A visitor to the new Clyfford Still Museum in Denver defaced a painting worth $30-40 million. It’s not clear what her motives were, but she punched, scratched, leaned on, and attempted to urinate on (!?) 1957-J-No. 2 , seen at left. Okay, she was drunk. In the middle of the afternoon. In a museum?? Via…
An engineering professor from the University of Southern California has lead a multinational group charged with saving Leonardo’s iconic fresco The Last Supper. One problem maintaining the fresco is the way it was painted: directly on a dry wall, which caused it to begin deteriorating almost immediately. Subsequent restorations haven’t helped the matter. However, the…
UC Berkeley announced a new online lecture series by Professor Emeritus James Cahill. The series, A Pure and Remote View: Visualizing Early Chinese Landscape Painting, consists of videotaped introductions with high resolution images and offers “the first comprehensive narrative and unparalleled view of one of the world’s longest and most continuous pictorial art traditions.” The…
A first look at the IRR (infrared reflectography) analysis of the Ghent Altarpiece is now available. The entire altarpiece has been photographed using the IRR technique as a way to study its underdrawings and to determine its different phases and contributors. It was initiated as part of an urgent conservation treatment in 2010. Twenty of…
American artist Cy Twombly, a long-standing figure in modern art, has died in Rome at age 83 after a battle with cancer. Twombly is known for creating paintings that combined elements of drawing and writing with gestural abstraction. via LA Times
The BBC, in partnership with the Public Catalogue Foundation and public museums and collections, has launched the website Your Paintings, which “aims to show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and where to see them for real.” The site is searchable by artist last name and subject matter.…