Fire Island, three miles off the shore of New York's Long Island, has long been a haven for the Northeast's LGBTQ community. The Pines were developed in the 1950s, making the enclave one of the youngest on the island. In the '60s, The Pines quickly went from a clothing-optional beach with a few coastal shacks to a clothing-optional beach flanked by impressive, architecturally assertive homes. In The Pines, design talent of the era found a primed audience, and the area rapidly became exceptionally rich in significant modernist residential architecture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
