and this month, mostly art hard news. Reports gathered by Alden Scott Crow & Musea.
IN STORAGE: Only 10% of the Louvre's collection of art is exhibited at one time. Surely there is a way for the great museums to show more. Musea has repeatedly suggested touring shows of exact replicas of paintings on canvas. The originals stay safely in vaults, the copies can be shown in any hall in the world. The technical know-how to do this, is here now.
BRIDGING WORLDS: On July 1, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and King Carl Gustaf XVI of Sweden will open the Oresund Bridge, a 10 mile long rail and motor link that joins Europe to the Scandinavian peninsula for the first time in history. The bridge is the longest of its kind in the world consisting of a cable stay bridge, an artificial island, and an underground tunnel. (House Beautiful)
CATALOGUES: Auction houses make quite a bit on their catalogues. A recent auction of Marilyn Monroe items at Christies sold 28,000 catalogues - each at $85. That's $2.38 million total.
FIRST MASTERPIECES: The Grotte Chauvet in southeast France, has stone etchings and 416 paintings that are, at 32,000 years old, the oldest cave art known. They picture lions, leaping horses, mammoths, owls, rhinos, etc. in 3 chambers - the largest 17,000 feet long, plus some smaller rooms. Though the cave had been discovered in 1994, a group investigating it in May found 12 new paintings.
SCENERY SENSATION: Listen to this scenery at the festival in Bregenz, Austria. Each year they stage a popular opera on a floating stage in Lake Constance. This year the set for Verdi's Masked Ball ballroom scene, is an enormous open book, whose pages are being turned by a towering skeleton of steel. And because it is outside, the setting sun across the lake adds a surreal blood-red light. (House Beautiful)
ARCHITECTURE: Musea gave a big salute to architect Frank Gehry's museum of art, the Bilbao Gugggenheim in Spain; but his design for the downtown NYC version is awwwwwwful ! Back to the drawing board Frank!
NAZI LOOT UPDATE. Germany (the town of Bremen) and Russia have agreed on this art swap (though like good bureaucrats, they say the 2 things are just a coincidence) - Russia will return 101 etchings and drawings (Lautrec, Goya, Veronese, Durer, Watteau, Manet, etc.) and Germany will return a mosaic panel from the Amber Room - the Prussian made, all amber room was presented to Peter the Great in 1716 in St. Petersburg. (The whereabouts of these panels were (and for the most part remain) one of the great mysteries of the world) (ARTnews))
AND SPEAKING OF MYSTERIES: Here's a true tale, that sounds right out of the Pink Panther. On New Years Eve with a party nearby, a thief burrowed his way through the roof of the Oxford University Ashmolean Museum, set off a smoke bomb, and using a fan to circulate the smoke, shielded himself from the security cameras. Ten minutes in the smoke and he was back out of the roof with Auvers-sur-Oise, a Cezanne painting valued at $5 million plus. Case unsolved! (Art In America)