellow-skinone where Homer becomes a celebrated outsider artist after building a shoddy barbecue pit in his backyard) featured Jasper Johns as himself.

On March 4th, Shepard Fairey and fellow street artists Ron English, Kenny Scharf, and Robbie Conal will be ensconced in the “Simpsons” guest star pantheon when they appear “Exit Though The Kwik-E-Mart.” Riffing on Banksey’s 2010 documentary, “Exit through the Gift Shop,” the episode will satirize the mainstream cooption of street art and urban gentrification. It will also probably be hillarious.

Fairey, a self-described “Simpsons” fan, has helpfully provided a synopsis of the episode on his website:

“In order to get back at his dad, Bart goes undercover as a graffiti street artist and plasters Homer’s unflattering image all over Springfield.

Greek Minister Offers to Quit After Second Museum Robbery

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:18:29 +0100

Greek Culture Minister Pavlos Yeroulanos offered to resign after the museum of ancient Olympia, birthplace of the Olympic Games, was robbed, the second major art heist this year.

Yeroulanos went to the museum in southern Greece this morning to assess the situation after submitting his resignation to Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, a ministry spokesman said in a phone interview given on condition of anonymity. There was no response from the prime minister’s office on whether the resignation was accepted.

The robbery occurred at 7:34 a.m., according to a statement posted on the website of the Athens-based Hellenic Police. Two hooded, armed men disarmed the museum guard and stole bronze and ceramic artefacts as well as a gold ring, according to the statement. Olympia’s Mayor Efthimios Kotzias told state-run NET TV about 65 items were taken.

The robbery is the second major theft in two months. On Jan. 9, police reported three works of art, including a painting by Pablo Picasso and donated by the artist to the Greek people, were stolen from the National Gallery of Art in central Athens. The thieves are still at large.

First exhibition to explore Pablo Picasso's lifelong connections with Britain opens at Tate

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:37:30 +0100

In February 2012 Tate Britain will stage the first exhibition to explore Pablo Picasso’s lifelong connections with Britain.

Picasso and Modern British Art will examine Picasso’s evolving critical reputation here and British artists’ responses to his work. The exhibition will explore Picasso’s rise in Britain as a figure of both controversy and celebrity, tracing the ways in which his work was exhibited and collected here during his lifetime, and demonstrating that the British engagement with Picasso and his art was much deeper and more varied than generally has been appreciated.

Pablo Picasso originated many of the most significant developments of twentieth-century art. This exhibition will examine his enormous impact on British modernism, through seven exemplary figures for whom he proved an important stimulus: Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney. It will be presented in an essentially chronological order, with rooms documenting the exhibiting and collecting of Picasso’s art in Britain alternating with those showcasing individual British artists’ responses to his work. Picasso and Modern British Art will comprise over 150 works from major public and private collections around the world, including over 60 paintings by Picasso.

Picasso and Modern British Art will include key Cubist works such as Head of a Man with Moustache 1912 (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris) which was seen in Britain before the First World War, when Cubism was first introduced to a British public through Roger Fry’s two Post-Impressionist exhibitions. It will also include Picasso’s Man with a Clarinet 1911-12 (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) and Weeping Woman 1937 (Tate), works which were acquired by the two most notable British collectors of Picasso, Douglas Cooper and Roland Penrose, both of whom were to become intimately associated with the artist and his reputation.

While many British artists have responded to Picasso’s influence, those represented in this exhibition have been selected to illustrate both the variety and vitality of these responses over a period of more than seventy years. This is a rare opportunity to see such work alongside those works by Picasso that, in many cases, are documented as having made a particular impact on the artist concerned; in other cases, they have been chosen as excellent examples of a stylistic affinity between Picasso and the relevant British artist. For example, David Hockney is said to have visited Picasso’s major Tate exhibition (1960) eight times, starting a life-long obsession with the artist. A selection of various Hockney homages to Picasso will be shown. In addition Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944 (Tate) will be compared with Picasso’s paintings based on figures on the beach at Dinard which first inspired Bacon to take up painting seriously.

Leonardo’s London Blockbuster: The Movie

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:07:01 +0100

Viewing an art exhibition on the big screen of a movie theater is not my idea of an optimal art experience.

But if, like me, you wish, or even half-wish, that you had traveled to London for the blockbuster exhibition devoted to Leonardo da Vinci that recently completed its three-month, sold-out run at the National Gallery, you may find yourself doing just that, and gratefully.

The chance comes Thursday night with “Leonardo Live,” a strangely hectic, occasionally informative and sometimes even insightful high-definition tour of the National Gallery exhibition, “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter in the Court of Milan.” It will have a one-night-only showing at nearly 500 movie theaters across the United States — and at many others around the world — a slightly staggered, sort-of-collective screening that is being billed as “a first-of-its-kind cinema event.”

To some extent it is. In a time when various performing-arts organizations — operas, orchestras, and ballet and theater companies — are increasingly expanding both access and revenue by beaming live high-definition video performances into movie houses around the world (and screening not-live performances too), “Leonardo Live” may the first instance of the format being applied to an art exhibition. Thankful as I am to have an inkling of what the Leonardo show was like, I can’t say that it is entirely a promising debut.

Directed by the documentary filmmaker Phil Grabsky, whose previous cultural subjects include Mozart and Beethoven, “Leonardo Live” is an 85-minute mixture of once-live coverage of the exhibition’s opening reception on Nov. 8 — punctuated by short interviews with a range of specialists and invited guests, from the curator of the show to an Anglican bishop — and segments about Leonardo’s life and the preparation for the exhibition. A somewhat shorter version was originally broadcast from the National Gallery to about 40 sold-out theaters across Britain as the reception was taking place.

The hosts of “Leonardo Live” are Mariella Frostrup, a television journalist, and Tim Marlow, an art historian and director of exhibitions at the blue-chip White Cube gallery in London. They both tend toward relentless hyperbole when it comes to Leonardo’s “divine,” “miraculous” “genius.” Similarly, they tell us too often that the exhibition is, or was, a historic, once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated occasion. It brought together 7 of the 15 paintings generally agreed to be by Leonardo, as well as “Christ as Salvator Mundi,” a newly attributed 16th that shows its subject up close with his hand raised in blessing.

The show also included numerous drawings by the master and several works by his assistants. While the Louvre did not lend the Mona Lisa, it allowed its version of “The Virgin of the Rocks” to cross the Channel so it could hang for the first time ever in the same room as Leonardo’s second, nearly identical version of the painting, which is owned by National Gallery. The National Museum in Cracow, Poland, lent “The Lady With an Ermine,” whose precisely beautiful, almost geometric features and overly large, androgynous hand resting on the ermine’s white fur may make it Leonardo’s most dynamic painting.

Rather like runners in a relay race, Mr. Marlow and Ms. Frostrup rush guests through their mini-interviews, he in the galleries in front of individual paintings, she on a couch in the lobby overlooking the entrance to the show. What these visitors have to say is often pedestrian, but there are occasional sparks of perception.

The ballet dancer Deborah Bull talks about the intensity and vulnerability of the pose in Leonardo’s unfinished painting of the anguished St. Jerome shown in the desert beating himself with a stone; and the actress Fiona Shaw pinpoints the eeriness of Jesus as depicted in the “Salvator Mundi” painting when she refers to “the hovering eternity” of the image. The art historian Evelyn Welch bluntly assesses Leonardo’s tendency to leave commissions unfinished, pointing out that patrons who wanted a project completed “on time and on budget” looked elsewhere.

There are also cutaways to the various canned back stories, with shots of Milan and Florence and behind-the-scenes visits with the National Gallery’s director of conservation, who walks us through the cleaning of the museum’s version of “The Virgin and the Rocks,” which helped set the show in motion.

As Mr. Marlow explains, not even Leonardo saw both versions together. A few critics have complained that while the paintings were seen in the same gallery during the show, they were installed on opposite walls rather than side by side, which would have greatly facilitated visual comparison. In one of the highlights of the final version of his film, Mr. Grabsky finally puts the paintings next to each other.

Picture: A scene from "Leonardo Live," a film documenting a Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery London.

Man-Hating Artist Kusama Covers Tate Modern in Dots: Interview

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:48:18 +0100

On a chilly February morning, an 82- year-old Japanese woman is wheeled into the Tate Modern gallery in London, wearing a fringed red wig and a polka-dot dress matching the balloons hanging all around.

She is the painter, peacenik and performance artist Yayoi Kusama, who made a splash in 1960s New York before heading home a decade later and then checking herself into the mental hospital where she still lives. Tate has opened a retrospective of her work, featuring polka dots, limp sculptures of the male organ and psychedelic rooms beamed with swirling colored spots.

Kusama sits at a long table on the gallery’s top floor, flanked by two assistants and facing four journalists. Her wide eyes are darkly lined, her lips theatrically traced. On the table is an unwrapped box of chocolates that Godiva sent after finding out she liked them.

“Today is the most wonderful day in my life,” says Kusama in halting English, before reverting to Japanese to praise the host country, its art-loving people and its monarchy.

“I hope royalty continues forever,” she says through an interpreter, her expression one of permanent stupor. “This is the thing that can contribute to peace throughout the world.”

The conversation turns to 46-year-old Damien Hirst, whose signature spot canvases are currently on show across 11 Gagosian Galleries worldwide. Is he a copycat?

“I have been using polka dots since I was a very young child,” says Kusama. “It’s only after that, it seems, that they’ve become popular throughout the art world.”

Single Particle

She loves Hirst, she says, and respects his work. Yet a subsequent comment suggests disapproval of Hirst’s methods: Kusama says she works alone, with no help from assistants, hence the leg aches and the wheelchair.

To Kusama, dots represent her life -- “a single particle among billions,” as she writes in her autobiography. It’s the dots that got her noticed in New York in 1959: large white “Infinity Net” canvases with faded gray spots. She became a contributor to, if not a precursor of, Minimalism and Pop Art.

Kusama’s mother was from a rich family of seedling merchants. Yet rather than marvel at the flowers blooming around her, little Yayoi developed visual and aural hallucinations that have continued to haunt her.

Home life was traumatic. She suffered physical and verbal abuse at the hands of a cheated mother whose husband chased every woman, including the household help. The little girl grew up to despise the opposite sex.

Bacon’s Nude Model Tops $126.5M at Auction

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:41:20 +0100

A Francis Bacon portrait of a naked model sprawled on a bed and a Gerhard Richter abstract last night boosted a 80.6 million pound ($126.5 million) auction as contemporary artworks drew multiple bids.

Bacon’s sexually charged 1963 canvas “Portrait of Henrietta Moraes” fetched $33.3 million, topping the 65-lot Christie’s International (CHRS) sale. The total was the company’s second-highest for a contemporary-art auction in London and was greeted with whoops and applause from Christie’s staff members.

“We expected fireworks, and we got it,” London-based art adviser Wendy Goldsmith said in an interview. “When you add all the extras up, the prices are high. Where will it end?”

Bacon is the U.K.’s most expensive artist at auction. The portrait’s final price of 21.3 million pounds with fees beat an 18-million-pound hammer-value estimate. The sale demonstrated investment demand for his paintings and the attractiveness of the U.K. capital as an auction venue, with its population of wealthy international residents, dealers said.

Sheldon Solow, a Manhattan real estate developer and art collector, was identified by dealers as the Bacon’s seller. The work was bought on the telephone by Sumiko Roberts of Christie’s London-based client services department, representing a customer, against two other telephone bidders.

“For a Bacon, it was a commercial image,” the London-based dealer Offer Waterman said in an interview. “I don’t think it would have fetched a higher price in a gallery.”

Record Triptych

The Bacon auction record is $86.3 million for a 1976 “Triptych” at Sotheby’s (BID) New York, in May 2008.

At least four telephone bidders were prepared to pay the upper estimate of 7 million pounds for Richter’s large green, blue and pink “Abstraktes Bild,” dating from 1994 and never offered at auction before.

Interest in the painting was high, following the recent Richter retrospective at Tate Modern and the record $20.8 million paid by the collector Lily Safra for a 1997 abstract by the artist at Sotheby’s New York in November.

It was eventually bought by Christie’s New York-based specialist Andrew Massad, bidding for a client on the telephone, for 9.9 million pounds.

There was also a flurry of telephone bidding for the 1990 black-and-white word painting “Untitled,” showing the word “FOOL,” by the U.S. artist Christopher Wool, who is consistently in demand at contemporary-art fairs. Again fresh to the auction market, this was sold to a record telephone bid of 4.9 million pounds handled by Pedro Girao, chairman of Christie’s European advisory board.

Secret art: Sotheby’s auction house finds hidden signature on Jean-Michel Basquiat painting

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:35:50 +0100

Thirty years ago, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat secretly signed one of his paintings in invisible ink, says Sotheby’s auction house, which discovered the hidden autograph as it was preparing the painting for sale.

Sotheby’s experts uncovered the secret this month as they were examining “Orange Sports Figure,” which goes on sale Wednesday. The vibrant image of an abstract crowned figure is estimated to be worth between 3 million pounds and 4 million pounds ($4.7 million and $6.3 million).

Basquiat, a graffiti artist who became a 1980s art star, signed relatively few of his canvasses. But Sotheby’s said ultraviolet light revealed the artist’s name and the date 1982 beneath the work’s layers of acrylic and spray paint.

“The signature just popped out,” Cheyenne Westphal, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s Europe, said Tuesday.

She said staff were initially “surprised, astonished and puzzled” by the signature, which appears to have been written in the type of pen used to mark banknotes.

“Nobody else probably ever knew about this invisible inscription, and the prospect that he might have left other invisible writings on his canvasses that are only visible under ultraviolet light is very exciting,” she said.

Westphal said she knew of no other invisible signature on a Basquiat work.

Basquiat’s paintings are often covered in words and doodles. He signed some paintings with a crown, others with his graffiti alter ego SAMO — but relatively few with his full name.

The son of a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Brooklyn-raised Basquiat developed a vibrant style influenced by Picasso and the Abstract Expressionists as well as by the work of street graffiti artists.

ARCOmadrid: One of the most comprehensive international presentations of Dutch art in recent years

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:56:14 +0100

From 15 to 19 February, the Netherlands is the guest country for the international contemporary art fair ARCOmadrid 2012.

During FOCUS The Netherlands, ARCOmadrid presents the diversity of modern art in the Netherlands. This is the biggest presentation in Spain of modern art from the Netherlands. In collaboration with the Mondriaan Fund and the Dutch embassy in Madrid, an extensive programme has been compiled consisting of gallery presentations, exhibitions, debates and other activities featuring art from the Netherlands.

As part of the general programme, curator Xander Karskens from De Hallen Haarlem presents 14 Dutch galleries: Annet Gelink Gallery, Galerie Diana Stigter, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Galerie Fons Welters, Grimm Gallery, Galerie Juliètte Jongma, Galerie Martin van Zomeren, Motive Gallery, ZINGERpresents, Galerie West, Jeanine Hofland Contemporary Art, tegenboschvanvreden, Galerie Paul Andriesse en Wilfried Lentz. There will also be a project stand dedicated to the history of one of the most legendary Dutch galleries, Art & Project (1968–2001).

Under the title The Dutch Assembly, curators Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna (Latitudes) are organising a continuous programme of debates, performances and presentations by Dutch museums and institutions in a Dutch Pavilion specially designed by artist Jasper Niens.

Alongside these programmes, the main museums and institutes of modern art in Madrid will be hosting exhibitions and presentations by Dutch artists, such as Aernout Mik in Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Navid Nuur in Matadero, René Daniels in Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and a group exhibition featuring two generations of Dutch conceptual art in La Casa Encendida. There will also be one-off activities based on the work of Dutch artists, such as a new performance lecture by Falke Pisano at the Reina Sofia and a screening of Gabriel Lester and Nathaniel Mellors at Cineteca/Matadero. During the evening programme, afterARCO, Dutch acts like Knalpot and Machinefabriek will perform live. At Plaza de Callao, there will also be screenings of the artists Jan Dibbets, Guido van der Werve, Yael Bartana, Jeroen Kooijmans and Lernert and Sander. Viral Radio will be focusing on music and art in its broadcasts from the radio studio of La Casa Encendida.

Dutch artist's works found in British warehouse

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:26:18 +0100

Over 400 stolen artworks by celebrated 20th-century expressionist painter Karel Appel discovered by storage firm.

More than 400 works of art by a celebrated 20th-century Dutch artist have been found in a British warehouse a decade after they disappeared, leaving the artist distraught.

Karel Appel, a leading expressionist, died at 85 in 2006. He never recovered from the loss of a lifetime's worth of drawings, sketches, notebooks and other works believed to be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The warehouse was bought by a UK storage and logistics company before Christmas and, in clearing out the contents, staff came across eight boxes filled with artworks. There was no documentation and it was not until a warehouse employee researched the name Karel Appel, whose notes and signatures appear on most of the works, that the company realised the boxes were worth more than mere salvage.

Unaware of their real significance, but intrigued, a manager took some 30 drawings to Bonhams, the auctioneers, to be valued. To their astonishment, they were told that these were on the Art Loss Register's (ALR) computerised database of "most wanted" stolen art.

Christopher Marinello, ALR's lawyer and chief negotiator, said: "After five weeks of intense negotiation with the logistics company … a settlement was finally reached with the company agreeing to release their claim to the artwork."

Appel was a painter, printmaker, sculptor and ceramist awarded the Unesco prize at the 1954 Venice Biennale. Represented in the Tate and other public collections, he was a leading member of the avant garde Cobra group (1948-51), particularly interested in the art of children. His paintings are admired for their thickly-painted, swirling depictions of grotesque animals and humans.

Many of the stolen drawings were experimental ideas for works that Appel never realised. The collection had disappeared in 2002 en route from his studio to the newly created Karel Appel Foundation in Amsterdam. The loss was immediately reported to the police and the ALR.

VIP 2.0 creates active online marketplace, 73,000 register for seven day event

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:42:31 +0100

VIP 2.0, the second edition of the VIP Art Fair, has confirmed its status as the leading online platform for contemporary art as 160,000 visits were made over seven days from 155 countries, viewing 1.5 million pages.

Bringing 135 galleries from 35 countries, exhibiting 1,500 works by 1,100 artists, to this broad international audience, VIP Art Fair has a firm position in the cultural calendar. Significantly, VIP 2.0 saw a growth in visitor numbers from key emerging markets, including a 278% increase in visitors from India, 288% UAE, 277% Brazil, 409% Turkey, 319 % Mexico and 456% from Chile.

Participating galleries reported they made sales to new and existing clients, developed a client base in geographies where they have not had business before, and that their artists were pleased to see them exploring new ways of exhibiting their work.

Lisa Kennedy, chief executive of VIP Art Fair, said: “The second edition of the VIP Art Fair has proven itself as a meaningful event that provided access to the most exciting contemporary artists as presented by the world’s most dynamic galleries. The Fair was effective in making connections and providing stimulus that is vital to an active international art market. Building on the success of this year’s Fair, we’re looking forward to holding our next event VIP Paper on 19th – 21st April, as well as VIP Photo (July 12th – 14th) and VIP Vernissage (September 20th – 22nd) later this year.”

Felipe Dmbad, co-founder of Mendes Wood, Sao Paolo said: “VIP Art Fair is such an amazing opportunity for new markets, like Brazil, where the general audience has low access to global contemporary art information. Having the possibility of getting in touch with all the best galleries and artists is priceless. The Fair will educate new markets, and help the development of new collectors and a larger audience.”

Exhibitors capitalised upon the rich potential of the Internet to present artwork of different media. Featured were 78 museum-scale installation works that took advantage of the unlimited space; 54 video and new media works were available for streaming; as well as almost 400 paintings hanging on booth walls and 300 sculptures shown with multiple views. Magdalena Sawon owner of Postmasters Gallery, New York who sold William Powhida’s, Exit Interview, 2011 a video artwork to a European foundation says, “We are especially pleased about the sale of this work, because video is not an easily collected medium and this fair is extremely well suited to present video and new media works.” Conversations trends on Twitter indicate that the presentation of video artworks were very well-received and considered an important offering of the fair.

Galleries demonstrated considerable innovation in curating their online booths. Matthieu Lelièvre, director at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris and Salzburg, says, “Because the Internet is moving so quickly, it was really important for us to show something very current. Not just works, but the entire program. That's why we presented a worldwide preview as part of an upcoming exhibition of London based artist Raqib Shaw. It was a real preview because no one has seen these works before. The ultimate in term of novelty is of course Terence Koh's performance, broadcast live, exclusively for the VIP Art Fair.” On the day of Terence Koh’s performance, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac was the most visited booth.

Following considerable investment in the technology, the second edition focused on building a sense of community at the Fair with visitors logging in 1.5 million page views and saving works 40,000 times, which were shared via Facebook, Twitter and e-mail. VIP 2.0 also proved that it was a flexible and highly responsive to its audience. Over the course of the Fair, the integrated chat messaging system was opened up to the whole community, progressively supporting conversations between visitors and exhibitors.

Steal Banksy is Over

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:25:44 +0100

Well the score ended up being even. One to the crooks, one to us!

Whilst there were many attempts at ‘Pulp Fiction’ (our second Banksy for the taking) ranging from the most cunning – a stellar tradesmen impersonation (ladder and all), to the most brazen – a hit and run, it seems our staff’s ability to stop crime improved tenfold since the early loss of “No Ball Games.” We now have a new found respect for those involved in crime stopping so we’ve decided to donate the Banksy to Crime Stoppers who will use it to raise some dollars to continue on in their noble pursuit of crooks.

World Press Photo Awards Announced

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:39:40 +0100

Today the winners of the prestigious 55th annual World Press Photo competition were announced in Amsterdam, and Samuel Aranda from Spain received the prize for World Press Photo of the Year 2011.

The winning photograph shows a woman caring for a wounded relative, inside a mosque used as a field hospital by demonstrators against the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, during clashes in Sanaa, Yemen on October 15, 2011. Samuel Aranda was working in Yemen on assignment for The New York Times. He is represented by Corbis Images.

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's unique vision of the world on view at Tate Modern

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:20:55 +0100

Yayoi Kusama’s (b.1929) pioneering work spans over six decades and this exhibition highlights the artist’s moments of most intense innovation.

Kusama is one of Japan’s best-known living artists and since the 1940s she has developed an extensive body of work. From her earliest explorations of painting in provincial Japan to new unseen works, the exhibition reveals a history of successive developments and daring advances, demonstrating why Kusama remains one of the most engaging practitioners today.

Conceived as a series of immersive environments, the exhibition unfolds in a sequence of rooms, each devoted to the emergence of a new artistic stance. Much of Kusama’s art has an almost hallucinatory intensity that reflects her unique vision of the world, whether through a teeming accumulation of detail or the dense patterns of nets and polka dots that have become her signature. She is renowned for her ‘environments’, large-scale installations of dazzling power that immerse the viewer. A highlight of the exhibition is a new installation conceived especially for the show, Infinity Mirrored Room - Filled with the Brilliance of Life 2011, Kusama’s largest mirrored room to date.

Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan in 1929. In her early career she immersed herself in the study of art, integrating a wide range of Eastern and Western influences, training in traditional Japanese painting while also exploring the European and American avant-garde. In the late 1950s, Kusama moved to the United States and during her time there worked tirelessly to position herself at the epicentre of the New York art scene. The exhibition includes a group of Kusama’s first ‘Infinity Net’ paintings from her early years in New York, canvases covered in endlessly-repeated, scalloped brushstrokes of a single colour. Kusama forged her own direction in sculpture and installation, adopting techniques of montage and soft sculpture which historians have seen as influencing artists such as Andy Warhol and Claus Oldenburg. The exhibition includes Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show 1963, her first room installation, and a significant selection of her classic 'Sex Obsession' and 'Food Obsession' Accumulation Sculptures dating from 1962-68.

As the 1960s progressed, Kusama moved from painting, sculpture and collage to installations, films, performances and ‘happenings’ as well as political actions, counter-cultural events, fashion design and publishing. The exhibition includes Kusama’s iconic film Kusama’s Self-Obliteration 1968, capturing this period of performative experimentation, and an extensive selection of archive material that reveal how Kusama’s artistic activity extended beyond the bounds of the gallery.

Photo: Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama poses for photographers in front of her painting 'Love Arrives at the Earth Carrying with it a Tale of the Cosmos' at the Tate Modern in London. An exhibition by the artist runs at the gallery from Feb. 9 until June 5. AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth.

Most ambitious exhibition of Lucian Freud's work opens at the National Portrait Gallery

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:08:10 +0100

There is a vast amount of flesh — clear and smooth or wrinkled and mottled — on display in the latest show at Britain's National Portrait Gallery, a retrospective of the work of Lucian Freud.

Freud was the most renowned British portrait painter of the 20th century, and he found that clothes often got in the way.

The artist, who died in July at age 88, approached the human body the way his psychoanalyst grandfather Sigmund Freud approached the mind — determined to unmask its secrets.

The exhibition, which kicks of with a royal preview for the Duchess of Cambridge on Wednesday, features more than 100 paintings completed over 70 years, many of them nude studies of the artist's friends and family.

Michael Auping, chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas — where the show will move after its London run — said Freud was often asked why he painted so many nudes.

"He would say, every time: 'It's the most complete portrait,'" Auping said.

The exhibition opens with early head-and-shoulders portraits from the 1940s and '50s, then moves on to the to vast, monumental nudes for which Freud became famous. He painted standing up in his London studio, layering oil paint on large canvases with a broad, coarse-haired brush.

Many of the paintings have generic names — "Naked Solicitor," ''Man in a Blue Scarf" — but the portraits are revealing images of the artist's inner circle, or sometimes Freud himself, often naked and looking vulnerably exposed.

Freud kept his focus on depicting the human body even when the prevailing fashion in art turned to abstraction.

National Portrait Gallery director Sandy Nairne said that for seven decades Freud looked at people with an "unrelenting, determined eye."

"They sometimes feel in your face and very explicitly naked," Nairne said of the paintings. "But that was always with the cooperation of the sitter. In the end, they were sympathetic.

"None of these are casual sitters. They are not figures — they are individuals."

Berlin-born Freud, who moved to Britain with his family in 1933 when the Nazis came to power in Germany, painted his mother, his brother, his daughters Bella and Esther, and an eclectic array of acquaintances. The subjects of his paintings range from performance artist Leigh Bowery and supermodel Kate Moss to Brig. Andrew Parker-Bowles, a horse-riding friend (who got to keep his uniform on).

He was at work until the very end. The exhibition includes Freud's unfinished final painting, "Portrait of the Hound," which shows his assistant David Dawson and whippet Eli, and appears to have been cut off mid-brushstroke.

Most of Freud's sitters seem to have loved the experience of posing for the master. Sue Tilley, subject of several nudes including "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" — which sold at auction in 2008 for $33.6 million, a record for a living artist — remembers long sessions of chat and laughter.

She said Freud was "a complete one-off ... exciting, interesting, funny and serious — every single personality trait wrapped up in one person."

"Lucian Freud: Portraits" is open to the public from Thursday until May 27, then moves to Fort Worth from July 1 to Oct. 29.

Photo: ue Tilley a model for British painter Lucian Freud poses for the media in front of a painting of her by Freud at an exhibition of his paintings at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2012. AP Photo/Alastair Grant.