There was a little orchestrated flurry of drama here at the Prado a few sweltering days ago when the museum staged a news conference to announce what was hardly news: that “Colossus,” the famous, much reproduced Goya painting of a giant terrifying a landscape, may not be a Goya after all. Experts had been questioning its authorship for years. Expert or not, anybody who bothered to look closely at the picture and not just glance at Goya’s name on the label next to it, might have felt doubts.

Visitors at the Prado Museum in Madrid in front of “The Third of May, 1808″ and “The Second of May, 1808.”

The museum suggested that two initials, A. J., in the lower left corner of the picture, which have always been right there in plain sight but somehow overlooked, may belong to Asensio Juli, a Goya associate. On a stroll through the galleries the other afternoon, Manuela Mena, a longtime curator at the Prado, shook her head at all the badly drawn animals in the landscape. The giant, too, makes you wonder how anyone like Goya — who, as the art critic John Berger once wrote, knew the appearances of things “in the very movement of his fingers and wrist” — could have painted such a clumsy figure.
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Works by Francis Bacon have been big sellers at auction recently, and Christie’s sale of postwar and contemporary art here on Monday was no different. Four tenacious bidders vied for his “Three Studies for Self-Portrait” from 1975 in what became the evening’s longest bidding war, with two would-be buyers on the phone still running up the price, even as it passed $30 million. The final tally was $34.4 million.

It wasn’t the only big seller among the 58 lots offered on Monday — sales totaled $171.8 million — in an auction that drew collectors and dealers from around the world to the start of the second week of sales here. Jeff Koons’s monumental sculpture “Balloon Flower (Magenta)” drew a hammer price of about $23 million, which was about equal to its estimate, but with the buyer’s premium reached $25.7 million, including Christie’s fees. The final number, while a record for this artist at auction, had been expected to go even higher.
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“I’M in Hollywood,” Salvador Dalí wrote in a postcard to André Breton in 1937, “where I’ve made contact with the three American surrealists, Harpo Marx, Disney and Cecil B. DeMille.”

“One always more or less believes to have ‘dreamed’ it when one recalls Claudette Colbert bathing in a pool filled with asses’ milk at the beginning of DeMille’s ‘Sign of the Cross,’ ” he wrote of the heavy-breathing 1932 biblical epic, with its gladiators, Christian-devouring crocodiles and other Dalí-esque touches. (The painter later met DeMille and is said to have prostrated himself at the director’s feet.)
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A major new work of temporary public art by internationally acclaimed artist Olafur Eliasson, The New York City Waterfalls, will be on display in New York City from June 26 to October 13, 2008. Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, the project consists of four monumental, man-made waterfalls installed for three months at four sites along the shores of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Governors Island: one by the Brooklyn anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge, one between Piers 4 and 5 in Brooklyn, one in Lower Manhattan at Pier 35, and one on the north shore of Governors Island. The 90 to 120-foot tall installations, which have been designed to protect water quality and aquatic life, will operate from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week, and will be lit after sunset, adding a striking element to New York City’s iconic skyline. The Economic Development Corporation (EDC) estimates that the Waterfalls, funded with private support raised by the Public Art Fund, will contribute $55 million to the City’s economy.

The New York City Waterfalls.
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Christie’s in London sold Claude Monet’s “‘Le bassin aux nympheas” for £40,921,250 / $80,451,178 / €51,683,539

Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale took place this evening (24 June 2008) and realised £144,440,500 / $283,970,023 / €182,428,352 - the highest ever total for an art auction held in Europe. The top lot of the auction was Le bassin aux nymphéas, a masterpiece painting by Claude Monet which realised £40,921,250 / $80,451,178 / €51,683,539, a world record price for the artist at auction. 34 works of art sold for over £1 million (44 for over $1 million), and buyer activity at the auction (by lot) was 62% Europe including United Kingdom, 34% Americas, 3% Asia and 1% other. The auction saw a total of 8 artist records established, including for Claude Monet, Henry Moore and Natalia Goncharova.
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Edward Steichen is one of the key figures in the history of photography. Beginning as a leading exponent of the 19th-century romantic movement called Pictorialism, Steichen metamorphosed rapidly into one of the leading lights of modernism. For more than half a century he occupied centre stage as the most famous living photographer, the medium’s first household name. However, until now Steichen, — a Luxembourger by birth — has never been the subject of a significant retrospective in Europe.

As a photographer of great renown in both amateur and professional circles, an editor, curator, horticulturalist, entrepreneur, promoter, and showman, Steichen’s reach was extraordinary. His picture-making interests and enthusiasms were extremely diverse: portraiture, the nude, flower photography, fashion, dance, theatre, still life, landscape and nature. He was one of the first to bridge the gap between creative photography and editorial, illustrational, and other applied usages of the medium.
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artdaily Forty-six powerful works by internationally acclaimed sculptor Martin Puryear (b. 1941) will be on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in the artist’s first retrospective in the United States in more than a decade. Martin Puryear includes sculptures dating from 1976 to the present, including one monumental work created especially for the exhibition tour. On view June 22 through September 28, 2008, the exhibition is the first in the Gallery’s history to be installed in both the West and East Buildings.

“It is a particular joy to present an exhibition celebrating Martin Puryear’s extraordinary oeuvre here in his hometown. The elegance of the National Gallery’s two buildings, offering both classical and modern architectural settings, highlights the impressive scale of many of the sculptures while allowing our visitors to focus their attention on the handmade aspects of Puryear’s art,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art.
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