One day in mid-January, after the Renaissance Siena exhibition had closed and was being deinstalled at The National Gallery, London, an almost-500 year old painting slipped its temporary frame and hit the floor. Sienese master Domenico Beccafumi's Marcia (seen here) is an oil whose panel support consists of three planks fastened together--one of which promptly separated from the other two upon impact. I can imagine the wooden sound of protest and don't know what would be worse: the elevator drop of the stomach, or the hair standing up on the back of the neck.

Normally the public doesn't hear about mishaps of this nature, but this one was too huge not to make the minutes of the February 8 Board of Trustees meeting. Because The Gallery falls under the aegis of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the minutes are a matter of public record. And because these minutes have only just been published, we now know about an accident that occurred four months ago.

Marcia, happily, has been restored and is back on display. A second stroke of good fortune: Marcia belongs to The Gallery. You'd hate to think of this happening to a loan, as was Cornelia (lent by the Galleria Doria-Pamphilj in Rome) one of the three Beccafumi "Women of Virtue" panels in the exhibition. It seems as if the best possible outcome has been achieved, although, granted, it's tough to guess about the employment status of the two art handlers responsible for the accident.

Image credit:

Domenico Beccafumi (Italian, 1484-1551)
Marcia, ca. 1520-25
Oil on wood
92.1 x 53.3 cm
© The National Gallery, London

© Robert Rauschenberg / Adagp, Paris, 2006
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© Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
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Our intrepid art critic, Beth Gersh-Nesic, and I had more fun with with her review of the Gustave Courbet exhibition (on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 18) than anything else over which we've batted around ideas. Courbet was such a Bad Boy, courter-of-controversy and, above all, technically proficient artist that he can, all these years later, be completely forgiven for consciously bending the star-making machinery to fatten his bank account.

For these reasons, yes, Gustave Courbet certainly resembles a contemporary rock star, movie star or any "celebrity" with a good publicist. Me, I rather thought his early self-portraits resembled a gorgeous young Jim Morrison of The Doors fame--the Lizard King before he became, as did Courbet, bloated from drink. Beth thought, no, the handsome actor Jake Gyllenhaal would more fittingly represent the painter at the start of his career. Both of us agreed wholeheartedly that Johnny Depp would play a perfect Courbet. (I invite you to look at The Desperate Man pictured here, and compare it to a photo of Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow.)

While Beth's review of Gustave Courbet has its seriously informative side, you are hereby invited to play along with us after reading. To whom in the Celebrity Sphere would you compare this artist?

Related viewing:

• Gustave Courbet - selected images form the exhibition

Image credit:

Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)
The Desperate Man, 1844-45
Oil on canvas
17 3/4 x 21 5/8 in. (45 x 55 cm)
Private Collection, courtesy of BNP Paribas Art Advisory
Photo: © Michel Nguyen

© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein
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I might have written the above headline in capital letters, but the appropriate time to shout jubilantly over the dismissal of United States District Court, Western District of New York's Order 04-CR-0155A (a.ka. "The United States of America v. Steven Kurtz") occurred nearly four years ago. If, indeed, there ever should have been a court case necessitating an appropriate time in which to be jubilant. Begging your pardon, it is impossible for me to be objective about what happened to Steven Kurtz. Rather than rail on (as I am sorely tempted to do) for 87 more paragraphs regarding aberrations of "justice" in a culture of paranoia, I will instead refer you to other sources.

More on the Kurtz Saga:

• "The FBI's Art Attack" - Washington Post article from June 2, 2004
• "Bioarts, Bioterror and the CAE" - College Quarterly, Spring 2005
• "The Political Problem of Luck" - email interview with Steven Kurtz from Plazm Magazine, Summer 2006
• "Art or Bioterrorism: Who Cares?" - interview with Steven Kurtz from 10 Zen Monkeys, September 26, 2007
• Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund - FAQs, links to documentation and a time line regarding the Kurtz case
• Strange Culture - official website of the film
• April 21, 2008 Ruling on the motion to dismiss Order 04-CR-0155A

Image credit:

The Stanford Humanities Lab collaborated with director Lynn Hershman on a screening of her latest film Strange Culture. This mixed reality event took place at Sundance and in the online world Second Life during January 2007.

Flickr image by Henrik Bennetsen
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

What would you call a gallery installation that featured crack cocaine in an incense burner, a musical loop of "Himno de Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional" playing backwards, words spelled out with pieces of dog food and a malnourished stray dog tied on a tether? Personally, I would call it My Artistic Bull___ Detector Has Lit Up and Started to Beep, but that's just me. The Costa Rican artist Guillermo Vargas Jiménez (who is in his early 30s, goes by the name "Habacuc" and is responsible for the above work) entitled it Exposición No. 1. Exposición No. 1, however, is now commonly known as Eres lo que lees (You are what you read) because those were the words meticulously spelled out with dog food.

It is verifiable fact that Exposición No. 1 was staged at Galeria Codice in Managua, Nicaragua on August 16-17, 2007. The above mentioned elements were present in Habacuc's piece, including the dog. The dog, whom the artist had named "Natividad," was on the premises of the gallery for three days. Several arts bloggers at the time mentioned what a dumb idea it was to tether a starving dog in an art gallery. I concurred wholeheartedly with the dumb idea part and thought that was that.

That was most certainly not that. What has happened in the interim is that all Internet hell has broken loose. Not one of those two day wonders, either, but a story that Read more...

True confession: this could rightfully be entitled "Artists *I* Should Know." All I'd ever retained--and that only vaguely--about Bernardino di Betto, a.k.a. Pinturicchio ("Little Painter"), was a comment by Giorgio Vasari in Lives of the Painters. I quote:

"Just as many are aided by Fortune without being endowed with great talent, so many men of talent are pursued by a hostile fortune. Thus she seems to adopt as her children those who depend upon her, without the aid of any ability, and is pleased that some should rise by her favor who would never have attracted notice by their own merits. Thus it was with Pinturicchio of Perugia, who, prolific as he was, and enjoying the assistance of others, nevertheless possessed a far higher reputation than his works warranted."

One of these days, I am going to get it through my thick skull that Vasari, master of snark Read more...

I'd love to say "April Fool!" except this really happened and the only fool involved was a suspect apprehended at lightning speed. In the wee hours of April 1 someone picked up a rock, smashed open a window at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin, Australia, gained entry to its Aboriginal Gallery and scooped up seven works of art before making a hasty exit. The thief, however, appears to have suffered immediate "buyer's remorse" (or perhaps was dizzy from loss of blood--the jagged bits of broken window proved merciless), because he promptly left all seven in shrubbery close to the Museum.

Northern Territory Police quickly recovered the paintings, valued at $500K (AU) but priceless in reality. Curators confirmed any damage was minimal, though art lovers everywhere should be very, very grateful that nothing got wet during what is the rainy season. As for the alleged B&E man, he was nabbed (still bleeding) while sleeping off a bender in a Darwin bus stop. All's well that ends well? Perhaps.

The reason six of these works are described as priceless is that they were created in an extremely small window of time Read more...

Wouldn't you get a nice warm tingly feeling if, while you had some valuation people poking through your odds and ends, one of them turned pale and whispered "Oh. My. God."? This is the scene I imagine happened recently at a private house in England when a long-lost Jean-Antoine Watteau masterpiece reared its (estimated) £3-5 million head. The aptly-named La Surprise (ca. 1718) seemingly popped up out of nowhere after the Art World hadn't seen it for nearly 160 years. It was thought to be gone for good, though HM Elizabeth II holds a copy in the Royal Collection.

Here is a large digital image of the newly-discovered Real Deal. This scene represents the short-lived (1684-1721) Watteau at the peak of his craft. In it we see a musician taking five and tuning what looks to be an 18th-century 5-course guitar, while next to him a couple is sharing an enormously passionate kiss. Well, either that or the woman has a blocked airway and the young swain is administering Breath of Life first aid--this, too, would certainly constitute a "Surprise." And of course it wouldn't be truly Rococo if there wasn't a small, semi-interested dog somewhere in the picture (here it is nearly hidden towards the lower right corner, temporarily crouching and not frisking through the scene).

Turns out that this painting had been passed down for generations in the same family that acquired it via a probated bequest in 1848. The catch here is that they weren't aware of what, exactly, they had. I'm sure they do now, and equally sure they are wondering how high the bidding will go during the July 8 Old Master & British Pictures evening sale at Christie's King Street, London location.

Image credit:

Jean-Antoine Watteau (French, 1684-1721)
La Surprise, ca. 1718
Oil on panel
14 1/2 x 11 1/2 in. (36.3 x 28.2 cm.)
© Christie's Images Limited