World Art News at IrishArt.com
Snippets of interest to lovers of Art - Irish Art or otherwise - sometimes the ridiculous, the obscure, the unusual or just art stuff you might have missed. Updated every day... If you have something for our Blog, email us at md@irishart.com
The World Guinness Organisation has just listed a 822.19 sq.m. painting by 1,445 Vietnamese children in its world record book. The picture, titled 'We paint our childhood' reflects the Vietnamese children's aspiration for peace and their desire to be named in the Guinness Book of Records. The painting will be displayed at Ho Chi Minh City's April 30 Park on September 10-11 and at exhibitions in Da Nang and Ha Noi later. Be there.
A man who stole a $2 million painting at gunpoint from the Auckland Art Gallery has lost an appeal in Wellington against his convictions. Ricardo Genovese, 54, claimed that his 1999 trial on aggravated robbery, theft and firearms charges was unfair and that he had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.
An 18th-century painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds will remain in the UK despite its having been sold last year to a foreign institution. Keeping important works of art in country has become a crusade in Britain in recent years, and the government slapped a temporary export ban on the sale to give the Tate Modern time to raise the necessary £3.2m to buy the painting back. The London gallery managed to meet the figure through a combination of grants, donations, the Tate's own collection fund and £500,000 raised by the gallery's own members.
The National Gallery of Australia has decided not to spend $35 million on a Russian expressionist painting.
A painting by JMW Turner has won a poll to find Britain's Grreatest Painting. Turner's painting, completed in 1839, is "The Fighting Temeraire.
A woman attacked a painting by American Pop Art legend Roy Lichtenstein, slashing it four times with a knife at an exhibition in the west Austrian city of Bregenz, police said yesterday. The 35-year-old woman, a resident of Munich, Germany, pulled a knife from her bag and damaged the painting, Nudes in Mirror, police said. Visitors and staff then managed to stop her. The painting was worth several million pounds. The woman said the painting in the Kunsthaus Bregenz museum was not authentic. Curator Rudolf Sagmeister said: "Of course the painting is a real Lichtenstein."
A new gallery is set to be built in Edinburgh to house one of the world's biggest private collections of modern art. Anthony d'Offay, one of the UK's leading art dealers, has been in year-long talks with the National. The collection, made up of around 700 works, includes pieces by Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha. It includes the first "pickled" sheep by Hirst and pop art by Warhol, dating from the 1960s. Sir Timothy Clifford, director of the National Galleries of Scotland, confirmed today that a new gallery was planned to house the collection. The dealer started his £30m a year business when he was a student.
A collection of modern art that has spent much of the past 25 years in a vault has gone on public display in Iran for the first time. The exhibition at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts includes works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Gauguin, Warhol, Bacon and Pollack. Most of the 188 works were purchased to further Iran's cultural activities by the wife of the late Shah. But the Shah's fall saw the collection locked away by an Islamic government opposed to Western influence. Three works in the collection - among them Gabriel, a highly-regarded Auguste Renoir portrait of a semi-nude girl - were not included to avoid offending conservatives.
