“The Rape of Europa,” which airs on PBS on Nov. 24 at 9 p.m. New York time, has a number of heroes and heroines. My favorite is Maria Altmann.
It took a lifetime, but finally in 2006 the Austrian government — with much lack of grace — returned a few nice paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele that the Nazis had pilfered from her uncle’s Viennese mansion during World War II.
Altogether, Nazi elites stole an estimated million-plus artworks in the strangest melding of extermination and aesthetics the world has ever seen.
“The Rape of Europa” documents how the lurid appetite for art coexisted with an equally powerful urge to torment and destroy.
Klimt’s glittering 1907 portrait of Altmann’s aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, spent the postwar years thrilling crowds at the Austrian State Gallery in the Belvedere. The Austrians sure didn’t want to see her go.
Altmann, born in 1916 and even in her ninth decade a glorious vision in lavender cashmere and pearls, speaks eloquently of their perfidy and her triumph.
Supposedly, her aunt willed her pictures to the Austrian state, a very ambiguous reading of the text and one that ignores the fact that when she wrote her will in 1923, she hardly expected her beloved country to turn into a happy outpost for murderers and thieves. (Bloomberg)

In 1962 Umberto Eco had theorized the concept of “Open work”, which paraphrased in a few words means that any work is “open” to as many interpretations as there are interpreters. A fascinating but rather anarchical theory considering that it expresses a certain relativism in the analysis of a work of art. However, when the matter involves an author like Mark Rothko and a museum like the Tate Modern in London there is little to joke about with respect to aesthetic critics, as the competence and credibility of art specialists is also involved. This is what happened. Two worldwide famous magazines wrote that two popular paintings by Rothko, the great American artist who died suicidal in 1970, exhibited in his retrospective at the Tate, were hung vertically instead of horizontally.
The paintings in question are entitled “Black on Maroon” and they are among Mark Rothko’s most popular works: a series of black stripes on a reddish and ochre background. But the artist had painted them and wanted them to be looked at with the stripes laid out horizontally; instead, the curator of the Tate wanted to hang them with the stripes appearing vertically. The serious thing is that it appears to have been a well-aimed decision rather than a mistake. The curator of the event would have decided that those canvases had a better effect with vertical rather than horizontal stripes, contradicting the US painter’s wish. 

Mark Rothko, the late American painter whose work commands multimillion-pound prices, offered Tate Gallery a gift of 30 paintings which was not accepted because trustees feared he would expect to see them on permanent display.
An investigation into Tate’s archives reveals how the generous 1967 offer included work from the artist’s 1961 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and his mural paintings from 1958. If the Tate had accepted the work, it would most likely be worth $1bn in the current art market.
The Tate’s then director, Norman Reid, who became friends with the artist after visiting his studio in October 1965, eventually accepted nine of the 30 paintings by Rothko, who was known to be particular about where his work was hung. The offer included pieces from his commission in 1958 to create a series of mural paintings for New York’s Four Seasons restaurant. But Rothko pulled out of that project after he deemed the restaurant as “a place where the richest bastards of New York will come to feed and show off”.
The nine works gifted to Tate led to the creation of the gallery’s “Rothko Room”, which is one of the most popular visitor spaces. Tate Modern is running a special exhibition of Rothko’s work, which further illustrates its enduring public appeal.
The investigation by The Art Newspaper also reveals that, according to Reid’s notes, the artist had pledged to donate other works over the years before his suicide in 1970. (The Independent)

In the first semester of 2008 auctions, Francis Bacon was one of the protagonists par excellence.  In London last June, “Study for Heas of George Dyer” executed by the artist from Dublin in 1967 was the highlight at Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale. But “Triptych, 1976” was even more important, realizing in May an extremely important record in the world of art: the canvas, sold by Sotheby’s for 86,281,00 dollars, set the new record for a work of contemporary art, breaking the record of “White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavander on Rose)” sold last year by Sotheby’s New York for 72,84 million dollars.
As a modern Caravaggio, the Irish Francis Bacon has become a true icon of the damned artist. Credit for this goes to a myth fuelled by himself and his life: the contrasts with his father, his journeys in the Thirties, his homosexuality, his tragic loves, his passion for gambling and pubs.

A Lucian Freud portrait of Francis Bacon may fetch up to 7 million pounds ($12.4 million) in a London auction, Christie’s International said today.
The unfinished oil-on-canvas work, one of only two oil portraits Freud painted of his fellow artist, will be offered in the Oct. 19 contemporary-art sale, the auction house said in an e-mailed statement.
Freud started the 14-inch-square portrait in 1956. By the following year, only the face of the planned head-and-shoulders work was completed. Bacon left suddenly, most probably to pursue his lover Peter Lacy in Tangiers, said Christie’s.
“It’s a painting of the most important friendship in 20th- century British art”, said Pilar Ordovas, Christie’s head of contemporary art in London. “Although it’s incomplete, Bacon’s whole face and presence is in the canvas”.
The picture hadn’t been finished because Freud requires his sitter to be present at all times during the painting process, said Ordovas in a telephone interview.
“It’s essential to his working method”, she said. “He thinks the sitter’s presence influences everything around them”.
The work is being offered from a family collection, having been acquired from a London gallery in 1972. It has rarely been seen in public, said Christie’s.
“It’s a striking image”, Stephen Ongpin, a London-based dealer in drawings, said in an interview. “It’s a portrait of one icon by another”. Since February 2007, Ongpin has bought and bid on behalf of an anonymous private collector for several Freud paintings at Sotheby’s and Christie’s auctions in London and New York, he said.
“The unfinished aspect of it appeals to me as a drawings specialist, but I don’t know whether it will to others who want to spend, say, 5 million pounds on a Freud”, he said.
Freud painted Bacon on only two occasions. An earlier completed portrait, dating from 1952, was stolen in 1988 when loaned by the Tate Gallery to a Freud retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. It has never been recovered. Since then, Freud has forbidden color reproduction of the missing painting, said Christies. (Bloomberg)

Until 16th November London’s Tate Gallery will not be simply a museum, but also an original racing circuit put on by English artist Martin Creed. It is not a photographic exhibition nor a film production, and it does not involve manikins or robots in mimic fixity, but rather men in flesh and bone, from every walk of life, recruited by means of a public notice to  sprint at regular intervals and whisk away through the restrained corridors of the London museum. Indeed, the prestigious “track”, every thirty seconds, is beaten by about fifty hundred-metre sprinters running wildly along the 90 metres of perimeter of the Duveen Galleries. Thus, during the spectators’ ecstasy, between a landscape by Turner and the Preraffaellites’ elegance, an actual speed race takes place.

Russian collectors seems to be increasingly aware of the great market potentiality that is developing around the art of their own country. Mindful of this, they are taking part with important pieces in auctions organized by the big international houses. Exactly like Bonhams, which in London on 9^th June organized a very successful auction proposing Russian works and objects of art. The 241 lots auctioned totalled 5.5 million pounds.

According to Evgenia Teslyuk, head of Russian art sales at Bonhams, this is the best time to sell high-quality works in this sector.

Article translated by Amritee Mahabir

Ever since the media and commercial exchanges have amplified the horizon of the art world, which was previously confined within the limits of schools and academies, it gave life to a complex and organised trade system for the diffusion of contemporary art.

Article translated by Amritee Mahabir

It seemed utterly incredible when in 2002 Anthony D’Offay decided to close up shop with his gallery in Dering Street in London. After years of activity the famous English art dealer chose “The Guardian” to give the news of his sensational retirement, declaring that perhaps it was the right moment to leave “I am in excellent health and I will continue to muscle in with whatever is happening in the world of art, offering my support”.