28 August 2008Big names slam federal cuts to arts
Some of the biggest names in Montreal's arts community rallied yesterday to denounce Prime Minister ..
Wednesday 27 August 2008 OTTAWA: OPPOSITION DENOUNCES FEDERAL ARTS CUTS
Opposition Members of Parliament have denounced the $45 million in cuts to programs to support the arts and to acquaint foreigners with Canadian cultural achievements. The reductions were carried out during the summer to programs aimed at promoting Canadian culture abroad. Critics claim the cuts were directed against artists who politics and philosophies don't square with those of the government. New Democratic Party MP Peggy Nash said at a meeting of the House of Commons heritage committee that the reductions were "...done in secret, with no consultation, with no public review." The Conservative government attribute the cuts to a "strategic review" which found that either the programs had either fulfilled their original goals or were a waste of money. The opposition has called for a suspension of the reductions until the committee completes its hearings on the matter. [let those that want it ...pay]
OTTAWA: CULTURE CALLED ECONOMIC PLUS
Meanwhile, an independent research agency says Canada's culture sector is a major contributor to the national economy. The Conference Board of Canada says the sector accounted for up to 7.4 per cent of Canada's gross domestic product last year. The board also says that culture contributed $46 billion directly to the economy, and brought $84.6 billion in direct, indirect and other benefits.
Sunday 10 August 2008 Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod: Then and Now
The iconic American artist spent nearly half the summers of his life painting isolated buildings in broad vistas. See how some of these landscapes have changed and hear what they mean to the people who live there. (Related: Article and Panoramic Image.)
Sunday 29 June 2008 A Goya Tour of Madrid Hear about the hidden gems of the Spanish master, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, in the city where he lived and worked from Janis Tomlinson, a Goya scholar and the director of University Museums at the University of Delaware. Related Article: Goya Framed by His City, Madrid
Tuesday May 27, 2008 Canadian works fetching far above expectations at auction A Tom Thomson painting sold for nearly twice as much as expected at a Toronto auction yesterday, fetching nearly $2 million - a record for the artist.
Pine Trees at Sunset, a small (26.7 by 21.0 centimetre) oil-on-board painting from 1915 or 1916, had a pre-auction estimate of $900,000 to $1.1 million but sold for $1,957,500.
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AT $2 MILLION, THIS ART IS A STEAL
The Post fronts, while the Globe goes inside with Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology’s offer of a $50,000 reward for information pertaining to the recent theft of fifteen artworks. The stolen pieces, taken between Friday night and Saturday morning, include several works of gold jewellery and a dozen sculptures by renowned Haida artist Bill Reid. Authorities are concerned that the thieves will melt down the gold objects for their intrinsic value, though both sources on the story report that the reward offered is more than three times the combined gold value of the stolen works. According to the museum, the total artistic value of the stolen pieces is nearly $2 million. Meanwhile, in happier news for the Canadian art world, CTV News fronts, while The National, the Star, La Presse and the Citizen go inside with the record-breaking auction sale of Group of Seven painter Tom Thomson’s “Pine Trees at Sunset.” The oil painting, which depicts three sparse pines against a fiery sunset, fetched almost $2 million, becoming the artist’s most valuable piece, and providing yet more evidence of what auction house Sotheby’s Canada describes on CTV News as the “vigorous growth of the Canadian art market.”
Jordan Himelfarb is a Quebec City-based MediaScout writer for Maisonneuve Magazine.
It's a Big Business
September 1972 - Eighteen paintings and 37 other artifacts valued at $2 million are taken from Montreal's Museum of Fine Arts. The most valuable item stolen was Rembrandt's Landscapes with Cottages, one of the artist's last landscapes, worth $1 million. To date, only one of the stolen paintings has been recovered - a small piece by Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Elder.
April 1996 - Thieves grab four abstract paintings worth nearly $600,000 from a gallery in Toronto's Yorkville area, two of which were later found abandoned in vans. Both of the recovered pieces were by famed Quebec artist Jean-Paul Riopelle.
The Scream
The Scream, 1893
Tempera and pastel on board
91 x 73.5 cm
Monday 04 February 2008 Learning to Mix Business With Art
By RANDY KENNEDY
In part, the goal of the Center for Curatorial Leadership is that business people — or at least those with far more financial acumen than art training — do not end up running museums.
Friday Jan 25, 2008 Commission: Gallery belongs in Ottawa The National Capital Commission's board sent a message to the Harper government yesterday that the Portrait Gallery of Canada should be located in Ottawa-Gatineau, but it stopped short of urging the government to reconsider its plans for the institution. Under the Conservatives' plan, the gallery could end up being located in one of eight other Canadian cities, and the government is hoping for a private developer to host the institution. The commission's board of directors, under the leadership of chairman Russell Mills, unanimously passed a motion at a meeting yesterday calling for the gallery to be located in Ottawa along with the rest of Canada's cultural institutions.
Tuesday 08 January 2008 MONTREAL: PAINTING STOLEN BY NAZIS TO BE RETURNED
In what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the United States, a U.S. judge has ordered that a painting sold in Germany under orders of the Nazi regime must be returned to the estate of the late Canadian art dealer, Max Stern. In the 1930s, the Nazis ordered all Jews, including Mr. Stern, to liquidate their art collections. Mr. Stern was forced to sell his paintings at bargain prices. Recently, one of the paintings was found in the possession of a German baroness living in the United States. Mr. Stern had no heirs, so he left his assets to a few universitites, including Concordia University in Montreal.
2007
Monday 24 December 2007 The art market in 2008 AFPNot worth it? Some dealers will look nervously toward the credit markets. No one, to your correspondent’s knowledge, has yet speculated about the impact of the credit crunch on the financial arrangements made by auction houses to ease a big sale, but it is hard to imagine them continuing to sweeten deals as though there was no tomorrow.
In 2007, much of the best business was fuelled by guarantees that let sellers transfer the risk of a sale not going through. By November, guarantees had reached giddy heights (as much as $800m, according to one estimate).
Monday 10 December 2007 Collecting in a venerable European tradition
THE names Giorgio Marsan and Umberta Nasi, whose collection is being auctioned on December 12th, may fail to excite, until you learn from the sale catalogue’s introduction that Nasi was the granddaughter of Giovanni Agnelli, who founded Fiat, and that she took beautifully furnished, grand houses for granted. Nothing runcible here
Ms Marsan tells of one exception to the rule. When her father saw a panorama of Cairo by David Roberts, a British landscape painter who flourished in the mid-19th century, he decided it was too expensive. His wife insisted on buying it. This compelling portrait of a city is even more expensive now. Its estimated value is £150,000-£250,000 ($304,110-$506,850).
Sunday 18 November 2007 One Market Remains Sound: Money Is Still There for Best Art Never mind the gyrations on Wall Street or the subprime mortgage and equity crisis. There’s still plenty of money out there and an unquenched appetite for art. At least that seems to be the verdict after a two-week round of auctions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips de Pury & Company, with bidders paying record prices for everything from a rare Matisse to a red heart sculpture by Jeff Koons.
Storied Rembrandt to Be Shown at the Getty An early Rembrandt portrait that has not been on public view for more than two decades and has a lively criminal past — it was stolen at gunpoint from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, more than three decades ago — will re-emerge for several months, beginning on Tuesday at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Saturday Nov 3, 2007 Gift
A leading British art collector, Simon Sainsbury, who died last year, has left 18 paintings by artists including Claude Monet, Francis Bacon and Paul Gauguin to two of Lon-don's top galleries. The National Gallery will receive five paintings including Monet's Water Lilies, Setting Sun and Snow Scene at Argenteuil, Gauguin's Bowl of Fruit and Tankard Before a Window and Henri Rousseau's Portrait of Joseph Brummer. The 13 works that Sainsbury left to the Tate Gallery include Study for a Portrait by Bacon, three pieces by Lucian Freud and Mr. and Mrs. Carter by Thomas Gainsborough. The works donated to both galleries will go on show at the Tate on June 9. The paintings are thought to be worth up to £100-million ($197-million), a spokeswoman for the National Gallery said.
Thursday 25 October 2007 Another $200 Billion President Bush waited until he had vetoed a relatively inexpensive children’s health insurance bill before asking for tens of billions of dollars more for his misadventure in Iraq. The cynicism of that maneuver is only slightly less shameful than the president’s distorted priorities. Despite a pretense of fiscal prudence, Mr. Bush keeps throwing money at his war, regardless of the cost in blood, treasure or children’s health care.
Thursday 25 October 2007 Another $200 Billion President Bush waited until he had vetoed a relatively inexpensive children’s health insurance bill before asking for tens of billions of dollars more for his misadventure in Iraq. The cynicism of that maneuver is only slightly less shameful than the president’s distorted priorities. Despite a pretense of fiscal prudence, Mr. Bush keeps throwing money at his war, regardless of the cost in blood, treasure or children’s health care.
Wednesday 24 October 2007 A cache worth millions A previously unknown Tom Thomson "masterpiece" capturing Canada's autumn splendour has been discovered amid a treasure of long-lost Canadian art found in a Vermont farmhouse after the death of a little-known collector.
The small sketch by the legendary landscape artist showing a fall scene in the Ontario backwoods is expected to fetch up to $600,000 at an auction in Toronto that will also feature dozens of other notable paintings - including prized works from the seminal "Beaver Hall" school of Canadian female artists - found last month collecting dust in the unkempt country home of a former Montreal art lover.
Tuesday 23 October 2007 One Person’s Trash Is Another Person’s Lost Masterpiece But, she said, she felt she simply had to have the 38-by-51-inch painting, because “it had a strange power.” Art experts would agree with her. As it turns out, the painting was “Three People,” a 1970 canvas by the celebrated 20th-century Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo that was stolen 20 years ago and is the subject of an F.B.I. investigation.
The art of seduction: sex through the ages, from every possible angle
According to co-curator Martin Kemp: "We are not setting out to shock, but it is certainly provoking." Marina Wallace, another of the curators, added: "We want London to be thinking about nothing but sex for three months."
Thursday Oct 11, 2007 Shermag must 'stop the hemorrhage'
Activist investor George Armoyan said yesterday there is still hope Shermag Inc., the beleaguered Quebec upscale furniture....
In the face of a spectacular run-up in global markets, savvy
investors are plunking down dollars in more unconventional assets.
And, in some cases, they are using complex, perhaps daring and
dangerous...
CTV News, the Globe, the Star, the Post (not available online), La Presse and the Citizen (not available online) all go inside with the theft of at least two major Picasso paintings from the Paris home of the artist’s granddaughter. Late Monday night, thieves broke into the apartment of Diana Widmaier-Picasso and surreptitiously snatched at least two paintings—a cubist portrait of Widmaier-Picasso’s mother as a child, and a late depiction of Pablo’s second wife, Jacqueline—with a combined value of around US $66 million. Though police have only acknowledged the theft of the two paintings, the Globe reports that Anne Baldassari, director of the Picasso Museum, claims that the heist was in fact much larger and included several other paintings and drawings. The Globe and the Star both stress how difficult it will be for the crooks to “fence” the works, since the paintings are so high profile. Nevertheless, these paintings join 549 other stolen Picassos, either languishing in thieves’ hiding places or sold for a pittance on the black market. Widmaier-Picasso—who slept through the heist, according to the Star—is an art historian and the author of Picasso: Art Can Only be Erotic. Unfortunately for her, it can also be robbed.
Sunday 26 November 2006 TORONTO: ART AUCTION REACHES NEAR-RECORD LEVEL
Heffel Fine Art Auction in Toronto sold CDN$11.7 million in art on Friday, the second-highest total for an event of its kind in Canada's history. Among the paintings sold were three by the late Quebec artist, Jean-Paul Riopelle, for a total of CDN$2.2 million. A painting by Tom Thomson sold for CDN$776,000, while one of three paintings by Helen McNicolls was bought for CDN$287,500. Among the items was a letter by Canada's first prime minister, John A. MacDonald, that he wrote in 1867, the year that Canada became a nation. It sold for CDN$34,500, somewhat less than predicted. But over half of the items sold exceeded their estimates. About 450 people attended, while 100 others bid by telephone from Canada, the U.S., Britain and Asia. Heffel Fine Art Auction set the record for art at Canadian auction last year when it sold CDN$12.5 million in items.
Wednesday Sep 27, 2006 Mona Lisa probably a new mom..
Scientists did an autopsy on the Mona Lisa and discovered the woman with the enigmatic smile probably had a baby just before being painted 500 years ago by Leonardo da Vinci.
It is not uncommon for old paintings
uncleaned for many years to reveal hidden elements. For example, long
forgotten dead soldiers suddenly appeared from the trenches when the
Canadian War Museum removed almost a century of grime from some First
World War battlefield canvases for an exhibition a few years ago. At
one point, a restorer screamed in surprise as a corpse emerged from the
painting she was cleaning.
The NRC's 3-D imaging technology
reveals even more than solvent can. It can peel back paintings layer by
layer, examine the medium holding the paint (a half-inch, slightly
warped, poplar panel in Mona Lisa's case) and identify both deliberate
and accidental changes made over the years to the image.
The 3-D
imaging technology showed Leonardo originally depicted Mona Lisa
tightly gripping the arm of a chair. At some point, the artist gave a
more relaxed look to the lady's hands.
The Mona Lisa, painted
between 1503 and 1506, is housed at the Louvre in Paris. It is
generally considered to be the most famous painting in the world, in
part because of the mysterious smile of the woman.
The 3-D imaging does not solve the mystery of Mona Lisa's smile. In fact, high-technology can ruin Leonardo's magic
Friday May 12, 2006 In the Race for the Millions, 2 Paintings Come In Tied Millions of dollars were spent at Sotheby's Wednesday night on instantly recognizable works by masters like de Kooning, Ryman and Lichtenstein.
Sunday Mar 26, 2006 nyt Ingres at the Louvre: His Pursuit of a Higher RealityBy MICHAEL KIMMELMAN Beneath the surface of this French icon's supernatural skill and imperious authority is art that is curiously touching.
Friday Feb 24, 2006 nyt Goya, Unflinching, Defied Old Age By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN The great satirist's late works as seen at the Frick Collection achieve a whole new level of freedom and depth, haunted by death but exalted.
Thursday Feb 2, 2006 nyt Audio Slide Show: The Snow Show A series of exhibitions in Turin, Italy, features works by teams of architects and artists and are created from snow.
• Related Article
Thursday Nov 3, 2005 nyt ONLINE SHOPPER Overcoming Fears of Miró and Picasso The trick to buying art online is to find a trustworthy seller who will guarantee authenticity and allow you to return a piece.
Sunday Oct 30, 2005 nyt The Pablo Picasso Alzheimer's Therapy By RANDY KENNEDY Museums are using guided tours to engage Alzheimer's patients and even tap their creativity. SITTING the other day in front of Picasso's
rapturous "Girl Before a Mirror" at the Museum of Modern Art, Rueben
Rosen wore the dyspeptic look of a man with little love for modern
art.
Friday Oct 28, 2005 nyt Noted Collections Bolster Christie's Fall Sales By CAROL VOGEL Rarely do three well-known art collections come to the auction block in the same season. Even more rarely does one auction house get to sell them all.
Friday Dec 5, 2003 bbc IBeethoven score sale exceeds £1m m A signed manuscript by composer Ludwig van Beethoven has fetched more than £1m at a Sotheby's auction in London.
The 31-page score of Scherzo from the String Quartet Opus 127, dating from 1825, was sold to a telephone bidder for £1,180,600.
Friday Aug 22, 2003 bbc Age puzzle over 'Roman' treasure
One of the British Museum's greatest Roman artefacts was actually made in the Renaissance, a scholar says.
Wednesday Jun 25, 2003 bbc Van Gogh works fetch £8m
Three works by artist Vincent Van Gogh including one with a letter written on the back of it have fetched £8,471,750 at auction in London.
Tuesday Jun 24, 2003 bbc 'Looted' painting fetches £11.3m A rare painting by Austrian artist Egon Schiele has sold for £11.3m at auction in London.
The 1916 landscape went under the hammer at Sotheby's on Monday in an auction which also saw a piece by Paul Gauguin sold for £6.8m.
An anonymous telephone bidder who made the highest offer for the Schiele will pay more than £12.66m once the buyer's premium is included - a record auction sale for the artist and the most expensive restituted impressionist work ever sold at an auction.
This 2' TV ad [for Honda, shown in the UK] is fascinating in what it portrays. Apparently it took over 600 tries before the sequence worked
out! It's worth 2' just to see the creative Rube Goldberg mind at work. I
don't know if it would ever be useful entertainment at a future Wednesday
Night but will leave that to you. Chears David Mitchell
Sunday Jun 8, 2003 bbc Museum celebrates landmark year Staff at London's British Museum will celebrate its 250th anniversary on Saturday - while keeping focused on the plight of its Iraqi counterpart.
Amid the champagne, four museum staff are preparing to fly to Baghdad to join a British Museum curator already assisting the international rescue effort.
VIDEO Clips from "Decasia," a film profiled in the magazine. Video | Article
Tuesday May 6, 2003 bbc Magritte picture sells for £2.3m A painting by Belgian surrealist master René Magritte has fetched 3.4 million euros (£2.3m) at auction.
The work, L'Oiseau de Ciel (Sky Bird), was regarded as the most important Magritte painting to go under the hammer during the past two decades.
Thursday Apr 17, 2003 cbc IRAQ'S TREASURES COULD END UP ON BLACK MARKET
The UN is sending a team of cultural experts to Iraq after looters
ransacked the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, destroying or stealing
thousands of artifacts.
Matisse and Picasso Face Off
The rivalry of two friends plays out at the Museum of Modern Art, temporarily in Long Island City, Queens.
January 21, 2003 nyt Al Hirschfeld, 99, Dies; He Drew Broadway To find the word "Nina," the name of his daughter, hidden several times in the lines of his caricatures, was a weekend pastime for millions of readers. Next to his signature he put the number of "Ninas" in his drawings, creating a sort of pleasurable Sunday game for his admirers.
A gallery of Mr. Hirschfeld's work is available at AlHirschfeld.com.
Saturday Feb 1, 2003 Picasso leads huge art sale A £6m work by Pablo Picasso leads what is thought to be the London's biggest art sale at auction house Christie's.
2002
Sunday Dec 1, 2002 cbc SIMIAN ART DRAWS RAVE REVIEWS
A small Toronto art gallery is featuring the abstract work of seven
unexpected talents.
Contemporary art has continued to rise in value despite weak stockmarkets and a growing number of sales from hard-pressed corporate collectors. The trend may not last chart better than stocks
Friday Sep 6, 2002 nyt Invasion of the Nude Victorians (In the Name of Art, of Course)
For the latest overview of British naughtiness, you may once again go to (where else?) the Brooklyn Museum of Art for "Exposed: The Victorian Nude," which has even more naked women without their pubic hair than the last Vanessa Beecroft show at the Gagosian Gallery.
Monday Jul 22, 2002 rci OTTAWA: WASHINGTON EMBASSY DRAWS DUBIOUS HONOUR
The Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., centre
of the greatest patronage sensation of its day,
has been voted one of the 10 ugliest buildings in
the world. A poll of architects by Forbes.com --
the Internet arm of Forbes magazine -- has placed
the $90-million building ninth on the list of
world eyesores. The buildings on the list were
selected "because they cost so much and look so
awful." Controversy has surrounded the embassy
since the day Vancouver's Arthur Erickson --
described as the godfather of Canadian
architecture -- was chosen to design it. His 1982
appointment aroused angry and partisan argument
in Parliament. Pierre Trudeau, then-prime
minister, overruled an independent advisory
committee that named four other firms as
finalists to ensure his long-time friend Erickson
got the job. But critics raved when the embassy
opened its doors at the end of 1987 on an
unparalleled site opposite the National Gallery
on Pennsylvania Avenue, under the shadow of the
Capitol. The New York Times described it as "an
odd mix of the grandiose and the graceful, the
pompous and the inviting, the awkward and the
appropriate." Erickson chose to describe it as a
blend of "neoclassic and modern concepts."
Sunday Jun 16, 2002 nyt Does a Painter With a Camera Cheat?
People fret about painters using "crutches" like lenses, cameras and photographs. But that misses the point. What artists make of these tools is the issue.
Harry Mayerovitch works are found in public museums and private collections and in published books of cartoons and verse and on town planning and architecture. "HOW ARCHITECTURE SPEAKS" was published in 1996
Wednesday May 8, 2002 bbc Sculpture smashes world record price A sculpture by Constantin Brancusi has broken the world record auction price for a sculpture, going for $18,159,500 (£12,374,446) at Christie's in New York.
BBC
Slide ShowAmericans in Paris
a Picasso 
Museo Picasso
Maya Widmaier-Picasso, right, with her daughter Diana in 2004. 
A Draftsman's Fist
ARTS
Museum of Modern Art Nov 18th 2004 | NY 
IBeethoven score sale exceeds £1m m 
'Looted' painting fetches £11.3m A rare painting by Austrian artist Egon Schiele has sold for £11.3m at auction in London.
The 1916 landscape went under the hammer at Sotheby's on Monday in an auction which also saw a piece by Paul Gauguin sold for £6.8m. 
Museum celebrates landmark year
Magritte picture sells for £2.3m 
Al Hirschfeld, 99, Dies; He Drew Broadway To find the word "Nina," the name of his daughter, hidden several times in the lines of his caricatures, was a weekend pastime for millions of readers. Next to his signature he put the number of "Ninas" in his drawings, creating a sort of pleasurable Sunday game for his admirers.
Picasso leads huge art sale
Invasion of the Nude Victorians (In the Name of Art, of Course)
Does a Painter With a Camera Cheat?
People fret about painters using "crutches" like lenses, cameras and photographs. But that misses the point. What artists make of these tools is the issue.
MacKay Smith slide show
;)
Heidi Hollinger Photos
Wayne Larsen
Sculpture smashes world record price A sculpture by Constantin Brancusi has broken the world record auction price for a sculpture, going for $18,159,500 (£12,374,446) at Christie's in New York.
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