NEWS

The New Museo del Prado
With the termination of Rafael Moneo’s project around the area of the church of the Jerónimos, the Museo del Prado has completed the most important extension to its building in its almost 200 years of history. Spain's royal family and its prime minister joined Prado Museum officials in Madrid Tuesday to officially inaugurate the renovation.
(view more...)

Sainsbury Gives More Than US$200 Million In Art To UK Museums
The National Gallery and the Tate announced an amazing gift of art bequeathed by late Simon Sainsbury, worth US$200 million. Sainsbury, whose family owns a stake in Britain's third-largest supermarket chain which still bears its name, died last September aged 76. He and two brothers funded a major new wing for the National Gallery which opened in 1991.
(view more...)

Princeton To Return Art To Italy
The Princeton University Art Museum and Italian cultural authorities on Oct. 30 will sign an agreement that resolves the ownership of 15 works of art in the museum's collection. The signing will take place in Rome. The agreement includes three works that became the subject of an Italian inquiry in 2004: a Greek psykter, an Apulian loutrophoros and an Etruscan relief.
(view more...)

Elton John´s Seized Photo Considered Not Indecent
Photograph owned by Sir Elton John has been deemed not to be indecent by the Crown Prosecution Service. The photo by Nan Goldin was part of a child porn investigation. The legendary singer donated over 4,000 photos to an exhibition at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, in Gateshead, England, earlier this month. The picture was confiscated by police the day before its inclusion. The next day, the gallery closed the exhibition from which the picture belonged, at John's request.
(view more...)

Truck Driver Arrested In Goya Painting Theft
Federal authorities arrested the trucker who stole a painting by Spanish master Francisco de Goya. The oil painting was snatched Nov. 8 from an unmarked truck as it was being transported from the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where it was to be included in the exhibition "Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History."
(view more...)

Bank of America Awards US$1 Million Grant to Support New Gallery
Union Station Kansas City announced a $1 million grant from the Bank of America Charitable Foundation to support renovations to the facility. The grant will help fund the soon-to-be- built 15,000 square foot state-of-the art exhibit gallery to host national and international one-of-a-kind exhibits.
(view more...)

Russia Trusts UK And Loans Masterpieces
Russia will lend some of its most treasured paintings to the Royal Academy of Arts. To close the deal, it was necessary a "Letter of Comfort" signed by the British Government to reassure that everything would be returned to Russia. The exhibition will show more than 120 artworks. "From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925" will run from January 26 until April 18, 2008.
(view more...)

Tamayo Painting Founded In NYC Trash
A passer-by in Upper West Side in Manhattan, New York, found lying on the street a painting and brought it home. Big was her surprise when she investigate and find our it was a painting by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo titled "Tres Personajes", stolen more than 20 years ago and was the subject of an FBI investigation. The painting is now back in the hands of the owners who decided to sell it at auction.
(view more...)

BMA Receives Gift Of 77 Matisse Prints
The Baltimore Museum of Art announced a major gift of 77 Matisse prints by the Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Foundation. Next Sunday, the museum will open "Matisse: Painter as Sculptor" that is the first major U.S. exhibition of the artist’s sculpture in more than 40 years. Featuring more than 160 sculptures, paintings, and drawings, this exhibition brings together works rarely shown together—many on loan from major museum collections such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Musée Matisse in Nice, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
(view more...)

MoMA Acquires Hundreds Of Works
The Museum of Modern Art has acquired significant works in a variety of mediums by such artists as Francis Alÿs, Louise Bourgeois, Andreas Gursky, Jasper Johns, William Kentridge, Neo Rauch, Richard Serra, Kara Walker, and Zhang Huan, as well as a major collection of conceptual art from Amsterdam’s Art & Project Gallery. Within this group of acquisitions are new works by Johns and Rauch, a key early sculpture by Serra, a seminal installation by Walker, and contemporary prints from China.
(view more...)

Salander-O´Reilly Galleries Closed By Lawsuits
Salander-O´Reilly Galleries were shut by Justice Richard B. Lowe III of State Supreme Court in Manhattan. He will hear from lawyers for customers and investors who have filed lawsuits or are preparing to do so against the gallery. Barbara Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, said they, too, were reviewing complaints about Mr. Salander and the gallery. Salander, 58, and Salander-O'Reilly Galleries are accused in lawsuits of defrauding customers and business partners and failing to pay more than $30 million in debt.
(view more...)

US$83,000 At Auction For Tracey Emin´s Fiat 500
A Fiat 500 with unique Tracey Emin artwork decorating its wings has been auctioned for US$83,000 during the Contemporary Art Auction at the Phillips de Pury & Company saleroom in London. The car is the first of four 500s specially designed by Emin. Described as a "moving exhibition," the Fiat 500 is named "I Told You Not To" and has the words "you told me not to" written on the side along with an image of two birds.
(view more...)

Oh My God! Chocolate Jesus Is Back
A Chelsea art gallery in New York, will present a controversial chocolate Christ. The 6-foot sculpture by artist Cosimo Cavallaro will be on view at the Proposition Gallery from Oct 27 to Nov 24. The exhibition will also feature eight small versions of saints. Six months ago during Holy Week, Cavallaro exposed his chocolate Christ at the Lab Gallery on Lexington Avenue, but the Catholic League forced the gallery to cancel the exhibition.
(view more...)

Grand Reopening After US$20 Million Renovation
The Bowdoin College Museum of Art celebrated its public reopening and its renewed position as the cornerstone of the arts and culture at Bowdoin on October 14, 2007, following an ambitious US$20.8 million renovation and expansion project. More than 3,000 people toured the Museum in opening events that spanned three days.
(view more...)

Bacon Painting Fetches US$15 Million At Christie´s London
"Study from the Human Body, Man Turning on the Light" by Irish artist Francis Bacon, fetched US$15 million at Christie´s London. Bacon originally gave this painting to the Royal College of Art in 1969 as rent for a Cromwell Road studio. This was part of the Post-war and Contemporary Art auction at Christie´s London.
(view more...)

Most Expensive Work By A Chinese Contemporary Artist Ever Sold
Last Friday, Chinese artist Yue Minjun´s disturbing painting "Execution" sold for £2.9 million at Sotheby's, a London record for a Chinese artist. His painting is a reference of Goya's "The Third of May, 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid". Yue affirmed that his painting was also inspired by the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989. Sotheby´s described the painting as "among the most historically important paintings of the Chinese avant-garde ever to appear at auction".
(view more...)

Alain Delon To Auction Part Of His Art Collection
The Cornette de Saint Cyr auction house will present forty paintings belonging to French actor Alain Delon on Monday 15. Experts expected the paintings to fetch US$6.5 - 8.8 million. Most works are abstract paintings from the 1950´s. The auction will include works by Nicolas de Stael, Karel Appel, Pierre Soulages, Alexandre Calder, among others.
(view more...)

Russia Banned 16 Artworks. Is This Russia Or USSR?
Russia´s culture minister, Alexander Sokolov, announced that he was banning photo "Kissing Policemen (An Epoch of Clemency)" and other 16 works from an exhibition of contemporary Russian art that is travelling to Paris next week. The artworks are considered as political provocation and will not be exhibited at the Maison Rouge exhibition hall in Paris, France. "If this exhibition appears [in Paris] it will bring shame on Russia. In this case, all of us will bear full responsibility," the minister said. "It is inadmissible...to take all this pornography, kissing policemen and erotic pictures to Paris." added Sokolov.
(view more...)

Artist Implants Ear In His Forearm
Australian philosopher and performer Stelios Arcadiou, known as Stelarc, has had an ear surgically implanted in his arm, all in the name of art. The 61-year-old, who was born in Cyprus, claimed the ear was grown in a laboratory from cells. He said it took him 10 years to find a surgeon willing to graft the ear on to his left forearm.
(view more...)

Andres Serrano Photos Attacked In Sweden
Four masked men went inside the Kulturen Gallery in Lund (Sweden) and smashed works by controversial American artist Andres Serrano. The crowbar- and ax-wielding thieves struck in broad daylight, with visitors in the gallery, and then posted a video of their raid on YouTube. The exhibition was titled "The History of Sex."
(view more...)

Crack In Floor Of Tate Modern
Doris Salcedo’s "Shibboleth" is the first work to intervene directly in the fabric of the Turbine Hall. Rather than fill this iconic space with a conventional sculpture or installation, Salcedo has created a subterranean chasm that stretches the length of the Turbine Hall. The concrete walls of the crevice are ruptured by a steel mesh fence, creating a tension between these elements that resist yet depend on one another. By making the floor the principal focus of her project, Salcedo dramatically shifts our perception of the Turbine Hall’s architecture, subtly subverting its claims to monumentality and grandeur. Shibboleth asks questions about the interaction of sculpture and space, about architecture and the values it enshrines, and about the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built.
(view more...)

Vandals Damage Monet´s Painting At Musee D'Orsay
Vandals enter on Sunday to the Musee d'Orsay in Paris (France) and punched a hole in a work by Impressionist painter Claude Monet. The painting was "Le Pont d´Argenteuil" from 1874. According to investigations, the intruders were four men and a woman completely drunked. The alarms sounded and museum personnel arrived to where the painting was but the vandals escaped.
(view more...)

Da Vinci Painting Recovered
Scottish police recovered a Leonardo Da Vinci painting that was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle four years ago. Two thieves posing as tourists overpowered a guide before escaping with the painting. The oil-on-wood painting, "Madonna with the Yarnwinder," which shows the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus on her lap holding a cross-shaped spindle for yarn, is one of several versions of the same scene painted between 1500 and 1510.
(view more...)

Prince Harry Memorial
A war-mutilated Prince Harry is the symbolic fallen hero in a memorial honoring those willing but unable to serve in the Iraq conflict. Harry, brother to Britain’s future king, was poised to be the most celebrated soldier of the Coalition forces, but due to the "specific threats to kill or kidnap him," he was kept home. However, Prince Harry will be remembered for his intended tour of duty in a memorial to be unveiled at the Trafalgar Hotel October 11th courtesy of Bridge Art Fair.
(view more...)

Four Artworks To Be Sold By Randolph College Creates Controversy
Randolph College decided to sell four paintings from the Maier Museum´s permanent art collection to raise money for the college´s US$153 million endowment. The decision comes after months of controversy and litigation regarding the school’s 100-year history of collecting American art.
(view more...)

Sotheby´s New York To Offer Koons´Spectacular Hanging Heart
On the evening of November 14, 2007, Sotheby’s sale of Contemporary Art in New York will feature Jeff Koons’ spectacular "Hanging Heart (Magenta and Gold)", 1994-2006, one of the most important works by Koons ever offered at auction, from his famed Celebration series. The brilliant magenta heart and gold undulating bow, which took ten years from conception to completion, is one of five uniquely colored versions. The monumental heart’s perfect surface is coated in more than ten layers of paint.
(view more...)

2007 Sees Huge Rises In Contemporary And Modern Art
Investors in contemporary and modern art are laughing all the way to the Banksy as new figures from specialist insurer Hiscox show that in the last year the value of contemporary art has risen by 55% and modern art by 44%. Other areas of art also saw increases in value. Significant earners, according to the annual Hiscox Art Market Research (HAMR) Index, include English sporting paintings (an increase of 26% in the last year) and European 19th Century paintings (an increase of 19%).
(view more...)