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Market: Unsentimental Education
By: James Panero The students of Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., have been enrolled in a crash course in museum ethics and the realities of the art market. On Jan. 26 the trustees voted unanimously to sell the permanent collection of the school’s 48-year-old Rose Art Museum, which houses one of the finest collections of…
Market: Winter Thaw
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley Some see the glass as half empty; others see it as half full. The sales of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art that Sotheby’s and Christie’s held in London in February contained fodder for the arguments of both camps. The half-empty crowd can cite the collective total for the four evening sales…
Pictures at an Exhibition
By: James Panero As the March 15 opening approaches for his exhibition Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the curator Frederick Ilchman moves from conservation to design to exhibition space with an amiable twitter. Dressed in a natty three-piece suit, he looks as if he just stepped off a…
Sacred Spaces
In two widely separated spots on the globe—Central America and Southeast Asia—two ancient civilizations created vast temple complexes that express a strikingly similar sense of man’s place in the universe.
In a Nutshell: Familiar Spirits
The bobcat knows secrets. The crow is the keeper of sacred law. The frog brings rain. The Zuni knew these things and made carvings, called fetishes, to help them access this other world. (The word “fetish” comes from the Portuguese feitiço, meaning “made by art.”) For collectors, Zuni fetishes are beautiful, highly sought after and small—most fit easily in the palm of the hand.
Treasure Hunt
The European Fine Art Fair, held every March in Maastricht, is justly famous for its selection of Old Masters. It’s easy to spend days lingering in that realm alone, but that would risk missing the fair’s other delights. TEFAF is uniquely able to attract a staggeringly large selection of rare treasures of all styles, shapes and varieties from across the millennia and the world.
Critic's Notebook: Lives and Works
One day Leonardo Da Vinci acquired a peculiar lizard, for which he made a pair of wings by flaying several similar creatures. He filled the wings with quicksilver, causing them to quiver whenever the lizard walked and, having tamed it, proceeded to terrify everyone he met.
Books: We'll Always Have Paris
One might think that Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (formerly known in English as Remembrance of Things Past) has by now been analyzed from every possible angle—psychoanalysis, homosexuality, fashion, French cuisine. The essayist Alain de Botton has even written a tongue-in-cheek self-help book calledHow Proust Can Change Your Life.
Metal Works
When race car driver Hervé Poulain asked his friend Alexander Calder to embellish the exterior of his 480hp BMW 3.0CSL for the 1975 Le Mans, Poulain’s car became Calder’s ultimate kinetic sculpture. The resulting colorful expression also launched BMW’s Art Car series, which has grown during the past three decades to comprise 16 cars by artists from several continents, including the most recent from Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, who encased a hydrogen-powered H2R in reflective ice and called it Your Mobile Expectations.
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