The Acquavella Galleries’ splendid Georges Braque exhibition is a 42-gun salute to this pioneering French Modernist. The first large Braque survey to be staged in New York in more than 20 years, it musters a vigorous if compressed account of more than five decades of art making, with 42 paintings and collages, almost all top-notch. More than half have been borrowed from American and European museums; the rest come from private collections and in several cases have not been on public display in quite some time.

This show means to establish Braque’s importance in a town where Picasso, his flamboyant partner in the development of Cubism, which set so much of 20th-century art in motion, looms very large. How large? The Museum of Modern Art’s Web site places the number of works by Braque in its collection at 31. The number by Picasso (sitting down?) is 1,211. Picasso was inordinately talented and important, but 40 times more so than Braque?

Organized by Dieter Buchhart, an Austrian critic, art historian and independent curator, the Acquavella show rarely lets down its guard. In nearly every effort Braque is at his most elaborate and ambitious, from his slightly over-heated Fauvist efforts of 1906-7 to his opulent still lifes of the 1930s and ’40s and his crowded and shadowy studio interiors of the 1950s. In the show’s middle portion, of course, we see Braque the Cubist.

His collaboration with Picasso began in earnest after he first saw the groundbreaking “Demoiselles d’Avignon” in Picasso’s studio in late 1907. But by then Braque was already alert to the implications of Cézanne’s angled brush strokes and multiple perspectives and the tantalizing way they destabilized painting’s traditional unities of form and space, and therefore time.

Braque would later say that he and Picasso were roped together like mountaineers in their invention of Cubism. Picasso saw things a bit differently, referring to Braque as “ma femme,” or “my wife.” Either way, their intensely close collaboration lasted until the fall of 1914, when Braque enlisted in the French Army early in World War I. They went their separate ways and, like many divorced couples, rarely spoke of each other.

They could not have been more different. Braque’s father was a house painter and decorator who made sure that his son learned the artisanal skills of his trade; Picasso’s was an academic painter who gave him drawing lessons.

Braque was tall, reticent, methodical and quintessentially French, with all that that implies in terms of reason and balance. He dressed in a neat, discreetly dandyish way, was intensely private, remained married to the same woman all his life and worked in the same studio from 1926 until his death in 1963, at 81.

Post-Soviet Kiev is a city in transformation. There are new shops and restaurants; airports are expanding, and the Olympic stadium is being revamped in preparation for the 2012 European football championships to be hosted jointly by Ukraine and Poland. But perhaps nothing exemplifies change in the country’s capital so much as the crowds queuing up to see sharks in formaldehyde, balloon rabbits in stainless steel, and sculptures of sperm-wielding adolescents, works by Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami respectively. All three artists have been shown for the first time in Ukraine at the Pinchuk Art Centre (PAC), a private museum of contemporary art in the centre of Kiev, which has just celebrated its fifth birthday.

Since its opening in 2006, nearly 1.2 million people have visited the gallery, which charges no admission and also includes a bookshop and a trendy bar with views over the city. Of these visitors, 60% are aged between 16 and 30. “Our society, especially young people, accepted contemporary art in a great way, in an unexpected way… there is a huge appetite for it,” says Victor Pinchuk, the steel magnate and billionaire who finances the museum and who has put himself at the centre of efforts to modernise Ukraine.

Pinchuk recently gave The Art Newspaper a rare interview on his estate outside Kiev, where he told us the success of his gallery has encouraged him to attempt a bigger, much more ambitious museum project. PAC is currently housed in an early 20th-century building in central Kiev which was once a hotel. But Pinchuk now wants to give it a new home in a purpose-built gallery designed by a top international architectural firm.

“It has to be an important building for our country, for our city. It has to be a destination for sightseeing tours in Kiev. I hope the image of this art centre will be on the most popular postcards… it has to be,” he says.

PAC hosts temporary exhibitions curated by museum staff and also shows a rotating display of work from Pinchuk’s own collection. The new gallery, in an “iconic” building, will do the same, says Pinchuk, who believes it could be ready within five years. He will not reveal the architects he is considering for the museum, however sources close to the project suggest Switzerland’s Herzog & de Meuron have been hired for the job.

An embarrassment of riches

Victor Pinchuk is an easy man to like. He is funny and charming and likes to gossip. He is also very, very rich. He trained as an engineer in the Soviet era, gaining a PhD from the Metallurgical Institute in Dnipropetrovsk in eastern Ukraine, before setting up his own company in 1990 to manufacture a new kind of metal tubing that he had invented. He went on to sell it all over the former Soviet Union. His fortune increased further after he met and married Elena, the daughter of the ex-president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma. The family connection helped Pinchuk secure Ukraine’s Kryvorizhstal steel company for $850m when the industry was privatised. Following the Orange Revolution, the sale was rescinded and the company was sold again, this time to Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal for $4.8bn. Despite the setback, Pinchuk has gone on to even greater success. He diversified and in 2006 set up EastOne Ltd, an investment advisory company which controls several TV stations and the most popular tabloid newspaper in the country, as well as multiple industrial assets. Today, Forbes estimates Pinchuk’s fortune at $3.3bn.

With that much spending power comes enormous influence. Although Pinchuk has only taken a serious interest in art in the last five years, he is courted by museum directors the world over. When Pinchuk asks for a favour, one imagines few turn him down. Alfred Pacquement, Glenn Lowry, Richard Armstrong and Nicholas Serota, respectively directors of the Pompidou, MoMA, the Guggenheim and Tate, all serve on the board of Pinchuk’s Future Generation Art Prize, a $100,000 award given every two years to an artist under 35 of any nationality.

A colossal south London warehouse packed with art worth millions: when White Cube Bermondsey opens today it will become Europe's biggest commercial art gallery – and cement yet another victory for the gallery's mercurial owner.

Jay Jopling, 48, is the founder of London's White Cube gallery empire, which has launched its third outpost in the capital to coincide with the Frieze art fair. It will see thousands of the world's wealthiest collectors flock to London over the next three days. Last night Jopling hosted hundreds of VIPs at the Bermondsey gallery's lavish official opening party – with many luminaries attending a small gathering at his Marylebone home afterwards. This week, London auction houses will sell 25 works by Jopling's most famous artist, Damien Hirst, emphasising the gallerist's standing as one of a small group of elite overlords in London's aggressive commercial art world.

Jopling's buoyancy exists despite widespread economic uncertainty. One London-based art collector said yesterday that some poorer galleries are currently "walking on eggshells" because of the financial downturn. Yet Jopling's mixture of charm, savvy and bullish behaviour will make him this week's most surefire victor.

"Jay told me a long time ago that if he couldn't be the best at what he does he wasn't interested," says White Cube's exhibitions director Tim Marlow. "The Bermondsey gallery is an affirmation of that. He wants a complex of galleries that will allow him to do the best shows with the best possible artists."

Jopling – "JJ" to his friends – is recognisable by his signature thick-framed specs and tailormade black suit and crisp white shirt. He exudes success, which creates the impression that his enterprises cannot fail – a useful trait in the tempestuous art world.

Throughout his career he has hit headlines – not least because of high-profile marriage to the artist Sam Taylor-Wood and short-lived fling with singer Lily Allen – along with a knack for representing attention-grabbing artists such as Hirst, Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers, expanding while others contract through two financial downturns over the past 20 years.

Marlow says that part of his success is that White Cube owns all of its properties – alongside Bermondsey, White Cube has spaces in the West End enclave of St James's and once-edgy, now commercialised Hoxton – meaning Jopling is in little debt. The man himself rarely gives interviews, preferring – it seems – to let the stratospheric sums fetched by his artists around the world and the endless photographs of Jopling and his famous friends do the talking.

He has endured three eventful decades in the art world. The son of Tory baron Michael, he became interested in art as a teenager, reading Gilbert and George's 1974 book Dark Shadow in assembly while a pupil at Eton. "He genuinely loves art," says cultural commentator Michael Bracewell. "I think he's genuinely passionate about it". He studied art history at Edinburgh University and when there flew to New York to convince artists including Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat to participate in a charity auction. He reportedly began selling fire extinguishers as a sideline, demonstrating their effectiveness by setting fire to his sleeve.

As the global economy teeters, one market is still reaching stratospheric highs: Chinese art.

A Hong Kong auction of fine Chinese paintings earlier this month raised $94.8 million, three times pre-sale estimates. In fact, China is now the world's biggest art market, according to the art information agency Artprice.

Yet all is not what it seems in the murky world of Chinese art auctions, including a painting that sold last year for more than $11 million, but appears not to be what was advertised.

The young girl in the painting stands naked against a burgundy backdrop, one leg bent, an elbow crooked behind her back. Her eyes downcast, she looks shy and uncomfortable.

This artwork was put up to auction by Beijing Jiuge Auctions, as a portrait by the famous artist Xu Beihong of his wife, Jiang Biwei, and it sold for $11.4 million. A note from his son, Xu Boyang, on the back of the painting attests that it was by his father, although the artist died in 1953.

But Wang Yanqing, a 66-year-old painter in Inner Mongolia, tells another story.

"It's totally laughable," he says. "That picture doesn't look anything like Xu Beihong's wife." He says the picture was one of several painted by art students in his class at the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 1983, 30 years after the artist's death. The model was a peasant farmer. Wang was one of those students who painted her, and his memory is crystal clear.

"At that time, it was very difficult to find nude models, so we painted the same ones over and over, and it was boring," he remembers. "Suddenly this new model came — a young girl from the south who'd never modeled before, and everyone was very excited. We all wanted to draw her, so almost 20 of us crowded into the same room. It was one of my most successful pictures. I still have it in my studio."

Indeed, the subject in his painting is identical to the one that sold for $11 million, except for the angle. Four other classmates have produced pictures of the same girl, in the same pose, with the same backdrop. As Wang points out, it's an impossible coincidence.

"The person we painted had a 1980s hairstyle," he says, and he also notes the different styles of painting. "Xu Beihong studied in France, so he painted in a Western European style. But we were painting under the Soviet influence in a Russian style." He and his classmates published an open letter exposing the picture as a fake to stop it from circulating on the market.

No Standards For Auctions

"At this moment, in practice, there are no standards" in the Chinese art market, says Gong Jisui, a former Sotheby's expert who's now a visiting scholar in Beijing at CAFA.

"It's really, really bad. For the classical Chinese paintings, most of the pieces are disputable," Gong says. "Also, for modern Chinese paintings, there is a serious problem with authenticity issues."

It's not just the pieces that might be fake. At Chinese auctions, the bids are sometimes fake too. In some cases, the seller, or even the artist, may bid on their own pieces to push the prices up.

Sometimes auctions are used to pass bribes. For example, the buyer overbids for something mediocre — or even fake — and so passes money legally to the seller. Many auction houses turn a blind eye, since the higher the price, the higher their commission.

Paul Dong of Forever Auctions, the trademark licensee for Christie's in China, describes how the approach is made. "There are clients at certain times who come to us and say, 'Don't look at the quality of the property. I can assure you someone will buy it at a very high price, you'll earn your money.' We absolutely reject such offers."

Once in a while, a television show takes a fascinating question and presents a clear, direct and relatively simple answer.

That's a good moment, and a good moment is what we get from this crossover collaboration between PBS' "Antiques Roadshow" and "History Detectives" over a Civil War tintype that shows a white and black man seated next to each other in Confederate Army uniforms.

The extremely rare tintype resurrects the longstanding question about whether some black men voluntarily fought in the Confederate Army. It shows two Mississippi men, the white Andrew Chandler and the black Silas Chandler, sitting down holding weapons.

The handful of other period photographs or tintypes showing blacks and Confederate whites together almost always have the black person in a subservient position, like standing while the white man is sitting.

In this one, however, Andrew and Silas are literally side by side, and the oral history of the families further complicates the puzzle.

Stories passed through the white Chandlers say the family freed its slaves, including Silas, before the war. If that's true, he put on that uniform as a free man.

The black Chandler family lore has Silas possibly buying his freedom, though it isn't clear when that might have happened.

So Wes Cowan, who assesses the value of antiques and collectibles on "Antiques Roadshow," now becomes a history detective. He combs family archives and public records, then asks experts to analyze the evidence.

“Can you paint a picture of the next five minutes of this, does it just go on and on?” asks Frances Morris, Tate curator, watching a film – a potential Tate purchase – at Frieze Art Fair. “Does the projector come with it? No? Oh that doubles the price.” Other comments flood in, then the wave of smart jackets, clicking heels, confiding voices, sweeps on to the next hopeful booth. “I find it really amusing, it makes me smile” (Candida Gertler, director, Outset Contemporary Art Fund). “We could show this in so many different contexts” (Ann Gallagher, curator, Tate). “Political, yes, but in a veiled way” (Adam Szymczyk, director, Basel Kunsthalle). “I’m just being a bit scathing . . . Enough!” (Nicholas Serota, director, Tate).

Every year, Tate goes shopping at Frieze. This week I trailed behind, eavesdropping, trying to grasp how our national collection is formed, what such acquisitions reveal about trends in taste and scholarship.

Tate’s budget, provided by the philanthropic Outset, is modest – £120,000. Millions of pounds worth of art is on sale in Regent’s Park. A committee – Serota, three Tate curators, two guests, this year Szymczyk and Bogotá-based curator José Roca – has a few hours before the fair opens to look, argue, negotiate prices, pare down a shortlist, buy. They must move fast but not impulsively – “we wouldn’t spend on an artist we knew nothing about, you can’t buy on spec,” says Morris. So they target – artists on their wish-list, geographic locations. The presence of Polish-born Szymczyk and Roca reflects Tate’s current preferred collecting areas – eastern Europe, Latin America.

“Our first priority is to acquire three major works by three women artists,” Serota announces. Outset can hardly believe its luck with Alina Szapocznikow’s “Tumour”, a wall-based polyester sculpture in toxic yellow, made in 1969 shortly before Szapocznikow died of cancer, and incorporating a crushed photographic self-portrait. Indisputably important, hauntingly caught between surrealism and pop, “Tumour” resonates

Szapocznikow, born in Poland in 1926 and a Bergen-Belsen survivor, was unknown half a decade ago; then her work was swept into the rising post-feminist market, and a transatlantic retrospective is now touring. “Almost every year we try to acquire a work and a private collector gets in first because they are so in demand and so rare,” says Serota. “But ‘Tumour’ is more raw and more affecting than ones we looked at before.” For Morris, the purchase – sweetened by a discount from the gallery, New York’s Broadway 1602 – is “a triumph”. Gertler names the piece her favourite in Frieze.

With a collection of 17,000 objects that span 6,000 years, San Francisco's Asian Art Museum is among the most impressive of its kind in the world.

The challenge now before it: avoid becoming a thing of the past.

Last year, the recession left the museum in financial turmoil. Nearly unable to repay millions of dollars in loans, it struck an unprecedented deal in which the city guaranteed the museum's $98 million debt.

Now, with the museum's finances on more stable ground, its leaders are seeking to make a comeback. On the way are exhibits intended to attract a broader audience, a campaign to raise $20 million and other money-making strategies.

"To me, ancient art, no matter when it was made, is never static," said Jay Xu, the museum's director, in a phone interview during a business trip in Taiwan. "It always has life. It's a point for knowledge, discovery."

Nearly 360,000 visitors came to the Asian Art Museum in the Civic Center in fiscal 2008-09 - but that number plummeted to 187,000 in 2010-11.

To help boost attendance, the museum hopes that new collections premiering this fall will appeal to more families and young adults while still luring art aficionados.

A show opening Oct. 21 will center on India's royal courts from the early 18th century to the mid-20th century. Titled "Maharaja," a Sanskrit word meaning "great king," the exhibit will showcase paintings, photographs, outfits, jewelry, furniture and other artifacts from palace life.

A related exhibition that starts Nov. 11 - "Deities, Demons and Dudes with 'Staches" - will offer a contemporary take on the culture. In a series of digitally drawn illustrations, Pixar animator Sanjay Patel employs pop-art hues, crisp geometric forms and cartoon figures to depict royal India.

"When we look at Sanjay's art in the context of the treasures in the 'Maharaja' exhibit, we can understand how he is inspired," Xu said. "In doing so, we're really connecting the art of the past with the art of today."

Making money

Christine Anagnos, executive director of the Association of Art Museum Directors, said the Asian Art Museum is not alone in struggling during the down economy, but that there are ways to help preserve the bottom line.

One thing museums can do is try to attract audiences by showing collections in new ways, she said.

She said Patel's exhibit at the Asian Art Museum is "a fascinating idea because it's an interpretation of art that is hundreds and hundreds ... of years old."

Boosting attendance is just one way the museum is trying to generate more money. In 2009, it started charging an additional $5 to see special exhibits. It also cut the annual number of exhibits by a third and lengthened each show's run time to six months from three months - moves that have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars, said Mark McLoughlin, the museum's chief finance and operating officer.

And this spring, Xu created the position of chief engagement officer, tasked with coordinating the museum's public relations, marketing, business development, and digital and Web presence. In September, the museum unveiled a new logo - an upside-down "A" meant to convey a sense of the unexpected.

Five world-famous paintings including ones by Picasso and Matisse worth up to £400million were crushed in a rubbish truck after being stolen, it has been claimed.

The masterpieces were all part of record-breaking haul from one of Paris's most prestigious galleries which was described by police as the 'Art Heist of the Century'.

If the claims - made by an underworld figure allegedly involved in the crime - prove true, then it will be one of the biggest catastrophes in the history of art.

In May last year a single 'cat-burglar' broke into the city's Museum of Modern Art, close to the Eiffel Tower, and got away with five pieces after cutting them from their frames.

Sleeping guards and a faulty alarm system failed to stop the hooded man as he made off with Dove with Green Peas by Pablo Picasso (1911), Pastoral by Henri Matisse (1906), Olive Tree near l'Estaque by Georges Braque (1906), Woman with Fan by Amedeo Modigliani (1919) and Still Life with Candlestick by Fernand Leger (1922).

The raid immediately leapt into crime folklore, with specialist police forces and private detective firms around the globe uniting to try and retrieve the paintings.

It took officers from the Serious Crime Brigade more than a year before placing three men - the alleged thief and two accomplices - under official investigation, but all the paintings remain missing.

Two unnamed men were finally arrested five months ago but, as soon as this happened, a third tried to destroy the evidence.

Dale Chihuly’s 42-foot-tall “Lime Green Icicle Tower” is here to stay.

The Museum of Fine Arts announced Oct 12 that it has raised the more than $1 million needed to buy the piece, which will remain in the MFA’s Shapiro Family Courtyard. The piece was part of the recent blockbuster featuring the Seattle-based glass artist’s work. In July, the MFA told museum visitors that if they wanted Boston to keep the piece, they would have to pay up. The public responded, with more than 1,000 people sending in cash or stuffing bills into a box near the sculpture. In fact, $760,000 contributed to buy “Lime Green Icicle Tower” came from donors who are not trustees or overseers of the MFA.

Since January experts at Sotheby’s have been trying to privately sell a suite of four bronze sculptures of a woman’s back that Matisse created over a period of 23 years beginning in 1908. The works belong to the Burnett Foundation in Forth Worth, and at the time the sale was announced, neither Sotheby’s nor the foundation would say what the asking price was, although dealers approached by the auction house reported that they were hoping for around $200 million for all four.

Now, as the fall auction season approaches and the sculptures remain unsold, Sotheby’s is announcing that it will auction the four works separately — in chronological order — over the next year, starting with the earliest and most classical of them all, “Back I,’’ which will be included in its Impressionist and modern art auction in New York on Nov. 2. It is estimated to bring $20 million to $30 million.

The foundation decided to sell the sculptures in November after another cast of the fourth back in the series brought $48.8 million at Christie’s. It was then, officials for the foundation said, that they realized the value of the four works far exceeded anything that could justify owning them, since its mission is to support health, education, human services and arts initiatives mostly in the Fort Worth area.

Exhibition Dates:   October 13, 2011 – January 2, 2012

For more than 60 years, the Alfred Stieglitz Collection has been the cornerstone of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s holdings of modern art from the first half of the 20th century. From October 13, 2011, through January 2, 2012, the Museum will present Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe, the first large-scale exhibition of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from Stieglitz’s personal collection, acquired by the Metropolitan in 1949. The exhibition will feature some 200 works by major European and American modernists, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, Vasily Kandinsky, Francis Picabia, Gino Severini, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, and Arthur Dove.

The exhibition is made possible by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation.

In addition to being a master photographer, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was a visionary promoter of modern American and European art, and he assembled a vast art collection of exceptional breadth and depth. Through a succession of influential galleries that he ran in New York City between 1905 and 1946, Stieglitz exhibited many of the most important artists of the era and collected hundreds of works of art by his contemporaries.

This will be the first time since their acquisition in 1949 that the Museum’s vast holdings from the Stieglitz Collection—including many works on paper that are rarely on view—will be exhibited together.

Alfred Stieglitz played a pivotal role in the introduction of modern art into America and its subsequent development over the course of the first half of the 20th century. At his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (1905-17), known as ‘291,’ Stieglitz boldly showed the work of avant-garde European artists such as Auguste Rodin, Picasso, Matisse, Picabia, Brancusi, and Severini—sometimes before it was shown anywhere else in the United States. The first rooms of the exhibition Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe will focus primarily on works by European artists. Among the highlights are: Picasso’s Woman Ironing (1901) and Standing Female Nude (1910), Kandinsky’s Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II) (1912), and Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse (1910), as well as a suite of prints by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1890s). The first half of the exhibition also includes a room of drawings by the Mexican caricaturist Marius de Zayas, who was a pivotal advisor to Stieglitz and played a major role in organizing some of the most avant-garde exhibitions at 291 in the 1910s.

In Stieglitz’s subsequent undertakings, first in borrowed space at the Anderson Galleries (1921-25) and later at his own galleries—the Intimate Gallery (1925-29) and An American Place (1929-46)—he refocused his energy on showing and supporting contemporary American art, which was not well represented in prestigious public and private collections at the time. The latter portion of the exhibition Stieglitz and His Artists will feature works by American painters whose careers he shepherded from the 1920s to 1946 and whose work he felt epitomized the authentic American experience: Arthur Dove, John Marin, and Georgia O’Keeffe. There also will be individual rooms devoted to the works of Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley, including Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928), and Hartley’s Portrait of a German Officer (1914). The exhibition will culminate in a gallery of some 14 works by O’Keeffe, such as her iconic paintings Black Iris (1926) and Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue (1931).

Among the other artists featured in the exhibition are: Gordon Craig, Henri Edmund Cross, Arthur B. Davies, Gaston Lachaise, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Diego Rivera, Paul Signac, Félicien Rops, and Abraham Walkowitz.

In addition to the paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints displayed, the exhibition will include a number of photographs by the Photo-Secessionists, as well as publications by the Stieglitz Circle, all from his personal collection.

About the Collection
After his death in 1946, Stieglitz’s wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, as executrix of his estate, decided which institutions would receive gifts of art from his collection. The Metropolitan Museum was very fortunate to receive the largest share of Stieglitz’s personal collection: more than 400 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints. The remaining works from his collection were distributed among the Art Institute of Chicago, Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Fisk University in Nashville, and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven.

Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe is organized by Lisa Mintz Messinger, Associate Curator in the Museum’s Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a major scholarly catalogue of the entire collection, edited by Lisa Mintz Messinger, with contributions by 11 Metropolitan Museum curators, researchers, and conservators. The catalogue will feature 440 full-color illustrations, an introductory essay, individual essays on the artists, and entries on all 409 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from the Alfred Stieglitz Collection at the Metropolitan. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, the catalogue will be available for sale in the Met’s book shops ($65, hardcover).

The Museum will offer an array of education programs for this exhibition, including subscription lectures, a Sunday at the Met program, gallery talks, films, and services for visitors with disabilities.

An audio tour, part of the Museum’s Audio Guide Program, will be available for rental ($7, $6 for Members, $5 for children under 12).

The Audio Guide is sponsored by Bloomberg.

Stieglitz and His Artists will be complemented by the presentation of Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz in the Museum’s Howard Gilman Gallery from October 13, 2011, through February 26, 2012. This installation will feature 45 masterpieces from Stieglitz’s collection of photography, including rarely seen works from the turn of the 20th century by Anne Brigman, Alvin Langdon Coburn, F. Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier, Joseph Keiley, Heinrich Kühn, Edward Steichen, Clarence White, and others.

Stieglitz and His Artists also will be featured on the Museum’s website at www.metmuseum.org.

London’s Frieze Art Fair opened its doors to VIP guests on Wednesday in an optimistic mood, defiantly showcasing the beautiful, the bohemian and the bizarre despite the volatility in world markets and concerns over the impact on the art world.

High-profile collectors and celebrities such as Russian entrepreneur Evgeny Lebedev and model Elle Macpherson gathered in Regent’s Park at London’s leading fair for the sale of contemporary art, which traditionally sees millions of pounds change hands.

This market has enjoyed several years of strong growth, especially at the top end, but amid global economic uncertainty and in the wake of a few weak London auctions last week, dealers are anxious to see if sales of contemporary art will hold up.

“The market feels sound. For people who have accumulated wealth contemporary art is, in a way, one of the most sophisticated ways of enjoying it...But people do say that the middle part of the market is suffering,” said Nicholas Logsdail, owner of London’s Lisson Gallery, which made five sales in the first three hours.

The White Cube gallery reported brisk trade, selling Antony Gormley’s “Spy”, a rusted steel standing figure, for £300,000 as well as Andreas Gursky’s “Cocoon II” for €600,000. An untitled 2011 painting by Mark Bradford also sold for $400,000. New York’s David Zwirner Gallery, meanwhile, sold a 2003 work by the German painter Neo Rauch for $1.35m to a US collector.

Hiscox, the insurers, have estimated that the five-day event will showcase $350m worth of art, $25m less than last year, displayed by 173 galleries from all round the world, including dealers from Colombia, Peru and Argentina for the first time. As in previous years, the fair also includes a sculpture park.

Many of the pieces on display use the internet and social networking to examine the role of information. A project by the German artist Oliver Laric will exist online only – he is filming the fair and creating an archive of slow-motion footage.

Matthew Slotover, co-founder of Frieze, said: “More galleries applied than ever before to take part. When the markets turned down in August we were worried but good art always sells. This is about getting quality works through the door.”

Laurence Tuhey, associate director of the Timothy Taylor Gallery, said there had been significant interest in the New York-based artist Kiki Smith. Her stained glass piece “A Behold” sold in the afternoon for $125,000. “We had expected doom and gloom but the energy at the start of the fair was really good,” he said.

A forged Robert Motherwell painting was branded with the equivalent of a scarlet letter on Tuesday in a legal settlement involving three art galleries and the Dedalus Foundation, which owns the copyrights to Motherwell’s works. “Spanish Elegy,” the painting at the center of the dispute, was sold to a European gallery, Killala Fine Art, for $650,000 in 2007 by Julian Weissman, who had previously worked as a salesman at Knoedler & Company in Manhattan. Before the sale Dedalus initially concluded that “Spanish Elegy” was authentic, but later backtracked and declared the work, supposedly painted by Motherwell in 1953, to be a fake. The Killala gallery said in its lawsuit that it had relied on the foundation’s assurance in making the purchase.

Pearl S. Buck International will auction off two paintings once owned by the author to help pay for a renovation project at her former home in Hilltown.

Buck officials said it was a difficult decision to make — and in some circles, a controversial one — but was necessary in order to complete the renovation of the historic Pearl S. Buck House. The two landscapes, by well-known Pennsylvania impressionist Edward W. Redfield, are together expected to fetch up to $500,000.

“Looking at it from someone on the board who has a responsibility, if you have an asset that’s being underutilized, and you can’t see how that asset can be put back into the fold, then why do you have that asset? It’s not helping advance your mission,” said Edward Wilusz, chairman of the Pearl S. Buck International board of directors.

The money raised through the sale of the paintings will allow the organization to start the third phase of a renovation project at the house. The $1.6 million project calls for exterior and interior work, including fixing damage to trim, plaster and cabinetry in the house, repairing parts of the roof and replacing stones in outside walkways.

“These resources will be employed in the house,” Wilusz said. “It is necessary.”

The paintings, “Spring” and “The Canal at Lambertville,” were acquired by Buck herself. She knew Redfield, one of the founding members of the New Hope artists’ colony in the early 1900s, Wilusz said.

Ten years ago, when the organization realized the paintings’ value, it sent them to the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown for safe-keeping, Wilusz said. They’ve been displayed at the museum only a few times since then, spending most of their time in storage. Copies hang in the Pearl Buck House.

“We have been happy to offer storage to (the paintings) over the years, because we have the facility to do so,” Michener director and CEO Bruce Katsiff said in an email. “Although it is always sad when an institution has to give something up, we completely understand Pearl S. Buck International’s decision.”

Katsiff said the sale is consistent with standards set forth by the American Association of Museums, which says the deaccession, or sale, of artwork held by museums and similar organizations should only be done to support the seller’s collection.

In the case of the Pearl Buck organization, that collection is the house, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.

“When considering an institution’s proposal or action to deaccession a work of art, one must first begin with the mission of the institution and the role played by its collections within that mission,” said Phillip Earenfight, director of The Trout Gallery at Dickinson College in Carlisle. “I can imagine instances where it would be acceptable for a historical house institution to sell paintings unrelated to the mission of the institution and use the funds to acquire collections that are central to its function.”

No 19th-century artist paid closer attention to the naked female form than Edgar Degas. Yet none seemed to harbor such complicated feelings about women.

This alone makes “Degas and the Nude,’’ a new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, one of the most electrifying exhibitions to open in Boston for years. The show opens to MFA members today and to the general public on Sunday.

If you come to the show with an image of Degas as the painter of pretty ballerinas and horse track scenes, be prepared to find something tougher. If, on the other hand, you come with your defenses up - convinced that Degas, along with being an anti-Semite, was also a misogynist - prepare to have these defenses weakened.

The MFA exhibition is the first museum show ever devoted to the subject of Degas’s career-long engagement with the naked human form. Organized by the MFA’s outgoing chairman of the Art of Europe, George Shackelford, along with the Musee d’Orsay’s Xavier Rey, it contains 160 works, more than a third of them lent by the Paris museum (where the show will open in March).

From the 1870s until about 10 years before his death in 1917, Degas knocked out one magnificently drawn, gauchely posed female nude after another. Only the means and the materials changed - charcoal, pastel, paint, monotype, lithograph, clay, pastel on monotype, and so on.

These now look like some of the greatest nudes in the history of Western art. Picking up on cultural currents that were gaining momentum in the mid-19th century, Degas aggressively stripped away centuries of idealization, sentimentality, and pomposity to reveal the female form as it was.

There was, however, an obsessiveness about the endeavor that can be disconcerting. You sense pride in Degas’s refusal to prettify, and relish in the way he continually contrived the most awkward-looking poses for his models. Right from the beginning, people described them as brutal, cruel, animalistic.

But Degas’s almost machine-like detachment is in constant tension with a sustained engagement that is sensual, marveling, and tactile. The effect, aesthetically, is a hot and cold dynamic unlike anything else in art.

Degas was the oldest of five children (three others died in infancy). His mother, worn out by child-bearing, died when he was 13. He was a lifelong bachelor who said he wanted to be “illustrious and unknown.’’

Miami art gallery owner Gary Nader went to an auction in London this summer with a budget in mind. He couldn’t keep it.

“I spent $2 million on those ceramics,” he said, gesturing to 11 pieces by Picasso. “I expected to pay $100,000.”

Nader, a longtime art dealer, hopes to bring that kind of bidding frenzy to Miami when he launches an auction house during Art Basel Miami Beach in December. After spending the last several months traveling around the world and soliciting art works, he has selected 112 lots valued at more than $40 million.

Nader will launch his auction house, Nader’s, with the Dec. 1 event. He expects to hold four to five sales per year featuring, of course, art, but also wine, antiques, watches and cars. Bidding will take place at Gary Nader Art Centre, 62 NE 27th Street in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, as well as online and by phone.

The December sale will focus on modern and contemporary art, only offering works from well-known artists, Nader said. Those include Fernando Botero, Damien Hirst, Roy Lichtenstein, Roberto Matta and Joaquin Torres Garcia.

Whether or not pieces find buyers, Nader said, the auction house has to pay for them — a condition that he said made the event more attractive for sellers. Often, auction houses take works on consignment and, if the art doesn’t fetch the acceptable minimum price, the pieces may be returned.Nader is funding the effort both from personal resources and investors.

While Nader’s auction house is new, South Florida is not a stranger to auctions. Charities are known for annual sell-offs, and Miami Beach-based Red Carpet Auction Events held art and memorabilia sales in August and September. Major auction houses have a presence here, too: Sotheby’s has a representative in Palm Beach, and Christie’s has an office in Miami.

Nader himself ran annual Latin American auctions from a Miami hotel between 1994 and 2003, but didn’t think the time was right to start an auction house until now.

“I needed to create exactly what I have created for this specific moment,” he said. “I needed to have the building ready, I needed to have more collectors from all over the world, I needed to have more experience. What I did 20 years ago was training for what I’m doing today.”

Longtime Miami art collector Dennis Scholl, vice president/arts for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, said Miami has evolved as well.

“I believe that the community’s appetite for the arts certainly is growing and in part the visual arts community has become a wonderful collector community,” he said. “This would be simply another opportunity for people to learn more about the visual arts in our community and to participate. I think there’s a real opportunity for it to work out.”

Scholl said the gallery-run auction would be new for Miami — and nearly everywhere else. The closest parallel: the purchase by Christie’s auction house of the London gallery Haunch of Venison a few years ago.

Billions of dollars in arts funding is serving a mostly wealthy, white audience that is shrinking while only a small chunk of money goes to emerging art groups that serve poorer communities that are more ethnically diverse, according to a report being released Monday.

The report from the Washington-based National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, shows foundation giving has fallen out of balance with the nation's increasingly diverse demographics. The report was provided to The Associated Press before its release.

A large portion of funding goes to more traditional institutions such as major museums, operas and symphonies. But recent surveys show attendance at those institutions is declining, while more people are interested in community-based arts groups.

"We've got the vast majority of resources going to a very small number of institutions," said Aaron Dorfman, executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. "That's not healthy for the arts in America."

According to the study, the largest arts organizations with budgets exceeding $5 million represent only 2 percent of the nonprofit arts and culture sector. Yet those groups received 55 percent of foundation funding for the arts in 2009. Only 10 percent of arts funding was explicitly meant to benefit underserved populations. However, the study's author acknowledged the report may not account for every dollar granted to help reach diverse audiences at larger institutions.

The study is meant to encourage funders to provide grants for a broader range of groups so programs can be more relevant and effective.

Otherwise, the "pronounced imbalance restricts the expressive life of millions of people," the study said.

The study cites 2010 census data that shows non-white populations have grown in every region of the country since 2000, adding that "our population never has been so diverse." More than a third of the country is comprised of people of color. In four states, white people are no longer the majority.

But philanthropy hasn't kept pace with the change.

For the next six months, Southern California will be awash in celebrations of Southern California art: close to 170 separate exhibitions at 130 museums and galleries stretching from San Diego to Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. Pacific Standard Time, as this festival is known, is an exhaustive accounting of the birth of the Los Angeles-area art scene, but it is also a statement of self-affirmation by a region that, at times, appears to feel underappreciated as a serious culture center.

This multi-museum event, in all of its Los Angeles-like sprawl, suggests a bit of overcompensation from a city that has long been overshadowed by the New York art establishment, a place that — arguably unfairly — still suffers from a reputation of being more about tinsel than about serious art, and where interest in culture starts and ends with movie grosses and who is on the cover of Vanity Fair.

“It’s corny,” said Dave Hickey, an art critic and a professor in the art and art history department at the University of New Mexico. “It’s the sort of thing that Denver would do. They would do Mountain Standard Time. It is ’50s boosterish, and I would argue largely unnecessary.”

Still, for many Los Angeles artists and critics, Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, is a long-needed accounting of the emergence of the region as an art capital in the same league as New York, Berlin and London. Indeed, Los Angeles these days has more than its share of ambitious museums, adventurous art galleries, wealthy collectors, top-notch art schools and — perhaps most important — young artists drawn here by relatively cheap rents, abundant light and an atmosphere that encourages experimentation.

“Since 1980 the art world has become global — New York is not the epicenter,” said Peter Plagens, a painter and essayist who has worked extensively in Southern California and who was here for some of the openings. “So L.A. is kind of doing this joust: ‘We want our art history to be in the books.’ ”

The shows cover the postwar outpouring of art from the Southern California region. The festival will run for half a year, and just as well: art enthusiasts intent on seeing all the exhibitions are approaching this as the art world equivalent of an Ironman Triathlon.

“I am going to treat it like a graduate course in art history,” said Jeffrey Deitch, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

For less determined mortals, highlights can be seen at the Getty, which features works by Los Angeles sculptors and artists like Ed Ruscha and George Herms, from 1950 to 1970; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with an exhibition of California-inspired modern furniture design and a retrospective of work by the Chicano performance and Conceptual art group Asco; the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, with a light and space exhibition; the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, with a display of prints; and the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, with work by local African-American artists.

In many ways, this multi-museum extravaganza goes against type, or at least stereotype. “It’s a coming of age for a city that sometimes doesn’t think of itself as having an art history,” said Michael Govan, the executive director of the county museum.

That novelty alone seems likely to feed curiosity about what is taking place here. “Los Angeles just presents itself as a fresh and new story — people will be interested in hearing some different narrative they haven’t heard before,” said Thomas E. Crow, an art historian. “And because so much of the art is really, really good, that will sustain the interest in these new narratives.”

No one is suggesting that Los Angeles is about to supplant New York as an art capital; it is not lost on people here that the executive directors of three of the four biggest museums in Los Angeles came here from New York. James Cuno, the president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which is financing the event, noted the abundance of galleries, auction houses and money in New York.

“It’s understandable that artists and collectors would find their way there,” he said. “In the art world, the world tilts to New York. New York has been dominant and held our imagination since the late 1950s. That has cast everyone else in the shadows.”

A judge on Thursday upheld his ruling allowing the Barnes Foundation to move its multibillion-dollar art collection from the suburbs to Philadelphia, rejecting claims that new evidence should force a reconsideration of his hotly contested decision.

The opinion by Montgomery County Orphans Court Judge Stanley Ott seemed to eliminate any doubt about the planned May opening of the institution's new downtown home, which has been under construction for nearly two years.

Foundation President Derek Gillman praised the "clarity and thoroughness" of Ott's decision. But opponents of the relocation, known as the Friends of the Barnes, vowed to appeal. They said Ott's ruling left many issues unexamined.

Barnes officials are moving the collection, which includes dozens of paintings by Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso, because they say the foundation is not financially viable at its original home in Lower Merion, about five miles from Philadelphia.

The relocation required Ott's approval since it breaks the trust created by the institution's late founder, eccentric pharmaceutical magnate Albert Barnes, who had ordered that the art never be moved. Ott granted permission in 2004.

The Friends have been fighting the decision for years, and Ott dismissed their most recent petition on Thursday. The group had contended that the 2009 documentary "The Art of Steal," which recounts the lengthy and bitter Barnes saga, contained information he lacked when he approved the relocation.

The Friends argued that then-Attorney General Mike Fisher, whose office had oversight of charitable trusts, made statements in the film that show he improperly acted as a "cheerleader" for the Barnes move when he should have been neutral.

Yet Ott ruled that the Friends "offered no case or other authority in support of this theory of mandatory impartiality."

The state attorney general's office had argued that Fisher was obligated to act in the public's best interest, which in this case meant saving the Barnes from financial ruin.

"As we said from the beginning, the Office of the Attorney General has always acted appropriately in this case and we're pleased that the court agrees," agency spokesman Nils Frederiksen told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Ott also reiterated his previous finding that the Friends, a citizens group that includes many neighbors of the Lower Merion gallery, lacked legal standing to block the relocation.

The National Gallery in London is facing the prospect of major strike disruption during next month's Leonardo da Vinci blockbuster exhibition, the Observer has learned.

Warder staff are considering industrial action in protest over security cuts that they warn will make works of art more vulnerable to damage or theft. The action would take the form of walkouts for an hour or two at a time, necessitating the evacuation of the building.

News of the protest comes after a man vandalised two Poussin masterpieces last July with paint.

Under pressure from government cuts, the gallery has instructed its warders – now called "gallery assistants" – to each watch over two rooms rather than one, as previously. Warders claim the new arrangement allowed the Poussin vandal time to attack two paintings because the warder was in the adjoining room.

About 200 members of staff – including curators – have signed a protest petition to the gallery's director, Nicholas Penny.

The gallery is expecting record numbers of art lovers for an exhibition of the "largest ever number of Leonardo's rare surviving paintings", including international loans. It is due to open on 9 November, when an initial protest could begin.

Negotiations between the gallery and its assistants are being conducted by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS). An indicative ballot is being run to test the mood for strike action. "They're keen to do something now," a PCS spokesman said.