Art Of The Day Weekly

In the tornado of return of art works stolen during WWII, no museum nor indiviual was left unturned, no matter what good reason they used in their defense. The Klimts from the Belvedere museum or the Schiele from a resident of Eastern France were equally returned to their legitimate owners before ending up in an auction. A simple suspicion was enough to spoil the sale of the Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto, a painting by Picasso which the wonderboy of musical comedies, Andrew Lloyd Weber, had to pull out from a sale last November, where it had been estimated at nearly 60 million dollars. Is the wind turning? Lady Elizabeth Taylor, the unforgettable Cleopatra in celluloid, succeeded in keeping her Van Gogh, View of the assylum and of the chapel in Saint-Remy, bought in 1963 for 92 000 £. Even though the descendants demonstrated that it belonged to their ancestor, Margarethe Mautner before the Nazis took over the belongings, they did not convince the 9th court of appeals of San Francisco, which felt they had waited too long to file their suit. According to BBC television, Lady Taylor, now 75 years old, limited herself to saying, «It is wonderful to have M. Vincent in my living room».

Dali and the art of cinema

LONDRES – Dali and cinema? One thinks immediatley of his two most famous successes: his collaboration with Buñuel in Un chien andalou and L’Age d’or. The second caused such a scandal that it endangered his principle sponsor, the viscount of Noailles… A donkey in a piano, a razor blade slicing an eye: the images that inspired the world of dreams have become icons of surrealism. But, as the exhibition at the Tate Modern demonstrates- through one hundred works of which sixty paintings- Dali's relations with the world of movies were not limited to these two experimental films. His universe attracted offers from Hitchcock to collaborate in the scene of the dream in The house of doctor Edwards in 1945 with Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, as well as from Walt Disney (the short Destino was finished in 2003, long after the two men died). On the other hand, Dali employs a way of writing or an atmosphere one could qualify as being «cinematographic» in some of his paintings such as Ossification matinale du cyprès(Morning ossification of a cyprus tree).

For a few Serras more:

NEW YORK – When one discovers three new works in a retrospective dedicated to Richard Serra, one can really consider oneself lucky! The American artist has specialised in such monumental creations, metallic segments with soft ondulations, that they each require months of work. The three pieces considered, exhibited at the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), Band, Sequence and Torqued Torus Inversion, weight a mere 200 tons. They are accompanied by 21 other sculptures, some of which are from the beginning of the artist's life, 40 years ago, when he used other materials such as rubber or neon. It took a month to install them up on the museum's second floor. Two other sculptures are placed in the garden, an environment that is by far more natural for these colossal forms of rusted steel.

A bridge over expressionism

VIENNA- At the beginning of expressionism, a group founded in Dresden in 1905 would play a very important role. Grouped together under the name Die Brücke (The Bridge), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff rebeled against academic painting. They used colors almost excessively and wanted simple forms (it is rather significant that they were all actually architecture students). Like many other experimental groups, theirs did not last very long but they did have time before separating in 1913, to fashion talents such as that of Max Pechstein, Otto Mueller or Norwegian artist Emil Nolde. In order to demonstrate the group's influence, the exhibition at the Albertina presents nearly 250 works, produced until the end of the twenties. They come from various collections but above all from that of Hermann Gerlinger. It started in the fifties, and focused on sheding light on the unknown elements of the movement.

Video-artists of the world...

BARCELONE – The Loop festival has imposed itself in a few years as the ost complete rendez-vous in the field of video art. This year, over 800 artists are shown in some one hundred different spaces in the Catalan capital: museums of course, as well as bars, cultural centers, gymnasiums, universities, etc. The last three days of the festival – from 31 May to 2 June – are dedicated to an international fair. In the lounge of the hotel Catalonia, buyers from all over the world are invited to meet while the rooms are dedicated to 45 galleries that present their artists. Three discusion panels will cover interesting themes: software for video art, the policy of exhibiting in public spaces and the conservation methods of video art.