ABOVE: right, detail from Niccolò dell’Abbate’s Holy Family, left, detail from Martin Johann Schmidt’s Virgin and Child adored by St Elizabeth and the infant St John. Both were looted from Czech Jewish families during the Second World War and now reside in the British Museum. A London high court judge ruled that returning the looted works would be illegal under current British law.

A British judge ruled on Friday that the British Museum cannot return four old masters’ pieces to the heirs of a Czech Jewish lawyer from whom they were looted by Nazis during the Second World War. The British Museum, the judge concluded, is compelled by law under the British Museum Act to keep and protect everything in its collection, regardless of whatever slippery or bloody means those items ended up there. That’s why tired old postcolonial-Tony-Blair England, on whose empire the sun once never set, is still in possession of truckloads of the world’s priceless antiquities, despite its current enfeebled state vis-a-vis colonial bootheel-crushmanship (Iraq is still up in the air as to who’s crushing who).

The four pieces involved in this case are some sketches and drawings that were stolen by Nazi looters from Arthur Feldmann, a Jewish lawyer who was killed during the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. The tragic aspect of the whole affair is that it’s got almost nothing to do with four rather mouldy and uninspired 15th-18th century drawings and almost everything to do with The Elgin Marbles, the collection of Greek statuary that was pilfered from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin in 1811 and which Greece has been understandably shrieking to get back ever since. Judge Andrew Morritt of the Chancery Division of the High Court ruled that if he were to order the return of the drawings to the Feldmann heirs, it would open the door to thousands of similar suits for the return of priceless artifacts that the British carried off during the colonial years. The judge was unwilling to do this himself, but hinted strongly that a legislative solution should be found. It’s all dark, messy stuff, terribly interesting and with very high stakes.

LINK: BBC News > Law blocks return of looted art

ABOVE: detail from Ilya Repin’s Barge Haulers on the Volga (1873), which will come to New York in September as part of the Guggenheim’s eagerly anticipated but obnoxiously named “RUSSIA!” show.

The Guggenheim’s New York franchise yesterday announced its big fall show, which will bring together more than 250 pieces of Russian art, dating back to the 12th century, and some of which have never travelled outside the country before. To adequately capture the excitement this exhibit evokes, the show bears the exciting name “RUSSIA!,” with the caps-lock and exclamation mark mandatory. It will open on September 16 and close in early January.

The show is clearly a massive undertaking, and it’s involved about a dozen curators in Russia and elsewhere; the pieces which will come to the Guggenheim have been cobbled together from museums across Russia, from the State Russian Museum, the Hermitage, the Kremlin Museum, regional galleries, and private collections. The Guggenheim press release says the exhibit will be organized chronologically, starting with medieval icons at the ground floor and spiralling up the corkscrew through genres including romanticism, critical realism (and its evil twin, socialist realism), and ending with post-soviet contemporary works. Seems worth an exclamation mark or two, but it still sounds like the title of a musical adaptation of the complete works of Solzhenitsyn. Coming to Broadway soon: Gulag!

LINK: Guggenheim Museum press office > RUSSIA!

ABOVE: detail from Driven, by Anton Darhuber, Benjamin Fischer and Sandra Troian, in the Microfluidic Research and Engineering Laboratory of Princeton University, who got second place in Princeton’s Art of Science exhibit. They wuz robbed, clearly.

Wired News posted a story yesterday about the first annual Art of Science competition at Princeton University, which was organized by the pointy-headed school—it’s where Albert “king of the pencilnecks” Einstein taught—to expand the aesthetic horizons of its profoundly left-brained student body. The second-place entry (superior, we feel, to the best in show) appears in part above, some groovy photo of stuff oozing on silicon. The artistes describe it thusly:

This image illustrates evolving dynamical patterns formed during the spreading of a surface-active substance (surfactant) over a thin liquid film on a silicon wafer. After spin-coating of glycerol, small droplets of oleic acid were deposited. The usually slow spreading process was highly accelerated by the surface tension imbalance that triggered a cascade of hydrodynamic instabilities.

Suck on that, Artforum. You’re not the only ones with a massive vocabulary of obscure and impenetrable exegetical nomenclature. But it’s nice to see some mixing of the slide-rule and black turtleneck set.

The Wired News article on the contest is the usual Wired hyperventilating enthusiasm. And note to the Art of Science organizing committee: your poster is terrible. It comes from the “SEX: now that we have your attention…” school of postery. Thumbs down.

Wired News > Enthralling art leaps out of labs

ABOVE: detail from Jasper Johns’s Bridge (1997), on show at the Matthew Marks Gallery through June 25.

The New Yorker’s new review of Jasper Johns’s current show at the Matthew Marks Gallery is a pleasure to read, as Peter Scheldahl’s writing often is. But it is also an airtight example of form trumping function: the whole review could pretty much be summed up with a shrugged “meh.” But this is The New Yorker, where a mediocre review is still expected to contain vocabulandmines like “demiurgic” (adj. 1. of or relating to a being responsible for the creation of the universe) and at least one word containing an umlaut.

But in the end, it’s not a review of the show so much as a meditation on the fact of Jasper Johns’s existence and an evaluation of his decades-long career. Nice to read, but doesn’t actually tell you much about the show. What we do know: it is called “Catenary” (”a curve formed by a wire, rope or chain hanging from two points that are on the same horizontal level”), it’s at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, and you can see three pieces from it here.

LINK: The New Yorker > The Art World > String Theory

ABOVE: detail from Titian’s Rest on the Flight Into Egypt, the object of a high-profile art theft that made headlines in 1995, and again in 2002 when it was recovered inside a plastic bag at a bus stop in Richmond. The Guardian says art theft is no laughing matter.

Well, clean your fingernails and straighten up that posture before you read The Guardian’s lemony little item today about the total un-harmlessness of major art theft and fraud. Art theft, they quote Rosalind Wright of London’s Fraud Advisory Panel as saying, “is perpetrated not by opportunist thieves but by organised criminals. There is nothing ‘gentlemanly’ or ‘white-collar’ about it—these are dangerous individuals.” Funny, we’d always pictured art fraudsters as being ascotted little Peter Lorre-types with tweed caps and a fondness for sherry in their tea, which they would drink while daubing a few casual strokes on the Gauguin they’re forging in the breakfast nook before going out to tool around the countryside in the Aston Martin. Well, we are illusioned no more.

The article makes the bold but basically unverifiable claim that 10 to 40 per cent of the paintings sold by major artists are fakes. It also cheerfully abuses the word “dangerous,” citing the fact that pensioners have lost their savings to art sharks; this is certainly a terrible thing to do to someone, but hardly dangerous in the classic sense of the word. The piece also takes a swipe at “the media” for treating art theft as “light entertainment,” never once noting that the Guardian itself was one of the pack in that respect. Today’s article, however, is echoing a particularly acid piece on the subject of art theft published by Bunny Smedley on the “high tory” art and culture online journal Electric Review. Smedley’s essay is guaranteed to provide you with 100 per cent of your daily recommended serving of dudgeon.

The Guardian > Masters Criminals

ABOVE: exterior of the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA announced recently that during its recent renovations, it also purchased adjacent land and will develop it at some future date.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York recently bought a swath of property directly on its west side with an eye for expansion, The Art Newspaper is reporting today. The purchase was apparently made while the museum was still closed for its latest renovations, which cost about $850 million. When the Museum’s board of directors found out that the property to the west was for sale, one of their directors reportedly offered this sage advice, cribbed from a Japanese proverb: “When your neighbour’s property is for sale, buy it,” which has to be about the most idiotic deciding factor cited in a multimillion-dollar New York property deal thus far this year.*

MoMA director Glenn Lowry wouldn’t say how much the property was purchased for, but it can’t be cheap. The Art Newspaper says that the museum took everything west of its current location as far as 6th Avenue. The New York City Property Assessment Roll lists a 39-storey building at the northeast corner of West 53rd St. and Avenue of the Americas, owned by Despa Real Estate, and gives it an estimated market value for 2005-2006 of $144 million, but has assessed it for tax purposes this year at just $55.3 million. That sounds like a sale and redevelopment to us, but then, we live in a refrigerator box and don’t know anything about real estate. The article says that the purchase includes all air rights, so conceivably the foundation will build a museum on the bottom and condos or office space up top, just like they did with the Museum Tower during their 1985 reno.

(* aside from “gee, I’d really like to live in the Time Warner Center!”)

LINK: The Art Newspaper > MoMA to expand again, but not for a generation

ABOVE: detail from a hand-painted North Korean propaganda poster, for sale through the Pyongyang Art Studio in Beijing. Flag reads “socialism our way.”

Just a small post today: The New York Times is a bit late to the party on this story about the Pyongyang Art Studio, a Beijing gallery that deals exclusively in posters, canvases, and ceramics from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The supersecretive closed communist country puts most of its artists to work on large-scale propaganda posters and murals, painted in the creepy Technicolor pop of the style known as socialist realism. Given N. Korea’s nazione-non-grata status on the world stage, this art was until recently not well-known outside its borders. Then some middle-aged British dude named Nicholas Bonner just swaggers in, cuts a deal with Pyongyang, and sets up an officially-sanctioned DPRK gallery in Beijing to sell North Korean art. According to the gallery’s website, it was written up by Newsweek and the International Herald Tribune way last winter. Why the Times didn’t get to it before now, especially given that they they own the IHT, is a mystery. But as everyone knows, until the Times has covered it, it ain’t been covered, friend.

The art is of mixed quality, but many of the pieces are quite affordable. You too can reduce an entire desperate nation to an ironic dining-room decor statement starting from just US$200.

LINK: The New York Times > A Gallery Peers Into the Closed World of North Korean Art
LINK: Pyongyang Art Studio

ABOVE: detail from Dan Flavin’s untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3, (1977). Flavin’s works, which were mostly executed with fluorescent lights now discontinued by their manufacturers, are presenting a problem for collectors and curators as the bulbs start to burn out.

Pop quiz: Let us imagine, for a moment, that you are an art collector of surpassing wealth who has just acquired a significant work by American artist Dan Flavin at considerable expense. You have paid a particular premium for the sculpture because Flavin is—posthumously, of course—enjoying a large retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and record auction prices. Having installed the new piece, a composition of fluorescent light tubes in several colours, in your expansive home, you discover that one of the bulbs is dead. Do you:

a) drive to Home Depot, purchase a $5.99 fluorescent tube, and replace it?
b) leave the dead bulb in place, to preserve the work in its original state?
c) contact the Flavin estate and arrange the purchase of long-discontinued bulbs in bulk?
d) scream into a throw pillow, stick the piece in storage until you die, and let your inheritants deal with it?

According to this article from The Art Newspaper, only option “a” is verboten, as it would render the work unoriginal according to Flavin’s rather baroque system of notation and certification of his pieces. Despite the artist’s early protestations that the works were to last only as long as the bulbs he built them with, he also established a regime of sealed and signed authentication certificates for each work, and at one time purchased 600 of the last lot of a particular type of green fluorescent bulb manufactured by Sylvania, in order to maintain the material integrity of his limited-edition designs.

The problems of maintaing ephemeral art like Flavin’s is bizarre but fascinating, and gets more and more abstract and philosophical the more we contemplate it. The Guggenheim, for instance, keeps a stockpile of extra bulbs around to maintain its Flavin collection; are the bulbs “art” before they are actually installed, given that that is their sole purpose, or does the act of plugging them in bestow the artist’s touch on them? Are the spent bulbs being collected, and will they ever be themselves displayed? Given that the art is technically worthless without the authentication certificate, will the certificates ever be displayed?

LINK: The Art Newspaper > What happens when Flavin’s lights go out?

ABOVE: detail from Cremaster 1: Goodyear (1995), a silver gelatin print of a frame from Barney’s epic bizarro-opera The Cremaster Cycle. The print was one lot in a headline-worthy sale by Phillips, de Pury & Company, which is quickly becoming a premiere auction house. Barney’s print sold for $156,000.

It was the $1.5 million sale of Jean Michel Basquiat’s Catharsis (1983) that garnered headlines for the reincarnated and apparently stylish auction house Phillips, de Pury & Company, but the real story here may be the trendiness the auctioneer has cultivated with New York buyers, which the New York Times hinted at in its story on the sale.

Phillips, de Pury & Co. is the product of several mergers and acquisitions of European and American firms, and was briefly owned by luxury goods mega-retailer LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton before being sold to Simon de Pury in chunks, with the whole deal being finished in 2004. The Chelsea salesroom opened in 2003, and has apparently become a destination for status-conscious collectors to whom Christie’s and Sotheby’s look rather dowdy.

The sale last Thursday didn’t meet its high estimate, but some pieces shot well beyond their estimated values. Basquiat’s was one, Richard Prince’s A Nurse Involved was another, going for $1 million, more than three times its $300K estimate; Ron Mueck’s important first sculpture, Pinocchio, settled at just above its minimum estimate, but still set a record for any sculpture by the artist. P, de P & Co. are going places—but it’ll be interesting to see if it’s up or down.

LINK: The New York Times > At $1.5 Million, Classic by Basquiat Leads Auction

ABOVE: detail from one of 22 newly discovered Jackson Pollock drip paintings. The trove of work, which also includes two works on paper and eight experiments on canvas, gathered dust in an East Hampton warehouse for more than 30 years.

America’s biggest name in abstract expressionism, Jackson Pollock (can we popularize “J. Po”?), haunts us still as 32 previously unknown paintings attributed to him surfaced yesterday, according to numerous news reports.

Apparently the cache of paintings—22 of Pollock’s distinctive “drip paintings,” two enamels on paper, and eight duds, or “experiments,” as the experts insist on calling them—spent the last half-century in a Manhattan boiler room and an East Hampton warehouse, wrapped in kraft paper and covered in soot. Alex Matter, whose parents were pals with Pollock and Lee Krasner, found the paintings among the family knick-knackery after his parents died. Matter had the paintings authenticated before telling the newspapers, so this sounds like the real deal.

Ed Harris: can we expect Pollock Redux: Lee’s Revenge? Call us!

LINK: Reuters > Trove of Jackson Pollock artwork uncovered

ABOVE: detail from Hugh Barron’s The Children of George Bond of Ditchleys (1768), in the Tate Britain collection. In a bid to get the kids through the door, the Tate Modern announced that admission to its big summer Frida Kahlo show will be free for everyone under 18.

The Tate Modern announced yesterday that they’re going to let everyone under 18 into its “Frida Kahlo” show at no cost this summer. For some people, that’s probably an excellent reason to stay the hell away, but it seems likely that only the polite and bookish kids will wander in by choice, or perhaps moody, sullen teenagers with sketchbooks full of ballpoint drawings of bleeding eyes; either way, they’ll both be reasonably quiet. It’s the school groups, clutches of 30 little twits who’d rather be at home with their PlayStations, who make public gallery-going a blood-curdling experience for the unfortunate weekday visitor.

But we digress. Obviously, anything that gets kids into art galleries is a good idea, and the choice of the Kahlo show, the website of which describes its “celebrated portraits” and “lush and erotic still-life paintings,” will probably sound dirty enough to make the whole thing seem rather rebellious and covert. The press release added that the members’ committee is going to raise £100,000 to spend on underserved kids’ groups, including kids under 5. If it works this summer, the museums say they will extend the free admission scheme to future exhibits as well.

LINK: Press Release > Tate celebrates 5th Anniversary of Tate Modern with increased access for young people

ABOVE: detail from Javad Hamidi’s Still Life (1990), part of the permanent collection at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

Dr. Ali Reza Sami Azar, whose sudden departure from the directorship of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art we noted in March (and misspelled his name*, we sheepishly add), has returned. The Art Newspaper has posted an interview with Sami Azar about why he left in the first place, and why he’s coming back. In Iran, the taste in art apparently swings conservative—shocking, we know—and Sami Azar had the ministry of culture breathing down his neck at every turn. Instead of putting up with it or compromising his curatorial vision, he decided to walk away.

His return, he says, can be credited to the community of contemporary artists in Iran who stirred up a ruckus with the minister of culture and asked the ministry not to accept Sami Azar’s resignation. The interview skips over the next part of the story—did the ministry ask him back? Did he retract his resignation after being persuaded by the coalition of artists?—but the ending seems to be a happy one. There’s a presidential election around the corner, however, and Sami Azar seems less than optimistic about the outcome.

(* - we used the spelling as it appeared in the Iranian newspaper, which seems, like, totally reasonable.)

LINK: The Art Newspaper > Interview with Dr. Ali Reza Sami Azar

ABOVE: The New York Times stuck its manicured finger in the eye of the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday, with an op-ed calling the Met’s “Chanel” show a syncophantic Karl Lagerfeld infomercial (or words to that effect).

A New York Times op-ed by Art in America contributing editor Lee Rosenbaum yesterday withered the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its new exhibition, “Chanel,” which opened on May 5 and goes to August. Rosenbaum’s beef is that the show is an uncritical and superficial commercial blowjob for a major fashion label, and furthermore, mostly a monument to the plus-size ego of current Chanel ringmaster (see picture, above) Karl Lagerfeld, whose designs take up roughly a third of the show. Where’s Coco? Rosenbaum cites news reports from around the time of the Met’s first attempt at this show, five years ago, when Lagerfeld allegedly tried to strongarm the curators into altering the show to his taste, quoting the designer as calling Coco Chanel’s iconic designs “old dresses.” Meow!

Chanel has put a slick online exhibit on their website, far cooler than the Met’s online treatment, which makes it look even more like the Met has essentially rented Chanel several galleries’ worth of prime fifth-avenue showroom real estate. Even worse, the chief curator of the Chanel exhibit, told Rosenbaum that the Chanel show is a test run to see if exhibits of living fashion designers would fly with the Met’s crowd. What’s next, a museum exhibit dedicated to Armani? Oh wait: been there, done that.

LINK: New York Times > Op-Ed > Fashion Victim

ABOVE: Detail of a cast of Louise Bourgeois’ Maman (1999), installed at the Guggenheim Bilbao. The National Gallery of Canada is installing its own bronze version of the 30 foot spider in its outdoor plaza.

The National Gallery of Canada is the latest museum to host a version of Franco-Americain sculptor Louise Bourgeois’ arachnoid nightmare Maman—”mother,” for those of us who fell asleep in French class—a giant bronze spider carrying a bulging egg sac. It is the last of six bronze casts of the sculpture, the previous versions of which are already on display in St. Petersburg, Tokyo, New York, and Seoul. The Tate Modern in London, which of course must always be different from everyone else, has a one-of-a-kind steel version.

Bourgeois, who is now 93 years old, is still going as strong as can be expected: Maman was sculpted in 1999, when the artist was 88 years old, and the Tate has a retrospective of her work planed for 2007. Though some see vulnerability and maternal affection in the piece, the arachnophobics among us are reaching for the nearest rolled-up TV Guide.

Additionally, the National Gallery is allowing the world, through The Magic Of The Internet©, to see the sculpture being assembled with a webcam feed of the construction site in Ottawa. The press release says it should take about a week to put the whole thing together, weather permitting.

LINK: National Gallery of Canada is latest major museum to welcome Louise Bourgeois’ Maman

ABOVE: detail from Morning (1958) by Geli Mikhailovich Korzhev-Chuvelev. It’s one of about 50 works on display at the newly renovated Museum of Russian Art through July 31.

The Museum of Russian Art (which, for reasons unknown but presumably compelling, is situated in Minneapolis), reopens to the public today, May 9, in its new location in a renovated church. Whether the idea of a museum that showcases Soviet art in an ex-church is a welcome one in the “Mini Apple” of the midwest is unknown to us; But the museum notes quite rightly on their website that during the cold war Russian art was largely ignored or actively dismissed in the West, and it needs and deserves the exposure now.

To that end they are opening the 11,000 square-foot facility today with a reheated Smithsonian exhibit called “In the Russian Tradition: A Historic Collection of 20th Century Russian Paintings.” Some of the pieces, viewable online, are striking: not just for their quality, but for their similarity to American and European art from the same period. There’s also quite a lot of the usual Stalinesque soft-porn heroic realism—it wouldn’t be Soviet without it—but the small sample available online shows more variety and depth than we would have expected. And admission is only $5.

LINK: The Museum of Russian Art > The New Museum of Russian Art Announces Grand Opening