Massive Art Helped

One of the largest religious paintings in the world needed an extreme makeover.

How do you save a century-old, 45-foot-by-195-foot-long painting one brush stroke at a time? Using 4-foot-long brushes, Polish artist Jan Styka completed the painting in 1897 after working on it 12 hours a day for five years. Styka originally had hoped to show the painting at the St. Louis Exposition of 1904 but there was no room so Styka displayed other works instead. Fortunately, it was never shown. There was a fire during the exposition and all his other paintings were destroyed. That is the irony of all ironies. Styka however managed to memorialize himself - he painted St. Paul in his own image.
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Irish Art

Warhol - The Movie

Sienna Miller is to play Andy Warhol’s drug-addicted muse Edie Sedgwick in new movie Factory Girl. Jude Law’s estranged fiancee had been touted for the role earlier this year but dropped out. Factory Girl director George Hickenlooper said she was offered the role again last month when Tom Cruise’s new love, Katie Holmes, pulled out. He said Miller was able to take the part of the original It girl, who died of a barbiturate overdose in 1971, because filming was pushed back. The director denied that it had anything to do with Miller’s increased media profile since Law confessed to sleeping with his children’s nanny. Guy Pearce is set to play Warhol.
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Irish Art

"Impressionists Abroad" at the RA

While the vast majority of European art collectors of the 19th century continued to fixate on the traditional, academic style of painting, with its predilection for semi-clad nymphs and pedagogic history scenes, in America it was a different story. There, the radical art coming out of France, Impressionism most significantly, found an enthusiastic and committed market. And nowhere was this more true than in Boston, a city grown fat on international commerce, whose cultured inhabitants have always maintained a particular interest in the styles and trends of Europe.

The Royal Academy's intelligent, instructive new show Impressionism Abroad examines this phenomenon in more detail. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has lent 57 works, both French and American, collected by Bostonians and later bequeathed to the museum. Highlights of the show include a bevy of Monet landscapes. The muted tones of his Snow at Argenteuil (1874) is a particular gem. There are also some very lovely pictures by seascapist Eugène Boudin. Manet, however, provides the only out-and-out masterpiece: The Street Singer (1862). As a creature of the city, the subject of this picture bucks the rural-only rule and towers, life-size, utterly magnificent and inscrutable, over the final room.
'Impressionism Abroad' is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1 (020 7300 8000), until Sept 11.
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Irish Art

"Amazing" Art Job

A hospital's decision to hire an art curator days after it was criticised for cancelled operations and a poor MRSA record has been condemned by nurses and patients. Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge has placed an advertisement for the £37,000 a year post in today’s edition of The Guardian, and it also appeared in the Public Agenda section of The Times. But patient groups believe that the money could be better spent on nursing staff and cleaners.The Patients Association said that the decision to recruit an art curator was “amazing”.
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Irish Art

UK And Nazi Looted Art

The British parliament is considering a bill that would make the return of Nazi-looted art easier. The country's Department for Culture, Media and Sport has begun consultations on the proposed bill, which would be limited to items taken between 1933 and 1945. The legislation was inspired by a situation at the British Museum, which had wanted to return four Old Master drawings to the family of Czech lawyer Arthur Feldman. The museum is stopped from doing so by the British Museum Act, which prevents it from dispersing anything in its collection.
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Irish Art

Art Winners And Losers

Artprice index for the main art movement trends from 1990 to 2004:

Renaissance: -21%
17th C. Northern School: +12%
18th C. French Paintings: -27%
Romanticism: -19%
Barbizon School: +8%
Hudson River School: +248%
French Impressionism: -36%
American Impressionism: +164%
Cubism: -25%
Surrealism: -16%
Expressionism: -22%
American Abstraction: +85%
Pop Art: +123%
Contemporary Photographs: +57%

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Irish Art

Chinese Art Prices Surge

A Beijing auction house sold a landscape by Chang Ta-chien for more than £5m yesterday, the latest sign that China's supercharged economy is inflating worldwide prices for the country's art. The 1968 work, Ten Thousand Mile Landscape, a 34.5 metre-wide image of the Yangtze river, fetched 73m million yuan, one of the highest prices paid for a Chinese painting.
The auctioneers, Beijing Zhongbang, declined to reveal the name of the buyer, but he or she is among a growing number willing to splash out millions on works that were worth less than half as much only two years ago. Chang's work was always likely to interest buyers. He died in 1983 at the age of 84, renowned throughout the artworld for his traditional ink landscapes and innovative "splash of colour" technique.
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Irish Art

Urban Wild Child

Basquiat is the New York artist who symbolises the madness and the greed of Manhattan in the 1980s. He began his career as an underground - and defiantly enigmatic - graffiti artist with self-styled works of SAMO ('same old shit'), then moved rapidly into the cultish downtown mainstream with explosive, self-taught canvases expressive of urban alienation, the African-American predicament and mortality.

Taken up by Haring and Warhol, the youthful Basquiat became an emblematic figure for those who wanted to change the critical vocabulary of art to reflect the pop cultural impact of comic books, mass advertising and food packaging. When money came to dominate Basquiat's life, he became addicted to heroin which fuelled severe attacks of paranoia exacerbated by the conviction that he was the victim of art dealers. It was drugs which contributed to his death at the tragically early age of 27, after a decade of turbulent, existential iconoclasm.
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Irish Art




Art Expo For Naked Visitors

Vienna's prestigious Leopold Museum is usually a pretty buttoned-down place, but yesterday, some of the nudes in its marble galleries were for real. Scores of naked or scantily clad people wandered the museum, lured by an offer of free entry to "The Naked Truth," a new exhibition of early 1900s erotic art, if they showed up wearing just a swimsuit - or nothing at all. Peter Weinhaeupl, the Leopold's commercial director, said the goal was twofold - help people beat the heat while creating a mini-scandal reminiscent of the way the artworks by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and others shocked the public when they first were unveiled a century ago.
Irish Art

Picasso for Turkey

135 paintings of Pablo Picasso will be put on display at a Turkish university museum in Istanbul. The works have only been shown in the Picasso museums in Paris and Barcelona. The works will be put on show from November 21 for four months in Istanbul University.
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Irish Art

Scottish Collection Heads East

Paintings from Edinburgh are set to head east in a tour of Japan. The National Gallery of Scotland's internationally renowned collections of French and Scottish art, an exhibition of more than 90 paintings, drawings and prints, will travel to the Far East. The exhibition Towards a New Century has been organised by the gallery in collaboration with Mainichi Newspapers in Japan. The selection will include major French art by Degas, Monet and Seurat, along with Scottish artists such as EA Walton, James Guthrie and William McTaggart.
Irish Art