Looted Art in US

Polish officials say that legal documents compiled in a new book bolster their ownership claim of drawings by Renaissance master Albrecht Durer that were looted by the Nazis during World War II.
The 27 drawings were stolen from the Ossolinski Institute in present-day Lviv, Ukraine, which was once part of Poland, and sold on the international art market after the war ended. They are now owned by major museums and collections in the United States and Europe, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Irish Art

Italians Buy Back Art

European art lovers and investors are taking advantage of the cheap dollar to buy back some of the hundreds of thousands of works that have crossed the Atlantic over decades. European bidders, flush with dollars, are pushing US buyers into paying prices well above estimates at US auctions. The weak dollar offers European buyers some remarkable bargains. Sources said Italians were particularly active buyers - there are plenty of works for Italians to repatriate.
Irish Art

Saw Art

Some artists work in oils. Some work in clay or watercolors. George M. Yatsko works in logs. Yatsko is a chain-saw artist, who carves tree trunks and branches into likenesses of anything that captures his fancy. He deftly wields his power saw to shape blocks of wood down to the smallest features - an eye, a nose, an indentation to represent fur or feathers.
Yatsko's favorite woods to work with are cherry and black walnut, though any hardwood will suffice, he said. Softwoods won't do, because they contain too much water and can crack extensively as they dry out.
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Irish Art

Canaletto Sold for 2.8 million

A painting of a Venetian view by Italian master Canaletto has been sold for 2.8 million pounds to a private buyer at a Christie's auction in New York. Painted in around 1740, it was one of four pictures originally sold by the Italian artist for a total of one hundred pounds. Known for painting highly detailed views of Venice, Canaletto also painted London and the River Thames in the mid-18th Century.
Christie's sold the painting alongside a number of Old Masters, with Filippino Lippi's piece The Penitent Mary Magdalen Adoring the True Cross selling for 1.2m pounds - 50% more than it's estimate.
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Irish Art

'Hoarding' Art Museums Warned

Too many works of art and historical artefacts are hidden from public view. Arts minister Estelle Morris says major museums in England should allow smaller galleries to exhibit undisplayed items. She said there was a growing appetite for "serious" culture in the country and called for the "cultural centre of gravity" to move away from London. Her comments come as a consultation paper on the future of museums in England is published.
While large parts of major London collections are rarely seen by the public, museums outside the capital are crying out to show fresh items, the former education secretary added. A spokeswoman for the British Museum said there were a number of reasons for keeping artefacts in storage.
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Irish Art

Theft Attempt At British Museum

A man tried to open a display case using a pair of pliers and wire and steal artefacts from the British Museum this week. A collection of about 15 ancient Chinese jewels was snatched from the museum just a few months ago.
A museum spokeswoman said: "A man was spotted by an alert gallery attendant acting suspiciously so they approached him and noticed he seemed to have some wire and pliers in his hand and was seemingly trying to get into one of the cases. A security expert carried out a covert security review of some of London's top museums last year, and said access to the building was extremely easy. A spokesman for the British Museum said it was always looking to improve security.
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Irish Art

Is Art Blind?

The painter Esref Armagan is in Boston to see if a peek inside his brain can explain how a man who has never seen can paint pictures that the sighted easily recognise - and even admire. He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he's never seen any of these things. He depicts colour, shadow and perspective, but it is not clear how he could have witnessed these. How does he do it? His paintings are disarmingly realistic; his skills are formidable.
Because if Armagan can represent images in the same way a sighted person can, it raises big questions not only about how our brains construct mental images, but also about the role those images play in seeing. Do we build up mental images using just our eyes or do other senses contribute too?
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Irish Art

Art Demonstrators in Berlin

Protesters marked Auschwitz commemorations by throwing paint outside a controversial Berlin art show given by the heir of a convicted Nazi industrialist. The demonstrators poured several litres of white emulsion by the entrance to the collection of contemporary artwork owned by Friedrich Christian Flick.
During the exhibition's opening in September a protester snuck in, stripped naked and began to shave his head and body hair to make himself look like a concentration camp inmate. A woman attacked two works of art a few days later before shouting that she forgave their owner.
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Irish Art

Does It Stack Up As Art?

The 22-foot tower of wooden pallets is officially a historic monument. It's unclear how serious members of the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission were in 1978 when they designated Daniel Van Meter's "Tower of Wooden Pallets" a historic art monument. One later joked that "maybe we were drunk" when they recognized the 22-foot stack of crumbling, termite-infested beer pallets.
Now the "artist's" heirs want to clear the land of feral cats, strange plants and the tower itself so a developer can put up 98 apartments which will make them millions from the 1.43-acre lot. But the tower is in their way - requiring layers of bureaucratic process, public hearings and detailed reports before the "sculpture" can go.
Irish Art

The Art Of The Garden

"Monet's Garden" Exhibition exploring the aesthetic role of the garden in the work of French painter Claude Monet (1840-1926). The show presents 70 paintings, from early works to his monumental, late paintings of water lilies. To March 13. Kunsthaus Zurich Heimplatz.
Irish Art

Young Whistler's Etchings

"Young Whistler: Early Prints and the `French Set". Showcases early impressions of the most important Whistler etchings produced up to 1858. To March 13. Freer Gallery, Washington.
Irish Art

Spanish Portrait Art

"The Spanish Portrait. From El Greco to Picasso". Major exhibition covering the development of portraiture in Spanish painting from the late 15th century to the first decades of the 20th century. Feb. 6. Museo Nacional del Prado Paseo del Prado, Madrid.
Irish Art

Paris Art on the Potomac

From Valentine's Day to Memorial Day, Washington is showcasing its French connections through shows, food and tours. Art exhibits include Toulouse Lautrec at the National Gallery of Art, Mar 20-Jun 14; Berthe Morisot at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, to May 8, and Modigliani - with a focus on the fruits of his 14-year career in Paris - at The Phillips Collection, Feb 26-May 29.
Irish Art

Pollack Drawings in Berlin

"No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock - Paintings on Paper" The exhibition features a group of approximately 40 artworks drawn from international collections and gives a comprehensive overview on the drawing works of the Abstract Expressionist. Jan 29-Apr 10 at Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin.
Irish Art

Art: "The Naked Truth"

More than 180 masterpieces of painting and drawing, this exhibition features early 20th-century artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, who broached taboo themes like sexuality and power, homo-eroticism, adolescence and the battle of the sexes. Jan. 28 through April 24. Schirn Kunsthalle Romerberg. Frankfurst.
Irish Art

Caro Birthday Art

A major new sculpture has been unveiled at the Tate Britain ahead of the opening of an exhibition celebrating its creator's 80th birthday. "Millbank Steps, 2004" stands more than five metres high and is made of high strength steel.

It will form part of the exhibition of Sir Anthony Caro's work, which will show key pieces of his craft from the early 1960s to present day. The retrospective exhibition opens in Tate London on 26 January.
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Irish Art

Sotheby Client List Goes Legal

Sotheby's is a magazine publisher alleging that he obtained a confidential list containing the names of 21,000 clients without its permission and then sold the information to Heritage Galleries & Auctioneers, based in Dallas, Texas. A writ lodged by Sotheby's in a New York court seeks an injunction restraining Wright and his magazine from using the list and demands the return of the data as well as compensation.
"Sotheby's goes to great lengths to protect the secrecy of its client lists," it says. The Texas saleroom purchased the data innocently and allegedly paid "a substantial sum of money" to use it for a year.
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Irish Art

Art Gallery Cancer Scare

The National Gallery of Australia was monitoring sick leave when it found something worrying. Five of its security guards had been diagnosed with cancer between 1997 and 2002, three of them since February 2001.
"There could be something in the work environment which is contributing to it," said the gallery's human resources manager in an email to her boss on February 21, 2002. She had learned earlier that day about the latest case - bowel cancer.
Three days later there was more bad news. Nine more guards had been diagnosed with cancer over an unspecified period.
As management learned of the cancers, an investigation was already under way into the health and safety of the building, prompted by long-running allegations by staff and former staff that it was damaging their health and the priceless collection. In a critical 2003 report, an investigator found staff had been exposed to a potentially deadly chemical. He did not know about the cancer alert or the gallery's actions that followed. Now he wants to know why.
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Irish Art

Katz Anticipated Pop Art

Alex Katz's flat, schematic figurative paintings and cutouts of the late '50s and '60s favored improvisatory, expressionist brushwork in which his portraits of friends and relatives stood before backgrounds of bold, flat color. The outlines and features of these simplified figures combine a deliberate naivete of manner with a mechanized technique that anticipated the elementary visualizations of Pop Art.

It is intriguing to see the methodology of a contemporary artist returning to a tradition of the Renaissance. His technique, originally used by Renaissance masters for tapestries and large wall paintings, is fully illustrated. Katz first draws his original idea on heavy brown paper; then, using a spiked wheel, perforates the paper along the lines. He then lays the "cartoon" over the canvas. Burnt sienna pigment is dusted through the holes in the cartoon, and leaves traces of the original drawing on the canvas. With these guidelines, he proceeds to paint. This exhibit is a tour de force of techniques, both old and new, in the hands of an American master. Katz's art extends portraiture into our own time with fresh ideas about identity. University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum.
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Irish Art

A Painting Every Day

Mary V. Dearborn's recently published biography Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim, explores the colorful life of the legendary art patron and dealer who helped launch the careers of artists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, among others. Included is a detailed 1942 inventory of Guggenheim's groundbreaking Art of This Century gallery in New York that individually lists more than 150 artworks by nearly 70 artists (many of the top-selling artists of all time), the year the works were created, and the original price Guggenheim paid for each work, usually directly from the artist.
The list ranges from 1937 photographs by Berenice Abbott (two bought for $14 each) to Pablo Picasso's 1928 oil The Studio, which at $6,000 was the most expensive piece listed. She set out to buy a picture a day - and in some cases was buying more than one a day.
Irish Art

Underrated/Overrated

Sometimes their work is hard to collect. Other times, it's hard to categorize. Sometimes artists are underappreciated because they belong to long-overlooked constituencies. And other times, as Claudia Gould, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, delicately puts it, "the personalities of the artists themselves are counterproductive to their careers."
For example, Jan Lievens was a contemporary of Rembrandt. They were the same age and painted almost side by side. Lievens was judged to be the more talented in his day. He was taken to England to be a court painter and just went straight downhill, while Rembrandt became Rembrandt.
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Irish Art

Art Gates In Central Park

Christo and Jeanne-Claude began overseeing the installation of 7,500 "gates" on 23 miles of pedestrian walkways in this city's crown jewel, Central Park. Hundreds of workers simultaneously unfurled saffron-colored clothes from each gate. The usually bare and silvery winter park appeared injected with a stream of honey.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude have waited 26 years to present The Gates, Project for Central Park, New York City. They tried to re-landscape the park with steel gates in 1979 but couldn't penetrate the bureaucracy. New Yorkers have long considered Central Park itself a work of art - transformed after a design contest in 1857 from a barren swampland into an idyllic urban oasis. One critic complained of the original proposal - like painting "a mustache on the Mona Lisa."
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Irish Art

Private Art Masterpieces

It's known as one of the world's best private art collections - and a multi-millionaire wants to share it. Jack Warner, 87, often can be found wearing tennis shoes, sitting in a red leather chair in the midst of his collection of masterpieces at the Warner-Westervelt Museum on the rocky cliffs overlooking Lake Tuscaloosa.
There are patriot portraits, frontier landscapes, Old West and Civil War battle scenes, and Impressionist idylls, painted by the greatest American artists: James Peale, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer, James Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassat, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keefe and Andrew Wyeth.
"It is the finest privately held collection of American art in the world - I can say that without reservation," said Director of the Birmingham Museum of Art. "What I love about it, too, is it gives this wonderful view of American history. Jack Warner has a great eye. People are never prepared for the quality."
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Irish Art