French Museum Discovers More Than Half Its Collection Is Fake

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A visitor looks at painting by French painter Etienne Terrus at the museum dedicated to the artist, in Elne(Elna). Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

PARIS — One painting included a castle tower that had been built in the late 1950s. But the artist who supposedly painted it, Étienne Terrus, died in 1922.

On another canvas, a light touch with a glove was enough to wipe away what had appeared to be Terrus’s signature, revealing another painter’s name.

These are the most flagrant examples of the disconcerting discovery made by a small art museum in the South of France: More than half of the works in its collection were fakes... Read More

 

Jeff Koons Plagiarised French Photographer

Koons’s one metre-tall work, part of his Banality series, shows a naked boy offering a bouquet of flowers to a naked girl with flowers strewn around the children’s feet.

Koons’s one metre-tall work, part of his Banality series, shows a naked boy offering a bouquet of flowers to a naked girl with flowers strewn around the children’s feet.

"Court rules American artist copied a 1975 postcard by Jean-François Bauret for his 1988 sculpture of two children". Read the full article at The Guardian

The judges decided the work, a porcelain sculpture of two naked children produced in 1988, had been copied from a 1975 postcard picture taken by photographer Jean-François Bauret called Enfants.

Koons’s limited company, Jeff Koons LLC, and the Pompidou Centre in were ordered to pay the late photographer’s family €40,000 (£35,000), half of which is intended to cover their legal fees."

Koons’s firm will also have to pay a further €4,000 for having used a picture of the sculpture on his website.

 

Plein Air

Artist Hank Schmidt in der Beek and photographer Fabian Schubert offer a hilarious take on classic outdoor painting. In their collaboration, Und im Sommer tu ich malen (“And in the Summer, I do paint”), Schubert photographs in der Beek at various locations famously captured by artists like Cézanne and Monet. However, rather than focusing on the scenic landscape around him, in der Beek is seen painting the pattern of his shirt.

As in der Beek explains his thought process: “Confronted with the immenseness of the mountains and the littleness of my canvasses, I decided to paint what’s nearest to me instead of what’s afield and giant.” see all

The Factory of Fakes

How a workshop uses digital technology to craft perfect copies of imperilled art – The New Yorker

The Egyptian painters who decorated King Tut’s burial chamber had to work quickly—the pharaoh died unexpectedly, at about the age of nineteen, and proper preparations had not been made. Plaster was applied to lumpy limestone walls. On the chamber’s western wall, twelve baboons with an identical design are arrayed in a grid, and various slip-ups suggest haste: one of the baboons is missing a black outline around its penis. When the entrance to the chamber was sealed, some thirty-five hundred years ago, the baboons, along with the gods and goddesses depicted in other panels, were expected to maintain their poses for eternity. This wasn’t an entirely naïve hope. Tutankhamun was interred in the Valley of the Kings, the vast network of tombs in the hills outside Luxor, four hundred miles south of Cairo. The air in the valley is bone-dry, and pigment applied to a plastered wall in a lightless, undisturbed chamber should decay little over the centuries. When the British archeologist Howard Carter unsealed the burial vault, in 1923, turning the obscure Tutankhamun into the modern icon of ancient Egypt, the yellow walls remained dazzlingly intact. The Egyptians had made only one mistake: they had closed the tomb before the paint, or Tut’s mummy, had dried, and bacteria had fed on the moisture, imposing a leopard pattern of brown dots on the yellow background. The room is known as the House of Gold.

Since then, tens of millions of tourists have crowded inside the living-room-size chamber, exuding a swampy mist of breath and sweat, which has caused the plaster to expand and contract. Bahaa AbdelGaber, an Egyptian antiquities official, told me recently that the temperature inside the Luxor tombs sometimes exceeds a hundred and twenty degrees. “Oh, the smell on a busy day!” he said.  Continue reading...

Self-fulfillment Through the Creation and Appreciation of Beautiful Objects

Makerbot Replicator

Makerbot Replicator

...The American Arts and Crafts movement... was concerned with promoting good taste and self-fulfillment through the creation and the appreciation of beautiful objects...

...(After a time...) the Arts and Crafts movement no longer represented a radical alternative to the alienated labor of the factories. Instead, it provided yet another therapeutic escape from it, turning into a “revivifying hobby for the affluent.” ...“The craft impulse has become dispersed in millions of do-it-yourself projects and basement workshops, where men and women have sought the wholeness, the autonomy, and the joy they cannot find on the job or in domestic drudgery.”

Read more :   Making It, Evgeny Morozov, The New Yorker, Jan 2014 | Posted by Daniell