Author: Darko Topalski

DENVER, CO.- The Clyfford Still
Museum officially broke ground on its future home in a public ceremony that
brought together Denver City officials, art and cultural ambassadors, and
business leaders. Scheduled to open in 2011 in the heart of Denver’s vibrant
arts district, the museum will provide an intimate environment
for the viewing of the Still Estates, encompassing some 2,400 works spanning the
artist’s career and representing one of the most comprehensive
single-artist holdings in the world. Designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works
Architecture, the new building reflects the institution’s mission to preserve,
present, and celebrate the work of this legendary American artist and will
provide architecturally compelling spaces for the study and enjoyment of Still’s
work.

LONDON.- Sotheby’s sale of Victorian and Edwardian
Art on Thursday, December 17, 2009 will bring together some 100 works by leading
artists of the era and is expected to raise in excess of £4.2 million.
Among the categories of works to be offered will be a strong contingent of
classical, mythological, genre, landscape and fairy pictures. The sale will
include a quintessential work by Charles Spencelayh (1865-1958). Considered his
masterpiece, The Old Dealer (The Old Curiosty Shop) was immensely popular at the
time of its exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1925. The subject is a purveyor
of antiques surrounded by a vast array of objects. Such was the appeal of the
bric-a-brac on display that Spencelayh was inundated with letters from admirers
enquiring about whether they might be able to purchase the items on view.
Estimated at £250,000-350,000, the painting was reproduced on the front cover of
the monograph on the artist published in 1978.

SCOTTSDALE, AZ.- Artist Ken Freeman always called
himself a “Jewish Cowboy.” The world premiere of the Kenneth M. Freeman Legacy
Exhibition opens at the Booth Western Art Museum in January 2010. The
display consists of fifty (50) oil paintings and sculptures that feature working
cowboys and cowgirls, rodeo heroes, Native American elders and children,
mountain men, Western landscapes, and Buffalo Soldiers. For artist Kenneth M.
Freeman, the cowboy hat and boots were not a gimmick or shtick. Neither was his
Arizona attitude. Ken Freeman may have grown up in a traditional Jewish home in
Chicago, Illinois but make no mistake … he was a cowboy. The Booth
Western Art Museum, an Affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, hosts the world
premiere of the Kenneth M. Freeman Legacy Exhibition – Artist at Work opening on
January 16, 2010. The exhibit continues through May 2, 2010 in the newly created
Special Exhibition Gallery.

LONDON.- The French/Algerian artist Alice Anderson (b.1976) will
fill Riflemaker in Soho with thousands of metres of hair as part of an
installation, including film, sculptures and photographs, based on fictional
childhood memories from 1 March 2010. Anderson considers time, or more
particularly the way that time shapes itself, to be her most significant working
material. For her, memories can be described as reconstructions, often distorted
to the extent that each becomes a creation or fiction itself. She views memory
as the ‘master of fiction’, whereby the passage of time may lead to a
remembrance being more akin to fiction than fact.

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL – Joram Rozov’s (b. 1938)
exhibition Landscapes and Milestones features works from the series “Landscapes”
(1983-2009), which presents vistas embedding his overt and covert life story,
and “Milestones” (2003-2009), which presents landmarks extracted from
the vast panorama of the artist’s life: childhood, military service, engagement
with wars, educational and other travels in the world. Through his immediate
surroundings—landscapes of the Galilee, Hebron, Africa, Tuscany, views of
foliage, trees, Sabra hedges, etc.—and their modes of symbolization, he delves
into broad, intricate realities. Opens at the Tel Aviv Museum of
Art on 19 of December, 2009.

PARIS (AP).-
Fragments of an ancient wall painting that caused a feud between Egypt
and the Louvre Museum are heading home. France returned the ancient artwork to
Egyptian officials after President Hosni Mubarak inspected one of the fragments
following a visit with his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy. The
pockmarked slab in sepia and blue tones, from a 3,200-year-old tomb near the
ancient temple city of Luxor, shows an offering from a nobleman to a servant.
French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand said in a statement that the
handover “is testament to France’s desire to … fight against the illegal
trafficking of cultural goods, which France is itself a victim of, as well as
the excellence of French-Egyptian cooperation in the realm of archaeology.”

New York, NY – A director of fables, fairy tales, and
fantasies, with an aesthetic that incorporates the Gothic, the Grand Guignol,
and German Expressionism, Tim Burton has created a body of films—fourteen
features released over two and a half decades thus far—that reveal an
uncompromised auteurist vision. Burton’s striking visuals and indelible
characters make even his blockbuster studio films intimately personal. From
adaptations to musicals to stop-motion animated films, his work bears a
distinctive, unmistakable point-of-view, and his unique interpretations of
well-known comic and literary characters, real-life personalities, and beloved
childhood icons have resulted in creations that sometimes surpass their sources.