Artist and Soldier

William Orpen strides back on stage to surprise and delight us - this time at the Imperial War Museum. He was an official war artist, but sensibly the scope of the exhibition has been extended to embrace his whole career.
Orpen died in 1931 at the age of only 53, by which time he was Sir William Orpen, pillar of the Royal Academy, and as successful as any society portrait-painter of his time. His technical command is impressive. Perhaps our puritanical modernist distrust of that facility accounts for his subsequent neglect. His female nudes are deliciously frank in their robust sensuality.

Many of Orpen's most important works are here: his masterly conversation piece, "Homage to Manet" (1909), being perhaps the most notable. But the surprises, and the sense at last of seeing the whole man, are what count.
Imperial War Museum, London SE1, to May 2, then to the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
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Irish Art

British Art at Sotheby

The market for works by 20th-century British artists has grown apace in recent years, and Sotheby's sale of 20th Century British Art on Thursday, March 10, 2005 is set to provide further indication of continuing demand. March's sale is replete with high quality works, many of which have been consigned for sale in response to recent high prices achieved in the field.
Sotheby's sale of 20th Century British Art last November set no fewer than nine new auction records, many of these for works by post-war artists such as William Scott, Terry Frost, Kenneth Martin, Keith Vaughan, William Tillyer, John Wells and Alex MacKenzie. A number of these artists will be represented in the forthcoming sale with works that are set to generate similarly high levels of interest.
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Irish Art

MoMA Has Lost Its Edge

Philip Johnson died last week without ever having seen Yoshio Taniguchi's completed expansion of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Confined to his Connecticut estate, he was too frail to travel to the museum's opening event and had stopped offering ideas to the Modern's curators.
It is hard to imagine that Johnson - the founding director of the Modern's department of architecture and design - would have been much impressed by the reinstallation of the department's main galleries more than 60 years after he organized its inaugural show.
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Irish Art

Leger Art In Denmark

From 5 Feb, Denmark's ARKEN Gallery is showing Picasso's rival, Fernand Leger. With more than 90 works spotlighting Leger's visions of man in the new age, the art exhibition is the first wide presentation in Denmark of his work.

Intent on a radical break from his Impressionist style of painting, in 1908 he destroyed the bulk of his art. He found them too harmonious and too far from his vision of the modern. He wanted the dynamic, chaotic, contrastive city culture to pervade his work. Like Picasso, Leger became one of the premier modernists in the first half of the twentieth century.
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Irish Art

Versace Art Under Hammer

The impressive Versace art collection once adorned the fashion guru's six-storey New York townhouse. Now the contemporary, impressionist, modern and 19th century paintings are to be auctioned by Sotheby's in New York in May and London in June.

The 45 painting collection is valued at 6.5-9 million pounds and includes important works by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse and Edgar Degas. In 2001, art and furnishings from the Florida house were sold for 5.5 million pounds. The Italian designer was shot dead outside his Miami Beach mansion in 1997.
Irish Art

Speed Date At The Tate

Students at Chelsea College of Art and Design, which has just moved to a stunning new home next to the Tate Britain on London's Millbank, will be getting intimate with their new neighbours when they curate the 'Late At Tate Britain' event on Friday 4 February.
They decided to take the task of exploring their new relationship with the great art institution literally - organising a speed-dating session for visitors to the gallery. They will also try to encapsulate the fusion between the future names of art and design with the established greats at Tate Britain with mobile DJs in shopping trolleys, singing and drumming workshops, and human architecture, with students forming a human wall around the Tate bar.
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Irish Art

Lenin Turns In His Coffin

Performances and art mocking Communist ideology are currently on show at the first Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. The project's most ambitious goal is to put Russia back on the world map of contemporary - a place it hasn't occupied since the 1930s.
Contemporary art is one of the few things that Moscow seemed to lack until now and the city has made a huge effort to plug this gap - although the result is not to everyone's taste. As a Biennale commissioner puts it, contemporary art doesn't have to be beautiful - it should explore, provoke and offer food for thought. The Moscow Biennale creators are hoping that their brainchild will make Moscow a center in the art world.
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Irish Art

National Gallery Goes Interactive

The National Gallery, London, unveiled a new interactive display service. The gallery hopes it will help shed light on its 2,300-strong collection. Interactive displays have been a part of museum and galleries for about two decades but have rarely been successful at augmenting the whole visiting experience. The National Gallery hopes it can change all that with its new service ArtStart.

With up to 36 kiosks are planned throughout the gallery, visitors can search and view the entire 2,300-strong collection with a complementary text on each art work. Users can plot a unique gallery tour, focusing on artists of their own choice.
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Irish Art

Museums Feel The Pinch

Europe's flagship museums - the Uffizi, the Musee du Louvre in Paris, and the British Museum in London - are feeling the pinch. Thrifty governments facing European Union deficit limits are capping cultural handouts and compelling museums to make money on the side by seeking sponsors, hiring out halls and selling snacks and knickknacks.
As a result, even as museums draw record crowds - the Louvre hosted 6 million visitors last year - they increasingly rely on sponsors. To put on shows, fund new wings and restore crumbling galleries, museums get help from major companies and national lotteries.
Irish Art

Museum Removes Erotic Art

A Swedish museum dedicated to world culture has removed an erotic painting plastered with verses from the Muslim holy book, the Koran, from an exhibition about AIDS after Muslims complained it was obscene. The painting by an Arab artist living in France was replaced by another less offensive one. The painting was removed to prevent public attention shifting from the exhibition's main message about AIDS and globalisation.
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Irish Art

Art Market At Highest

Art prices are now at their highest levels since 1990. The Artprice Global Index calculated using data on repeat sales reveals that following the fall auction season in New York, art prices rose by 24.4% between January and December 2004. Taking into account fluctuations in exchange rates, the increase in euro terms was just 14% over the same period.
If prices continue to advance at the same pace as in 2004, they could well surpass November 1990 highs in November 2005, thus taking art market prices to unprecedented levels. Collectors seeking to make substantial gains might by that stage consider it the right time to sell off some of their art assets they acquired in the 1980s.

Artprice index for the main art movement trends from 1990 to 2004 shows the two highest gains were the Hudson River School: +248% and American Impressionism: +164%. Artprice lists over 21 million auction prices and indices covering over 306,000 artists collected from 2,900 international auction houses.
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Irish Art

Wall Street HiJacks Art

For Bruce Taub, life isn't about imitating art, it's about selling a stake in it. As the estimated 25 billion dollar art economy draws a wider range of investors, Taub's firm is readying the first two U.S. funds catering exclusively to them. Besides buying and selling art in the same way equity funds invest in stocks, the firm will provide tools for investors to gauge pieces with a more critical financial eye.
Returns from art have kept pace with the Standard & Poor's 500 Index since the 1950s. This fact alone is forcing savvy investors to judge a piece of art by the value it is likely to hold in the future as well as how it will fit into their overall wealth. The fund should be able to buy art assets valued at about $150 million.
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Irish Art

Elizabeth Taylor's Van Gogh

A California judge will consider only written arguments in an Ontario man's dispute with actress Elizabeth Taylor over ownership of a Van Gogh. The case was brought by a lawyer whose great grandmother once owned the 1889 van Gogh 'View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy'. In 1963, actress Elizabeth Taylor bought it at a Sotheby's in London- it is now worth an estimated $20 million U.S.
Elizabeth Taylor says she purchased the work in good faith and that it changed hands through two legitimate art galleries before Adolf Hitler's rise to power. The judge must decide whether to declare Elizabeth Taylor the rightful owner and dismiss the claim or agree to hear the challenge in full.
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Irish Art

Death Row Art Is Legal

James Vernon Allridge IV may have been guilty of capital murder. But there was nothing illegal about the drawings of flowers, animals and landscapes that the Fort Worth killer sold from death row. That's what the Texas Attorney General ruled last week.
Victims rights advocates had argued that Allridge's Internet art sales to patrons such as actress Susan Sarandon and rocker Sting violated a state law against profiting from crimes. But Abbott ruled that inmates are free to sell their artwork. Allridge was executed last year for killing a convenience store clerk during a robbery.
Irish Art

Aussie $50,000 Art Prize

A Queensland, Australia artist Dale Frank has won that nation's richest open painting prize.

The winner of the 50,000 dollar Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize drew attention throughout Australia. The artist's colourful abstract work 'Three Lies' was selected from 41 shortlisted works.
Irish Art

Harvard's 250,000 Artworks

Thomas Lentz, the new head of the Harvard University Art Museums, has a portrait by British artist Lucian Freud and a large Franz Kline, one of his signature slashing black abstractions in his office.
He doesn't have much time for gazing at art these days. He's in one of the greatest - and one of the toughest - positions in the museum world. He's taken charge of the university's art collection of 250,000 objects, a stunning total outnumbered in the United States by only three institutions: the Metropolitan, the Brooklyn Museum, and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.
The storerooms are stuffed. Less than 1 percent of what the museum owns can fit in the galleries. And the small scale of the rooms dramatically restricts the ability to show contemporary art.
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Irish Art

Bacterial Art In Court

Lawyers for Steven J. Kurtz asked a judge to dismiss fraud charges against the artist and art professor, following an FBI probe into his bacteria-based art work.
Kurtz, 46, a University professor, was accused of illegally scheming to obtain bacterial agents that he used in art exhibits sponsored by the Critical Art Ensemble. That group has protested policies of the federal government. Protesters accused the U.S. Justice Department of unfairly targeting Kurtz because he participated in art exhibits and wrote books that criticized the government. "It's not an exaggeration to say artists all over the world are watching this case," one Chicago artist said. "To me, it's a test case on how far the government can go to repress artists and intellectuals."
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Irish Art

Netherlands Hoards Stolen Art

The Netherlands is a depot for stolen artworks, the director of the world's largest detective bureau for stolen art says. Julian Radcliffe, the director of the London based Art Loss Register, said art stolen from northern and eastern Europe (Scandinavia, Germany and Russia) is often taken to the Netherlands.
Radcliffe says that the criminal market thrives in the Netherlands because of a gap in Dutch law in relation to stolen art. Due to the statute of limitations, thieves become the owners of stolen private art after 20 years and 30 years for publicly-owned artworks that were stolen. "That means that thief can consider the Netherlands as a relatively safe warehouse if he cannot export the art," Radcliffe said. EUR 150 to 200 million in art is stolen worldwide each year.
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Irish Art

French Art Auction Gap Widens

The art market in France shrank slightly in 2004 as Drouot - the umbrella organisation for Parisian auction houses - reported turnover of 365 million euros. The gap is gradually widening between Christie's and Sotheby's and their larger French competitors, whose sales are stagnating or declining.

Last year, Christie's confirmed its position as the auction house in France with the highest turnover, followed by Tajan, Sotheby's and Arcurial. Christie's and Sotheby's results do not tell the whole story, as the highest value works consigned to them in France are sent for sale elsewhere. One example is Monet's view of the Houses of Parliament which Christie's sold for 20.17 million dollars in New York last November - another is Van Gogh's Deux Crabes which sold at Sotheby's London last June for 5.1 million pounds.
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Irish Art

Sickert Not The Ripper?

In the 1930s Walter Sickert was the pre-eminent painter in Britain - now he is better known as "the man who might have been Jack the Ripper". Matthew Sturgis's outstanding new biography attempts to reassert Sickert's original fame over his posthumous infamy.

His standing now is somewhat below the first rank - a judgment confirmed by his auction house prices (the record for one of his paintings stands at a relatively modest 200,000 pounds). While Sickert was undoubtedly a painter of importance on the British scene, that is not the same as being a painter of important pictures. His legacy is as a champion of Impressionism, a long-lived link to the greats of 19th-century painting, an early practitioner of seedy realism and as a pioneering modern artist in the way he used photography and the press to further his art and his public profile.
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Irish Art

Toronto Art Exhibitions Flop?

Heavily advertised art exhibitions in Toronto failed to sparkle with visitors. The numbers show the city is still trying to shake off the effects of the SARS crisis and the reluctance of tourists to travel in the wake of the terror attacks of 2001 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Modigliani: Beyond the Myth attracted just over 126,000 visitors in a 13-week run and Picasso and Ceramics received 31,000 visitors.
Irish Art

Hirst Art Chapel In Rome?

The Italian collector Carlo Bilotti has commissioned Damien Hirst to create four paintings of the Evangelists to display in a deconsecrated church. Bilotti is in discussions with Rome City Council to convert a former chapel into a centre for contemporary art which will display works by Hirst and other artists from his collection.
Since Bilotti sold his cosmetics company he has spent his time and money on enlarging his art collection. In the 70s and 80s, he developed personal relationships with artists such as Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali. His collection is mainly 20th-century works by Matisse, Picasso, and Roy Lichtenstein among others.
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Irish Art

Smart Art Search

If you don't know art but know what you like, new search technology could prove a useful gateway to painting. ArtGarden, developed by BT's research unit, is being tested by the Tate as a new way of browsing its online collection of paintings. Rather than search by the name of an artist or painting, users are shown a selection of pictures. Clicking on their favourite will change the gallery in front of them to a selection of similar works.
Browsing is much more akin to wandering through the gallery. The technology uses a system dubbed smart serendipity - is a combination of artificial intelligence and random selection. It 'chooses' a selection of pictures, by scoring paintings based on a selection of keywords associated with them.
Irish Art

26 Million Pound Super Museum

Plans for an ambitious 'super' museum which would be home to more than 500,000 artefacts are gathering pace. The Heritage Lottery Fund announced it was donating more than 9.2 million pounds to the Great North Museum scheme. Due to be completed in 2009 - it will involve an extension of Newcastle's Hancock Museum. Total cost will be 26 million pounds.
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Irish Art

Booming Tate Art Expands

It is a gargantuan presence on the south bank of the Thames, and the most popular art museum in the world - with a turbine hall that struggles to look anything other than cavernous, whatever vast sculpture is put there. But now Tate Modern is planning to grow - by a staggering 60% by 2012.
Tate Modern already has a display space of nearly 12,000 square metres. The largest contemporary art gallery in the country has been a wild success, tempting 20 million visitors through its doors, and is the third most popular tourist attraction in the country.
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Irish Art

Anger Over Stonehenge Delays

The National Trust accused the government of abandoning the scheme to rescue Stonehenge from the stranglehold of traffic yesterday, despite its undertakings to protect the world art heritage site. The director general of the trust, said there was an "ominous silence on the subject", forcing the National Trust and English Heritage to delay plans for a 25 million pound centre and improvements at the site.
Irish Art