As those of you interested in such matters surely know by now, Christie’s London sale of Old Masters and 19th Century Art, December 8, will feature the drawing by Raphael excerpted above. Estimated to fetch £12-16, it will easily break the record for most expensive drawing ever, jointly held by pieces from Michelangelo and Leonardo,…
Obama’s career up to now, lucky as it was, had been wanting in singular achievements for which he alone was responsible. His experience seems not to have taught him the law of natural selection in politics by which majorities are put together out of remainders. Any act that achieves something concrete will leave small multitudes…
Just a short update on that gorgeous drawing, which is gaining recognition as a Leonardo at the moment, and which I wrote about briefly earlier this year. If nothing else, it gives me an excuse once again to run a picture here. Apparently, a forensic art analyst, Peter Paul Biro, has now found a fingerprint…
OK, so this is one of those half-baked posts that are the bread-and-butter of most blogs, but I just cannot believe that there’s even a controversy over the miraculous appearance a few years ago in a gallery in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, of five cases of deeply personal, never-before-seen work by Frida Kahlo. The…
Den uforlignelige Jens Thegler udstiller en række af sine seneste malerier på Galleri Udengaard i Ã…rhus fra og med i morgen, fredag d. 25, hvor der er fernisering mellem 16.00-18.00, til 31 oktober. Det skal ses!
I was excited to learn of, and especially to see, the spectacular results the recent cleaning of a Spanish 17th-century portrait at the Metropolitan Museum have yielded. Hidden under a thick, dull varnish for ages, the picture has long been taken to be by a follower of Velázquez, but has now been upgraded to fully…
I should have noted this before, but at the moment a small painting by Titian, The Triumph of Love, showing Cupid surfing the back of a lion, is on view at the National Gallery in London. Although the painting has been known for a long time, it has only recently emerged from the private collection…
Yesterday saw the publication of the first four volume of a lavish, projected five-volume monographic work on the great Danish Renaissance printmaker and draughtsman Melchior Lorck (c. 1526/27-after 1583), published by the Royal Library and high end publisher Vandkunsten. Not only was Lorck a highly accomplished printmaker, he was also a wandering spirit and, crucially,…
One of the Bunker’s favorite young(ish) cartoonists, Anders Nilsen, has started an art auction to support the current efforts by the US Government to reform the country’s health care system in favor of the universal scheme the country should have had a long time ago. The prospect of these vitally important measures crashing a burning…
This Friday, the 28th, one of Copenhagen’s finest small book/art stores CMYKkld hosts a reception for the release of the artist’s anthology Short Stories from Hurricane Publishing, one of Copenhagen’s finest small art publishers. Also, the store has now expanded its selection of original artist’s prints to include poster-sized formats. There’ll be live music and…
Jeez, talk about sleeping on the blog — I just found out, from Alex Holden, that original New York graffiti legend Iz the Wiz died two weeks ago. It’s a bit late, but I just wanted to pay my respects to one of the great early stylists of subway art and one of the most…
The picks of the week from around the web. London Review of Books: “The Rome-Tehran Axis”. In his typical perambulatory fashion — segueing from Iran to Berlusconi to Kung Fu Panda — celebrity philosopher Slavoj Žižek makes a somewhat off-the-cuff, but nevertheless compelling and disturbing argument about the current evolution of Western democracy. Comics Comics:…
For ten years now, my man Lars has run the graffiti project at the Roskilde Festival — every year, they gather writers from around the world, who come at their own expense to decorate the walls and barriers around the festival area and parts of the camping grounds, and the quality of the work has…
The English illustrator, painter and comics artist Martin Vaughn-James passed away last week (obits here and here). Perhaps this will be an occasion for comics world to take greater note of this significant artist and innovator in the medium. Owing to his influences and probably especially the fact that he lived in Brussels for the…
The picks of the week from around the web. New York Times: Errol Morris — “Bamboozling Ourselves”. Famously, the picture above was sold to Göring as a Vermeer at an astronomical sum in 1943. Hard as it is to believe, it had prominent experts fooled. Read the story behind one of the most high-profile fine…