A start-up gallery along Toronto’s beachfront, defying the global credit crisis, is asking $50 million for a disputed Jackson Pollock painting bought for $5 at a California thrift shop in 1992.
Teri Horton, a retired U.S. truck driver, bought the piece as a joke for a depressed friend before realizing it may be the work of one of America’s most famous artists. After failing to find a U.S. gallery or auction house willing to sell it, she hooked up with the Gallery Delisle in Toronto.
“This is a great chance for Canada”, gallery owner Michelle Delisle said. “There’s no question this is a Pollock. It’s a class thing - if Teri were a Harvard grad or a blue blood, the painting would have found its way into Sotheby’s or a museum already”.
The Pollock sale comes as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression spreads to art. In New York auctions this month at Sotheby’s and Christie’s International, as many as a third of works remained unsold, and prices fell short of estimates.
Christie’s, the biggest auction house, sold $113.6 million of contemporary works on Nov. 12, half its presale low estimate. Almost a third of 75 lots found no buyers in a room that included tennis player John McEnroe, actress Salma Hayek and billionaire Eli Broad. Among the rejects was a self-portrait by Francis Bacon that Christie’s had estimated would sell for about $40 million. (Bloomberg)

A Jackson Pollock painting, bought for $5 in a thrift store, is for sale at a Toronto gallery with an asking price of $50 million US.
The painting, made famous by the 2006 PBS documentary, Who the #$%& is Jackson Pollock, is being exhibited for the first time at Gallery Delisle in east Toronto from Nov. 13-27.
Teri Horton, a 76-year-old retired truck driver, bought the painting in 1992 as a gag gift, not knowing who the painter was at the time. Since the painting, nicknamed Teri’s Find, was authenticated forensically she has refused all American offers and sent it to Canada to find a foreign buyer.(Cbc News)

If the Mad Hatter suddenly acquired taste and culture, he might hang a Jackson Pollock drip painting with a watercolor of a fruit bat and call the match inspired instead of weird.
Such bizarre couplings rule “The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s effusive hats-off tribute to its retiring director of 31 years.
Specialists from the New York institution’s 17 curatorial departments have approached the show with an eclecticism that is as sublime as their task is ridiculous: to mine the 84,000 works acquired during de Montebello’s tenure for just 300 that could adequately represent his character and vision.
Their wildly unpredictable presentation, organized by dates of acquisition, looks like a glorified pawn shop in some galleries and a marvelous cabinet of curiosities in others.
An introductory gallery that puts an early 1990s Lucian Freud painting of an enormous, fleshy male together with a fastidiously carved marble bust of 17th-cenutry Florentine patron Cosimo III de Medici hints at the confounding, centuries-wide leaps of medium and message awaiting viewers in the 11 rooms ahead.
The juxtapositions seem intended to throw even the steadiest viewers off balance, as acknowledged masterpieces compete for attention with the merely fabulous and exceedingly rare.
Early in the show, the young girl in a Vermeer painting gazes calmly at a melancholic 13th-century terracotta figure from Mali with button-like rows of either decorative tattoos or horrible tumors protruding from its curving spine. (Bloomberg)

Most of us remember Dennis Hopper for “Easy Rider,” the ultimate drop-out picture of the sixties, and as Frank Booth, the unhinged sadist in David Lynch’s 1986 “Blue Velvet.”
Between these high points, Hopper lived through a long period of alcoholism, drug addiction and mostly futile attempts to find backers for his projects. “Nobody had more trouble with Hollywood,” said the 72-year-old actor-director at the Cinematheque Francaise on the eve of a retrospective of his work.
The movies are only the backdrop of a show that portrays Hopper not just as one of the founding fathers of the “new Hollywood” outside the major studios. It also pays tribute to Hopper the photographer, painter and art collector.
“In 1963,” he told his Paris audience, “the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts bought its first painting by Jackson Pollock which was promptly denounced by the trustees as communist propaganda. Los Angeles was a cultural backwater then.”
Thanks to Hopper and like-minded artists, we are given to understand, this has changed.
The show includes excerpts of movies by fellow mavericks such as Nicholas Ray, Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola. Most of Hopper’s photos are closely related to his film-making.
When we see him shooting “Colors,” his 1988 movie about Los Angeles’s barrios and slums, he is surrounded by members of the Crips street gang.
Pop-Art Waiter
Although his own paintings tend to be abstract, pop art has clearly influenced him: In front of the Cinematheque stands one of his sculptures — a giant waiter in Mexican garb, complete with sombrero, moustache and a tray full of spicy food.
Hopper the collector is no less catholic in his taste. A graffiti-style painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was all over the place in the 1980s, hangs alongside an assemblage by Robert Rauschenberg and Hopper’s portrait by Julian Schnabel with a halo of broken crockery.
Other artists in the show such as George Herms are little known outside California.
The organizers try to set the movies and artworks in a political context, reminding you of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the civil-rights movement and the sit-ins against the Vietnam War. Still, the result looks more like a fair of anecdotal tidbits than a coherent survey of the “New Hollywood.”
If you leave the show convinced that Hopper is your archetypal Hollywood leftie, you are mistaken. At the news conference, he outed himself as a lifelong Republican who voted for Bush father and son. Next month, however, he will vote for Obama. “It’s time for a change,” he said.
The exhibition “Dennis Hopper & le Nouvel Hollywood,” including two film showings a day, runs through Jan. 19, 2009. For details, go to http://www.cinematheque.fr or call +33-1-7119-3333. (Bloomberg)

The Haunch of Venison in Manhattan, with its exposed brick, blackened steel and skylights, has millions of dollars of abstract expressionist art hanging around every corner of the gallery’s mazelike five rooms.
Christie’s International is using the sleek, 20,000-square - foot space in Midtown to muscle its way into a new business - selling contemporary art in a gallery.
More than 60 paintings, drawings, sculpture and photographs from artists such as Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning are displayed but not for sale. The works are borrowed from museums and private collectors including John McEnroe.
Haunch, in a Rockefeller Center office building around the corner from the Christie’s salesroom, is selling other artworks in private rooms at the gallery.
Unveiling Haunch earlier this month with a not-for-purchase exhibition “seemed an appropriate way to tip our hats and say, We are here” said Haunch’s managing director, Robert Fitzpatrick, the former director of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. (Bloomberg)

If we enter another 1930s-type Depression, art may more likely swing to the Right than the Left…
Still from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia
Fascist fire … a still from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia. Photo: Ronald Grant Archive
If the economic crisis does become this century’s Great Depression, how will art be changed? That seems hard to answer without also considering politics. In the 1930s art was divided between Left and Right, as well as between modernist and realist. It mattered more where you stood than how you painted. Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and other American socialists were influenced by realism and pictorialism and the mural tradition of revolutionary Mexico, but ended up finding their own voices as abstract artists. The realism of Walker Evans’s photographs of rural poverty, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, or in this country George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier makes us think of Depression-era culture as serious, truthful, shorn of illusions - and many might like it if we got more art of that kind now. But hang on.
The Depression was also the era of Salvador Dali’s kitsch surrealism and, more seriously, of fascism and its cultural excesses. The Nazis had their own answer to economic catastrophe. In Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will formerly unemployed Germans march with the shovels they’ve been given to work on autobahn-building. With the Nazis’ corporate solution came art like Riefenstahl’s - irrational, fantastic, disturbingly powerful.
Of course in the 1930s there was another alternative - the USSR. The Communist alternative has however been crushed by history, and is not coming back. Those on the Left who see opportunity here will soon be disabused. Instead, the terror of capitalism in crisis without the alternative of Marxism is that irrational alternatives will flourish. We are more likely to get a new Riefenstahl than a new Walker Evans. (Artsjournal)

In Claude Lefebvre’s 1670 “Portrait of Louis XIV”, the 38-year-old king is decked out in a big curly brown wig, thin upturned moustache, formal military armor decorated with gold fleurs de lys, lace kerchief at his neck and an imperious gaze at the viewer. It helps you understand why there was a revolution in France a century later.
The painting is a highlight of “Spared From the Storm”, an exhibition of 87 works from the New Orleans Museum of Art, now on view at Stanford University in California. (The Louisiana museum is being renovated after flooding by Hurricane Katrina in 2005; the art was saved by the staff.)
The show, a survey of four centuries of European and American works, is perfect for a university, almost an introductory art history course in itself. Standouts range from Giovanni Martinelli’s “Death Comes to the Banquet Table” of 1630 - in which a skeleton rudely interrupts a lavishly costumed wedding party at a table groaning with wine, fruit and a half- eaten tart - to a Jackson Pollock drip painting of 1948.
In between are several impressive portraits, including Elisabeth Louise Vigee-LeBrun’s gigantic 1788 canvas of a seated Marie Antoinette in blue-and-white dress and feather-plumed hat and John Singer Sargent’s 1898 “Portrait of Mrs. Asher B. Wertheimer” pretty regal herself in a lace - and pearl -trimmed ivory gown. (Bloomberg)

The works by American artist Cy Twombly really seem to be loved and sought after by many collectors, curators and museum directors. And in July 2007 a reported fact proved how someone can love excessively his masterpieces. Everyone will remember the scandal raised by Rindy Sam, French artist of Cambogian origins who, while visiting the  Collection Lambert Museum of Avignon, kissed a white canvas by Twombly. A love gesture, an artistic act provoked by the power of art that cost Sam the charge for having “vandalized” a masterpiece worth 2 million dollars.

Article translated by Amritee Mahabir

The Whitney Museum announced a few days ago that it had received a truly generous donation, the biggest ever to be received by the New York Museum. We are talking about 131 million dollars, donated by the cosmetic industry typhoon Leonard A. Lauder through the The American Contemporary Art Foundation that he is president of.