It’s a concept that takes Warhol one bold step further: Receive $100,000 in prize money, and instead of spending it, tack 100,000 used $1 bills to the walls of a museum.

But the notion that, as Warhol, the man who painted “200 One Dollar Bills,” once said, “making money is art” is exactly what Hans-Peter Feldmann, the German artist who was awarded the $100,000 Hugo Boss Prize in November, does not want art lovers to think next month when they step into a large gallery off the Frank Lloyd Wright ramp of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and see a room covered floor to ceiling with 100,000 $1 bills.

“I’m 70 years old, and I began making art in the ’50s,” Mr. Feldmann said in a telephone interview from his studio in Düsseldorf. “At that time there was no money in the art world. Money and art didn’t exist. So for me $100,000 is very special. It’s incredible really. And I would like to show the quantity of it.”

Describing the installation as “a big statement,” Mr. Feldmann said “it would be a pity” if people think that the exhibition is crass, or that he is thumbing his nose in some way at the prize or the money or the Guggenheim. “I am not at all against the museum,” he said. “It’s great that they have agreed to do this. It is a bit out of the norm.”

The Hugo Boss Prize, established in 1996 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and named for the German men’s wear company that sponsors it, is given every two years for significant achievement in contemporary art. The winner is awarded not only $100,000 but also an exhibition, which this year runs from May 20 through Nov. 2. Mr. Feldmann is the oldest artist to win the prize, which is generally given to emerging professionals. At the time of the announcement last year the jury of art professionals defended its decision, saying that Mr. Feldmann epitomized the best of contemporary art right now.

A combination picture shows the half-hour process of painter Zhao Xiaoyong working on a Van Gogh self-portrait in his gallery at Dafen Oil Painting Village in Shenzhen, south China's Guangdong province April 24, 2011. Zhao said he has sold more than 70,000 pieces of Van Gogh's paintings, with the price ranging from 200 to 1,500 yuan ($30-$230) a piece. Dafen village, a suburb in Shenzhen, is believed to be the largest mass producer of oil paintings in the world. Artists here manufacture some 60 percent of the total global trade volume, according to China Daily. Thousands of artists and dealers rent shops or exterior walls on buildings to display and sell oil paintings, but they will soon need to find other places as the local government has pledged to ban the practice in an effort to brush up its image before the upcoming Universiade, local media reported.

April 2010 marked a milestone for Art Chicago.

It was the 30th anniversary of Chicago's first international art fair, dubbed the Chicago International Art Exposition and staged on Navy Pier in May 1980. In the three decades since, the fair changed hands (and names) a half-dozen times, ultimately landing in the lap of corporate art fair giants Merchandise Mart Properties Inc., which saved the previously independent fair from certain bankruptcy in 2006 and has produced it at the Merchandise Mart ever since.

Thirty-one years, on the other hand, is different.

Five years into MMPI's version of Art Chicago, locals have learned to associate the fair with the Artropolis moniker, coined by MMPI as an all-inclusive umbrella under which the traditional Art Chicago fest lives alongside the contemporary-driven NEXT exhibition of emerging art, now in its fourth year, and the International Antiques Fair, which MMPI has hosted since 1997. Together under the same massive roof, the trio of fairs coexist as a one-stop Midwestern shop for international collectors who may very well be shopping for art and furniture in the same way they pick out matching cabinetry and counters elsewhere in the building.

This year, the lines between MMPI's fairs will blur even further: Art Chicago and NEXT share a floor in the Mart (they've previously been on separate floors), feasibly making it easier for collectors to roam from classic to contemporary. According to MMPI vice president Paul Morris, who is Art Chicago's acting director, the combined floor plan came by request.

"We were encouraged by both collectors and dealers, making it easy for collectors as possible to navigate the fair," Morris said last week, adding that visitors will be able to cross back and forth between established work and emerging work, as opposed to waiting in line for the Mart's elevators.

NEXT curatorial director Ken Tyburski maintained that despite this year's comingled floor plan, the number of exhibiting galleries will remain roughly the same as last year, and the "energy is going to be that much greater" with the two fairs combined.

A parade of sculpture once again has popped up on North Orleans, which can mean only one thing. Artropolis is back.

Spring wouldn’t be spring without this celebration of art, antiques and culture that is centered in the Merchandise Mart but also spreads out to cultural institutions across the city.

Under the umbrella title Artropolis is Art Chicago, an international fair of contemporary and modern art, and NEXT, an invitational exhibition of emerging artists. Both are housed on the 12th floor of the Mart. Making it a trio is the International Antiques Fair, now in its 14th year; find it on the Mart’s eighth floor.

Six years ago, Art Chicago, the city’s once-great art fair, was all but dead. But an 11th-hour save by Mart president Chris Kennedy rescued the show. Since then, the Mart team works year-round to bring the fair back to its former prominence in the art world.

“We have a history of listening to dealers and artists and collectors,” said Jennifer Woolford, the Mart’s senior vice president. “Listening helped the event evolve over the years. And we adjusted things to make it right.”

The revived show in 2006 drew 21,600 people. Last year, the number was more than 40,000 attendees, ranging from seasoned and novice collectors to art students and casual observers simply enjoying the vast range of art on exhibit.

A highlight of Art Chicago 2011 is a special exhibition by Shepard Fairey, the creator of the ubiquitous red, white and blue Barack Obama “Hope” poster. He and his Los Angles-based team will create an outside installation on the Mart’s south drive.

Sir Denis Mahon, who has died aged 100, was one of the most distinguished art historians and collectors of the 20th century, and a determined campaigner on behalf of museums into his 90s. His collection of Italian baroque paintings, including masterpieces by Guercino, Guido Reni and Luca Giordano, has been deposited in British institutions, including the National Gallery in London, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Twice a trustee of the National Gallery (1957-64, 1966-73), he was instrumental in pushing through several important acquisitions, including Reni's Adoration of the Shepherds, still the largest painting in the gallery, and, in 1970 (with the much-appreciated support of the sculptor Henry Moore, a fellow trustee), Caravaggio's Salome Receives the Head of St John the Baptist, a very moving late work by the artist. He was a zealous guardian of the public interest, actively opposing the imposition of charges for visitors to museums and lobbying for legislation to prevent the National Gallery from selling any of its pictures.

Together with the National Art Collections Fund (now the Art Fund) and others, he pressed for the conversion of the Land Fund – set up in 1946 as a memorial to those who had given their lives for their country and which had then been conveniently forgotten, as he put it, by the Treasury – into the National Heritage Memorial Fund, with independent trustees. His collection was always a very effective weapon in these campaigns, and he several times threatened to dispose of it abroad if the government of the day, Labour or Conservative, failed to live up to its responsiblities in defence of museums and heritage.

His natural attitude towards ministers and bureaucrats was one of suspicion, and theirs towards him was one of respectful fear combined with intense exasperation. He did, however, have a good working relationship with several arts ministers, including the Conservative Grey Gowrie (1983-85) and the Labour culture secretary Chris Smith (1997-2001).

Even after making public the details of his decision in 1999 to bequeath his pictures to the national collections fund, with the instruction that they be deposited in various British galleries and museums, he still threatened to change his arrangements if the government refused to change the rule whereby the non-charging national museums – including the British Museum, National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery – could not reclaim VAT, whereas the charging museums – the Victoria and Albert, Natural History and Science Museums – could. In 2001 the government agreed to remove the anomaly, a gesture that gave Mahon real pleasure.

Born in London, he was the the son of John FitzGerald Mahon, a member of the family that had prospered from the Guinness Mahon merchant bank, and the grandson, through his mother, Lady Alice Evelyn Browne, of the fifth Marquess of Sligo. On visits with me to Kenwood House, on Hampstead Heath, north London, he would point out with evident satisfaction that the Portrait of Countess Howe, one of Thomas Gainsborough's finest paintings, showed his great-great-great-grandmother.

Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he read history, Mahon developed a great enthusiasm for opera. A career in the family business held little attraction for him, and he soon decided to devote himself wholly, and to the exclusion of the pleasures of opera, to studying the history of art. Kenneth Clark, then at the Ashmolean, was an influential figure in his formative years and recommended him to Nikolaus Pevsner, the German émigré art historian, who was then teaching at the fledgling Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

Best known today for his writings on the architectural history of Britain, Pevsner had early been interested in Italian baroque art, and suggested to Mahon that he study the work of Guercino – the little squinter – the nickname of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, a neglected Bolognese painter of the 17th century. Guercino was an ideal subject because his life is well documented, and he was remarkably well represented in British collections. The largest group of drawings by him is at Windsor Castle, in the Royal Collection, which Mahon was to catalogue, together with Nicholas Turner, in 1989.

In his 20s, Mahon travelled extensively to study the works in museums and private collections of the Bolognese painters: the Carraccis – the brothers Annibale and Agostino, and their cousin Ludovico, who were jointly responsible for a revival of Italian painting at the end of the 16th century – Reni and, of course, Guercino, who remained his principal interest throughout his life.

Together with the Viennese expert Otto Kurz, another member of the diaspora of Jewish art historians who had left Germany and Austria in the 1930s, he visited Stalinist Russia, with a trunk of full of antiquarian books, including the biographies of artists written in the 17th century by Gian Pietro Bellori and Carlo Cesare Malvasia. The customs officials demanded that the English newsprint that had been used to wrap up the books be removed and handed in to the authorities, and informed them that they could claim it back when they left.

American photographer Jim Goldberg was awarded the 2011 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize today in a ceremony at Ambika P3, University of Westminster, London, the temporary home of The Photographers’ Gallery, which is undergoing renovation. The £30,000 ($49,443) prize, founded in 1996 and administered by The Photographers’ Gallery, is awarded to a living photographer who has made the most significant contribution to photography in Europe in the past year. This is the 15th year the prize has been given out.

Goldberg was nominated for his exhibition Open See at The Photographers’ Gallery, London. For Open See, Goldberg photographed refugee, immigrant and trafficked populations using large- and medium-format cameras, and Polaroids. Goldberg then embellished the images with the handwritten stories of his subjects or with ephemera, and also incorporated video into his storytelling technique. The Photographers’ Gallery director, Brett Rogers, who was the non-voting chair, said in a statement that the award recognized Goldberg’s “timely and inventive approach to documentary practice, at the heart of which lies for him co-authorship, a form of creative collaboration allowing these individuals to tell their own stories.”

The other three shortlisted photographers were:

German artist Thomas Demand was nominated for his exhibition Nationalgalerie at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. For the exhibition, Demand built and photographed life-sized paper models that were constructed using news, personal and other images as a reference. The work, which focuses on German social and political life, emphasizes and questions the photograph’s role in constructing the viewer’s sense of reality.

American artist Roe Etheridge was nominated for his solo exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles in France. Etheridge, also considered a conceptual photographer, utilizes photographic forms such as commercial outtakes, still life, landscape and studio portraiture, grouping seemingly unrelated images together to create new associations between widely practiced modes of photography.

Spencer Tunick, the artist known for gathering together hundreds of naked volunteers, is planning his next project at the lowest place on earth, the Dead Sea in Israel. He is using the Internet to raise money for it.

The Dead Sea, popular for the restorative powers of its mud baths and mineral waters, is shrinking more than three feet (a meter) a year, marine experts said. The drop is caused by the diversion of agricultural and drinking water and dry winters.

U.S.-born Tunick, 44, has photographed large groups of naked people at the Big Chill Festival in the U.K., and cities including London, Amsterdam, Sydney and Buenos Aires.

“This project is dear to me, one that I have dreamed of since my early days as an artist,” Tunick said in an e-mailed statement seeking backers. “I look forward to your support in exposing a part of Israel that hasn’t been seen before and at the same time bring attention to the deteriorating situation of the Dead Sea.”

From his very early years as Davie Jones and the King Bees, through his glam-rock transformation into Ziggy Stardust, his coke-fueled exploits as The Thin White Duke, and even the disastrous Tin Machine period, David Bowie has long held a deep fascination with and appreciation for the visual and performing arts. And this summer, The Museum of Arts and Design will be highlighting Bowie's cinematic achievements with a new audio-visual retrospective: David Bowie, Artist.

The exhibit, which opens on May 9, will showcase the "too-often overlooked diversity and multifaceted nature of Bowie’s total artistic output," with a particular focus on his acting career. Eight of his major films will be shown throughout the two-month event, showcasing roles that span a humanoid alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth, a goblin king in Labyrinth, a vampire in The Hunger, a British officer in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ, and Andy Warhol in Basquiat. Rounding out the movies will also be screenings of The Linguini Incident, a "lost" rom-com starring him and Rosanna Arquette, as well as his seminal 1973 tour film Ziggy Stardust.

Harry Jackson, a Marine combat artist who turned his back on a promising career as an Abstract Expressionist painter to become a prominent realist artist known for his paintings and bronze sculptures of cowboys and Indians, died on Monday in Sheridan, Wyo. He was 87 and lived in Cody, Wyo., and Camaiore, Italy.

His death was confirmed by his son Matthew.

Mr. Jackson, infatuated by the West from early childhood, headed to Wyoming from his hometown, Chicago, at 14 and found work as a ranch hand, working his way up to cowboy. There, when not tending cattle, he turned out shoot-’em-up sketches in the manner of Frederic Remington.

After enlisting in the Marine Corps at 18, he was assigned as a sketch artist to the Fifth Amphibious Corps. He was seriously wounded in the battle for Betio Island in the Tarawa atoll in November 1943 and again at Saipan, for which he was awarded the Purple Heart. Because of his war injuries, he struggled throughout his life with life-threatening epileptic seizures and severe mood disorders.

After being shipped to Los Angeles, he was made an official Marine Corps combat artist, with the assignment to execute drawings and paintings depicting, as he put it, “my bloodiest close-combat experiences.” This he did in paintings like “Tarawa-Betio” (1944), now in the collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Va.

After seeing the Jackson Pollock painting “The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle,” Mr. Jackson underwent an artistic conversion. The painting, he said, “shot the first crack of daylight into my blocked-off brain.” He moved to New York, where he became a close friend of Pollock’s and began painting in the Abstract Expressionist style.

He quickly gained notice as an artist to watch when Meyer Schapiro and Clement Greenberg included him in their “Talent 1950” exhibition at the Kootz Gallery, and over the next several years he exhibited at Tibor de Nagy, a nerve center of second-generation Abstract Expressionism.

Now in its 29th year, the Art Brussels art fair, which will run from Thursday 28 April to Sunday 1 May 2011 is already being heralded as a must-see event for all lovers of contemporary art. Art Brussels, the fair for established and upcoming talent, excels at blending both into a unique concept. Art Brussels is a global player in the contemporary art field and manages, now more than ever, to maintain itself at the top of the major international art fairs. More than 400 galleries from 33 countries have submitted an application in the hope of being selected for the exhibition. A selection which is becoming increasingly difficult every year, due to the ever increasing number of prominent galleries that apply. The international selection committee selected 170 art galleries. Roughly one quarter of the galleries are Belgian, the remainder are from Europe and all over the world.

They present a variety of works by young and established talent and guarantee an interesting mix of conceptual art, contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, video, installations and performances. The emphasis, as always, is on quality. New this year is that the traditional Monday opening has been abolished at the express request of the international participants. To compensate for this, the preview will be organised on Wednesday 27 April and the fair will thus open one day earlier. The fair opens to the general public on Thursday 28 April and runs till Sunday 1 May. The new architectural plan, which was introduced in 2010 with Hall 3 reserved to the young galleries and Hall 1 to the established galleries, has been maintained. This format generates additional visibility for the young galleries and  also capitalises on the interest of collectors interested in young and emerging talent.

Mousse Contemporary Art Magazine will curate the fifth Artist Projects event. In the context of this project, several international artists will be invited to create on-site interventions using the fairs existing ephemera and exhibition structure. The successful outdoor sculpture project 'Art in the City, is also set to continue, in collaboration with the City of Brussels. This collaboration gives the laureate an opportunity to develop a project for the city of Brussels. The available budget is 100,000. This cooperation with the city of Brussels will also be pursued in the next few years. Given the importance of the fair for the city, it has been decided that henceforth the city will promote the week during which Art Brussels is held as Brussels Art Week. This cooperation aims to generate greater visibility for the city as well as for Art Brussels, and raise greater public awareness for contemporary visual art. Art Brussels also works closely with various official organisations, museums and art centres which synchronize their events with Art Brussels. Each year the off-programme is expanded.

The Petersen Automotive Museum announced Tuesday that one of its founding benefactors, Margie Petersen, has donated buildings, collectible cars and cash with a combined estimated value of $100 million.

"We're all just absolutely ecstatic," said Buddy Pepp, executive director of the museum at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, across from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Pepp said the cash component is "many, many, many millions of dollars" but won't be disclosed at the request of Petersen, widow of Robert E. Petersen, the car magazine publisher and former Hollywood publicist who spearheaded the museum's creation in 1994 and saved it with a $25-million donation in 2000.

"I am thrilled to make this gift which continues what Mr. Petersen and I began two decades ago," Margie Petersen said in a statement released by the museum. "I am so happy that this day has come and that I can launch the museum into a new era of growth and expansion."

Without owning them, the museum previously had free use of the museum building and adjoining parking garage, as well as the 135 vehicles that are part of the gift, said Pepp, a former firehose manufacturer who has been active as a museum supporter since the beginning and 10 months ago became its second director, succeeding the retired Dick Messer. The newly gifted autos join about 250 others, plus more than 50 motorcycles, that had made up the museum's collection.

The cash from Margie Petersen comes with a requirement that the museum raise an undisclosed matching amount. Recently its annual budgets have been in the $4 million to $5 million range, with attendance averaging about 150,000 a year. Pepp said the museum will now hire its first staff of fundraising specialists as it launches a campaign to build an endowment, and over the next two years will more than double its board from the current seven members to 15, which figures to further increase its fundraising firepower.

The most visible near-term changes, Pepp said, will be a thorough sprucing-up of the museum's interior and changes to the exterior aimed at bolstering its street presence.

Despite the honor of having his work currently on display in MOCA's much buzzed about and controversial graffiti showcase "Art in the Streets", local street artist Revok is anything but a celebrated champion of the arts in the eyes of the judge who just sentenced him to 180 behind bars.  The law caught up with Jason Williams a.k.a. Revok while trying to board a plane destined for Ireland out of LAX last week for failure to pay the court-ordered restitution as part of his probation to his victims in previous vandalism charges.

The donor flew to Australia from the US last year to personally hand over the painting, "Jeune fille endormie", which is one of the largest gifts ever made to the University of Sydney.

The vivid painting, which measures 18 inches tall by 22 inches wide, was painted in 1935 and depicts Picasso's lover and muse, Marie-Therese Walter. It has only been shown once in public before now.

In June, the artwork, which shows Walter asleep with her head leaning on her crossed arms, will be sold at Christie's auction house in London and is expected to fetch between £9 million and £12 million. Last year, a 1932 portrait of Walter by Picasso, "Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur" set a world record when it was snapped up by a mystery bidder for $106.5 million (£65m).

Michael Spence, Sydney University vice-chancellor, said the "extraordinary act of generosity" came with three conditions.

The elevator to the Manhattan apartment of Picasso biographer John Richardson opens on life- size photocopies of two paintings.

Inside the sprawling flat, the Spaniard’s intense eyes gaze from black-and-white photographs and book covers displayed amid vases of white lilies. Drawings, paintings and lithographs line the walls.

Picasso has been part of Richardson’s life for almost 60 years. With three door-stop volumes of the biography in print, Richardson is working on a fourth.

We met last week to discuss “Picasso and Marie-Therese: L’amour Fou,” an exhibition Richardson, 87, curated for Gagosian gallery in New York.

“Except for Jacqueline, his second wife, this was the longest, most-enduring love of his life,” said the patrician Richardson in a tweed jacket.

The artist was 45 and unhappily married in January 1927 when he spotted the voluptuous 17-year-old Marie-Therese Walter on a Paris street.

The creative deluge that followed is the subject of “L’amour Fou.” Its almost 90 paintings, drawings and sculptures explore love, lust and desire through Surrealism, Cubism, deft academic drawings, scenes of rapture, bulbous eyes, phallic noses and stick figures that predate Giacometti.

“Some are very tender, some are rough sex,” said Richardson, who organized the exhibition with the couple’s granddaughter, Diana Widmaier Picasso.

What was Walter’s appeal?

‘No Fool’

“She was exceedingly submissive, infinitely sustaining and no fool,” said Richardson. “She understood his need for affairs on the side and she forgave that because she knew that fundamentally he belonged to her.”

The Pace Gallery is honored to present Willem de Kooning: The Figure: Movement and Gesture, on view at 32 East 57th Street from April 29 through July 29, 2011.  This will be the first exhibition at Pace devoted to the artist since the gallery announced exclusive representation of the estate last fall.  Willem de Kooning: The Figure: Movement and Gesture features nearly forty paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the late 60s through the late 70s, including a number of private loans and rarely seen paintings.  A catalogue with an essay written by art historian Richard Shiff will accompany the exhibition.  An opening reception will be held at the gallery on April 28 from 6 to 8 pm.

From the late 60s to the late 70s de Kooning explored the figure with new gestural liquidity, merging the figure into landscape and working in sculpture for the first time.  The Figure: Movement and Gesture focuses on the movement of transformation from figuration into abstraction and the complex ways that de Kooning depicted motion as he rendered the human figure. “The figure,” de Kooning stated during this period, “is nothing unless you twist it around like a strange miracle.”  The artist twisted, turned, and contorted the figure into the landscape as he investigated form, blurring the edges into abstraction and bringing it back into moments of clarity.
 
This new consideration of the figure coincided with de Kooning’s permanent move to the Hamptons from Manhattan in 1963 and a growing interest in a pastoral vocabulary.   As de Kooning resumed painting in his new studio, the figures that emerged were decidedly different from his anatomically distorted, wild-eyed women from the 50s.  In contrast to the dark lines of charcoal or black enamel that bound those earlier compositions, brushstroke and color were freed from form.  As the artist experienced the motion of the figure and of his own strokes the distinction between figure and ground diminished until woman was no longer differentiated from landscape. 
 
In Woman, 1969, a rarely seen painting, on view here for the first time in New York, de Kooning pulls the twisting figure out from fields of color.  Amityville, 1971, reveals glimpses of “feet, hands, and perhaps a central torso,” Shiff writes, “But what do we actually see?  The bright colors—white, yellow, red, and blue, all distributed nearly equally throughout the field of this image—create a sensory tension between the linear configurations and the chromatic contrasts. To concentrate on the one is to be distracted by the other, with the result that perceptual movement—now this, now that—is built into the painting.” 
 
De Kooning’s process of building a painting was entwined with the movement that it depicted; insistent on working each painting from all four sides, he rotated the paintings into different orientations—a vertical composition becoming horizontal and vice-versa.  As he turned the image of the figure around in his mind, considering it from every angle, “it was touch,” Shiff explains, “that guided his contact with the pictorial surface.”  At times de Kooning drew with his eyes closed, with his left hand or both hands, drawing from the moving image on a television screen, feeling his own body into the position of the figures that he would paint—internalizing the motion he wished to depict.  The paintings mutated constantly, rarely considered finished, and a day’s work was often scraped down to begin anew over the traces of pigment that preceded it.  
 
De Kooning worked on multiple paintings simultaneously, using vellum to invert, mirror, or replicate a movement and transfer the image from one work to another or to study a movement from both sides, working on both recto and verso of the page.  Examples of the artist’s works on vellum will also be on view, mounted so that they will be visible from both sides.  Twenty drawings will provide a glimpse at the quickest, most direct expression of hand to paper.  “[My] drawings are fast,” de Kooning once remarked, “like snapshots.” 

The time period presented coincides with de Kooning’s first foray into sculpture in 1969, the result of a chance encounter on a visit to Rome with an old friend who owned a foundry.  Working with clay enabled the artist to connect to the human body without the interruption of the brush, and he responded to the visceral act of pushing, squeezing, and shaping the form as he considered it in three dimensions.  In 1971 he began sculpting again in his East Hampton studio, making works larger than those he had made abroad, often working with dexterous wire armatures that could accommodate the heavy masses of wet clay he applied. In 1972, de Kooning made several figures related to the paintings that immediately preceded his work with sculpture, such as Cross-legged Figure (1972), a bronze figure twisted around a central axis with its limbs flayed outwards.   Hostess (1973), a bronze sculpture measuring 49" x 37" x 29," will also be on view.
 
Willem de Kooning’s relationship with Pace dates to the gallery’s origins in 1963 and spans five decades, during which the gallery has presented more than a dozen exhibitions devoted to the artist.  These include three groundbreaking shows that have greatly contributed to the scholarship on de Kooning, providing new revelations and insight into his richly nuanced career.  De Kooning/Dubuffet: The Women (1991) was the first full-scale exhibition to pair both artists’ series of women, painted almost simultaneously on each side of the Atlantic; De Kooning/Dubuffet: The Late Works (1993) explored affinities in the final works of the artists, and Willem de Kooning and John Chamberlain: Influence and Transformation (2001) examined two Abstract Expressionists working across generations and mediums.
 
At Pace, the de Kooning estate is reunited with contemporaries and friends from the artist’s life, including the estates of Adolph Gottlieb, Isamu Noguchi, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko.  For decades Pace artists ranging from Chuck Close and Jim Dine to Robert Irwin have noted de Kooning’s influence and their own admiration for his work.  Born on April 24, 1904 in Rotterdam, de Kooning would become recognized as a leader of the New York school by the 1950s.  In 1948, Josef Albers invited de Kooning to teach at Black Mountain College, where Robert Rauschenberg and John Chamberlain, among others, studied.  Moving from figuration to abstraction—and at times working simultaneously in both, de Kooning’s work underwent radical stylistic shifts from decade to decade. 
 
This exhibition precedes a major retrospective devoted to the artist at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, which will examine the development of the artist’s career over nearly seven decades through more than 200 works from public and private collections, representing nearly every type of technique and subject matter that the artist worked in. De Kooning: A Retrospective will be on view from September 18, 2011 through January 9, 2012.    Willem de Kooning’s work has been featured in hundreds of solo and group exhibitions internationally and can be found in nearly every important public collection around the world.  
 
For more information about Willem de Kooning: The Figure: Movement and Gesture, please contact the Public Relations department of The Pace Gallery at 212.421.8987. For general inquiries, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; for reproduction requests, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. 

Now showing at Los Angeles' Geffen Contemporary museum: "the first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti and street art," an exhibition that reverently displays "installations by 50 of the most dynamic artists from the graffiti and street art community."

Translation: They're having wine and cheese parties surrounded by framed images of urban blight. They're giving the destruction of other people's property a hallowed place in high-art halls.

And they're inviting school groups to tour this retrospective, even - no kidding - selling cans of spray paint (along with books like "Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art," $39.99) in the gift shop.

If all that weren't bad enough, this grand celebration of vandalism is slated to come to a museum near you - the Brooklyn Museum - in March.

Which means museum mavens will be sticking their thumbs in the eyes of every bodega owner and restaurant manager who struggles to keep his or her property graffiti-free, not to mention the eyes of all New Yorkers who cringe recalling the days of graffiti-covered subway cars.

They will be doing this with taxpayers' help. While the city spends some $2.4 million a year to battle vandalism, and the transit authority spends plenty more, taxpayers also subsidize the Brooklyn Museum to the tune of about $9 million a year.

Usually a fine investment. Not this time.

Marc Chagall was an enormously popular 20th century painter, revered by the public for his rooftop fiddlers, biblical lore, upside down lovers and fanciful visions of Jewish shtetl life in the old Russian empire. Art historians and critics, however, have always had difficulty placing him among the many currents of modern art; to them, he often seemed unique, special, one of a kind. Some also found him repetitive and sentimental.

But Chagall was not always a loner. In an innovative exhibition, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has decided to concentrate on his younger years when, far from unique, he and a band of mainly East European, mainly Jewish artists honed their craft in Paris. The show, "Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle," closes July 10. Made up mostly of paintings from the Philadelphia museum's own collection, the show, which displays Chagall alongside his contemporaries, goes nowhere else. The museum has a large collection of Chagalls mainly through the legacy of Louis E. Stern, Chagall's American lawyer. "I wanted to give Chagall an edge," said Michael R. Taylor, the museum's curator of modern art. "He's usually seen alone. Here I put him with ... the others, and he's more interesting."

Chagall arrived in Paris in 1911 at age 24. He grew up in a poor Jewish family in Vitebsk in what is now Belarus but was then Russia and studied painting there and in St. Petersburg. Like many poor artists in Paris and a few writers, he soon rented a cheap apartment and studio in La Ruche (the Beehive) at No. 2 Passage Dantzig in the rundown slaughterhouse district near Montparnasse on the Left Bank.

With government blessing, La Ruche had been constructed by a French philanthropist in 1902 to accommodate the throngs of young artists drawn to the city that was now the world's center of art. The building's name came from its cylindrical shape: 16 sides three stories high with scores of small studios looking on the city through large windows.

The French artist Fernand Leger once lived there. But most residents were foreign and over the years included the Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani, the Lithuanian painter Chaim Soutine, the Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, and many other Jewish artists.

Unlike Modigliani and Soutine, Chagall was not noted as a habitual client of the bars of Montparnasse. He was engaged to a woman back home, Bella Rosenberg, and did not socialize as much as the others. But he did absorb their ideas on art.

One of Chagall's first paintings in 1911, "Half-Past Three (The Poet)," shows the influence of the fashionable movements in Paris at that time. The subject of the painting was supposed to be a Russian poet who lived at La Ruche and often stopped by Chagall's studio for coffee, but Taylor believes Chagall may have been painting himself as well. The figure of the poet is cubist with his head turned upside down, symbolizing, according to Taylor, "the head-spinning impact of his [Chagall's] encounter" with cubism. The colors also resemble those used by the French painter Robert Delaunay, who was well known to the artists of La Ruche because his wife, the painter Sonia Terk, was a Ukrainian friend of theirs.

The influence of Delaunay, who often depicted cubist impressions of the Eiffel Tower, is obvious in Chagall's 1913 masterpiece, "Paris Through the Window," which gives the exhibition its title. The painting is supposed to show a scene of Paris as seen through Chagall's window at La Ruche. It is a fanciful, delightful, explosive scene.

The Eiffel Tower is there, much closer and larger than it would have seemed from the window, and it is set against the bright and yet transparent blue, white and red colors of the French flag. A parachutist seeps downward, a well-dressed man and woman float horizontally and an upside-down train chugs ahead. A strange cat bays from the window sill. Within the room, Chagall puzzles us with a two-faced man. Taylor believes the man is Chagall looking eastward toward the traditions of Russia and westward toward the modern painters of Paris.

Chagall once said, "In La Ruche you died or came out famous." By 1914, he had achieved a measure of fame with a successful solo exhibition in a gallery in Berlin. World War I broke out that same year, trapping Chagall while he was visiting his family in Vitebsk. He spent the war years there, marrying Bella in 1915. From then on, he once said, he would never declare a painting or print finished unless she approved. When the Revolution of 1917 pulled Russia out of the war, the new Communist government named him commissar of art in Vitebsk.

During the Vitebsk interlude, Chagall began to introduce traditional Jewish themes into his symbolic, Modernist paintings. This would set him apart from his old friends. In 1923, Chagall — now with a wife and child — made his way back to them in Paris.

While sexy modern designs, like midcentury Karl Springer coffee tables and John Vesey steel chairs, are going for fat sums, prices for period pieces are down from their '80s peak. "Now is the time to buy good antiques," insisted Guy Regal, the Manhattan antiques dealer, over lunch a few weeks ago.

According to Mr. Regal, the market for period pieces, including 18th-century Louis, authentic English Regency and Irish Chippendale, is ripe for the picking. "There's a glut of important, dowager furniture out there and not a lot of demand, thus, a pricing free fall," he said. Consider this: A pair of Louis XVI fauteuils that were $35,000 15 years ago just went for $10,000 at auction.

It's all great news for those with spare cash and an expert's knowledge of what to look for. I, on the other hand, am a touch short on both. But I am curious, and I do love a deal.

One trip to Mr. Regal's space at the chicly renovated Newel showroom on 53rd Street and I was ready to (pretend to) invest in Old World. His inventory is refined glitz—like if Jackie O were a table. Walking through the aisles, all that buffed mahogany reminded me of Cold War-era Sunny von Bulow décor, in a good way.

The scale and seriousness of the furniture was inspiring and would offer a nuanced jolt to any room short on history. For those of us who obsess about living rooms, it's exciting to bring home a glossy, gilded antique, like an Italian secretary desk, and redefine it for the 2010s against a more subdued backdrop. Plus, this subgenre is not as gray granny as you might think—like it or not, '80s vapor is thick right now.

Trend followers have been blogging about old master fluffers like Mark Hampton and Mario Buatta with nostalgic longing, hoping for a neo-"Dynasty" revival. Style setters like Carolina Herrera Jr. have been layering in the old lady pieces for years—her laid-back house in Spain is a triumph of festive fabrics, modern upholstery and old-guard furniture.

Book dealer Ken Sanders has seen a lot of nothing in his decades appraising "rare" finds pulled from attics and basements, storage sheds and closets.

Sanders, who occasionally appraises items for PBS's Antiques Roadshow, often employs the "fine art of letting people down gently."

But on a recent Saturday while volunteering at a fundraiser for the small town museum in Sandy, Utah, just south of Salt Lake, Sanders got the surprise of a lifetime.

"Late in the afternoon, a man sat down and started unwrapping a book from a big plastic sack, informing me he had a really, really old book and he thought it might be worth some money," he said. "I kinda start, oh boy, I've heard this before."

Then he produced a tattered, partial copy of the 500-year-old Nuremberg Chronicle.

The German language edition printed by Anton Koberger and published in 1493 is a world history beginning in biblical times. It's considered one of the earliest and most lavishly illustrated books of the 15th century.

"I was just absolutely astounded. I was flabbergasted, particularly here in the interior West," Sanders said. "We might see a lot of rare Mormon books and other treasures, but you don't expect to see a five-centuries-old book. You don't expect to see one of the oldest printed books in the world pop up in Sandy, Utah."

The book's owner has declined to be identified, but Sanders said it was passed down to the man by his great uncle and had been gathering dust in his attic for decades.

Because of the cotton bond paper it was printed on, not wood pulp paper like most present-day works, Sanders said the remaining pages have been well-preserved albeit literally coming apart at the seams

"Barring further calamity or disaster, it will last another 500 years," he said.

And Sanders is certain it's not a fake.

"It passes the smell test," he said. "I'm not sure there's ever been a forger born who is ambitious enough to hand-create a five-centuries-old book in a manner sufficient enough to fool people."

But what's it actually worth? Turns out, not much.

It is believed there are several hundred copies in circulation worldwide, making it not-so-rare of a find, and about two-thirds of its pages are missing.

Still, it's not the monetary value that excites Sanders.

On May 24th the Whitney Museum of American Art will break ground on a 200,000 sqf facility, designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Renzo Piano. Located in the Meatpacking District adjacent to the southern entrance to the High Line, the building will provide the Whitney with essential new space for its collection, exhibitions, and education and performing arts programs in one of New York’s most vibrant neighborhoods.

To celebrate this historic moment for the Museum, from May 19 to 27 they will host a series of events, programs, performances, and public art initiatives.