Darren Julien, president and CEO of Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills, says the jacket was purchased Sunday by Milton Verret, a commodities trader from Austin.

The jacket is one of two Jackson wore during the filming of the 1983 Thriller video. Jackson wears the jacket in a scene with a troupe of zombies who rise from their graves and break into a dance routine.

Fridamania last hit Britain in 2005, the year of Tate Modern's big retrospective. The nation was smitten, just as Frida Kahlo's husband Diego Rivera and all her other lovers had been during her lifetime. We were dripping in Frida earrings and Frida hairpieces; we were knee-deep in Frida dolls and Frida-inspired skirts. And, of course, there were all those extraordinary self-portraits to look at.

Six years on, Kahlo is back, one half of an exhibition that opens at Pallant House in Chichester next week, showing alongside Rivera's work; it is the first time the couple have been exhibited together in the UK.

In their lifetime, there was little debate over who was the greater artist. Rivera, who retold the turbulent narrative of Mexican history in murals that adorned public buildings throughout the capital city, was thought to outshine his wife in every way. (He was also an extraordinary self-publicist, who loved to entertain as he worked.)

Kahlo, 20 years his junior, was far less well-known. Her oeuvre could hardly have been more different. While Rivera looked outward, and back through history, Kahlo looked inward. She used her art to examine and confront what it meant to be an individual, to be a woman, and – in her case – a woman who had suffered a devastating catalogue of injuries as an adolescent (in a bus accident); these injuries left her in pain for the rest of her life. She was patronised by critics and the press. A fairly typical 1931 picture caption reads: "Mrs Diego Rivera can and does do very passable portraits."

But what a difference time makes, as the new exhibition will show: Kahlo's popularity has now entirely eclipsed Rivera's, a turn of events that would have stunned them both. In this, she has had one huge advantage: her works travel, while his finest pieces are murals, confined to Mexico. The Rivera works now on loan to Pallant House are very much his second 11.

Does it make sense to show the two artists together? American artist Judy Chicago – recently in the UK to promote her book, Frida Kahlo: Face to Face – thinks not. When we meet in London, she is outraged that Kahlo continues to be viewed through the prism of her husband; it means, she says, that her work is forever seen as reactive.

Kahlo featured in Chicago's best-known work, The Dinner Party (1974-79); a huge table laid for an elaborate feast, each place was set for a woman whose cultural contribution had not, in Chicago's view, been fully acknowledged – Elizabeth I, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Georgia O'Keeffe, among others. Kahlo did not have a place at the table but, Chicago explains, "other women are represented with floor tiles beneath the tables, and Kahlo is one of these".

At any rate, Kahlo hardly fits the "overlooked by history" tag. Her work has been the subject of sell-out exhibitions across the world; since the Tate show, there has been a blockbuster 100th birthday show in Mexico City, and another major retrospective in Berlin. Yes, says Chicago, but we still fail to look at her work in isolation, separate from Rivera's. "The big issue is that we need to open the narrative to allow women to be seen as central, rather than peripheral," she says. "Are we going to continue to see them in relation to giant males – as exceptions, in other words?"

Chicago admits that when she was first approached to write a book about Kahlo, she felt they had little in common ("I mean, I'd never have put up with Diego Rivera for a start"). But as she studied Kahlo's paintings, and her writing, "I started to see things I didn't think other people had seen – the way she represents animals, for example. There have been suggestions that Kahlo paints herself with animals when there's a separation issue with Rivera. But how do we know that? Why don't we look at what she is trying to say about the relationship between human beings and other species? This kind of thing rarely happens with male artists. Imagine an art historian saying Jackson Pollock threw paint at a canvas whenever he and his wife Lee Krasner had a fight."

But Kahlo, surely, invites a Rivera-centric interpretation. I once visited The Blue House, the home the artists shared in Mexico City, and remember feeling almost sickened by the plethora of sycophantic quotes on the walls and in other displays ("Diego was everything . . . my child, my lover, my universe").

Not fair, insists Chicago: if you read Kahlo's journals, you realise she gushed about other lovers, too. What's more, the reality for a woman in the 1920s was that marriage to a famous artist provided a key to a door. "The only vehicle for achievement at that time would be through a male artist. Women couldn't get proper training, and they weren't allowed to be part of an art movement. The only way a woman could access the art world was through a man."

Chicago has scant time for the Pallant House exhibition. "Kahlo's relationship with Rivera has been done to death. There are so many other rich avenues to explore – like her treatment of animals, or her use of dolls. There has been so little conversation about the fact, for example, that her work opens up new areas – illness, miscarriage, abortion, violence against women – that hadn't been explored in art before. By looking at her art in relation to Rivera, rather than for itself, she is kept in a place where she is a lot less challenging than she might be."

Recent results at Skinner, Inc. in Boston offer further evidence that China is remaking the art market in every corner of the world. But can the Chinese art boom be sustained or is it a bubble that is bound to burst? Signs suggest that, short of radical realignment of the Chinese economy, the rally will continue though perhaps take different directions as supplies of classical Chinese art dwindle globally.
 
Consider this:

• The French auction market authority CVV reported in June that China had overtaken the United States as the biggest auction market in the world for art and antiques after sales in China more than doubled in a year to $10.8 billion.
  
  
• According to the World Wealth Report 2010, there are now 477,000 collectors in China.
  
  
• A study by the China Minsheng Bank claims that the Chinese spend at least $12.4 billion a year on art.
  
  
• According to the most recent Hunan report, mainland China has nearly a million millionaires.

 
Aggregated statistics about the art market are always hard to come by and these, like others, should be read with great caution. Nevertheless, there is no question that the sleeping dragon has awakened, as Skinner’s results underscore.
 
At $6.1 million, Skinner’s June 2-5 Asian art sale was the firm’s second largest grossing ever, in any category.
 
“When you consider that the top lot came in at $539,500 and only seven other lots exceeded the $100,000 mark, you can appreciate the incredible demand,” says Skinner department chief James Callahan, noting that the auction was 94 percent sold by lot.
 
Almost exclusively, Skinner’s buyers are mainland Chinese and their agents, a trend that has been increasing, says Callahan. Much of the buying at Skinner was in the room. Online bidding is steadily rising, too. Skinner has seen a five-fold increase in the dollar amount sold via the internet since the second quarter of 2009.
 
Skinner dominates its middle-market niche. “Sotheby’s and Christie’s have large sales of very good material, but also have high estimates and high pass rates. We have a more workable formula,” says Callahan. Paintings specialist Tianyue Jiang said prices at Skinner for old and modern Chinese painting of impeccable provenance rival results achieved in Hong Kong.
Eighteenth Century Qianlong carvings and porcelain and 19th and early 20th century paintings led sales at Skinner:
 

• Heavily carved with Immortals in a mountainous landscape, an 18th century bamboo brush pot, the sale’s cover lot, surpassed its $800/1,200 estimate to sell to a Chinese bidder for $539,500.
  
  
• A pair of Qianlong covered jars ornamented with landscape panels and foo dog lugs made $292,000 against an estimate of $600/800.
  
  
• A carved rhinoceros horn libation cup dating to the 18th century fetched $250,000 (est. $5/7,000).
  
  
• Carved with scholars amid rocky mountains, a 19th century wood sculpture on an ivory stand brought $106,650 (est.  $5/700).
  
  
• Dating to the late 18th or early 19th century, a carved, white jade double-gourd vase and cover brought $142,200(est. $2/3,000).
  aaaaa
• Ex-collection of Rhode Island Senator Theodore F. Green , a mounted leaf illustrated with a landscape in ink and colors on silk soared to $159,975 (est. $300/500).

 
The Chinese art boom is playing out in auction houses large and small around the world. Witness this:
 

• At Schultz Auctions in Clarence, N.Y., on May 7, a Qianlong moon vase fetched $1.55 million from a Shanghai dealer. It had been expected to bring $100,000.
  
  
• In London between May 9 and 13, a series of record-breaking Asian art sales tallied more than $88 million, more than triple the 2010 take.
  
  
• Sales of Asian art at Christie’s Hong Kong reached $489 million between May 27 and June 1. Fully 70 percent of the sales went to Chinese buyers from the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan.  Ninety percent of the buyers of modern Chinese paintings were Chinese.
  
  
• On June 20, Michaan’s 403-lot sale of Fine Asian Works of Art grossed just under $2 million, an all time record for the Alameda, Ca., based auction house. A pair of horseshoe chairs fashioned from 16th and 17th century elements brought more than 17 times estimate, selling for $310,000.
  
  
• On June 21, sales reached $11.5 million at Bonhams & Butterfield’s auction of Fine Asian Works of Art in San Francisco. A pair of 18th century Chinese huanghuali  yoke-back armchairs contributed $1.5 million to the total.

 
Writing in the June issue of Art + Auction, Souren Melikian noted a lack of discrimination among Chinese buyers as a whole and identified nationalism as the force driving what he calls the repatriation of Chinese works of art to the “homeland.”
 
But most experts believe that Chinese tastes are steadily becoming both more sophisticated and more adventurous.
 
“The Chinese are expanding. They are beginning to buy whatever they may feel is a good investment,” says New York dealer Joel Frankel, who has been trading in Chinese art for 44 years.
“There is a learning curve, but knowing the Chinese, it won’t take long,” agrees Callahan, who sees, for instance, an uptick in sales of beautifully crafted but undervalued Japanese art to Chinese buyers.
 
Meanwhile, do not expect pre-sale auction estimates to adjust to the market’s new reality anytime soon. As a recent Facebook exchange made clear, it is a brave, new Chinese world out there.
 
“Nice to know that I’m not the only who can’t put estimates on Chinese antiques,” said a Midwestern auctioneer.
 
“No reason to try,” replied his Mid Atlantic colleague.
 
Write to Laura Beach at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
 

In 1990, two men dressed as police officers broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and stole a Vermeer, five Degas and three Rembrandts.

The masterpieces and four other paintings stolen that day are estimated to be worth more than $500 million.

Two decades later, the case remains stubbornly unsolved. It has been called “the holy grail of art crime.”

But with the arrest in Santa Monica Wednesday of notorious Boston crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger, many in the art world are now asking: Could it provide a break in the greatest art heist in American history?

Rumors have long swirled that Bulger, the head of the city’s powerful Irish American mob at the time, may have played a role -- or must have known who did.

Some have speculated that he stashed the stolen masterpieces away to use as a “get out of jail free card” if he was ever caught. Others think he sent the paintings to allies in the Irish Republican Army to use as a bargaining chip.

The Gardner Museum had no comment on the arrest on Thursday other than a tweet saying, “Until a recovery is made, our work continues.”

Many who have studied the case are similarly skeptical about Bulger’s direct involvement. Last year, investigators in the Gardner case said that there is no evidence in the mountains of wiretaps and other records to link Bulger to the crime.

“He was quite a powerful figure at the time of the heist,” said Ulrich Boser, author of "The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft." “But his M.O. was to collect criminal taxes, not to organize fresh crimes.”

As Boser writes in his book, after Bulger became an informant for the Boston FBI, he helped them take out his Italian competitors, the Cosa Nostra, leaving him the uncontested king of the underworld in Boston. By 1990, his focus was on collecting protection money from lesser underworld figures like bookies and drug dealers.

“To organize something like the Gardner heist doesn’t make sense,” Boser says.

Still, Boser and others familiar with the case believe that Bulger may still have important information to contribute. Little happened in Boston in those days without Bulger knowing about it.

Florence, 24 June (AKI) - Italy has launched a campaign to convince the Louvre Museum in Paris to lend the Mona Lisa painting to Florence's Uffizi Gallery in 2013 to mark the 100th anniversary of its recovery following one of history's most famous art thefts.

The Italian Culture Ministry and the Province of Florence have jointly launched an appeal to the French to lend them what may be the world's most famous masterpieces, but the prestigious French museum said the painting is not in the condition to withstand the trip south.

Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa was briefly displayed in the Uffizi in 1913 after being recovered in a Florence hotel two years after its theft from the Louvre.

That was the last time it appeared in Italy and only one of three times the work was displayed outside of the Louvre, according to a statement posted on Thursday on the Province of Florence website.

Starting with Italian politicians, the initiative aims to collect at least 100,000 signatures to be sent to France in around six months, the statement said.

On Wednesday, Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, a painter detained on April 3, was released on bail after confessing to tax evasion. According to Ai’s lawyer, the charges were just an “excuse” to silence his client — in 2009, Ai had unflinchingly criticized China’s communist regime, asking, “If you aren’t anti-China, are you even human?” in an online forum. But three months in jail could lead Ai to be less visibly anti-China. After all, Ai is just one in a long line of artists who have dabbled in politics and suffered the consequences. How have other notable aesthetes responded to oppression?

Michelangelo (1475-1564): Even in the face of occasional disapproval from the Catholic Church, the Renaissance master championed a shockingly erotic style. When Florence fought and expelled the ruling Medici family in 1527, Michelangelo came to his city’s aid, helping fortify against invasion. This proved a bad bet: After Florence fell to the family in 1530, a Medici governor under Pope Clement VII ordered the artist’s assassination, forcing him into hiding. Later forgiven for his political sins, Michelangelo completed the sensuous “The Last Judgment” at the Sistine Chapel in 1541, a fresco commissioned by Pope Clement himself.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881): Dostoevsky’s involvement with a radical, anti-czarist St. Petersburg literary group brought him the unwelcome attention of Czar Nicholas I, who sentenced him to death in 1849, then commuted the sentence just as the author was to be shot. Dostoevsky became an ardent nationalist, embracing deeply Orthodox Christian and Russophile beliefs that shaped his most prominent works, such as “Crime and Punishment” and “The Possessed.” His time as a political prisoner turned his focus from political ideology to the spiritual angst of “The Brothers Karamazov.”

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): Five years after he published his bleak novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” the great Irish dandy was sentenced to two years of hard labor in 1895 for homosexual behavior. The experience forever changed Wilde. After serving time, he published “De Profundis” and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” both lamentations darker than “Dorian Gray” and as depressing as “The Importance of Being Earnest” was buoyant.

Intrigued by pigs? Not many of us are, but in the steady eyes and paint brush of Jamie Wyeth, pigs are one of God’s most enchanting creations.

Take the 2,200-pound porker Den-Den who one day ransacked Wyeth’s painting station on the Ball Farm near his home in Chadds Ford. Snorting wildly, she appeared at a corner of the barn, her snout plastered with cerulean blue, cadmium orange and lemon yellow. Den-Den had just swallowed 22 tubes of oil paint.

“The next day I arrived in the morning and I was expecting to find a corpse,” Wyeth recalled with a laugh. “She was perfectly fine, snorting away, and of course, all these rainbow color droppings were everywhere.”

Months later Den-Den was ticketed to the local butcher. Wyeth thought, “My God I can’t have that.” So he took her to live at his Point Lookout farm where she became the infamous subject of his life-size “Portrait of Pig.”

Wyeth’s love for animals is quite evident in the artist’s new show “Farm Work” on display at the Brandywine River Museum through Sept. 11. It is a cracker of an exhibition, encompassing so much of the artist’s personality, humor, wit and sense of wonder. The extensive collection surveys four decades of a mix of farm animals, equipment, buildings and landscapes at Wyeth and his wife Phyllis’ farm on the Brandywine River as well as his farm on Southern Island off the coast of Maine.

No ‘Farmer in the Dell’

His first exhibition to focus exclusively on this subject, the show includes over 70 works drawn from private and public collections across the country.

“I stay away from the cuteness, the ‘Farmer in the Dell’ thing,” Wyeth explained. “There is a definite life span on a farm. It’s reality. I try to capture the animal on the move, not getting the animal frozen. I really do get a sense of who the animal is.

“I always said that if born in New York, I would be painting cabs or something, but it happens that I was raised in an area where there were farms. There are wonderful objects on the farm and things about farm life, so that is where the attraction is.”

The Van Gogh Museum is shutting its doors for six months for renovations starting next year, its director said Friday, becoming the latest major Dutch museum to close for reconstruction.

But dozens of the tormented Dutch impressionist's finest works will remain on public display, moving across the Amstel River to the Hermitage Amsterdam museum during the work, scheduled to last from October 2012 through March 2013.

Van Gogh Museum director Axel Rueger said some 75 paintings and other works will move to the Hermitage, which will be staging an exhibition on impressionism at the same time.

"Art lovers will be able to see a splendid survey of 19th-century art by Van Gogh and his contemporaries in the Hermitage Amsterdam," Rueger said. "This represents a rare opportunity, one not likely to happen again any time soon."

To propel itself into the 21st century, the Morgan Library & Museum began to present and collect Modern and contemporary art in the last few years. Now it is also beginning to concentrate more heavily on what it has always been known for: drawings.

This week the Morgan announced the formation of a drawing institute, which will present exhibitions, sponsor annual fellowships, host seminars and organize a full schedule of public and academic programs. Eugene V. Thaw, a Morgan trustee, collector and philanthropist, has given the institution $5 million to start it.

Called the Drawing Institute at the Morgan Library & Museum, it will collaborate with the International Music and Art Foundation Center for Drawings at the Courtauld Gallery in London, and with the Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center in Houston, to present small, focused drawings exhibitions, programs and publications. All three institutions have exceptional collections of drawings.

Linda Wolk-Simon, who was recruited from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to run the Morgan’s department of drawings and prints this year, will oversee the institute.

The institute will also start a fellowship program for scholars, conservators and others involved in drawings, who will spend part of their time researching and lecturing on specific subjects, as well as participating in seminars and public programs.

William M. Griswold, the Morgan’s director and a drawings scholar, said that in creating the institute, “I am hoping to strengthen the bridges between the academic and museum worlds in new ways.”

FULLER LOOK AT A RENOIR

Right now at the Frick Collection there is a small show about Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert,” that great Renaissance painting, which recently underwent conservation and examination. Next year there will be another, perhaps more ambitious exhibition centering on Renoir’s painting “La Promenade,” also known as “Mother and Children,” another gem that belongs to the Frick. This work, widely considered its most important Impressionist canvas, is also so cherished by visitors that a postcard of the image is among the museum shop’s top sellers.

The French luxury-glass maker Lalique has gone through three different owners in the past two decades, and its collection of design drawings and products, some dating back more than a century, ended up somewhat neglected in the shuffle. They have rarely been kept on regular view at the factory or the corporate offices.

Lalique’s current owner, Art & Fragrance, a Swiss company headed by the perfume magnate Silvio Denz, has helped create an all-Lalique museum that opens on July 2. French government agencies worked with Art & Fragrance to set up the Musée Lalique, with a dozen galleries built atop a ruined 18th-century glassworks in Wingen-sur-Moder, France, a village in Alsace near Lalique’s manufacturing plant.

About 650 artifacts are arranged by form and function, including vases, enameled floral jewelry and church windows molded with translucent saints.

Mr. Denz has lent about 230 of his own perfume bottles, including an 1890s teardrop-shaped vessel that the company’s founder, René Lalique, molded at the kitchen stove of his Paris apartment. His experiments caused a fire that devastated his home, but he was able to salvage the bottle.

The museum has recreated a 1930s glass fountain with leaping fish, and the roof beams have been reinforced to support a spiky chandelier from the 1950s that weighs about two tons.

Some of the material on display came from a 2005 Paris auction of the estate of Marie-Claude Lalique, René’s granddaughter, who died in 2003. (She had sold her share of the company to a French corporation about a decade earlier.)

Other recent sales of Lalique material have been held at Christie’s in London, which has organized all-Lalique auctions twice a year for two decades, and at Heritage Auctions in New York, which started annual art glass sales in 2009.

Prices reach six figures for the more imposing pieces. Last week at Sotheby’s in New York, a five-foot-long 1920s ceiling fixture molded with pineapples and pomegranates brought $254,500. (The estimate was $150,000 to $250,000.) A milky rectangle, the piece hangs from cylinders shaped like bamboo stalks; René Lalique created the design for the dining room of a prince’s palace in Tokyo.

The ranks of Lalique buyers have been growing lately, particularly in China and Korea, said Nicholas Dawes, Heritage’s vice president for special collections. “There are very few French collectors, oddly enough,” he added.

Many American collectors have donated their Lalique to museums in recent years and have financed acquisitions, and a handful of institutions keep their holdings on long-term view. At the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., a few dozen vessels are on the gallery shelves, including vases with fish, feather and mermaid patterns. In October a new wing at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will display about 30 Lalique objects. The Chazen goblets, vases and perfume bottles are molded with pine needles, grapes, butterflies, scarabs, parakeets and grasshoppers.

CEREMONIAL SNUFFBOXES

In the 18th century European diplomats gave one another porcelain snuffboxes with jeweled gold rims as rewards for loyalty in political alliances. The givers knew that the boxes were more likely to be put on display than filled with snuff, and that the jewels might well be removed and sold in hard economic times.

“This was a ceremonial gesture more than something for use,” said Nette Megens, a European ceramics specialist at Bonhams in London.

On July 5 the auction house will offer about 75 snuffboxes made in the 18th and 19th centuries, some with plain metal frames added later to replace originals encrusted with garnets and rubies.

Edward J. Dolman, chairman of Christie’s International, is leaving the auction house to join the board of the Qatar Museums Authority.

A Christie’s employee for 27 years, Dolman will be working directly for the emir’s daughter, Mayassa Bint Hamad Al Thani, as the executive director of her office, the London-based auction house said today in an e-mailed statement.

Dolman, 51, became chairman of Christie’s in September 2010, when Steven Murphy, the former president and chief executive of the U.S.-based publishing company Rodale Inc., succeeded him as CEO.

Dolman had been appointed CEO in December 1999 after spending several years as a European furniture specialist.

Qatar’s museums authority administers collections of Islamic art, Orientalist paintings, natural history, photography, armor, Islamic coins, costumes and jewelry.

In October 2010, the emir said he may be interested in acquiring the London-based auction house, the Financial Times reported, after months of speculation about a possible Qatari bid. Christie’s remains a private company owned by the French billionaire Francois Pinault. The auction house was bought by his holding company, Groupe Artemis SA, for $1.2 billion in May 1998.

Active Buyers

The new National Museum of Qatar, designed by Jean Nouvel, is scheduled to open in December 2014, according to the authority’s website. Members of the Qatari royal family have been active buyers of Western modern and contemporary art in recent years.

An Aston Martin formerly owned by the actor Peter Ustinov and a Bentley Speed Six Tourer were among the top lots of a car auction last night as collectors bought British classics.

The vehicles were two of 57 being offered by RM Auctions at Syon House in west London. The Canadian-based company sold 44 of its lots for 5 million pounds ($8 million) including fees, against a presale estimate of about 5 million pounds at hammer prices.

Exceptional cars are in demand from wealthy investors, with Aston Martin among the desirable marques. The Dukeand Duchess of Cambridge’s drive in an DB6 at the royal wedding in April heightened awareness of the maker, seen by some buyers as the British equivalent of Ferrari. Even with the James Bond association, Astons have been undervalued, dealers said.

“At least two billionaires have been buying Aston Martins aggressively over the last three or four years,” said Dietrich Hatlapa, founder of Historic Automobile Group International (HAGI), a London-based research company.

The Ustinov DB4 Vantage Convertible, dating from 1961, sold for 431,200 pounds. The left-hand drive model had been bought new by Ustinov and had been entered fresh to the market by its Swiss owner with an estimate of 250,000 pounds to 320,000 pounds. Finished in its original Royal Claret, it attracted five bidders before selling to an undisclosed buyer.

Le Mans Tourer

The top price of the evening was 470,400 pounds, for a 1929 Bentley Speed Six “Le Mans’’ Tourer, recreated in the 1970s using an original chassis. It was estimated to sell for between 450,000 pounds and 550,000 pounds and attracted three bidders.

A 1926 Rolls-Royce Phantom I Experimental Sports Tourer sold to a Japanese client for 392,000 pounds. The price was below the minimum valuation of 400,000 pounds, reflecting the thinner buyer base for pre-World War II models.

A Bitter battle has erupted over the $300 million estate of famed art dealer and collector Allan Stone. His widow, Clare Stone, has accused the executor of his estate, Lelia Wood-Smith, of improperly buying an $8.5 million Connecticut house with his money and moving $200 million of his art into it without court approval.

Stone, a leading collector who opened his gallery in 1960, owned works by Willem de Kooning, Wayne Thiebaud, sculptor John Chamberlain and Andy Warhol. He died in 2006, leaving his estate to his wife of 40 years in a trust. But Stone's children and other executors disagreed about how his art should be handled, so Wood-Smith, a family friend and lawyer, was appointed independent trustee and executor in 2007.

But now Clare is demanding Wood-Smith be removed. Her court papers claim that Wood-Smith bought an $8.5 million Greenwich property without court approval and moved "the bulk" of the artwork into the house, where she never lived. The papers also claim Wood-Smith entered Clare's upstate Purchase home in June 2010, "removing everything, including her dining-room table, her furniture and her rugs . . . on the pretense that the home had to be improved."

A painting by Leonardo da Vinci that was lost for centuries has been authenticated by distinguished scholars in the United States and Europe and will be exhibited at London's National Gallery as part of a Leonardo show that opens November 9, ARTnews has learned.

The painting, Salvator Mundi, or "Savior of the World," depicts Christ with his right hand raised in blessing and his left hand holding a globe. It is painted in oil on a wood panel and measures 26 by 18 1/2 inches in size.

"It's up there with any artistic discovery of the last 100 years," said one scholar.

The work is owned by a consortium of dealers, including Robert Simon, a specialist in Old Masters in New York and Tuxedo Park, N.Y. It was reportedly bought at an estate sale in the United States about six or seven years ago. Simon declined to comment about the painting, the price, or the location of the auction. "I've been asked not to discuss it," he said.

One scholar said that the consortium had turned down an offer of $100 million for the painting. "I was told they're asking $200 million for it," he told me.

Simon brought the panel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art about two years ago to have it examined by several curators and conservators. "It was brought in for inspection in the conservation studio," said a person close to the Metropolitan who asked not to be identified. "The painting was forgotten for years. When it turned up at auction, Simon thought it was worth taking a gamble. It had been heavily overpainted, which makes it look like a copy. It was a wreck, dark and gloomy. It had been cleaned many times in the past by people who didn't know better. Once a restorer put artificial resin on it, which had turned gray and had to be removed painstakingly. When they took off the overpaint, what was revealed was the original paint. You saw incredibly delicate painting. All agree it was painted by Leonardo."

The work was shown last year to curators at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Frederick Ilchman, the museum's curator of paintings, declined to comment.

It was also brought to the National Gallery in London about 18 months ago. Nicholas Penny, director of the museum, and Luke Syson, curator of the forthcoming exhibition, invited four Leonardo scholars to see the work in the museum's conservation studio. "We have something interesting to show you," Penny told them.

The scholars were Carmen C. Bambach, curator of drawings and paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Pietro Marani, who directed the restoration of Leonardo's Last Supper in Milan; Maria Teresa Fiorio, author of many books on the Renaissance, including a biography of Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, considered by many to be Leonardo's best student; and Martin Kemp, professor emeritus of art history at Oxford University, who has spent more than 40 years studying Leonardo. Simon also attended.

"There was a lot of excitement," said a scholar who was briefed on the session. "Some were somewhat reticent, but there was general acceptance. Christ's garment is painted in blue with a miraculous softness."

To fit African art into Western art history, we had to contain it, tame it. One way was by sorting the art into so-called tribal styles, in much the way we split up the continent into countries. Sure, the divisions were fake, but they gave us a feeling of control.

Then, further in the interest of manageability, we assigned those tribal styles to a sliding scale of value, by which certain kinds of what we called primitive art appeared to be better — meaning somehow more like our own art — than other kinds.

For example, we celebrated the great 15th-century figurative bronzes from Ife in Nigeria for being up to (and, the assumption was, indebted to) our own Renaissance sculpture. And to later, more abstract-looking art, like Dan masks and Fang reliquary figures, we awarded proto-Modernist status because they had provided raw material for Brancusi and Picasso.

Still, in the contest for acceptance some African material had a tough time making the cut. Art from the Republic of Cameroon in West Africa, for example, presented problems. Its formal variety resisted ready packaging. With its tendency toward bold expressiveness, it felt irrepressible and untethered in a way that made advocates for an African classicism nervous.

Of course, much has changed in art history’s attitude toward all of this in the past half-century or so. With that change has come an awareness both of how many opportunities for study have been lost to blinkered thinking, and of how much very basic ground still needs to be explored. And this awareness helps us to see question-asking exhibitions like “Art in Cameroon: Sculptural Dialogues,” at the Neuberger Museum of Art here, for what they are: invaluable.

The show isn’t large: 30 sculptures, with 2 from the Neuberger, and the rest loans from museums and private sources in the United States and Europe. But many of the pieces that the curator, Marie-Thérèse Brincard, has chosen are spellbinders. And she has given them plenty of room to work their magic in an installation made up of isolated sculptures and small clusters of related forms — masks, stools, bowls, carved figures — spaced out over a large gallery.

In this airy arrangement everything is in a spotlight. A small, leopard-shaped bowl that might have been lost in more crowded surroundings shines. A seated carved wood male figure, covered head to foot in a kind of skin-tight Batman costume of colored beads, becomes the eye-grabbing superhero he was meant to be.

At the same time, all the objects work in unison to illustrate the ideas about art from Cameroon set out in the exhibition catalog. At a mere 40 pages, the catalog is closer to a pamphlet than to a book, but it’s packed with information, much of it found in a history-adjusting essay by Christraud M. Geary, senior curator of African and Oceanic art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The group that runs The Breakers mansion in Newport is urging Rhode Islanders to vote online as the historic property competes for the $25,000 top prize in a national competition.

The Breakers is among 100 places across the country -- and the only one in Rhode Island -- selected for the "This Place Matters" event run by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. First place gets $25,000, second place $10,000 and third place $5,000.

A legal fight over artists’ copyrights in Canada may come to a head this month in a hearing scheduled for 20 and 21 June, which is likely to have wide-ranging repercussions. Two government-appointed organisations are looking to boost the status of artists in a complaint against the National Gallery of Canada. The museum argues that this could lead to increased costs for exhibitions of national artists.

The controversy stems from a 1992 law, Canada’s Status of the Artist Act, which recognises the right of certified groups to bargain collectively on work issues with Canadian “federal producers”, a definition that the museum meets.

The organisations, Canadian Artists’ Representation/Le Front des Artistes Canadiens (Carfac) and the Regroupement des Artistes en Arts Visuels du Québec (Raav), are seeking to establish copyright fees for any works by Canadian artists displayed or owned by the National Gallery.

The case highlights a peculiar element of copyright law in Canada: the “exhibition right”. Under this law, the owner of any work created after 7 June 1988 cannot display it without the copyright holder’s permission, which could mean paying a fee to the artist each time a work is exhibited. Most Canadian museums try to negotiate the long-term right to display works they acquire at little or no fee. An extra exhibition fee is generally paid if a post-1988 work is borrowed.

“Canadian visual artists simply want the same working conditions from the National Gallery of Canada that artists in other sectors enjoy, including binding minimum fees for the use of their pre-existing works. This is consistent with the spirit and intention of the Status of the Artist Act,” said Gerald Beaulieu, a Prince Edward Island-based artist and president of Carfac.

The National Gallery argues that copyright obligations fall under Canadian copyright statutes, which protect artists’ rights to control the reproduction and exhibition of their work. The museum says that collective bargaining should not be used to resolve copyright questions as it is meant to apply to services performed by artists such as performances, lectures, tours or for the labour of installing exhibitions—but not to art that has already been produced.

A painting of a Hindu goddess sold for more than three times its estimate at a $4 million online auction by a Mumbai-based company as demand for Indian artworks is boosted by the country’s growing number of billionaires.

The green goddess picture fetched $1.3 million, beating a top estimate of $402,300. Rival collectors pushed 53 percent of the lots above high estimates, with 72 percent of the items finding buyers, the Saffronart auction house said on June 21.

Works by Brazilian, Russian, Indian and Chinese artists have risen in value as emerging-market wealth develops. India has ranked behind China as the briskest-growing major economy for much of the past decade, giving rise to a class of entrepreneurs and billionaires.

The untitled picture of the goddess Kali was by Tyeb Mehta, who died in 2009. Kali is shown against a dark-brown background, looking less menacing than in the usual blood-splattered images of her garlanded with the heads of demons she has killed.

G. Ravinder Reddy’s untitled gilded head fetched $262,055, while Jehangir Sabavala’s “The Bangle Sellers” sold for $201,250, Saffronart said in a statement. A work by Manjit Bawa, who died in 2008, titled “Nayika” fetched $248,780, while Syed Haider Raza’s “Carcassonne” sold for $218,500. Raza, 89, graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

John Studzinski, senior managing director of Blackstone Group LP (BX) and a cultural philanthropist, is sponsoring the British Museum’s new show on the art of the Christian relic.

The exhibition, which features elaborate containers for sacred human remains from 1000 to 1500 A.D., runs through Oct. 9. Highlights include reliquaries said to contain pieces of the Crown of Thorns and the Virgin Mary’s breast milk.

“If you believe in something and you have the resources to support it, you try to bring it to other audiences,” said Studzinski, a Catholic who has a chapel in his London home.

“People today have mixed views about religious formalism or structure, whether it’s the structure of the Church or the structure of other organized religions,” he said in an interview at Blackstone’s London offices. The show should appeal to visitors because “what people are really looking for is objects or sources of energy for spiritual nurturing.”

Studzinski in May 2007 pledged 5 million pounds ($8 million) to Tate Modern for its new extension. Besides one-off gifts and sponsorships, he spends about 1 million pounds a year nurturing young art in the U.K. via donations to institutions including the Royal Court Theatre and the Young Vic theater.

He regularly commissions religiously inspired music. Last week, three choral compositions funded by his Genesis Foundation were performed by Harry Christophers and the Sixteen at St. James’s Church in London.

Riverside Mansion

Studzinski, 55, is also a collector, with a mix of old masters and modern and contemporary art in his Chelsea riverside mansion. The banker said he is selling “several items” at Sotheby’s next week.

“I buy and sell art in the ordinary course of managing my collection, setting money aside for charity, and funding my new art purchases,” Studzinski said. He would not give any details of the art going on sale.

The annual summer art tour is finally over. It was bookended by the Venice Biennale and the mega-fair Art Basel and included a few stops in between. Basel was packed with collectors and dealers and was very successful, with art changing hands at the fastest pace we’ve seen since ’07. If the art market isn’t 90 percent back to the good old days it’s damn close.

But I don’t obsess over art fairs; instead I go to museums where there’s nothing to buy but plenty to learn.

In Basel, the Beyeler Foundation is always my first stop. Director Sam Keller followed up last year’s Basquiat blockbuster show with a tag team extravaganza: “Constantin Brancusi-Richard Serra.” The show included so many rarely seen works that it wowed everyone … everyone except me.

Brancusi defined the abstraction of form that announced the beginning of modern sculpture, and the show presented multiple versions of signature works like Bird in Space and The Kiss. My favorite was the five-foot-high wood sculpture Adam and Eve, in which two abstracted gaping mouths over a phallic form sit on top of a zigzag pedestal that combines Coptic architecture with influences from African Lega sculpture. Unlike some classic works that are overexposed, Brancusi’s sculptures never look kitsch, not because they defined history, but because their sober reduction of form gives them a powerful religious aura. Mr. Serra, too, is an artist I grudgingly love. Although his work is somewhat repetitive, it succeeds in being at once heavy and light even though his scale is monumental: he makes you feel like his art is designed to last forever, and it probably will—the beautiful Corten steel it’s made of weighs tons.

Despite being shoved into the Beyeler’s low-ceilinged galleries, the amazing Serra works looked good, but the pairing of these two great artists didn’t work for me. I see the benefit of refreshing century-old works by mixing them with those of a living master, but with these two I don’t understand what was achieved. I asked several dealers this question and read the exhibition catalogue but the only affinities I could find were the medium—sculpture—and the fact that both artists’ sculptures involve precarious balance: Brancusi’s Bird in Space looks like it’s just on the verge of tipping over and Mr. Serra’s huge, twisting, steel slabs appear like they are just about to topple over, like giant dominos.

On the whole, the pairing reminded me of last year’s failed blockbuster The Tourist, a film starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp in Venice: both stars were hot, but they had no chemistry. If a fresh dialogue was the point of the show, I think a Brancusi-Carl Andre match would have worked better. Mr. Andre’s still the dark and unsung hero of American minimalism. He was tried and acquitted of murdering his artist wife, Ana Mendieta, in 1988 and most museums won’t touch him, but his works are sober and powerful, the wooden railroad ties he uses are no doubt directly inspired by Brancusi, and his metal floor pieces wouldn’t tower over Brancusi’s more delicate scale. Apparently Mr. Andre even knew Brancusi in the 1950’s. Mr. Andre’s moment in the spotlight will have to wait until 2013, when the Dia Foundation gives the 76-year-old his first American retrospective in 40 years.

Paris is my favorite city, so everything there looks better to me. This was sadly not the case with “l’Art de l’Automobile” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, an exhibition dubbed “masterpieces from the Ralph Lauren car collection.” I’m a vintage car lover and I’ve owned some pretty nice Italian and French pre- and postwar rust boxes, though nothing as good as what Mr. Lauren has. I drive mine every weekend, and his look like they haven’t been started in a decade: the collection is probably the most overrestored and underdriven group of blue-chip collector status symbols in the world.

Unlike their European counterparts, American collectors are known to buy only perfect examples of just about everything. They won’t buy an African sculpture with a broken arm or a Khmer torso if it’s headless. They don’t want imperfections or aging in their Art Deco, or a Mondrian painting with its original cracks and patina. And so, when selling to the Americans, dealers restore the arms and fill in the paint on the Mondrians. Like them, Mr. Lauren has overrestored his cars, with chrome shinier and leather more supple than any car offered in the past century, including those of the great Ettore Bugatti. The fact that American collectors have favored the overrestored stuff for decades says something about our American culture: we refuse to accept things, as the French say, “dans son jus”; instead we clean them up and present them devoid of aging and wrinkles (think face lift).

We want the old stuff to look shiny and new, even if it’s a lie.

Ralph Lauren clothes, which are so successful you can find them from Europe to Asia, have a similar point of view: they are smart and beautifully made selections of other people’s design. Whether British or American classics, they are always high-quality copies. But copies and overrestoration are not for me; I like cars and paintings with patina. When something is old but doesn’t show its age, I’m suspicious. Sources tell me that Mr. Lauren’s fabulous Ferrari 250 GTO is actually a rebodied car with period chassis and motor, and that his fabulous Bugatti Atlantic is reupholstered in leathers that are not period options, meaning the chrome and paint job are not what Bugatti offered back in the day. I was also disappointed not to see a fabulous Ferrari Spyder California, or a Jaguar C-type, or some eccentric choices in the display. Then again, maybe I’m just too jealous of his Jaguar D-type and gorgeous XKSS to think straight.

In the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris is an interesting Richard Prince show through June 26 titled “American Prayer,” which combines his extensive book collection from what he calls the “Beat-Hippie-Punk” generation with some of his newer book-related art works. It includes important dedicated editions of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as well as amazing hand-written letters from Jimmy Hendrix to his father, ones in which he complains about not getting paid or not even getting a gig.