Hirst Art In Boston

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston shows a select overview of four paintings and three sculptures by Damien Hirst from 1994 to 2004 from various collections. One of today's most influential and controversial artists, Hirst has created a thoughtful and provocative body of work that addresses such traditional and historical themes as mortality, love, and spiritual redemption. Hirst was instrumental in the rise of British art throughout the 1990s, and he helped pave the way for other artists of his generation.
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Irish Art

Madonna Sues Over Art

Pop star Madonna is suing her longtime art consultant Darlene Lutz, claiming she is owed 265,000 dollars for a painting that the adviser sold. The summons was filed in Manhattan Supreme Court and made public and says Lutz owes Madonna the money based on a settlement agreement made between the two women in May 2004. "The lawsuit is based on a breach of contract agreement," said a spokeswoman for Madonna.

MOMA And The Bankers

New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) shows an exhibition of works from an art collection owned by the Swiss banking giant UBS. The exhibition celebrates the bank's gift of 44 pieces of art to MOMA and includes paintings, sculptures and photographs by 50 leading international artists.

The UBS Art Collection is almost like a who's who of modern art. It includes outstanding works by de Kooning, Freud, Lichtenstein, Warhol and Hirst. All the gifts once hung in the offices of PaineWebber, until the business was purchased by UBS for 12 billion dollars in 2000.
Irish Art

Dallas Hits Art Jackpot

Bequests totalling 400 million dollars - including three extensive art collections, a house designed by an award-winning architect and a painting by Monet valued at 25 million dollars- are being donated to the Dallas Museum of Art. The collections include 800 works from the 1940s to the present with artists like Johns, Serra, de Kooning and Richter. The museum also received a 32 million dollar anonymous endowment and has raised 100 million dollars as part of an endowment campaign.
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Irish Art

Getty Art Goes High Tech

Visitors to the Getty Center in Los Angeles can check out the new GettyGuide - a handheld multimedia system that looks a bit like an iPod or Blackberry, designed to enhance a gallery-goer's visit. The Getty is one of the first museums in the country to feature the new technology for visitors. The handheld device, which hangs from a strap around a user's neck and requires headphones, is replete with information about the Getty Center's visiting and permanent exhibitions. It can be checked out for free at the information desk.
Irish Art

Back To The Studio

Former keeper of the Royal Academy schools, Brendan Neiland, spoke out for the first time since resigning amid claims of financial irregularity - quitting his job in July 2004 after it was found he was holding 80,000 pounds of missing funds. He said he had kept the money in "good faith". Plans to strip him of his Royal Academy membership have so far failed.
Professor Neiland, a renowned photorealist painter, also told the Guardian that his 6 years working for the Academy was "far too much time in the institution. An artist in the end is better off in the studio," he said.
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Irish Art

Fingerprint Points To da Vinci?

A fingerprint found on 'The Adoration of the Christ Child' may prove it is the work of da Vinci. The painting, attributed to Fra Bartolomeo bears a fingerprint. This will now be compared with Da Vinci's 'Lady with an Ermine', which bears his fingerprint. Da Vinci was known for using digital imprints in his art and for giving female figures large, powerful hands - a feature which The Adoration's Mary shares.

There are many details that make one think of Leonardo, like the stylistic power, the technique of 'sfumato,' the virile hands, the eyelids, and the expressive intensity of Saint Joseph, as well as that it's a work full of symbolic meaning. Sfumato is a painting technique pioneered by da Vinci for giving outlines a hazy, dreamy sheen. Although it was picked up by others, Leonard used it in a unique way.
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Irish Art

New York "Gates" Success

More than 700,000 art lovers walked through "The Gates" over the weekend - bringing record crowds to Central Park, New York. The saffron-colored sheets billowing across 23 miles of footpaths attracted throngs far larger than are seen on the sunniest of spring days.

"The Gates" is the creation of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who erected the 7,500 15-foot-tall gates at no cost to the city. The exhibition - which cost them $21 million to assemble - will be up until Feb. 27.
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World's Biggest Art Piece

A Swedish artist is hard at work, painting what he hopes will be recognized as the world's largest painting done by a lone artist. David Aaberg has been labouring inside a former aviation hangar since May, painting his 43,056 square-foot "Happy People" portrait of thousands of faces from around the world.
Guinness World Records said the current record is a 41,400 square-foot painting by Canadian artist Eric Wasught. "Hero" was unveiled in 2000 at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. And - just as Aaberg intends to do - Waugh cut up his painting in more manageable sizes and sold them for charity.
Irish Art

Warhol Downs And Ups

Warhol ranks fourth in the world index of artists by lots sold, behind Picasso, Chagall and Miro, and has the eighteenth highest price at auction for any artist in the last 10 years. Rarity is not the sole determining factor in the price of an art work. Prolific output frequently reflects an artist's fame. Over 800 of Warhol's works come up for auction each year and three-quarters are prints. Half sell for less than USD 6,000.
At an auction held by Sotheby's New York in 1998, an "Orange Marilyn" sold for over 17.3 million USD, consolidating the price levels for this artist. This work had originally been sold straight out of the studio for 2,500 USD. In 1998 his price level rose 80%.
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Irish Art

Contemporary Art Is A Winner

Over the last one and five years, the pre-1950 American-painting index has performed the best (25.2 percent and 9.4 percent returns, respectively). Over the 50-year period, Impressionists won out (10.7 percent.) Art watchers say that paintings of this caliber are usually passed on through generations, but that aristo fidelity is waning.
If today's want of contemporary artists is any measure, that category will win out soon. Buyers are paying record prices for living artists and many works from recently dead artists have skyrocketed. Art News last month even opined about the fall auctions, "it was clear that Impressionist and modern art had ceded ground to the hipper and hungrier contemporary market."
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Irish Art

Levy To Crush UK Art Market

Severe damage will be caused to Britain's growing 600 million pound market in modern and contemporary art - a quarter of the world's total - when a EU levy comes into force next year. The effects of 'droit de suite', a sliding scale levy paid by the vendor of a work of art to a living artist or to an artist's family for 70 years after his or her death, looks certain to drive business out of Britain to non-EU countries such as the US and Switzerland.
It will be levied on the work of living artists resold in Britain next year and - from 2012 - on art produced by those who have been dead for up to 70 years.
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Irish Art

$450 million Art Gift

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will soon get the largest cash gift to a fine arts museum ever. Caroline Wiess Law, the daughter of one of Humble Oil's founders, made the museum the prime beneficiary of her assets - between 400 and 450 million dollars.
Soon after Law died in 2003, aged 85, her estate also gave the museum her contemporary art collection valued at between 60 and 85 million dollars. The 55 major works include pieces by Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro.
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Van Gogh Hunt Is On

The hunt is on for a Japanese print from Van Gogh's own collection which the artist reproduced in the background of his painting 'Self-portrait with bandaged ear', now at the Courtauld Institute Gallery, London. Vincent's copy of the print Geishas in a landscape was also in the Courtauld Collection, but was stolen in 1981. The theft was never announced. The print published by Sato Torakiyo has little intrinsic value, but the copy stolen from the Courtauld may well be languishing in a collection, its link with the artist unrecognised.
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Jumbo-Sized Art Ambition

Collectors, museum curators and dealers from all over the world visit the international art market's most important fair in the small Dutch town of Maastricht every year. A significant number are Americans, who spend more money on art than any other nationality, yet curiously the United States has yet to hold an event with similar pulling power. Art Basel Miami Beach attracts an international crowd interested in cutting-edge contemporary art, while glitzy New York fairs pull in wealthy buyers from the north-east, but there is no single dominant event on the art market calendar in the United States.
Now, however, an ambitious fair, founded 8 years ago by a US entrepreneur seeks to take advantage of the fact that many of America's wealthiest citizens spend winters in south Florida, has announced that it wants to become the Maastricht of the USA.
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Irish Art

Russian Argues For "Trophy Art"

Russia will return so-called trophy art taken from Nazi Germany during World War II only on a case-by-case basis, an official said, arguing that most of the cultural treasures Moscow retains were seized as compensation for huge Soviet wartime damage. Anatoly Vilkov, deputy chief of the Russian government agency that preserves the nation's cultural legacy, said Russia held some 249,000 art objects, more than 260,000 archive files and 1.25 million books and publications seized as compensation. Germany and other countries have pressed for the return of the collections, which they argue were taken illegally.
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Irish Art

Irish Art - 'After The Thaw'

'After The Thaw - Recent Irish Art from the AIB Collection' opened at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery showing over thirty paintings and sculptures by contemporary artists and exploring the resurgence of the landscape in Ireland from the early nineties to present day.
Artists featured include Brian Maguire, Alice Maher, Sean Scully, Bernadette Kiely, Charles Tyrrell, Dorothy Cross, and Sarah Walker. A full colour catalogue will accompany the exhibition including an essay by Aidan Dunne. Ends 2nd April.
Irish Art