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Old Masters
Finders, Sleepers
By Sallie Brady Leveraging luck and sleuthing skills, savvy dealers discover hidden treasures. Miscatalogued, overpainted, lost amid the ephemera of a pokey country auction—a hidden masterpiece is the holy grail of every any good art and antiques dealer. It’s the fantasy that keeps them awake nights, the dream that their hunch on a “could it…
The Rest is Noise
The Futurist Luigi Russolo was a lousy painter, but as a composer he was way ahead of his time. Reminiscing in the late 1950s, Igor Stravinsky recalled an evening in 1915 when he first heard the Futurist music of Luigi Russolo. “Five phonographs standing on five tables in a large and otherwise empty room emitted digestive noises, static, etc.,” he said. “I pretended to be enthusiastic and told [the Futurists] that the sets of five phonographs with such music, mass produced, would surely sell like Steinway grand pianos.”
A Woman of Valor
This month, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, which originated at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last fall, comes to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. With a broad selection of works, some of them never before shown, and a series of installations that demonstrate Gorky’s work process, the exhibition illuminates the development of the artist’s unique style.
Help Wanted
In the old days, most directors of major art museums could settle in and look forward to decades-long tenures. The job was unique and prestigious—the qualifications were a background of serious scholarship as a curator and the ability to be a reassuring pillar of the community—if a little sleepy at times. Fast forward to 2010: Museum directors are hustling more than they ever had dreamed they would have to, grappling with the perils of the Great Recession and with increasing demands on their time.
Otherworldly Masquerade
There is something inherently uncanny about masks. The placement of a false face over a real face, the displacement of identity, the fixed expression, all conspire to unsettle or even frighten the beholder. The sense of the weird is especially strong in masks that were intended to represent unearthly beings and to allow humans to temporarily assume the identity of denizens of the spirit world during religious or magical ceremonies.
A Haunting Humanism
Nearly a century ago, much of Europe waited with trepidation for war to break out. In August 1914, the conflagration that would become World War I finally erupted, and the German artist Otto Dix was one young volunteer who eagerly headed to the front. An avid reader of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century philosopher who had championed an ideal “superman” or “overman” who would overcome the limitations of mere humanity as it had evolved thus far, Dix would soon find his illusions shattered.
Walking Into History
It was a thrilling victory, but a narrow one. Once the currency conversions were worked out, it was clear that Alberto Giacometti’s L’homme qui marche I (Walking Man I), offered at Sotheby’s in London on Feb. 3, had made history, fetching £65 million, or $104.3 million, to claim the title of “most expensive artwork sold at auction” from Picasso’s Garçon à la pipe (Boy With a Pipe), a 1905 painting that fetched $104.1 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2004.
From the Editor: Wings of Eagles
Take a look at the forbidding Aztec warrior at left, encased in an eagle suit, and then look at the Roman bronze eagle on page 70. Not exactly birds of a feather, art-historically and stylistically speaking. But according to the curators at the Getty Villa, they had a lot in common, at least in the minds of the 16th-century Aztecs and Spaniards who are the subjects of a fascinating exhibition that opens there late this month.
Passage to India
A long lunch is ending on a short autumn day, as late sun streaks the dining room of London’s Chelsea Arts Club, where two monuments of Indian art are catching up on a decade spent apart. Syed Haider Raza, 88, and Maqbool Fida Husain, 94, go back 60 years to 1940s Bombay, where they pioneered modern painting in India. Their most recent works are hanging together again, first at a preview at Art London and then at a major exhibition in December, and the occasion is worthy of a reunion.
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