Unsolved Mysteries: The Death of Caravaggio

PORTO ERCOLE, ITALY — What killed Italian Baroque master Caravaggio? Nobody knows for sure, but new DNA research may soon solve this real life unsolved mystery. 

Popular theories speculated that Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was assassinated for religious reasons or collapsed from malaria on a deserted Tuscan beach. But in 2001, an Italian researcher found the artist's death certificate indicating that he actually died in a hospital. Working with the latter theory, a team of Italian anthropologists hopes to determine the true cause of death - if they can locate the painter's remains.

Assuming Caravaggio died in the hospital, his body was most likely buried in the San Sebastiano cemetery. In 1956, the San Sebastiano bodies were moved to a nearby town of Porto Ercole, where scientists will have to exhume the remains of up to 40 people to find Caravaggio. Since the artist died childless, "We will check the DNA extracted from the bones and teeth of possible matches against that of the painter's male descendents," explained Professor Giorgio Gruppioni, who will head the excavation team.

Caravaggio will be the toast of Rome next year, as a major exhibition of his paintings is being organized to commemorate the 400th anniversary of his death.

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Read More - DNA Tests Could Solve Mystery of Caravaggio Death | Reuters
[Image: Chalk portrait of Caravaggio by Ottavio Leoni (ca. 1621). Courtesy: Wikipedia.]

Unsolved Mysteries: The Death of Caravaggio

Underdog Painter Wins the Prestigious Turner Prize

LONDON — Against all odds and in his last year of eligibility, 49-year-old Glasgow-based artist Richard Wright has been awarded the 2009 Turner Prize.

Organized by the Tate gallery, the annual Turner Prize is presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50. The award is named after famed landscape artist J. M. W. Turner and was established in 1984 to celebrate new developments in contemporary art.

In years past, the Turner Prize has been awarded to conceptual artists working in "innovative" media, such as video art, installation art and unconventional sculpture. So it was a shock to some - especially bookies - when a painter, Richard Wright, was announced as the $41,000 prize winner on Monday night.

But Richard Wright is no ordinary painter.

Wright's entry for the Turner Prize exhibition is a large gold-leaf mural that will be painted over and destroyed once the show at Tate Britain closes in January. "I like the idea of there being nothing left when I'm gone," said Wright, who deliberately painted fresco-style directly onto the gallery wall. "I'm interested in the fragility of the moment," he said. "I hope the work will live on in the memories of the people who saw it."

The three other shortlisted candidates - Enrico David, Roger Hiorns and Lucy Skaer - will each receive $8,000.

 

Watch as Adrian Searle, art critic for The Guardian, tours the Turner Prize exhibition and discusses the finalists' entries:

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Read More - Artist Richard Wright Strikes Gold As Winner of This Year's Turner Prize | The Guardian 

[Images: Top - Richard Wright, "No Title" (2009). | Bottom (left to right) - Lucy Skaer, "Black Alphabet" (2009). Roger Hiorns, "Untitled" work made from metal dust from an atomized passenger jet engine  (2009). Enrico David, ""Absuction Cardigan" detail (2009).]

Underdog Painter Wins the Prestigious Turner Prize

Art Basel Miami Beach: Comfy Shoes Required

MIAMI BEACH — An estimated 40,000 art enthusiasts, art collectors, artists, dealers, curators and critics will attend the eighth annual Art Basel Miami Beach, America's preeminent contemporary art fair. From December 3-6, the fair, held at Miami Beach Convention Center, will offer contemporary art and rare museum-caliber artworks.

Art Basel Miami Beach is the younger sister of Art Basel Switzerland, held annually in June since 1970.

This year's Art Basel Miami Beach boasts itself as bigger and better - 20% more exhibition space, extra lounge areas, wider aisles and bigger stands - so you'll want to wear comfy shoes in order to see it all. Exclusive selections of more than 250 leading art galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa will exhibit 20th and 21st-century artworks by over 2,000 artists. Visitors will also experience an exciting program of special exhibitions, parties and crossover events featuring music, film, architecture and design.

In the city known for its all-night parties, Art Basel Miami Beach always attracts its share of celebrities. So far, early sightings include Lenny Kravitz, Sylvester Stallone, Calvin Klein, Naomi Campbell and John McEnroe. Stallone, who paints when he's not busy acting, unveiled a collection of his artwork at the fair. "I’m not just painting for painting’s sake. I want to be truthful," said Stallone, who reportedly already sold two paintings for $40,000 and $50,000.

Are these early sales a good sign? Tough economic times have caused most art collectors to scale back on their spending, but fair organizers remain optimistic. “What we are seeing, and what we saw at other shows in the fall, is that there is definitely a market for high quality art,” said Art Basel co-director Marc Spiegler.

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Art Basel Miami (December 3-6, 2009) | Website
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[Images: Top - Olaf Breuning, "Colors" (2009), Metro Pictures, New York. | Bottom - (Row 1, Left) Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin. (Row 1, Right) James Cohan Gallery, New York. (Row 2, Left) Niels Borch Jensen Editions & Gallery, Berlin. (Row 2, Right) Mona Hatoum, "Undercurrent (red)" (2008), Galleria Continua, San Gimignano.]

Art Basel Miami Beach: Comfy Shoes Required

Munch Art Heist Was Well-Planned, Oslo Police Say

OSLO, NORWAY — Perhaps it's the miserable, tortuous scenes in the artwork of Edvard Munch that makes it attractive to the criminal element. The Symbolist painter's most famous agony-laden image, The Scream, was stolen on the same day as the opening ceremony of the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics. In 2004, another version of The Scream and the Madonna were both taken from Oslo's Munch Museum. And on Thursday, a man smashed the window of the Nyborg Kunst art gallery in Oslo and snatched Edvard Munch's Historien.

Historien (Norwegian for history), is a rare lithograph, measuring approximately 2x3 ft and estimated to be worth $355,000. Though several copies of the work exist, the stolen piece was hand-embellished by Edvard Munch, making it unique and quite valuable.

Norway's most popular artist, Edvard Munch was a major influence on the development of the early twentieth-century's Expressionist movement. Rather than depicting physical reality in his art, Munch concentrated on illustrating raw emotions like fear, misery and death.

Authorities have already recovered the thief's vehicle, reported stolen 10 days prior to the Munch heist. "This leads us to believe it was a well planned robbery," said John Roger Lund, head of the organized crime unit for Oslo police.

The artworks stolen in 1994 and 2004 were later recovered. Police are hoping for a similar outcome in this case.

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Read More - Munch Artwork Stolen from Oslo Gallery | AFP

[Photo: A version of Edvard Munch's Historien, 1912-1913.]

Munch Art Heist Was Well-Planned, Oslo Police Say

Emerging Artist Wins Big in Temple University Art Competition

PHILADELPHIA -- Doesn't this October seem to be the month of art competitions offering hefty cash rewards? First there was ArtPrize in Grand Rapids. And this week, the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Pennsylvania, named a winner in the world's largest juried visual art prize granted by a university.

28-year-old painter/sculptor/filmmaker and Philadelphian, Ryan Trecartin, was awarded $150,000 cash in the first annual Wolgin International Competition in the Fine Arts. Trecartin won for his 50-minute video entitled Sibling Topics (Section A). "I'm completely honored. This is going to change my life and my practice," remarked Trecartin at Thursday night's award ceremony.

The Wolgin Competition was endowed by Philadelphia real estate investor, Jack Wolgin. 20 competitors were chosen by an advisory board seeking to find "an emerging artist whose work transcends traditional boundaries and exemplifies the highest level of artistic excellence."

Trecartin, however, doesn't exactly personify an "emerging" artist, having exhibited at the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), Saatchi Gallery (London) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York). The other two finalists, Sanford Biggers and Michael Rakowitz, have similarly impressive curricula vitae. Perhaps contest organizers should redefine their criteria/mission statement before next year's competition.

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[Read More - Philadelphia Artist Takes First Wolgin Prize | Philadelphia Inquirer]

Emerging Artist Wins Big in Temple University Art Competition

American Feminist Artist Nancy Spero (1926-2009)

"I have come to the conclusion that the art world has to join us, women artists, not we join it. When women are in leadership roles and gain rewards and recognition, then perhaps 'we' (women and men) can all work together in art world actions." ~Nancy Spero

NEW YORK — Figurative artist Nancy Spero died of respiratory complications on Sunday. She was 83. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Spero and her husband of 53 years, painter Leon Golub, lived together in New York City until his death in 2004. The couple met while studying at the Art Institute of Chicago.

An active feminist, Spero's focus was primarily the representation of women from various cultures throughout history. Her works combine drawing, painting, collage and printmaking techniques to reflect her strong ideals. The artist has exhibited at prominent institutions such as New York's Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, and a retrospective of her work is scheduled at the Centre Pompidou in Paris next year.

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[Read more - Nancy Spero, Artist of Feminism, Is Dead at 83 - Obituary | New York Times]

American Feminist Artist Nancy Spero (1926-2009)

The Painter of Black and Light: Soulages at the Pompidou

"Painting is a play of opacities and transparencies."  ~Pierre Soulages

PARIS -- The Centre Pompidou is putting on a major retrospective to celebrate the work of an artist who the museum calls, "the greatest painter on the current French scene." Approaching his 90th birthday, Pierre Soulages, nicknamed the "painter of black and light," is recognized as a major figure in the genre of abstract art.

Following a National Museum of Modern Art show in 1967, the Centre Pompidou held its first large scale exhibition of Pierre Soulages in 1979. This autumn's show looks back at over 60 years of painting and offers a new reading of the artist's oeuvre, with emphasis on more recent developments in his work.

Soulages brings together over a hundred major works dating from 1946 to the present day, from the striking walnut stain works executed between 1947 and 1949 to the paintings of recent years. The collection displays the dynamism and diversity of the artist's constantly evolving approach. Most of the paintings are being shown for the first time.

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Soulages (Oct. 14 - March 8, 2010) @ Centre Pompidou | Website

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The Painter of Black and Light: Soulages at the Pompidou

19K Portrait Is a Leonardo da Vinci Worth Millions, Fingerprints Show

In 1998, Christie's art auction house sold a $19,000 drawing to New York dealer Kate Ganz. Catalogued simply as “German, early 19th century,” Young Girl in Profile in Renaissance Dress, (a 13x9" portrait, in chalk, pen and ink on vellum, mounted on an oak board), was purchased by Canadian-born Peter Silverman in 2007. Silverman decided to do some sleuthing into the provenance of his newly-collected, unattributed work of art. His curiosity just may have paid off.

LONDON /TimesOnline/ -- The ghost of a fingerprint in the top left corner of an obscure portrait appears to have confirmed one of the most extraordinary art discoveries. A growing number of leading art experts agree that it is almost certainly by Leonardo da Vinci and worth about £100 million.

Carbon dating and infra-red analysis of the artist’s technique are consistent with such a conclusion, but the most compelling evidence is that fragment of a fingerprint. Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, found it while examining images captured by the revolutionary multispectral camera from the Lumière Technology company.

The fingerprint corresponds to the tip of the index or middle finger, and is “highly comparable” to one on Leonardo’s St. Jerome in the Vatican. Importantly, St. Jerome is an early work from a time when Leonardo was not known to have employed assistants, making it likely that it is his fingerprint.

Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford, is convinced and recently completed a book about the find (as yet unpublished). He said that his first reaction was that “it sounded too good to be true — after 40 years in the business, I thought I’d seen it all”. But gradually, “all the bits fell into place.”

If it is by Leonardo, it would be the only known work by the artist on vellum although Professor Kemp points out that Leonardo asked the French court painter Jean Perréal about the technique of using coloured chalks on vellum in 1494.

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[Read More -  Unrecognized Leonardo da Vinci Portrait Revealed By His Fingerprint | TimesOnline]

19K Portrait Is a Leonardo da Vinci Worth Millions, Fingerprints Show

Editions with Additions: Working Proofs by Jasper Johns at the National Gallery of Art

"An aspect always of interest to me is to develop an idea or an image and execute it in different ways to determine what its meaning could be." ~Jasper Johns

The National Gallery of Art has acquired the largest institutional repository, over 1,700 proofs, by American contemporary artist Jasper Johns. A new exhibit at the museum showcases a selection of this acquisition. 

Johns is known for incorporating pop culture icons and symbols such as the American flag into his paintings. Though simplistic and familiar, whether or not there is a significance to the artist's execution of the imagery  is subject to interpretation. “There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists,” says Johns, who remains fairly elusive when asked to comment on his work.

WASHINGTON, DC /NGA/ — The prints of Jasper Johns (b. 1930) are heralded for their beauty as well as their conceptual and psychological complexity. A group of the artist's "working proofs" — prints pulled during the working process on which Johns made drawn and painted additions — will be showcased as independent works of art for the first time in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art.  

Editions with Additions: Working Proofs by Jasper Johns includes approximately 45 proofs for lithographs, etchings, and screenprints that the artist expanded in a range of media, including pastel, ink, and paint. The works of art are installed in two galleries. The first features works from the 1960s and 1970s, highlighting motifs associated with Johns' art throughout his career, such as the alphabet, targets, and body parts. The second gallery introduces complex compositions from the 1980s and 1990s, among them autobiographical references such as family photographs and art objects owned by the artist

This extraordinary body of work, which incorporate a range of media that includes graphite, pastel, ink, and watercolor, has been created and carefully annotated by Johns over four decades.

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Editions with Additions: Working Proofs by Jasper Johns (Oct. 11, 2009 – April 4, 2010)

National Gallery of Art | Website

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Editions with Additions: Working Proofs by Jasper Johns at the National Gallery of Art

Van Gogh Letters Exhibit a Method Behind the Madness

"There are so many people, especially  among our pals, who imagine that words are nothing. On the contrary, don’t you think, it’s as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint a thing."

~Vincent van Gogh to Emile Bernard (April 19, 1888)

The Dutch Post-Impressionist painter, Vincent van Gogh, was largely unknown during his lifetime but is well-regarded today as one of history's greatest painters and contributors to the foundations of modern art. As famous for works like The Starry Night, as for his suffering from mental illness (i.e. that legendary ear-cutting incident), a new exhibition of the artist's letters demonstrates the method behind the madness.

AMSTERDAM /Van Gogh Museum/ -- Vincent van Gogh's letters take center stage in the exhibition Van Gogh's letters: The artist speaks. More than 120 original letters are on show alongside the works that Van Gogh was writing about. These important documents have seldom or never been shown to the public due to their extreme fragility and sensitivity to light.

The combination of more than 300 works from the museum's own rich collection, including paintings, drawings, letters and letter sketches, offers a penetrating and comprehensive insight into Van Gogh as letter writer and as artist.

Van Gogh's correspondence has a special bearing on his art because of the sketches of his own work that he included in his letters. These sketches served no artistic purpose but were made with the sole intention of showing Theo and his other correspondents what the paintings or drawings he was working on or had completed actually looked like. Visitors are able to view a large number of letter sketches and enjoy the unique opportunity of being able to compare them with the paintings and drawings on which they are based.

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Van Gogh's Letters: The Artist Speaks (Oct. 9, 2009 - Jan. 3, 2010) 
Van Gogh Museum | Website
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Van Gogh Letters Exhibit a Method Behind the Madness

Winner Chosen in the American Idol of Art Contests

What is it like to be a starving artist/surfing-enthusiast one day, and $250,000 richer the next? For the newly-crowned winner of ArtPrize, the art contest hailed as the "American Idol" of the art world, that is exactly the scenario. But this competition didn't have Simon, Paula or Randy as judges. Votes were cast by the general public - and some say the unqualified art critics may have gotten it wrong.

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN /NYTimes.com/ — Ran Ortner, a painter from Brooklyn, was named the grand-prize winner Thursday night in the ArtPrize, a public competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Mr. Ortner’s work, Open Water No. 24, received the highest number of votes among 10 finalists on display across Grand Rapids, a city of 200,000 in western Michigan. He will receive $250,000. In all, the finalists shared $449,000 in awards.

The 16-day competition, created by the web entrepreneur Rick DeVos, ended Wednesday night. It took place at 159 venues, with more than 1,200 artists participating. More than 334,000 votes were cast in the competition, open to anyone who registered in person at sites around the city. An initial round of voting ended last week, in which the top 10 were selected.

Open Water No. 24, a three-panel depiction of deep blue waves, was the only two-dimensional work to rank in the top 10. Second prize, worth $100,000, went to Tracy Van Duinen of Chicago, for Imagine That, a colorful mosaic installed on the front wall of the Grand Rapids Children’s Museum. The third prize of $50,000 went to Eric Daigh, of Traverse City, Michigan, for Portraits, a series of three pictures created from pushpins.

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[Read More - Michigan Art Prize Goes to Brooklyn Painter | NYTimes.com]

Winner Chosen in the American Idol of Art Contests