Versailles and Venet

This year’s guest artist at the Palace de Versailles is French painter and sculptor Bernar Venet. His monumental sculptures will be adorning the gardens and framing the palace.

After a very popular year with the art of Japanese super star Takashi Murakami, the museum veers in more concrete and less whimsical direction. Venet’s avant-garde sensibilities in his paintings, installations, performance, gigantic sculptures and even writing have made a lasting mark on the contemporary aesthetic landscape. The exhibition is on view from June 1st through November 1st, 2011.

The stolen Virgin

A 14-th Century panel painting that was stolen from an Italian villa in the 70s was traced to the permanent collection of the J.B. Speed Art Museum in Kentucky. The piece was one of 14 taken from the Italian villa. The Speed Art Museum bought it in 1973 from the Newhouse Galleries in New York for $38,000. The triptych has been attributed to Jacopo del Casentino, who died in 1358. Italian authorities will now decide what will become of the painting.

Other works by Jacopo del Casentino, a fresco painter of sacred images who founded a Company of Painters in Florence in 1349.  A Tattoowall can also recreate any of these exact images.

New Klimt

Look what the latest Tattoowall class produced!

Water Serpents, by Klimt.

Spiderman Behind the Scenes

With  a different kind of hero, Master Plasterer Jean-François Furieri of Iconoplast Designs in Toronto.

This Broadway theatre is located at 213 West 42nd Street in Manhattan and has been called Foxwoods, the Hilton and the Ford Center for the Performing Arts. (At one time it was the Apollo and Lyric Theatres.)

In 2009, Jean-François was called in to set the stage for Broadway’s largest production ever.

Jean-François had come from a large scale restoration job in Toronto and his task in New York was herculean. His team’s mandate was to retain 100% of the historic plaster – stabilize, crate, transport and store until re-installation. They spent three months painstakingly removing monumental plaster ornaments from the Apollo.

The theatre reincorporates key elements from its past lives. Today, patrons visiting the theatre sit under the dome from the Lyric and proscenium arch from the Apollo, and pass through the ornate Lyric facades on 43rd and 42nd Streets.

The proscenium needed to be reconstructed and increased in size. The proscenium arch was cut into 69 sections, the elliptical dome into 34, and the great sail vault over the orchestra pit into nearly 70 parts. A special metal structure had to be created to hold the pieces in place for paint removal.

The pieces were then packaged in crates and transported to storage.

The restoration work took a whole year to be completed, and left the Foxwoods ready for the production of the new musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which was anticipated to open in December 2010. However, problems surrounding the large budget of the show have delayed its opening, now scheduled for June 14, 2011.

The Master of Plaster,  Jean-François Furieri.

The Wounded Angel

This painting, The Wounded Angel, is the most famous by Finnish symbolist painter Hugo Simberg and can be seen along with other of his works at the Didrichsen Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland, during a special exhibit until August 28th. The 1903 painting was voted Finland’s “national painting” by the Ateneum Art Museum in 2006.

When Simberg was commissioned to paint the frescos at Tampere Cathedral in 1905-06, he did a larger version of The Wounded Angel, his favorite painting.

The world’s largest structure

Moscow is moving ahead with the construction of Crystal Island, a 1500 ft. tall multi use structure featuring 900 apartments, 3000 hotel rooms, an international school for 500 students, cinemas, a theater, sports complex and much more. It will house 30,000 residents and it  will contain more floor space than any other structure on Earth.

The £2 billion “city inside a building” was designed by Lord Foster. The surface area of the proposed Crystal Island complex in Moscow is more than double that of the largest current building, and visitors will be able to enjoy panoramic views of Moscow on the viewing platforms located 980 ft. above ground.

Wooden bust by Gaugin sets record

A rare wooden bust by Paul Gauguin has been sold at auction in New York for $11.2 million, setting a record for a sculpture by the French artist. The “Jeune Tahitienne” sculpture dates from Gauguin’s visit to Tahiti between 1890 and 1893, a period from which only a handful of sculptures have survived. Sotheby’s said the previous record price for a Gauguin sculpture was $1.4 million.

The latest auction coincides with the “Gauguin: Maker of Myth” exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It is the first major exhibition of the artist’s career in the United States in about 20 years.

Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved.

Nefertiti

Nefertiti, the wife of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, was the most renowned Great Royal Wife of all 31 Egyptian dynasties. Her bust, found during the excavation of the studio of famous royal sculptor Thutmose, is one of the greatest finds of ancient Egypt.

The bust was discovered in 1912 by German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt, about 275 km south of Cairo in 1912, and it was taken to Germany the following year. It consists of a limestone core covered in layers of stucco of varying thickness. Using computed tomography imaging to study the priceless bust, researchers have uncovered a delicately carved face in the limestone inner core and gained new insights into methods used to create the ancient masterpiece. Thin-section CT was able to provide detailed images of the inner structure in a completely nondestructive manner and showed the limestone core to be not just a mold, but a skillfully rendered work of art.

Egypt has repeatedly asked that the 3,400-year-old bust be returned from Germany, where it is exhibited at the Berlin Museum, but the requests have so far been rejected.

Source: http://www.artknowledgenews.com/

The Creation of Adam

Speaking of frescoes, here’s a famous one. If you follow our blog, you are familiar with the Tattoowall and all that it can do.  We took one of the most iconic images in Western Culture and put it on canvas…

And then embellished it.

This is the piece on canvas during the embellishment process.
Such is the versatility of the Tattoowall. You can capture any part of an image and make it a painting.

Churches or Galleries?

Churches have always been repositories of astounding works of art, but at times they are the works of art themselves.  They can also provide great inspiration for décor, and their frescoes can be reproduced easily today with the Tattoowall.

The gilded cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral

Some churches are famous for their façades and exterior embellishments. The 18^th-century Havana Cathedral is renowned for its beauty. It has been called “music cast into stone.”

Others are revered by the art they contain, the legendary Michelangelo frescos in the Sistine Chapel being the most egregious example.

But even lesser known churches can be veritable galleries of inspiring pieces of art. The Visconti Chapel in Milan, contains frescos of the coats of arms of the House of Visconti (circa 1375) and the Legend of Saint George by an anonymous painter.

And some churches have so much art inside, they become museums. The Vatican Museums boast one of the world’s greatest art collections, all housed in a series of lavishly adorned palaces, apartments, and galleries leading to the Sistine Chapel.

Source: Artnews