Breaking 4th Century Art News

Archaeologists from the Vatican believe they have found the earliest-known portrait of St. Paul in the catacombs of St. Thecla, near St. Paul fuori-le-mura in Rome.

The portrait was discovered about two weeks ago, but has already been cleaned and restored (by lasers, no less) for its release to the public.

In related news, the Pope says that remains discovered in an eight-foot sarcophagus underneath St. Paul fuori-le-mura "seem to be" (or in Pope-speak, "definitely are") St. Paul's mortal relics., as popular Christian tradition holds. Carbon dating confirms that the bones date from the 2nd or 3rd century.

Art Links

-A new show of paintings by modernist Belgian artist James Ensor in the creatively titled James Ensor at MoMA.

-A show of objects from the National Museum in Kabul, Afghanistan at the Met, which was previously at the National Gallery in Washington. Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures From the National Museum, Kabul is on through September.

-Sotheby's has done pretty well in the last few days, with solid modern and contemporary sales, with Picasso and Giacometti selling well at the modern sale and contemporary standbys Warhol and Calder selling well yesterday, though American art is not doing well at either house.

-LACMA, in a somewhat surprising but still totally predictable move, sold off their old master paintings at Sotheby's. I guess they didn't get the memo about older art being a consistently good investment.

-The new Acropolis Museum in Athens is awesome, which has sparked debate over who really owns the Elgin marbles, currently housed at the British Museum in London.

And now for some bad news

The art world is still suffering, bad news this week includes:

-A disappointing Impressionist and modern art sale at Christie's London, which just barely cleared the $60 million low estimate. As Souren Melikian says: The hard lesson for auction houses is that scraping the barrel to fill a catalog no longer does the trick. To do well, you need real art and there is not much left of it.

-Contemporary art galleries in Chelsea (and pretty much all galleries in New York) are in trouble this summer, and there have already been several notable closings. The notoriously slow summer season combined with a huge recession in art buying make it survival of the fittest (and best-marketed).

-More and more exhibitions are being cut from museum schedules due to financial concerns, and in most cases, a lack of funding.

-The Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum announced last week that both major institutions will cut more staff. The Guggenheim will cut 25 positions, or about 8% of their full time staff, while the Met laid off 74 employees and offered 95 other employees retirement packages.


But let's end on a good note!

-Most of the documents, many dating back to the Middle Ages, have been recovered from the rubble of the Cologne Archives, which collapsed back in March. The catch is that everything has to be sorted and re-cataloged, and 15% of the materials are still missing.

-Art Basel did surprisingly well, partially due to lowered prices and partially owing to the fact that most rich art collectors are still rich.

Art Theft: Picasso Notebook

Recent Art Theft: Picasso Notebook stolen from the Picasso Museum in Paris 2 weeks ago

From the Art Loss Register:
A notebook of sketches by Pablo Picasso was stolen from the Picasso Museum in Paris between June 8-9, 2009. The notebook was taken from a locked case within the museum, and consists of 33 drawings in pencil that were made between 1917 and 1924. The notebook is valued at several million Euros.

Experts fear that the notebook may be broken up by the thieves in an attempt to maximize the value. However, the real value of the notebook is the historical documentation it preserves for scholars of the artist's work. Since the individual sketches are unsigned, there would be little market value if the notebook were divided.

The notebook is approximately 6 by 10 inches and has a distinctive shiny red cover, with the word "album" printed in gold on the cover.

The Art Loss Register also notes that Picasso is its number one most stolen artist. For more information, visit their website.

New Exhibition: It’s About Time: 244 Years at the Morris-Jumel Mansion

Sometimes, when you think about New York, you forget the long and tumultuous history the city has. The history of a city is usually evident in its buildings, though buildings get torn down and built back up again in New York so often that a lot of that history gets erased. Not so at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights.

The 244-year old house was George Washington's headquarters during the doomed defense of New York in 1776 at the beginning of the Revolutionary War (I just learned all this from the excellent tome Gotham: A History of New York to 1898). The mansion now functions as a museum with fully restored interior and antique furnishings, and is part of The Historic House Trust of New York City.

The new show at the mansion, It's About Time: 244 Years at the Morris-Jumel Mansion, curated by education director Carol Ward, juxtaposes historical photographs from the house's history with work by modern photographers. The show provides a unique peek into New York's living, but often forgotten, past. Check out the write-up and excellent slide show in Times' CityRoom blog today.

For more information on The Historic House Trust, other historic houses in and around New York City, and the ongoing efforts to preserve and protect them, go here.

Art Meets Technology: Peter Greenaway

I'm always interested to see how technology interacts with traditional art, so when the Times reported on Peter Greenaway's exhibit at the Venice Biennale, which is a digitized film-esque version of Veronese's masterpiece, The Wedding at Cana, I was interested.

The traditionalist in me usually is opposed to contemporary artists reusing the work of the masters and billing it as their own, but Greenaway takes a more thoughtful approach (did anyone see the Cezanne wrapped in bubblewrap at the Philadephia show? Now that really boils my blood). First, the piece is being exhibited in the Benedictine refectory on San Giorgio Maggiore, where Veronese's original hung previously. I appreciate the sensitivity to a measure of historical accuracy.

The Wedding at Cana digital project is also one of a series, the 3rd of 9 entitled simply Nine Classical Paintings Revisited. I appreciate the lack of pretention that so often accompanies reused classical art. (Previous work includes digitizations of Rembrandt's The Night Watch and Da Vinci's The Last Supper.)

Greenaway plans to work his digital magic on another Renaissance piece, Michelangelo's The Last Judgment as well as on Picasso's Guernica, a Pollock, some Monet and a Seurat. It makes me wonder if art historians will react differently when Renaissance art is repurposed versus when Impressionist or abstract art is reused. What about the "old masters" makes them untouchable in the minds of art historians?

Greenaway's digitization project is unique to me in that it doesn't disrupt the spirit or impact of the original, but rather enhances it in many ways. It's a way of using technology that doesn't interrupt the original, but manipulates it slightly in a way that is still true to the color and visual dynamism of the original but dazzles all the same.


If you need a hit of more traditional Veronese, check out the exhibiton website for the Rivals in Renaissance Venice show at the MFA in Boston (I'm dying to see it!)

New Feature: Museum Shop Madness

As long as I can remember going to museums, I've loved the gift shops. Lately I've noticed museum gift shops stepping things up a bit and instead of being the random assortment of art-related key-chains, posters, and coasters at the end of a blockbuster exhibition (though of course, all those things are still available...who needs a coaster set of Monets?), they've become well, shops in their own right.

In this new feature, I'm just going to post things at online museum shops that happen to catch my eye, the wonderful, the weird, the colorful, and occasionally the useful. Enjoy!

First up, this fantastic Dual-Spout Chinese Porcelain-inspired teapot from the Met:











According to the item description: "Our teapot is based on an original made in China in the late 17th century containing two chambers, one for brewing tea and one for hot water; an ingenious and elegant form allowing a harmonious couple to enjoy different strengths of tea simultaneously." Cool. Buy it here.

Next, in the "slightly weird and creative" category, a book entitled When Pigasso Met Mootisse from the Morgan Library's store:








I think this is self-explanatory. Pick it up for the child in your life (or yourself, because you know you want it) here.

This next item, a carved wood necklace from the Art Institute of Chicago's store, is a piece of jewelry I'd actually wear, and very on-trend with this season's statement necklaces. As a bonus, it doesn't look too "museum-y" the way a lot of museum shop jewelry tends to:



Just think how amazing it would look with a plain t-shirt and a snappy blazer. It's even on sale for web orders only.

For the creative interior designer, MoMA's design shop always has a selection of weirdly beautiful things you never knew you even wanted, like this vaguely mushroom-cloud shaped Nesso Table Lamp:











Based on the lamp in MoMA's collection by Giancarlo Mattioli, if you ever wanted a lamp made from injection molded ABS thermoplastic, this is the lamp you've been looking for, if you've got an extra $375 ($337.50 for MoMA members) on hand.

Finally, if you really want to break the bank on a unique look for your living room, try the Gehry Easy Chair from the Philadelphia Museum of Art's store:














For a mere $730, you could own this. Or complete your living room set with matching molded sofa, bench, left, right and 3-sided twist cubes, an easy chair and a coffee table. Gehry-riffic!


So what do you think? Would you buy any of this stuff? What are your favorite museum gift shops?

Medieval Friday

Medieval Fridays are the best kind of Fridays, right?

-The NYT review of Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages makes me want to go back and see it again.

-The must-see exhibit at the Morgan Library, Pages of Gold, consists entirely of "orphan" leaves--pages removed from their original manuscripts. The show looks at the market for and the individuals who collected such single leaves and (delightfully) ends with a few forgeries. The show covers not only medieval issues of illumination, but a glimpse of the unique medieval art market as well.

-St. Anthony Tormented by Demons, the so-called "first painting" of Michelangelo is now on display at the Met. The small exhibit is made up of the actual painting accompanied by the evidence for its authenticity. An interesting exercise in art historical analysis--now in exhibition form!

-Meanwhile, the Walters Art Museum has a show called Prayers in Code, which presents a selection of unusual Books of Hours and explores artistic patronage at the court of King Francis I (1494-1547). The exhibit centers around the unexpected relationship between images and text in Books of Hours at this time.

New Exhibition: Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages

Over the weekend I went to the Met to check out the new medieval show, Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages, and also caught a lecture on the topic of drawing the Middle Ages by Dr. Jonathan Alexander of the Institute of Fine Arts.

This show is one of the first of its kind to treat drawing as a separate and distinct art form in the Middle Ages. Installed in the special exhibition space in the drawings and prints department, the show features over 50 examples of medieval drawings, from line drawings done for early 9th and 10th century manuscripts similar to the Utrecht Psalter, to late 14th century pattern books, maps, and cosmological charts. Dr. Alexander spoke about the common conception of drawing as something of a lesser medium than painting, more preparatory than final, and what this show does to dispel that popular opinion.

One thing I found intriguing while looking at the various examples was the play between line and color, and the interaction of the two in extremely interesting ways. In several examples, line drawings are executed in various colored lines, creating masterful scenes evocative of fully colored manuscript miniatures, but with a special and different aesthetic. In some cases color is used to highlight only a few objects in a miniature, like the warriors shields in the example from the early 10th century Book of Maccabees from St. Gall (pictured above). In many cases, color and line work together to create extremely sophisticated compositions.

Other interesting objects include early maps, medical treatises, teaching scrolls, constellation charts and cosmological texts, genealogical charts, and of course the familiar psalters and Books of Hours (the lovely Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux are also included). Many of the books' pages will be turned periodically at the beginning of each month until the show closes in August, offering an ever-changing variety of images.

Overall the show offers a glimpse into a little-studied field, and presents objects from some of the most famous libraries (including the Vatican Library) around the world. Many of these texts will probably not be seen again soon in any exhibition, so I suggest you get to the Met and see them before they get locked away again, only to be seen by the most intrepid (and persistent) scholars of the book arts.

Quick note: The Met is doing a new thing where each exhibition has its own blog, where visitors can participate in the discussion. Check out the blog for the Pen and Parchment show here, where you can find information on the show, medieval drawing techniques, and read commentary from the show's curators.

Tim Burton at MoMA

In what is possibly the coolest retrospective ever planned, Tim Burton will be featured at MoMA beginning November 22nd, later this year.

The show will feature, among other things, drawings, costumes, and puppets, mostly from his various film projects. It will also include "artifacts" from Burton's college film projects, early career, and unrealized projects. Best of all, the exhibition will be accompanied by a film series.

For other happenings at MoMA, check out this weirdly difficult to understand exhibition calendar.

The Ara Pacis Museum in Rome Vandalized

Vandals defaced the outside of the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome with paint-filled balloons of red and green, creating an Italian flag of sorts on the white wall. The vandals also left a porcelain toilet and a few rolls of toilet paper next to the building, in a brilliantly simple comment on the building's design.

Designed by Richard Meier, and opened in Rome in 2006, the Ara Pacis Museum was built to house the Ara Pacis, or "Altar of Peace" commissioned by Emperor Augustus in 13 BC. The massive stone structure was rapidly deteriorating from exposure to the elements, and the new complex was built to protect it, though it's contemporary design has been the subject of much criticism.

I was just at the Ara Pacis Museum last week, and while it is a nice museum, sun-filled, with seating, serves its designated purpose of protecting the Ara Pacis (and is a fantastic air-conditioned respite from the sweltering Roman sun), it's totally out of sync with Rome as a city, and classical Roman architecture. It feels completely out of place, and doesn't really complement the Ara Pacis so much as it simply seems to rise out of the ground around it.

Any thoughts about the recent vandalism, or about the Ara Pacis Museum in general?