Art Impressions Revisited

American Impressionist Childe Hassam traveled in the early 1900s - painting landscapes, waterscapes and street scenes in New York, Paris and Boston. He is best known for cross-sections of city life - pedestrians clad in black, horse-drawn buses and rainy skies. And he is famous for a series of American flag paintings, one of which, "Avenue in the Rain," hangs in the White House, next to the Oval Office.

A new exhibit at the Portland Art Museum focuses on a little-known aspect of Hassam's work - Impressionist renderings of peaks, stormy bays, frothy shores and big-skied deserts in the Northwest.
Altogether Hassam finished about 80 paintings in the Pacific Northwest - many of them landscapes, but also portraits and still-lifes. "We argued that he is really the leader of American Impressionism," said the Portland Art Museum. "He was the only American artist who studied in Paris who really connected with French Impressionism."
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Irish Art

The Art Of The Nipple

"When James Hall, the art historian, tackles Michelangelo, he is tackling a figure as gigantic and paradoxical as the artist's own David. Michelangelo's strength was one that many of his fellow artists and contemporaries would have considered a weakness - his sustained interest in the lone figure under stress, in crisis or transition.
His art was made for an age that was emphatically post-heroic, recognising bitterly and protesting that the age of chivalry was over. It was technically brilliant, erotically charged and inherently unstable.

Hall reads and thinks like a scholar but it helps that he writes with the confidence of a hack. "Michelangelo is the poet laureate of male nipples," he writes. "David's nipples are erect, and stand to electro-charged attention."
Yes, well...whatever. Better get the library ticket out then.
Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body, James Hall, Chatto and Windus 25 pounds.
Irish Art

Belgian Art Fakes

What stands out in the wood panels of the Flemish Primitives is the immaculate precision of detail and the translucence of light that survived centuries from the Middle Ages to this day.
Now, the Groeninge Museum - home to some of the greatest works of the 15th-century Flemish masters - wants you to take a closer look. Some of the Primitives may not be what they seem.
A stunning new show, Fake or Not Fake, assesses the darker side of art restoration during the mid-20th century, when some great craftsmen stepped beyond the entrusted task of retouching and succumbed to "hyper-restoration" - and, curators say, even painted sheer fakes.
Even if some may be outraged, a younger generation raised on digital enhancers may take it well in stride. "You would not know the difference," said one visitor. "I don't feel cheated." Fake or Not Fake at the Groeninge Museum through Feb. 28.
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Irish Art

DIY Art Promotion

James Burpee has painted hundreds of yards of art on canvas. Local galleries have given him art shows since the '60s, and companies have bought his art - but no museum collected him, and no galleries outside Minnesota have exhibited him in nearly 30 years. For the moment, Burpee's creative career sits shrink-wrapped in the form of a book titled "James Burpee: Paintings and Drawings, 1960-2004."

Waiting in frustration for the art world to recognize him, Burpee spent his own money on the half-inch-thick, full-color, catalogue-quality retrospective of his own artistic output. He's planning to pitch the art book to major art museums around the country and has organized a complementary retrospective art exhibition, opening at the California Building Gallery in Minneapolis.
This art exhibition was born through a visit Burpee paid to the California Building Art Gallery. One of the three owners of the art gallery, listened and opened the gallery for Burpee to create his own retrospective. The gallery owner was a kindred soul - an artist himself.
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Irish Art

Monet's London

The staff of St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts, Florida had to coax, plead, fret, travel and work long hours to pull together the massive "Monet's London" - based around one of the museums most prized art works - a Claude Monet painting of the Houses of Parliament.

The show of 150 art works includes a dozen paintings by the French impressionist, all but a few borrowed from 30 venues in the United States and Europe. Scoring a cache of works by an artist of Monet's stature, and supplementing them with important art including a James McNeill Whistler painting so fragile it rarely leaves its home, is significant and could elevate this areas status among art watchers. The art exhibition runs from Jan 16 - Apr 24 then moves on to the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
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Irish Art

Lottery On Ice

Over 4 million pounds of heritage lottery money has been given to safeguard the finest example of ice age cave art in the UK - images of animals, dancing girls and female sexual parts.
Creswell Crags in Nottinghamshire is a limestone gorge believed to mark the most northern explorations of ice age man. It houses Britains earliest cave art, discovered two years ago, and is said to have the world's most elaborately carved cave ceiling.
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Irish Art

Saatchi On The Canvas

Charles Saatchi is about to unveil his epic new collection - and there isn't a tent or a preserved animal in sight. Instead, the millionaire art collector has bought canvas after canvas.
"Painting has been out of favour with international curators for some time," says Saatchi. "They have been obsessively peddling video, photography and installation art. Their eyes dull over when they see painting. It's categorised as bourgeois. They are fashion victims, beyond help."
The Triumph of Painting is unlikely to please either the "I know what I like" traditionalists or the art-world spivs. It's a collection of artists, few of whom are publicly well known here. Their work is personal, aggressive and neurotic. It isn't what the pro-painters mean by painting, although much of it is very painterly and quite beautiful. "This first show," says Saatchi, "is for the artists I most often see admired and ripped off when I go round art schools."
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Irish Art

Irish Art - David Crone

Referred to by Dr S. B. Kennedy as "one the most vital artists working in Northern Ireland today" (exhibition catalogue, Fenderesky Gallery, Queen's University, Belfast, 1991, p.4), David Crone has been lecturing in fine art at the Belfast College of Art since 1985. He has been included in many prestigious, travelling group shows including The Delighted Eye (1981) and Divisions Crossroads Turns of Mind: Some New Irish Art (curated by Lucy Lippard, 1985-1987) and has had many one-man shows with the Northern Ireland Arts Council, the Tom Caldwell Gallery, and the Hendriks and Kerlin Galleries, Dublin.
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Irish Art

Art Reality and Hype

"A sad truth is that all too often in contemporary art, the reality simply does not live up to the hype. So you would be forgiven a modicum of suspicion on entering the latest art exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.
Ellen Gallagher is certainly one of the art worlds hottest, hippest, most hyped names. Lauded in all the right places, she rose to fame with mid-1990s New York art exhibitions. She was one of the stars of the 2003 Venice Biennale and later this month a major show of her work opens at the Whitney.

Is all the excitement justified? On the strength of this show, confounding even my own cynicism, the answer is a resounding yes. This is a complex exhibition, but persevere and you are in for a rewarding and enriching experience." Until Feb 13.
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Irish Art

A Strange Irish Art Story

James Miranda Barry - a close relative of the prominent 18th-century painter James Barry - died of dysentery, alone in a rented room in London. There was no post-mortem, and he was buried promptly, given the infectious nature of his final illness.
Two weeks later the person who had helped lay out the doctor, popped up with the bizarre assertion that Dr Barry was a perfectly formed woman.
This highly regarded army surgeon and humanitarian who had performed the first successful caesarean section known to British medicine and gave Florence Nightingale a piece of his mind, had fooled everyone.
He was born Alice Bulkeley, to an Irish family of greengrocers, a niece of the prominent 18th-century painter James Barry. Disowned and destitute, Alice and her mother threw themselves on the mercy of their rich relation. The artist became the first of three influential patrons who enabled the teenage girl to become a young man with the resources, education and contacts to become a doctor before women were welcome in the profession.
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Irish Art

Futuristic Carnegie Artist

Among all of the artists whose cutting-edge art works are included in the 2004-5 Carnegie International at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, one artist stands out like Jules Verne at a sci-fi writers convention - reclusive, 73 year old Lee Bontecou - one of the few women artists to achieve broad recognition in the mid-20th century.

Her sculptures look like something straight out of science-fiction novels. They appear to be old satellites or spaceships once built by some far-off civilization.
Irish Art

Spring is Sprung

Part of the Irish Museum of Modern Art Collection will open at Glor Gallery, Ennis, Co Clare on Friday 4 February 2005. 'Spring is Sprung' combines art by Irish and international artists and includes a series of prints by Sean Scully, sculpture by Siobhan Hapaska and paintings by Jack B Yeats and Peter Doig.
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Irish Art

New Zealand Art Boom

Art sell-outs even before the opening night. Art by both established and younger, emerging artists being snapped up by collectors at a feverish rate and gallery owners trying, frequently in vain, to keep speculators at bay. "Like the stock market, only prettier" - this how the current NZ art market was described recently.
It seems like the established collectors have now been joined by a new breed of younger, well-travelled and knowledgeable collectors who include art as part of a balanced investment portfolio. Sound familiar?
Irish Art

MoMA Sees All

Furious West 54th Street residents feel like unwitting art exhibits since the Museum of Modern Art in New York unveiled an all-glass facade that puts their private lives on display to 10,000 daily visitors. Museum-goers now have a clear views into living rooms and bedrooms.
MoMA was not giving much away. We have "an ongoing dialogue with the neighbors," they said.
Irish Art

The Art of Realism

Grant Wood, the American Regionalist painter, produced one the best-known and greatest works of American art, 'American Gothic'.

He went to Munich, Germany and there saw the sharply detailed art of 15th-16th-century masters like Holbein and Durer. He also admired the Holbein-influenced German painter Wilhelm Leibl and the art of his own contemporary, Otto Dix. In their attention to the details of everyday life and in the clean, hard quality of their paintings, Wood found the art technique for which he had been hunting. He abandoned impressionism.
His famous "American Gothic" caused a sensation when it was exhibited in Chicago in 1930. The hard, cold realism of the technique displayed in the painting and the honest, direct, earthy quality of the subject were unique in US art.
Irish Art

Painter With a Vision

Neo Rauch is one of Germanys most successful artists. He works in a Leipzig studio with no nameplate and no doorbell. The secrecy is intended for Rauch strictly limits the number of studio visitors.
Rauch favors bleached-out colors for his work - set somewhere between Surrealism and Social Realism. The prominent figures of his visual world often look like Communist, working-class heroes frozen in disastrous situations. They populate stage-like landscapes filled with empty military barracks, gas stations, abandoned factories and empty speech bubbles. There is an eerie, distraught atmosphere inherent in all of his paintings.

Rauch was born and reared in East Germany. When he was 4 weeks old, his parents died in a car accident. He could not recall many happy moments from his childhood. It was only when he became a student at the Academy of Visual Arts that he stopped feeling like an outsider. It was also here in the early 90's that he developed his distinctive painting style.
"It's this strange twilight zone between reason and irrationality where the artist hunts for prey," Rauch said. "If I could really explain this, I wouldn't have to paint it."
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Irish Art

Versace Art Sale

Donatella Versace will soon auction her collection of paintings, sculptures and jewelry, worth almost ten million. Some works belonged to her murdered brother Gianni Versace, founder of the Versace fashion dynasty.
Irish Art

Heavy Metal Pioneer

After working for Henry Moore, Anthony Caro developed his own style of abstract sculpture, influenced by the US avant garde and using materials often found in scrapyards.
Caro, who will be honoured by a large retrospective at Tate Britain this month, is renowned - as Picasso was - for the range and versatility of his work. His readiness to experiment with hitherto unimagined forms, wrought from unlikely materials, has established him as a one-man sculptural avant-garde, constantly capable of changing the method and direction of attack.

Greenberg the art critic Clement once wrote "I was overwhelmed by what you did... The recklessness of it... You are creating or recreating the medium."
Caro has maintained the position of an outsider in British art. He claims not to feel like a European artist at all. "New York had more influence on me than Europe", Caro says.
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Irish Art

Jasper Johns in Dublin

'Past And Present' is show at the IMMA, Dublin with some 90 works by the iconic American artist Jasper Johns. The exhibition explores the last 20 years work through a selection of related paintings, prints and drawings that demonstrate his continually evolving and innovative talent. Feb 9 - Apr 24 2005 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
Irish Art

Northern Irish Art

An Irish Museum of Modern Art exhibition in Dublin shows part of the Irish Art McClelland collection. It highlights artists active in Northern Ireland during the middle of the last century - including Colin Middleton, William Scott, FE McWilliam, Daniel O'Neil and Gerard Dillon.
McClelland acted as their agent from the 1950s through to the 1970s when the McClelland Galleries in Belfast were closed down due to the 'Troubles'. Among works shown for the first time the drawings for the McWilliam 'Women of Belfast' series and paintings direct from the studios of Gerard Dillon and Daniel O'Neill. Ends Mar 6 2005.
Irish Art

'No Sketch' Zone

6 year old Julia Illana loved the works by Matisse, Picasso, Monet and Degas at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She wants to an artist too. So she tried to copy the modern masters in her little sketchbook.
Her parents watched with pride. Her sketch of the Picasso 'Woman with Bangs' came out pretty good, and her Matisse looked fine too.
Then Museum security swooped. A guard warned her parents that sketching was prohibited because the great masterpieces are copyright protected. Her mum tried to explain this concept to Julia.
Actually, the museum guard was wrong. There was no copyright issue and the museum apologised. Julia is heading back on Sunday to try her hand at a Cezanne - or maybe whip up another Matisse or two.
Irish Art

Irish Art - Daniel O'Neill

Irelands foremost romantic painter, Dan O'Neill was the son a Belfast electrician. He took life classes at the Belfast College of Art and the advent of his painting career coincided with the outbreak of WWII. After the 1941 Blitz of Belfast he took to salvaging wood and experimenting with wood carving. His first exhibition was in 1941 and within 5 years the Dublin art dealer Victor Waddington had taken him in hand, granting a regular income which allowed him to give up his day job and focus on painting full time.

He visited Paris in 1949, and there absorbed the lessons of Rouault, Vlaminck and Utrillo. In the early 1950s, O'Neill left Belfast for Conlig in Co. Down which had a small-scale artists colony at the time, with George Campbell and Gerard Dillon also living there. In 1958 he left Ireland for London. His work from this time onwards was increasingly introspective and often desolate. He died in Belfast in 1974.
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Irish Art

Evening Impressions

Sotheby in London sell Impressionist and Modern Art on Tuesday evening, February 8. They feature an array of works by artists for whom the female form was a central theme. From Degas studies of ballet dancers through to a Delvaux depiction of Venus, the selection of paintings demonstrate what a vital element women played to some of the most important artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Examples of Modigliani Caryatids in oil are particularly rare, so the fact that a pair is appearing at auction is unique in recent saleroom history. With work by Van Dongen, Bonnard, Picasso, Beckmann and others, Sotheby should see brisk sales.
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Irish Art

An Arty Meal

'What a Big Mouth' was a recent Buenos Aires art show. The young artists - called Mondongo - use foods like cold cuts to create literal feasts for the eyes. Wall-sized art 'meatscapes' are formed with a palette of cheeses and smoked ham, deer, salmon and other edibles - each chosen for their specific shade of colour. The food is freeze dried and vacuum sealed in layers of resin, letting the artists create a sense of depth in their art by including food on varying levels within the artwork.
Art collectors are biting - including board members of the Tate Gallery in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Since the exhibition opened, Mondongo has sold most of their art for prices up to $35,000.
Irish Art

Figure & Ground

The Crawford Irish Art Gallery in Cork, will show 80 drawings and watercolours spanning three centuries - including works by Rembrandt and Van Gogh.
It explores how artists, even separated by different centuries, are united by underlying concerns or values - pragmatism, honesty, an appreciation of landscape, a sense of structure or geometry underlying the landscape, and an understanding of the close relationship between mankind and nature. Feb 12 until April 2.
Irish Art

Younger Irish Art at IMMA

This exhibition presents a selection of works by younger Irish artists and artists who are based in Ireland and have come to prominence in the last two decades.

The Irish Museum of Modern Art exhibition in Dublin 'Tir Na Nog' exhibition ends Mar 28 2005.
Irish Art

Waiter To Serve Sentence

A French court sentenced a former waiter who stole hundreds of artworks across Europe to 26 months in jail. The Strasbourg court also ordered Stephane Breitwieser, 33, to pay damages.
His mother, Mireille, who told the court she took a hammer to stolen art worth millions of dollars to cover her sons tracks was sentenced to 18 months in jail. Breitwieser's former girlfriend, who acted as a lookout while he stole, got 6 months.
Swiss police arrested him in 2001 when he returned to a museum to wipe away his fingerprints.
Irish Art

Old Masters, New Prices

Each January, European old master dealers descend on New York for the Sotheby and Christie old master auctions.
The dealers from London and Paris try to sniff out discoveries or snap up bargains to restore for the March European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht.
Maastricht - one of the most important world art fairs - sees many paintings just sold in January turn up reframed and restored with substantially higher price tags.
Because the dollar is weak, European dealers are expected to be big buyers. Christie and Sotheby together should generate about $50 million in old master sales. A Canaletto, originally bought in 1730 for 100 pounds, could star by topping 4 million dollars.
Irish Art

Summer Picasso Bathers

An exhibition planned for the summer called 'Picasso: Bathers' investigates some uncharted territory on the map of this great artists oeuvre. The exhibition centers on Picasso's ensemble of 'Bathers' of 1956, and comprises 120 works from European art museums and private art collections.

Relevant works are those artists who inspired Picasso - such as Cezanne, Matisse and Renoir, but also paintings by Derain, Braque, Leger and Miro.
The Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart - June 18 to Oct.
Irish Art

Turkish Delight

Modern art in Turkey has lurked in private galleries or staged every two years at the International Istanbul Biennial.
Now Istanbul city has its first modern art museum - Istanbul Modern - a huge former customs warehouse on the gray-blue waters of the Sea of Marmara. The opening exhibition, 'Observation-Interpretation-Multiplicity,' is an eclectic mix of paintings by 100 Turkish and Turkish expatriate artists from 1900 on.
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Irish Art

Tripping With Charcoal

A website is showing 9 drawings that were allegedly done by an artist under the influence of LSD - part of a test conducted by the US government during its dalliance with drugs in the late 1950s. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the doctor that jabbed him.

The first drawing is done 20 minutes after the first dose. The attending doctor observes - the patient chooses to start drawing with charcoal...judge the results yourself.
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Irish Art

In The Studio

The artists studio changed with photography. Painters and sculptors loved being photographed in their studios - their places of creation. At once messy and carefully organised, mingling paints, plasters, easels and models, the studio was a reflection of the creative personality of its owner.

The Musee d'Orsay collection in Paris shows photographs of the studios of artists including Camille Corot, Bonnard and Rodin. Wonderful moments, frozen in time. Feb 15th - May 15th.
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Irish Art

Wellcome Home

The Wellcome Trust is converting its old central London headquarters into a museum of art and science, at a cost of 20 million pounds.
The renovation, designed by Hopkins Architects, will add performance and debate facilities to the building, which already houses the Wellcome Library's archive of more than 100,000 images, among them an ancient Egyptian medical prescription and an etching by Van Gogh.
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Irish Art

Art Thief Waiter Tries Suicide

Stephane Breitwieser, the French waiter on trial in France for stealing 239 artworks from museums across Europe during a seven year, billion dollar spree attempted suicide overnight.
Described by his lawyer as 'deeply depressed', Breitwieser tried to hang himself in his jail cell but his cellmate saved him by alerting authorities.

Last Chance For Raphael

On Jan 16th the London National Gallery Raphael Exhibition ends. It is the first major exhibition of paintings and drawings by the great Renaissance painter, Raphael (1483-1520), to be held in Britain.

In little more than a decade (1500-1513), Raphael transformed himself from a competent master of provincial church decoration into one of the greatest painters who ever lived. His remarkably lucid compositions influenced Western art up to the 20th century.
Irish Art

Manson Art in Court

A Scottish murder jury were shown paintings by goth rocker Marilyn Manson who is obsessed with the gruesome 1947 Hollywood murder of Elizabeth Short - known as the 'Black Dahlia'. Manson's website featured the explicit art.
Luke Mitchell, 16, denies murdering 14 year old Dalkeith schoolgirl Jodi Jones who died during a horrific, sustained knife attack. The prosecution stressed similarities between the art and post-mortem photos of the murder victim.
Irish Art

Billion Dollar Art Waiter

A French waiter went on trial today for stealing 239 artworks from museums across Europe during a seven year, billion dollar spree.

Stephane Breitwieser, 33, whose mother is also on trial in Strasbourg for slashing some works or throwing them into a canal, has already served time in Switzerland. Breitwieser claimed he stole out of a devouring passion for art, and said he had intended to return the works one day. He said he was sorry that his mother had destroyed many works.
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Irish Art

Art In A Time of Horror

A great painting such as the Picasso Guernica, conceived in the face of the Spanish Civil War, is therapeutic. Its outpouring of humanist despair allows us to reduce and frame the unimaginable.
We can turn to art to draw strength and find reason to continue - from the ancient images that say of a vanished people that they, too, once lived, to contemporary painting and music and dance that draw us into the community of human experience.
Art cannot explain the inexplicable. It can, however, offer solace and bear witness.
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Irish Art

Unmissable Cesar Manrique

Lanzarote modern master, Cesar Manrique died in tragic car accident in 1992 just as his major life work was finished.
The Cesar Manrique Foundation is a self-funding private cultural foundation in the artist's own house and studio workshops. One can see sculpture, paintings and drawings by Manrique and other artists.

The house stands in a stream of petrified lava and five volcanic bubbles have been incorporated in the building - the uniquely shaped living rooms are in the bubbles themselves. The Manrique story is unique in art. If you visit Lanzarote, this is simply unmissable.
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Irish Art

Irish Artist Program Returns

The Irish American Cultural Institute has revived the Irish Artist in Residence Program in cooperation with Location One, a New York City based arts center.
The Arts Council, in collaboration with the Irish American Cultural Institute, will offer one artist a 10 month residency beginning September 2005.
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Irish Art

Irish Art 1830 to 1990

This book by Irish Art critic Brian Fallon traces the development of Irish art from its roots in the Romantic movement to the end of the 20th century The Irish Times called it 'A formidable study of the period'. ISBN: 0862818079 - Appletree Press
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Irish Art

Rich Love New Art

The wealthy once bought Old Masters to adorn their homes - now they are more likely to invest in a Damien Hirst than a Regency commode.
"I see, I love, I buy", says the wife of a former investment banker perched on her sofa surrounded by her art collection - including a heart-shaped neon work by Tracey Emin that spells out Kiss My Soul.

Changed times. The largely patrician board of Christie were dubious about even the idea of contemporary art sales: "I remember the old master department peering over the banisters at contemporary art collectors climbing the stairs for the first auction as if they were animals in the zoo", says Philip Hook, a former Christies director who is now at Sotheby.
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Irish Art

Irish Art - Robert Ballagh

Robert Ballagh (b.1943)
Ballagh is recognised for his imaginative and hyperealistic renderings of well known literary, historical or establishment figures. He represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale 1969 and soon became one of Irelands most reputed painters. In the evolution of his art, in moving from abstraction to figuration, he introduced the figure first as a silhouette or 'cut-out', then as a heavily outlined, painted figure (as in his pastiches of Goya, Delacroix, Poussin or Ingres) .
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Irish Art

Wild Beasts in Washington

The National Gallery of Art in Washington is showing its collection of fauve paintings in an exhibition until May 30th to mark the 100th anniversary of the naming of this movement in French art.
It has brought together 10 of its 13 "fauve" paintings and 10 of its 20 Matisse paintings in the next room. Altogether the gallery owns 113 works by Matisse.

In 1905, critic Louis Vauxcelles first mentioned fauve, or "wild beast," to characterize an explosion of color in the work of a loosely knit group of young painters exhibiting at the Salon d'automne in Paris.
Between 1904 and 1907, Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Georges Braque, Maurice de Vlaminck, and others brought a newly liberated colorism into cityscape and landscape paintings. Working with an intense, pure color and the bold strokes of a loaded brush, these artists adapted the advances of postimpressionism, creating a more impetuous manner.

2005 Art Auction Predictions

Here is a year-end list from Artnet on how some of the most widely collected artists performed at auction in 2004 - who is up, who is down and who has maintained the status quo - plus a prediction on how they will do in 2005. All artists are listed in alphabetical order within their respective categories.

Above: Jenny Saville - a bona fide auction star who is already being compared favorably to Lucien Freud. Her large scale works are the most impressive but her medium size pictures bring more money, proportionately speaking. Outlook for 2005: Up.
For the full list from ArtNet - click the title
Irish Art

Top 100 Art Rankings

Want to gaze at graphs that reflect the top 100 artists exhibition career from 1999 to today as seen from the perspective of the organizing curators of museums and private galleries? A fascinating rollercoaster of useful information? Or perhaps "get a life" springs to mind... You decide.

For all the graphs - click the title
Irish Art

Artists Forgiven $600,000 Rent

A battle between the owner of a historic factory building in Jersey City and a group of about 60 artists fighting eviction has ended. The artists agreed to move out by March 1 and the owner is to forgive them $600,000 in back rent.
The owner of the 328,000-square-foot building also agreed to pay $35,000 tenant legal fees provided that the artists leave by the deadline. The owner wants to tear the building down for housing but the city are contesting his plans.
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Irish Art

Summer Irish Art in NYC

Several New York City cultural organizations will celebrate the rich variety of 20th-Century Irish art this summer.
New York University Grey Art Gallery will present When Time Began to Rant and Rage: Figurative Painting from 20 century Ireland, from May 25 - July 24.
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center will feature 0044 - an exhibition of work by 20 young Irish artists who live and work in the London area.
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Irish Art

Revolting Art Students Burn Art

Fine Art students in Kerala, India burnt over 100 of their paintings to protest at low grades and lack of facilities. All students of the Bachelor of Fine Arts course brought out the paintings they had made in the past year and burnt them.
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Irish Art

"Klimt" The Movie

Shooting for a movie featuring John Malkovich as Austrian art nouveau painter Gustav Klimt has begun in Vienna and will move to Cologne.

"Klimt," directed by Raoul Ruiz, will have a dispute about paintings commissioned by the state as a central theme. It also will focus on the struggle by Klimt for artistic freedom and on his personal relationships, including his lifelong, platonic friendship with Emilie Floege, played by Veronica Ferres.
Irish Art

Lunch with MoMA

MoMA's quiet black granite walls soar gloriously above West 54th Street in New York city.
The $840 million Museum of Modern Art and its 630,000 square feet expanded gallery space is a wonder not to be missed.
Take a friend and pay $40 to get in. Lunch? The restaurant is beautiful, but with a glass of wine and a tip, except little change from $100.
At last, art for the ordinary people...

Abstract artist Edo Murtic dies

Abstract artist Edo Murtic, one of Croatia's most prominent painters, has died at the age of 83. Murtic gained worldwide recognition after the end of the World War 2.

Characterised by an aggressive use of colour, his work appeared in prominent galleries including the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and New York.
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Irish Art

Gate "Art" in Central Park

Christo and Jeanne-Claude will erect 16-foot-high gates placed along 23 miles of footpaths in Central Park, New York. Saffron-colored fabric will be suspended from each gate, falling to 7 feet above the ground.
Jeanne-Claude said they were hopeful it would cost less than $21 million, but he added they would not know the final amount until the piece is completed.
"We truly don't know," he said. "It is very much like a child. It will cost us whatever it has to cost."
Christo and Jeanne-Claude are known for their large-scale public art pieces. They surrounded 11 islands off Miami with pink woven fabric in 1982, opened 3,100 umbrellas in Japan and California in 1991 and wrapped silver fabric around the German Reichstag in 1995.
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Irish Art

Take That, Arty Arc

"One piece is named "Two Indeterminate Lines." I may not understand art, but I understand the English language, and that's pretentious nonsense.
Sculptor Richard Serra's work called "Tilted Arc" was put up at a cost of $175,000. It's a leaning slab of rusting metal. There was a war in New York between people who hated it and people who accused them of being culturally deprived. "Tilted Arc" was taken down, cut in three pieces and stored. Take that, arty arc."
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Irish Art

Sotheby Wins in 2004

Turnover at fine art auctions in 2004 jumped by more than 30% on 2003 - much of this growth was due to high-profile auctions hosted by Sothebys and Christies.
With strong demand in the US art market, no less than 378 went for over a million dollars. Sothebys ran out a clear winner in the race for million-plus sales, with 223 over the year. The flagship auction was the break-up of the Whitney collection in May with "Le Garcon a la Pipe" by Pablo Picasso fetching USD 93 million, an all-time record for any artwork.
Other big sales contributing to the 75% rise in Sotheby's fine art turnover, included the USD 35 million price tag for Paul Gauguin "Maternite II" in November and the USD 28 million paid for Amedeo Modigliani "Jeanne Hebuterne devant une porte".

Detail - Modigliani
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Irish Art

The Nevin Art Collection

Mr Nevin, an attendant at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, stole 2,544 items from the 1930s to the 1950s, according to records recently released by the National Archives in the UK.
He stole prints, oil paintings, musical instruments, ceramics, lacquer boxes, 98 Japanese swords and two imitation 18th century French tables. About 100 of the recovered items were irreparably damaged. The thefts went undetected for years because the museum amazingly had not done an inventory. Police found over 2,000 items at his home. Nevin got three years in prison.

Irish Art - George Barret Jnr

George Barret Junior (1767-1842)
Son of the celebrated Irish artist, George Barret RA (1732-1784), George Barret Junior was, according to Strickland "one of the foremost water-colour painters of the English School." He was a foundation member of the Old Watercolour Society in 1804, a major exhibitor there and also showed at the Royal Academy. Strickland again: "In some qualities his watercolours have never been surpassed, excelling in their effects of atmosphere and brilliant sunlight, and full of poetic feeling".
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Irish Art

Art Failure

The proposed levy on the sale of European artwork will devastate UK dealers. The measure will give artists, and their descendants for 70 years after their deaths, claims upon a levy imposed every time one of their works is resold. Very fair, some will say. Yet in practice, it will simply cause owners of contemporary art to send to markets where the levy is not applied, notably Switzerland and the US.
It will deal a devastating blow at the London market, which today accounts for half of all European art sales. Experience in countries such as France, where a droit de suite already operates, shows that it is very costly to collect. It chiefly benefits not impoverished living artists, but the relations of rich dead ones.
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Irish Art

Orkney to Edinburgh

The extraordinary woman called Margaret Gardiner is now in her 100th year. She created one of the most important art collections in the UK - then gifted it to the Pier Arts Centre on Orkney. The collection is now on loan to the Edinburgh Dean Gallery giving an unprecedented chance to see a significant body of British modernism from one of the most important art movements of the 20th century.

The exhibition amply describes the development of St Ives modernism. The peerless simplicity of three seascapes by Roger Hilton, still-life works by Nicholson and the Wallis ship paintings, the priceless Hepworth Large and Small Form of 1934, Patrick Heron - pulsating Small Red Square of 1958, William Scott - 1956 Still Life. These, and world-class Hepworths are as good as anything in the Tate.
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Irish Art

Irish Art Tax Shock

Ireland is going to review its tax policy that allows artists to not pay any taxes.
There is public anger that artists have been using relief schemes to legitimately avoid paying any tax on their earnings. The tax free scheme for writers, artists and musicians was introduced more than 30 years ago. The scheme - unique to Ireland - was intended to show how the country valued artistic and creative talent, as well as being of practical help to struggling artists.
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Irish Art

Kiss for Charity

The original paintings of Alex Ross - which appeared in the opening title sequence to SpiderMan 2 - are being auctioned on eBay. These one of a kind artworks will be listed exclusively on eBay with all proceeds donated to charity.

The starting bid for the upside-down kiss painting is $9000.

Martin Gale Retrospective

The 60 painting Martin Gale retrospective at the Ulster Museum and Art Gallery, Belfast is all about rural Ireland. These tense, expectant, hyper-realism images are not idyllic picture postcard Irish images. Their surreal quality stems largely from the isolation of his figures in the landscape and the uncertainty surrounding their activities.

The art critic Aidan Dunne: "The mystery of a single moment that contains a bewildering wealth of impressions. The mystery of an action caught out of context and left undefined and ambiguous." Ends 6th of March 2005.
Irish Art

German Art Island

Museum Island in Berlin is a symbol of the reunification of Germany and is expected to a world-class museum rivaling the British Museum and the Louvre.
The Museum Island project will be completed in 2015 at an estimated cost of 1 billion euros. The museums - connected by underground passages - will present a magnificent collection embracing 6,000 years of Western civilization, from ancient Egypt, western Asia, Greece and Rome to modern European paintings and sculptures.
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Irish Art

Kiddy Art

Critics describe the Marla Olmstead paintings as "laden with emotion". They rave about how she makes colors interact with such intensity. Her pieces have already sold for as much as $15,000 - and she has sold nearly three dozen to date.
For now, though, 4 year old Marla from Binghamton NY is more interested in making friends and playing with her little brother Zane. This shy little blonde has shot past loose-leaf paper on the refrigerator to giant canvases hanging in art galleries, studios and homes.
"We honestly didn't think it was beyond anything any other 3-year-old would do." her mother Laura said.
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Irish Art

Irish Art - Joseph Poole Addey

Joseph Poole Addey (1852-1922)
Addey became the first Head Master of the Londonderry School of Art. In the latter half of his life he lived mostly in Dublin, working as a tutor to students of the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. He often took outdoor sketching classes at Rathfarnham Castle during the summer holidays. According to Theo Snoddy, Addey "could not comprehend how anyone would be unable to copy accurately, with pencil, a simple object". In the last years of his life he moved to London where he taught the principles of perspective to students at the Slade School of Art.
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Irish Art

Come One And All

McKinley, Norman and Associates, a global private client team at Merrill Lynch will speak about about "multi-generational financial planning" on January 19th at Palm Beach, Florida. The program will be combined with a private viewing of paintings by Camille Pissarro, the French Impressionist. Reservations are required and an invitation must be presented at the door.

The sounds you will hear in the background is Pissarro, who endured prolonged severe financial hardship in keeping faith with the aims of Impressionism, grinding his teeth and turning in his grave.

Sutherland quit over Picasso

A celebrated collection of works by Picasso and Degas at The Tate Gallery was almost lost because of a furious row between the gallery management and the distinguished artist Graham Sutherland.
Sutherland accused the Tate director, Sir John Rothenstein, of misusing funds bequeathed to the Tate and paying above market price for works by continental masters like Picasso. He wanted the money invested in British art.
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Irish Art

Modern Art Forever?

"There is a dispute in our culture between those who think art is for ever and those who feel it is disposable. Modern art galleries are filled at the moment with piles of rubbish, some of it more interesting and more beautiful than others.
I, for one, have lost patience with the Warhol-tainted love of the repetitive and the banal. You can see more interesting accumulations of that sort just by visiting your local corporation dump. Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp."
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Irish Art

Kids Exchange World Art

The father of an art-loving 6 yr old believes childrens creativity can provide a link of understanding around the world - an idea that came to him in a dream.
His "Global Day of Peace Art Exchange" has sent paintings and drawings from local schools to 15 countries. Students in other countries have sent their art to him for an exhibition in Jackson County, USA in January.
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Irish Art

An Irish Artist...

Thomas Hovenden was orphaned at six. He was a seven-year carver's apprentice and his master sent him to the Cork School of Design. In 1863, aged 23, he emigrated to the United States.
His favorite subjects were interiors, and whilst primarily a genre painter, he also painted some Impressionist landscapes with softened forms and a lighter palette.
He was killed by a train while trying to save a child.
Irish Art

Art for Life

If you are in the fitness business or in the arts world, you might benefit from a new idea that combines both. A gym owner in America, has come up with a way to inspire people to get fit - and explore museums at the same time. He has developed a self-guided fitness walk of the museums of lower Manhattan in New York.
He thinks the idea would work well in London. People could visit the British Museum on Great Russell Street, jog to the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, and then recover in the National Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar Square.
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Irish Art

Compassionate Rouault

A Georges Rouault print exhibition opens on January 11th at the Miami University Art Museum. Miserere is a series of 58 prints made by Rouault at the beginning of World War I as a plea for compassion.
Rouault, a French painter who lived from 1871 to 1958, was as a deeply religious artist whose work resembles stained glass.
Irish Art

Zimbabwean Home Truths

Jason Gambitzs, a 72 year old Zimbabwean Art Gallery owner told his employees that President Mugabe was to blame for their lack of Xmas bonuses, A two month suspended jail sentence for slandering the president followed.
He told employees Mugabe printed useless money and chased tourists away and that was why he could not host a Christmas party or pay their annual bonuses.
Irish Art

V&A Robbed Yet Again

More than 500,000 pounds worth of Renaissance plaquettes have been stolen from the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
The eight bronze 15th and 16th century works which show religious scenes were jemmied from their wooden showcases in broad daylight.
Mark Jones, director of the V&A considered this to be "a well-planned professional theft."
The V&A has been robbed of ceramics three times in the last few months including 60,000 pounds worth of Chinese jade and Meissen figures worth 30,000 pounds.
Irish Art

Artless in Seattle

Seattle Art Gallery owner Kurt Lidtke knew his art - but artists, other dealers, clients, his landlord and even friends still sued him for payment for works by Degas, Matisse and many local Seattle artists. Some payments were extracted from his forced $710,000 house sale.
Divorce action, a charge of domestic violence and an order that forbids him from using drugs or alcohol followed for Lidtke. "There's two sides to every story," he said "The last year has been difficult for everyone."
This is particularly true for some of his older Seattle collectors who have lost their art with no chance of payment.
Irish Art