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Rick Norsigian unveils the prints made from a stash of negatives he bought in a garage sale that several appraisers say is the work of Ansel Adams. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
A wall painter for the Fresno school district who bought a cache of antique glass-plate photographic negatives at a garage sale 10 years ago laid out his case Tuesday that they were created by Ansel Adams early in his career, offering affirmations from photographic and forensic experts he had hired.
In a Beverly Hills gallery packed with reporters and photographers, Rick Norsigian and the Beverly Hills law firm that is helping him market prints made from the negatives (and promote a documentary about his find) said the negatives of Yosemite, the San Francisco waterfront, and Carmel’s mission and nearby Point Lobos were taken by Adams from 1919 to the 1930s, before he became famous as the visual bard of America’s natural landscape.
Mike Boehm
Los Angeles Times
Green shoots … the new Strata tower in Elephant & Castle, London. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
I am standing on the wind-buffeted tip of the Strata tower, looking out through the blades of what appear to be an enormous propeller, at the London skyline and the green basin beyond. St Paul’s cathedral, across the river, seems close enough to touch. It’s the kind of view, and the kind of heroically stylised building, you would expect to see in some 1930s sci-fi movie: the perfect place for a hero and a villain to have a rooftop showdown.
At 147 metres, the newly opened Strata is London’s tallest residential building. The nine-metre blades I’m standing beneath are housed in one of three wind turbines that crown this new tower soaring above Elephant and Castle, an area of the city not known for flashy penthouses. But Elephant and Castle is undergoing a massive, if slow, transition from a rundown miasma of noisy road intersections, underpasses and vast housing estates into what the Borough of Southwark hopes will be a £1.5bn model of inner-city regeneration.
Jonathan Glancey
Guardian
When the many-headed exhibition extravaganza “Pacific Standard Time” opens in October 2011, some 40 Southern California museums and nonprofit galleries will offer shows focusing in one manner or another on the origins of the art scene here, from 1945 to 1980.
Since the first news conference in 2008, it has been clear that “Pacific Standard Time” is easily the biggest collaboration that Southern California museums have undertaken. Now that collaboration is getting even bigger, thanks to two new initiatives.
The Getty Trust, which has been coordinating and funding the project through its different branches, has confirmed there will be a performance and public art festival scheduled for nine days at the end of January 2012.
Jori Finkel
Los Angeles Times
An anthropomorphic stele of the 4th millennium B.C. shown as part of the ‘Routes of Arabia’ exhibition at the Louvre Museum in Paris. (Photo: Michael Harvey/Musee du Louvre, via European Pressphoto Agency)
The most novel show of the year is now on view at the Louvre. “Routes d’Arabie” (Roads of Arabia) sets off the viewer’s mind dreaming like none other.
The revelations to be found in hundreds of artifacts never before seen outside Saudi Arabia are startling.
Forget about Arabia as a land without figural representation. It was already there in the fourth millennium B.C. In a small village near Ha’il, three sandstone steles were dug up within the last four decades. The geometric stylization of one, a standing man with two straps across his chest and a long dagger with split blade, would have appealed to Western avant-garde sculptors of the 20th century. Another stele represents the bust of a man, arms pressed against his chest, reduced to a nearly rectangular volume. By contrast, the head is extraordinarily expressive with its lips bitterly pressed and one eyebrow slightly raised, as if in puzzlement.
Souren Melikian
New York Times
Snøhetta’s National Opera and Ballet in Oslo, photo by Jens Passoth. Courtesy Snøhetta and SFMOMA.
Can an art museum in this economic climate raise $480 million for an ambitious expansion and endowment campaign without a world famous architect like Frank Gehry or Renzo Piano attached to the project?
SFMOMA has just placed a very big bet that it can, by selecting the critically acclaimed but not so commonly known Oslo-based firm Snøhetta — named after a mountain in Norway — as the architect for its large-scale renovation and expansion. The museum’s board of trustees approved the selection on Wednesday; an official announcement is expected Thursday.
The decision was not a complete surprise, as SFMOMA named Snøhetta in a shortlist released in May of four firms officially under consideration, which also included Adjaye Associates, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and, most established of all, Foster + Partners. But, as SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra admits, Snøhetta is “not terribly well known in our country, and especially not in the West.”
Jori Finkel
Los Angeles Times
A parking lot at Second Street and Grand Avenue across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles is the area where Eli Broad would like to build an art museum. (Bryan Chan / Los Angeles Times)
A potential roadblock to Eli Broad’s plans for a downtown museum housing his contemporary art collection sprang up Thursday while he was en route to securing approval to plant a $100-million facility on publicly owned land.
The commissioners of the city Community Redevelopment Agency OKd Broad’s plan 4-0, but suddenly now vying for consideration is a rival plan to build a 3,000-seat theater and training center for a tradition-steeped Chinese performing arts company on the same parcel at Grand Avenue and 2nd Street. Behind the proposal is Shen Yun Performing Arts, which has brought shows to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Orange County Performing Arts Center and other major venues and says it will stage more than 400 performances this year in 30 countries.
Mike Boehm
Los Angeles Times
Worth every penny? … Glasgow’s Armadillo, housing the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre Glasgow. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
The idea that we have now seen the last of the great, prestige architectural projects of the last 10 years has provoked a strong, if divided response.
The debate started at the weekend when Rab Bennetts, the architect behind the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon, said he feared the UK is sailing into the architectural doldrums. At the same time, though, he conceded that some of the landmark building projects that changed the skyline of our cities in the past 10 years were perhaps excessive, or even gratuitous.
Vanessa Thorpe
Guardian
The martyrdom of St Lawrence in a newly discovered painting thought to be by Caravaggio
Art experts in Rome are analysing what they believe is a previously unknown painting by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio.
As his homeland marked the 400th anniversary of his death this weekend, the Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano published the newly discovered work on its front page. Depicting the martyrdom of St Lawrence, it was found recently among the possessions of the Society of Jesuits in Rome. It shows a semi-naked young man, his mouth open in desperation with one arm stretched out as he leans over flames. If the suspected provenance is confirmed, it would be the first painting by the Baroque genius to emerge since The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew, which went on display two years ago.
Michael Day
Independent
Tasmanian collector David Walsh owns Jenny Saville’s Matrix, 1999 (above), which he describes as “one of the pieces I like most”
Imagine a museum that assaults every sense as you walk through its rooms. A museum where the rotting flesh from one work of art is fed to the mechanical digestive system of another so it can be processed and turned into excrement; where the mutilated bodies of suicide bombers are sculpted in chocolate and the Bible and Torah are displayed with bombs inside them.
Imagine a museum that overturns virtually every accepted notion of institutional practice: an underground museum with no natural light, with a deliberately confusing design so visitors get lost as they wander through its halls, and a museum which, in places, is incredibly noisy and very, very smelly.
This is the vision of David Walsh, mathematician, professional gambler, vineyard and brewery owner, who describes his Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) currently nearing completion outside the Tasmanian capital Hobart, as both an “unmuseum” and a “subversive Disneyland”.
Mona has been under construction for the past three-and-a-half years and, if all goes according to plan, it will open to the public in January free of charge. We recently visited Walsh and were given a rare interview as well as a first look at his new building and the art he has collected to go inside it.
Cristina Ruiz
The Art Newspaper
Christo and his wife and collaborator, Jeanne-Claude, who died in November, with a rendering of “Over the River” in February 2009. (Photo: Dominic Favre/European PressPhoto Agency)
Assessing a work of art using in-depth technical analysis sounds a bit like writing a scholarly treatise about a joke. If you peer inside too deeply, armed with numbers and equations, does “Mona Lisa” still dazzle? And is “A man walks into a bar…” still funny?
But that, in a nutshell, is the question that faces the artist Christo and a giant federal agency called the Bureau of Land Management. On Friday, the bureau issued what may be the first ever draft environmental impact statement purely about art — specifically a project called “Over the River,” which Christo has proposed building along a stretch of the Arkansas River in southern Colorado.
Kirk Johnson
New York Times
