Art
Thursday, March 28, 2024

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Leonardo Cover 

PARIS — Expectations have been high for the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition that is being mounted at the Louvre to mark the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death. For months, there has been speculation, about which works would travel to the Louvre, about the geopolitical backstory to each potential loan, and about a problematic but fascinating painting known as the “Salvator Mundi,” which sold at auction for more than $450 million to controversial Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman, in 2017.  Leonardo da Vinci: 1452-1519 is on view at the Louvre in Paris through Feb. 24, 2020.

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 Tiered seder plate from the 18th 19th century. Gift of the Danzig Jewish Community to The Jewish Museum NYC 1 

The New York Jewish Museum's exhibition: Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art traces the fascinating timelines of individual objects as they passed through hands and sites before, during, and after World War II, bringing forward their myriad stories. During World War II, untold numbers of artworks and pieces of cultural property were stolen by Nazi forces. After the war, an estimated one million artworks and 2.5 million books were recovered. Many more were destroyed. This exhibition chronicles the layered stories of the objects that survived, exploring the circumstances of their theft, their post-war rescue, and their afterlives in museums and private collections.

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 Mules de Bie Van Gogh 1888jepg 1

 A Vincent van Gogh landscape seized by the Nazis during their Second World War occupation of France has sold at auction in New York for $35.9 million (£26.8 million), a record for a watercolor by the Dutch impressionist. The 1888 work, “Mueles de ble”, was purchased for well above its pre-sale estimate of $20-30 million, auction house Christie’s said.  The proceeds of the sale of the work, “Meules de Blé” (“Wheatstacks”), created by van Gogh in 1888, will be divided between the current owner — the family of Edwin Cox, a Texan oil businessman — and the heirs of two Jewish families whose predecessors owned the work during World War II.

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 Arc de Triopmph lit.jepeg 2

Over the course of his iconic career, the artist known as Christo has navigated extraordinary logistics in order to wrap buildings and bridges in his signature colorful fabric. He and his wife Jeanne-Claude have battled Colorado ranchers, New York mayors, and the elements. But Paris’s famed war memorial, the Arc de Triomphe, proved another matter entirely. Before opening “L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped” on Sept. 18, Christo had to deal with delays spurred by birds nesting in the monument and a global pandemic. Then, the artist himself died in May. The artist’s team said they felt compelled to push on. 

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 netherlander 2

Neanderthals may have been closer to our species of prehistoric modern human than previously believed after cave paintings found in Ardales, Spain proved they had a fondness for creating art, one of the authors of a new scientific report explained. Red ochre pigment discovered on stalagmites in the Caves of Ardales, near Malaga in southern Spain, were created by Neanderthals about 65,000 years ago, making them possibly the first artists on earth, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal. Modern humans were not inhabiting the world at the time the cave images were made.