Science is solely concerned with the observable world. If it can’t be observed, measured and recorded, it doesn’t exist. Magic on the other hand believes in forces which cannot be assigned the yardstick of scientific criteria. The forces at work are mystical, rooted only in the believers imagination or belief system. In short the two are poles apart, irreconcilable. Or are they? Art on the surface deals with only the observable but often conveys messages and meanings which go well beyond the observable. Magic?

Art has often been created for magical reasons. Perhaps the best example of this is The Egyptian Book of the Dead which illustrated the Egyptians view of the magical processes associated with death. Thousands of years later, we have paintings being made during the Renaissance which seek to convey meaning beyond the observable ie magic. During this period in Florence, paintings of traitors were often painted in public places. These were not just visual representations of the individual. “They were visual curses: paintings that set out to injure their victims, to invoke malevolent magic.”

“The most famous magical images of the Renaissance were, however, more benign in their influence. A famous church in Florence treasured – and still does – a miraculously painted Annunciation whose protecting powers made it, in the 15th century, more famous than anything by Botticelli. When the city was in danger it was believed to guard the populace while another magical Madonna was ritually brought into the city from the suburbs at moments of peril.”

Of course not all works of art contend to have such magical powers. However art can make us think of issues not directly portrayed in the work. Surely a form of magic

Five years ago Polly Morgan was working as a bar maid today she is one of the most important and collectible Young British Artists. She has been lauded by Gagosian director Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, Damien Hirst and Saatchi to name but a few. She owes the transformation to a life long fascination with the craft of the taxidermist. It wasn’t until 2005 when she had lost her job that she thought of actually skinning an animal and a piece she did that year was bought for £2,000 by Richard Branson’s sister Vanessa. The piece consisted of a white rat curled up in a champagne glass and it was purchased hours before it was due to be exhibited at Zoo Art Fair.

Today her pieces can go from anything from  £8,000 to £30,000. Her largest piece to date went for a staggering £85,000. Modeled on a Victorian flying machine the piece consists of starlings, Pigeons Canaries and three huge white backed Vultures all in flight and strapped to a circular frame.

When Morgan first started out, she would trawl pet shops, wildlife parks and farms to keep up a regular supply. She’d also drive up to a big bird fair in Stafford where she’d offer stall-holders £5 for every bird that died. She has now built  up a wide circle of suppliers as the crows heads and wings in her freezer can testify to. “I describe my craft as part butchery, part sculpture.” she says. “There is a general distinction between male and female taxidermists,” Morgan observes. “Men tend to favour big, robust creatures. These are less interesting to me; I’m drawn to the delicate and fragile.”

She had graduated in English from Mary’s University. She hated University and afterwords couldn’t settle. “I was running the Electric Showroom bar in Shoreditch, where the Young British Artists would hang out; I was constantly surrounded by these artistic people who were doing really well,” One evening she asked a friend in the bar where she could acquire a piece of taxidermy to furnish her flat. The friend suggested that she do it herself and after some research she was ready to give it a go. She had tracked down a taxidermist who was willing to give lessons. “For £150, I’d get a day’s tutorial and get to keep the bird at the end of it; it was even cheaper than buying one,” she says

The rest is history.

The art world is brimming over with excitement at the news that Charles Saatchi is giving his majestic gallery, which lies off the King’s Road in London, to the British nation. Saatchi is famous for his ability to spot up and coming artists and he has amassed a huge collection over the years. He is said to have virtually founded The Young British Artists movement of the 1990s and has the best of their work displayed in his gallery. Small wonder then that the news he is throwing in at least 200 works of art has been greeted with such excitement. The total value of the gift is believed to be in excess of £25 million.

Amongst the donations are iconic works such as Tracey Emin’s “My Bed” One of the most visited installations ever in the history of the turner prize. Despite the generous nature of the gift Saatchi is very self effacing about it all. He is insisting that the Saatchi Gallery will be renamed the Museum of Contemporary Art. This is unusually coy for a donor. Normally donors insist on embroiling their name with the collection.

So why has he chosen to do things this way. He almost never gives interviews but Rebecca Wilson, associate director of the Saatchi Gallery, spoke for him and his insistence that the gallery be renamed.  “He feels after he has left the building, it makes sense for London to have a big museum of contemporary art and that it should be called just that, so that people begin to think of this place as that. He has been very clear about that. He doesn’t want his name attached to it when he retires,”

It truly is a selfless act.

Sculptor Jamie Wardley is known for his work in two unusual mediums. For the first medium, ice, he uses drills and saws and travels to the Artic to execute them. For the second medium, sand, he uses spades and spoons. He will create a number of sand sculptures in four hours between low tide and high tide on Elie Beach in Fife on 4 July for the East Neuk festival. One of the sculptures will be a giant sand train and the idea behind it is that, during the tidal cycle, the train will look as if it is coming out of the sea. It is estimated that the train sculpture will take up to twenty tons of sand to complete.

Wardley took up sand sculpture after watching a Norwegian artist construct the Queen and Mr Bean on a beech. He was enthralled and immediately started working with sand. One would think it is a lot of effort just to witness your work wash away in the tide. Wardley says “The point is not so much the finished thing, more the journey towards getting it done, the huge expenditure of energy. But we will photograph it, as we do our sand drawings.”

His work for East Neuk festival will have a shelf life of only four hours. He is currently doing a slightly more durable work in  sand  for the Tate Liverpool which will showcase between 15 and 18 July.

Christies planned art auction is expected to fetch £230 million and confirm that despite the recession the art market has fully recovered. Picasso’s Portrait of Angel Fernández de Soto (The Absinthe Drinker (from his acclaimed Blue Period) and Monet’s Nympheas (above) are estimated to raise between £30m and £40m each. When Leahmans Brothers collapsed in 2008, the bottom fell out of the art market and most observers pictured a long and painful recovery. The proposed art auction has proved them wrong.

Giovanna Bertazzoni, head of Impressionist and Modern art at Christie’s, said: “The strong results at our auctions over the last year, and during the last six months in particular, have further fueled the confidence of vendors; we are witnessing a great willingness from clients to consign works of art of the highest quality.

“There is a fierce international demand in the art market, particularly for the rarest and the best, and the market itself is now truly global as illustrated at our auction in New York in May where we saw bidding from Russia, China and the Middle East, as well as from Europe and the Americas.”

Monet’s Nympheas is inspired by the pond he had built in his new home in Giverney in 1890 at the height of his fame. This pond became a central theme in the inspiration for much of his work afterwords. The work to be offered at Christie’s is the largest of nine Nympheas painted by Monet in 1906.

Vincent van Gogh’s Parc de l’hopital Saint-Paul, painted in 1889 while the artist was convalescing during a voluntary stay at the hospital. The period is considered one of the artists most important periods of work.

Other iconic painters such as Gustav Klimt feature in the auction and if the June 23rd auction raises the projected £230 million it will not only confirm that the art market has bounced back, it will in fact be the most expensive art auction ever.

Yesterday 20/05/2010 staff arrived at the Museaum of Modern Art, Paris to discover an unprecedented £86 Million worth of art had been stolen during the night. Details are still emerging but it seems all the thieves had to do was break a padlocked gate and then remove a small window pane. Amongst the treasures stolen were Picasso’s 1912 oil painting, Le pigeon aux petits pois (Dove with Green Peas), estimated to be worth €23m, and Henri Matisse’s Pastorale (Pastoral, 1906, above), valued at €15m. Understandably, the robbery is being described as the heist of the century.

Staff at  the museum have told investigators that the security system had not been working for the last few days, opening up the possibility that they had been deliberately disabled. The security cameras did catch an image of a single masked raider, prompting speculation that the theft may have been the work of just one man. There is a certain amount of disbelief that such a large and audacious heist could be the work of one man alone. Whatever the truth, the race is on to catch those responsible and recover the art works. If they are not recovered immediately, precedent dictates that it could be decades before they are recovered, if ever.

The heist also confirms Picasso’s reputation of the most stolen artist. In June last year, a sketchbook valued at €8m was stolen from the Picasso museum in Paris and has yet to be recovered. In February 2007, two paintings worth nearly £45m and a drawing were stolen from the Paris home of the artist’s granddaughter. Police later recovered the art when the thieves tried to sell it.

From the criminals point of view, art heists are notoriously tricky. It is very difficult to unload stolen artworks and a lot of heists begin to unravel at this point. It is to be hoped that this will be the case with yesterday’s robbery.�

“We have always held that a collector of art is merely a custodian who is serving posterity.” So said Chester Dale of the extensive art collection that he and his wife, Maud, had collected. At one point they had over 700 pieces in their collection. They had no children “My pictures are like a family. Each one has a special niche in my heart.”Sentiments like that are quite common for art collectors and the role collectors play in the history of art is often underestimated. It is they who determine through donations or loans to museums what will become to be regarded as fine art.

The couple fell out with several galleries but eventually left the bulk of their collection to the National Gallery in Washington . A director has described the collection  “the whole rib structure of the modern French school here”.  So much so that  For the past 45 years, the Dale paintings were not shown as an ensemble, because it would have left too many blank spaces on the museum’s walls.

Recent renovations of the Washington National Gallery have meant that 81 works from the Dale’s “family” have been reunited until the summer of 2011. The stunning collection, which includes twelve Picassos, is called “From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection” can be seen at the National Gallery, Washington, DC, until July 31, 2011. The collection is a reflection of the passion both Chester and Maude had for their art. Even during the 1929 stock market collapse, when Chester’s fortune fell from $60 million dollars to $10 million dollars, they continued acquiring art with the same zeal they had always had. His most expensive purchase was at about this time. He paid $250,000 for a single painting. This was an enormous sum at the time

In 1939 the rise of Hitler seemed impossible to stop and an invasion of France was a matter of when not if. It was in this climate that a young Jewish art dealer walked into a bank in Paris, Société Générale, and hid an extensive collection of art masterpieces. He hoped to survive the war and retrieve the collection afterwords. Tragically this was not to be as Erich Slomovich was eventually captured by the Nazis in his native Yugoslavia. He was sent to the gas chambers in the summer of 1942, taking the secret of the art collection with him.

He had been given the collection by his boss, the legendary French art collector Ambroise Vollard who had recently died in a car crash. The exact circumstanced in which Slomovich came to be given the collection by Vollard would became a matter of great legal controversy.

The collection sat in the bank vault gathering dust throughout the war and indeed well afterwords. It was not until 1989 that officials finally opened the vault. The discovery they made within led to a series of monumental legal battles between the Vollard and Slomovich families. Slomovich’s heirs claimed Vollard gave the paintings to the young entrepreneur so he could launch a gallery in Belgrade. However Vollard’s family argued that he gave the works to his business partner to sell on his behalf. The court cases dragged on for decades but were eventually settled in 2006, with the most of the art collection going to Vollard’s descendants.

The collection includes a selection of prints and etches from some of France’s most influential modern painters including Cézanne, Degas, Gaugin, Renoir and Mary Casatt. There will be two sales hosted by Sotheby’s in London and Paris in June and the works are expected to go for up to up to $26m (£16.9m).

Very few people can be unaware of the major crisis in the banking sector. The bankers themselves are the butt of public ire as the sums of money required to bail them out are off the monopoly scale. It would seem that we, our children and even our grand children will be paying for the mess the banks have created. So what has all this to do with art? Well it is a fact not generally known that one of the main culprits Allied Irish Bank has since the early eighties being acquiring an incredible art collection. Since we are all paying to bail them out, is it not fair that the public should have access to this art? AIB should make their extensive collection available for viewing by the public instead of the select few who grace the corporate halls and corridors of AIB.

When they embarked on the path of acquiring art for its premises, it decided it would take a coherent approach rather than randomly picking up pieces. They decided to do one thing in their approach to collecting art. That one thing was to represent the entire history of Irish modernism, roughly from 1890 to the present. In this respect they were far more foresighted in their policy of collecting art than they would be proven to be at actual banking. In the early eighties, Irish art was hugely undervalued and underappreciated.

Writing in The Irish Times last week, Fintan O Toole had this to say about the collection

“There are at least two superb Jack Yeats paintings. Now or Never (1929) is one of Yeats’s most energetic and takes on a favourite subject – horse racing.  A Race in Hy Brazil , meanwhile, is a bona fide masterpiece, suffused with mysterious light and mythic gaiety. Samuel Beckett was so struck by it that he compared it (rightly) to Watteau’s L’Embarquement pour Cythere .

Among the earlier works, Roderic O’Connor’s Red Rocks near Pont-Aven is a superb example of his barely restrained wildness and Aloysius O’Kelly’s Corpus Christi Procession (1880) earns its keep as one of the first Irish paintings that can accurately be called Impressionist.

There are top-class examples of the work of the three big figures of post-war Irish art: Louis Le Brocquy, Patrick Collins and Tony O’Malley. The Le Brocquys include the Picasso-influenced early work Irish Tinkers , the numinous 1960 oil painting Presence and two magnificent and starkly contrasting tapestries: Cúchulainn IV and Cherub . Among the Collins paintings is Travelling Tinkers , in which his ability to imbue figurative art with a haunting, misty abstraction marks him as Yeats’s successor. O’Malley’s brilliant uses of colour are well illustrated in the examples in the AIB collection, which include the outstanding Old Place, Callan .”

He went on to talk about other paintings but inevitably it was only a sample of the extensive art collection in the hands of AIB. Given all that has happened and the fact that the bankers owe us instead of the usual other way round, AIB should be compelled to at least start repaying us. A large step in that direction would be the making available for public viewing their art collection.

“It took someone as volatile and unpredictable as Caravaggio to truly capture the betrayal of Christ. His masterpiece continues to speak through the ages”

“The prisoner is submissive, sorrowful. His hands are joined together in a passive gesture of faith. He is making no attempt to defend himself, or even to push away his betrayer. As he endures the treacherous kiss, he looks downwards, too appalled to glance at the traitor. He does not wish to accuse or to question. The man who kisses him appears frenzied, sweat shines on his skin. His desperation is reflected in the brute paw of his hand as it grabs at its prey. The three soldiers of the Roman army stand close. One of them forces his gauntleted hand upwards, close to the captive’s throat.”

Although born in Milan, he took the name Caravaggio after a town in Lombardy where he had been sent at five years of age in order to escape plague ridden Milan.

His greatest work the Taking of Christ (1602) described above has a core theme of betrayal and is as poignant this Good Friday as it ever was. If you wish to see the painting, the bad news is that it is currently on loan from the National Gallery of Ireland to the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome.