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Archaeologists unearth oldest musical instruments ever found - The Boston Globe

Archaeologists unearth oldest musical instruments ever found - The Boston Globe

Jerry Saltz on the Met’s Incredible Boxer at Rest Sculpture

Jerry Saltz on the Met’s Incredible Boxer at Rest Sculpture

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Well, well, well.

Three Rockwell Classics Bring Nearly $57.8 Million

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: December 4, 2013

Three paintings by Norman Rockwell celebrating homey, small-town America, among the most popular of his 322 covers for The Saturday Evening Post, sold at Sotheby’s on Wednesday morning for a total of nearly $57.8 million, about twice their high estimate.

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The Saturday Evening Post Illustration, owned by SEPS. Licensed by Curtis Licensing.

Norman Rockwell's "Saying Grace" appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post on Nov. 24, 1951.

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The Saturday Evening Post Illustration, owned by SEPS. Licensed by Curtis Licensing.

“The Gossips” ran on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on March 6, 1948.

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The Saturday Evening Post Illustration, owned by SEPS. Licensed by Curtis Licensing.

Rockwell based “Walking to Church” on a Vermeer painting, “The Little Street,” translating the scene to fit his idealized vision of an urban street scene.

The auction house’s York Avenue salesroom in Manhattan, filled with American art dealers and collectors, went dead quiet while a tense nine-and-a-half-minute bidding battle played out for “Saying Grace,” one of Rockwell’s best-loved scenes. It brought $46 million, well over its high estimate of $20 million and the most ever paid at auction for his work.

Two contenders on different telephones — one represented by Elizabeth Goldberg, director of American art for Sotheby’s, and the other, Yasuaki Ishizaka, managing director of Sotheby’s Japan — tried to buy the painting, which ended up selling to Ms. Goldberg’s unidentified client.

The 1951 oil, which depicts a boy and an elderly woman bowing their heads in prayer at a diner, topped a 1955 readers’ poll at The Saturday Evening Post four years after it appeared. (The magazine paid Rockwell $3,500 for the cover painting, equivalent to about $30,500 today.) Wednesday’s auction price smashed the previous high flyer, “Breaking Home Ties,” depicting a fresh-faced boy leaving home for the first time, which brought $15.4 million at Sotheby’s in 2006.

Another favorite, “The Gossips,” a finger-wagging montage of friends, neighbors and Rockwell himself, was expected to bring $6 million to $9 million but was snapped up for $8.45 million by another telephone bidder. When the image ran on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on March 6, 1948, the magazine was flooded with inquiries from readers wanting to know what the heads were gossiping about.

The third canvas, “Walking to Church,” sold for $3.2 million to Rick Lapham, an American paintings dealer who said he bought it for a client. Mr. Lapham was one of only two bidders for the painting, from the April 4, 1953, cover of The Post. Rockwell based its composition on a Vermeer painting, “The Little Street,” translating the scene to fit his idealized vision of an urban street scene, with family members in their Easter best, each clutching Bibles. He used a composite of different buildings in Troy, N.Y., and a church steeple in Vermont. The painting sold for $3.2 million with fees. It had been expected to fetch $3 million to $5 million. Asked why there was not more competition for the painting, Mr. Lapham replied, “It’s stylistically different,” referring to Rockwell’s translation of an old master painting.

(Final prices include the buyer’s premium: 25 percent of the first $100,000; 20 percent from $100,000 to $2 million; and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

All three paintings had belonged to the magazine’s longtime art director, Kenneth J. Stuart, who had received them as presents from Rockwell while the two men worked together, from World War II to the eve of the Vietnam War. And Wednesday’s auction was the final chapter in years of bitter legal battles. When Stuart died in 1993, he left his entire estate to his sons — Ken Jr., William and Jonathan — in equal shares. But shortly after his death, William and Jonathan sued their older brother, Ken Jr., claiming that he had taken advantage of their ailing father, forcing him to sign papers to gain control of the fortune and contending that Ken Jr. had used estate assets for his own expenses.

The brothers, who were secreted in a skybox above Sotheby’s salesroom watching the proceedings, only recently settled out of court.

Until the Rockwell works arrived at Sotheby’s this fall, they had been on loan to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., for the past 18 years. But during Stuart’s lifetime, “Saying Grace” had adorned his office at The Post, and when he left the magazine, it hung in the family’s living room in Wilton, Conn. “Walking to Church” had been in the bedroom of Stuart’s wife, Katharine. (He never hung “The Gossips,” according to his children.) Wednesday’s auction also included several works on paper by Rockwell, also from the Stuarts. Top among them was a color study for “Breaking Home Ties,” from 1954, which brought $905,000, more than three times its $300,000 high estimate. Again, the buyer was bidding by telephone.

Who bought the works remains a mystery. Sotheby’s isn’t saying, nor are the buyers. Among this country’s top Rockwell collectors are the filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, as well as the businessman H. Ross Perot and Alice L. Walton, the Walmart heiress. None could be spotted in the audience or in any of Sotheby’s skyboxes.

Jonathan Stuart said that he had no clue who bought the family’s artworks, but he said everyone was “very happy, exhilarated.”

“We set an American art record,” he added, referring to the $46 million sale of “Saying Grace,” which Sotheby’s was touting as the highest price ever paid for a painting at an American art auction. “It’s be

hmmmmmm

Augustine's World

What Late Antiquity says about the 21st century and the Syrian crisis.

BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN | DECEMBER 3, 2013

The Pax Romana was a period of relative peace and stability throughout the Greater Mediterranean. But history is often a matter of convulsions. In 200 A.D., the Roman Empire still existed in the shadow of the recently deceased emperor and pagan philosopher Marcus Aurelius -- at a time when, according to Princeton University historian Peter Brown, "a charmed circle of unquestioning conservatives" gave order to the world. Over the next 500 years, however, everything changed.

 

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By 700 A.D., the Roman Empire had disappeared from the map of the West, the Sassanid Persian Empire had vanished from the Near East, Europe had become Christian, and the Near East and most of North Africa had become Muslim. During this era, poor, uneducated, and extremist Christian heretics and sectarians -- Donatists, rabble-rousing monks, and so on -- had dispersed around the Mediterranean basin, burning and terrorizing synagogues and pagan temples, before they themselves were overtaken in North Africa by Arab armies proselytizing a new, more austere religion. Meanwhile, Gothic tribes ravaged Europe, and Asia Minor was on the brink of an epic conflict between Christians who venerated icons and other holy images and those who glorified their destruction. Brown, in the course of a lifetime of scholarly work, gave a name to this pungent epoch in which the world gradually turned upside down: Late Antiquity.
Late Antiquity was dominated by vast civilizational changes, though many were not marked at the time. Writing about the Middle Ages that followed, the now-deceased Oxford University historian R.W. Southern noted, "This silence in the great changes of history is something which meets us everywhere." Late Antiquity appears full of drama only because we know its beginning and end. But on any given day during that half-millennium, the Mediterranean world might not have seemed dramatic at all, and few could have said in what direction events were moving.
Of course, the historical clock moves a great deal faster today, and thousands upon thousands of words -- in these pages alone -- have been written on the Arab Spring, the military rise of China, the tumult in the European Union, a nuclear Iran, and the chipping away of America's post-Cold War hegemony. But can we really discern any better than the denizens of Late Antiquity in what direction events are moving?
The erosion of America's role as an organizing power, which heretofore relied on public acquiescence and the inability of anyone else to challenge the status quo, has disoriented elites in Washington and New York whose own professional well-being is intimately connected with America's proactive involvement abroad. And few developments have been more evocative regarding the sentiment of splendid isolation creeping once again through the American citizenry, or more integral to understanding the weakening of the United States, than Syria.
Syria is the Levant, the geographical core of Late Antiquity. And its disintegration, like the crumbling of Libya, Yemen, and Iraq, along with the chronic unrest in Tunisia and Egypt, signifies not the birth of freedom but the collapse of central authority. Rome could not save North Africa, and the United States will not save the Near East -- for as the opinion polls demonstrate, Americans have had enough of foreign military entanglements. Anarchy, perhaps followed by new forms of hegemony, will be the result.
IF THE LIFE OF ANY INDIVIDUAL ENCAPSULATES Late Antiquity, it is that of St. Augustine, a Berber born in 354 in Thagaste, modern-day Souk Ahras, just over the border from Tunisia inside Algeria. In drifting from pagan philosophy to Manichaeism and finally to Christianity, which he subjected to the logic of Plato and Cicero, St. Augustine straddled the worlds of classical Rome and the Middle Ages. His favorite poem was Virgil's Aeneid, which celebrates the founding of Rome's universal civilization. He railed against the radical Donatists (Berber schismatics), whose heresy was undermining the stability of the Maghreb, even as he saw the benefits in traditional bonds like tribalism. And he died at age 76 in 430, in the midst of the assault of Genseric's Vandals on Africa Proconsularis, Rome's first African colony. His great work, The City of God, writes scholar Garry Wills, sought to console Christians who were disoriented by the loss of Rome as the organizing principle of the known world. Rome, St. Augustine wrote, could never satisfy human hearts: Only the City of God could do that. Thus, as Rome weakened, religiosity intensified.
We are at the dawn of a new epoch that may well be as chaotic as that one and that may come upon us more quickly because of the way the electronic and communications revolutions, combined with a population boom, have compressed history.
Consider that, in 1989, at the end of the Cold War, the United States was the unipolar military and economic colossus, the triumphalist liberal democracy captured by political philosopher Francis Fukuyama in his article "The End of History?" Since then, the European Union has expanded throughout Central and Eastern Europe, promising an end to the furies of the continent's past. Of course, the Middle East, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian subcontinent, was benighted and illiberal through the first years of the 21st century. But at least it was quiescent, if only by its own dismal standards.
Then the world broke apart. An attack on the American homeland by Muslim extremists led to two large U.S. ground invasions in the Middle East, which, in turn, helped set the region in motion. Decadent autocracies later crumbled and conservative monarchies were forced to make unprecedented concessions, even if President George W. Bush's Freedom Agenda did not turn out as intended. North Africa has since devolved into a borderless world of gangs, militias, tribes, transnational terrorists, anti-terrorist expeditionary forces, and weak regimes gripped in stasis. The adjacent Levant erupted into protracted low-intensity war, with only two strong legal entities left between the easternmost edge of the Mediterranean and the Central Asian plateau: a Jewish state and a Persian one (thus the centrality of Iran arguing for a rapprochement with the United States).
While this has happened, the European Union has begun to seriously stagger. A debt crisis, negative growth, and unseemly levels of unemployment have persisted for years as the welfare state -- that signature moral accomplishment of postwar Europe's politicians -- becomes in large measure unaffordable. The result is that the European Union itself, so dominant in the first two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, has lost some of its geopolitical force in Central and Eastern Europe, just as Russia has re-emerged as authoritarian and powerful, thanks to hydrocarbon revenues. The map of Europe is changing from one uniform color back to divergent shades, with national identities -- once presumed to be in retreat -- undergoing a resurgence.
As for China -- that demographic and geographical behemoth that has become the engine of world trade -- after almost a third of a century of unprecedented growth, its economy is finally slowing down. China's economy and military are still growing massively in absolute terms, but the future of the Middle Kingdom is less certain than it was just a decade ago. With ethnic minorities and Han Chinese both pining for more freedom amid fewer opportunities, it is possible that China might one day face a variation on the Soviet Union's fate.
Authority, once so secure and conveniently apportioned across the globe, seems in the process of disintegrating into small bits, with sects and heresies -- Salafists, cybercriminals, and so on -- entering from the side doors. The United States still reigns supreme economically and militarily, with immense stores of natural resources. Nevertheless, American power is increasingly stymied by these new and unpredictable forces. Sheer might -- tanks and jet fighters, nuclear bombs and aircraft carriers -- seem increasingly like products of an ever-receding Industrial Age. Yet the postmodern version of Late Antiquity has just begun.
Amid this panorama of global unraveling and new forms of sovereignty (a phenomenon that St. Augustine experienced 1,600 years ago), a curious observation has been made in the interstices: Tribes suddenly matter. Yes, tribes. They were the solution to checking the violence and undermining the religious extremists with their death cults in Iraq. They have been the dominating reality in Afghanistan, a world of clans and khels (what the Pashtuns call subclans). And when those reptilian regimes in North Africa and the Near East foundered, it was not democracies that immediately emerged, but tribes. This was particularly the case in Yemen, Libya, and Mali, but it was also true to a surprising degree in more developed societies like Syria, where beneath the carapace of sectarianism lay a grand guignol of tribes and clans, too many of which were infused with the spirit of holy war.
In St. Augustine's world of imperial collapse, these ancient ties offered some respite from disorder because within the tribe there was hierarchy and organization in abundance. But modernity was supposed to free us from these cloistered shackles of kinship. Indeed, modernity, wrote Ernest Gellner, the late British-Czech social anthropologist, means the rise of centralized authority and the consequent decline of tribalism. But the opposite is presently occurring: The crumbling of central authority throughout much of North Africa and the Near East (as well as the rebirth of lumpen nationalism in parts of Europe) indicates that modernity is but a passing phase. Today, tribes with four-wheel-drive vehicles, satellite phones, plastic explosives, and shoulder-fired missiles help close the distance between Late Antiquity and the early 21st century.
St. Augustine's North Africa, now with its degraded urban conurbations of cracked brick and sheet metal, will see its population increase from 208 million to 316 million by 2050, putting severe pressure on both natural and man-made resources, from water to government. As these millions move to the cities in search of jobs and connections, the political order will assuredly shift. Whatever arises by then may not be the states as they appear on today's map. Indeed, what we consider modernity itself may already be behind us. The headlines between now and then will be loud and hysterical -- as they are today in Syria -- even as the fundamental shifts will at first be obscure. For history is not only about convulsions, but about the ground shifting slowly under our feet.
In The City of God, St. Augustine revealed that it is the devout -- those in search of grace -- who have no reason to fear the future. And as the tribes of old now slowly come undone in the unstoppable meat grinder of developing-world urbanization, religion will be more necessary than ever as a replacement. Alas, extremist Islam (as well as evangelical Christianity and Orthodox Judaism in the West) may make perfect sense for our age, even as its nemesis may not be democracy but new forms of military authority. Late Antiquity is useful to the degree that it makes us humble about what awaits us. But whatever comes next, the charmed circle of Western elites is decidedly not in control.

Culinary Art History!

Mark Tansey-"Simple eye exam"-Metropolitan Museum

CSI tests authenticate Pollock’s final work

By Jennifer Gould Keil

November 8, 2013 | 4:06am

SOLVED: Fur from a bear rug at Jackson Pollock's Hamptons home was found in "Red Black & Silver" (left), owned by his mistress, Ruth Kligman (right with the artist).

The painting is abstract — but its origin is now crystal clear.
One of the art world’s greatest mysteries has finally been solved — as CSI tests have proven a painting owned by Jackson Pollock’s late mistress is truly the master’s final work.
Pollock paramour Ruth Kligman insisted until her death in 2010 that the pioneering New York painter gave her “Red, Black & Silver” as a love letter shortly before he died in a drunken car crash in 1956.
But since the artist’s wife, Lee Krasner — who hated the younger Kligman — ran the group that authenticated his works, the final painting was never declared a true Pollock.
Until now.
In an announcement likely to change art history, Kligman’s estate will reveal at a conference Friday the findings of a former NYPD detective that it says authenticates the work — including a hair from a polar-bear rug owned by the artist.
Forensics expert Nicholas Petraco, who was hired by the estate, found traces of rug fur stuck in the artwork’s paint.

Fur from this bear rug at Jackson’s Hamptons home allowed investigators to authenticate the disputed work.

Other telltale clues found in the paint were Pollock’s own hair and sand unique to the area around his East Hampton home.
It marks the first time crime-scene-style trace analysis has been used on fragments found in a painting, rather than just on the paint itself.
The discovery, if accepted by the art world, could lead to a huge payday for the Kligman estate.
A similar-size Pollock painting (about 2 by 2 feet) sold for $58.3 million at a Sotheby’s auction last May.
“There’s a f- -king polar-bear hair in the painting . . . It’s Dick Tracy,” said artist Jonathan Cramer, one of the estate’s co-trustees.
“The world was flat. Now it is round. It’s Galileo. Science can now be used to authenticate the art . . . We are [tracing] the painting back to where it was executed. It’s very CSI.”
Kligman was in the car when a boozed-up Pollock skidded off a curve in East Hampton on Aug. 11, 1956. She survived; he and another woman were killed.
Afterward, she knew better than to present “Red, Black & Silver” to the board run by Krasner and waited until the widow’s death in 1984 to attempt to get it named a real Pollock and his final work.
But the board was still populated by Krasner’s pals and “Red, Black & Silver” never got recognized.
Kligman died in 2010, leaving a trove of 700 artworks and letters from her lovers and friends, including artists Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Franz Kline, Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe.
Her estate’s executors turned to Petraco, who consults for the NYPD.
Kligman had no beneficiaries, so the painting’s future is unclear.

A portrait thought to have been by an unknown German artist from the 19th Century has been identified as a work by Leonardo da Vinci. If true, it is a rare find indeed, the first additional work to be assigned to Leonardo in over 100 years. The rendering, which has been in the hands of private collectors, is in ink and colored chalks. Though some things can be determined about the work by it’s style, such as the left-handedness of the artist, it was not attributed to Da Vinci, or any of his contemporaries. Because of it’s more modern approach (and despite the Renaissance dress of the subject, a young girl shown in profile) it was thought to fit in with stylistic characteristics of a different time and place. The attribution is being made on the basis of a fingerprint, found in the upper left edge of the canvas (image above, top right), that has been analyzed and matched to another fingerprint in one of the master’s other works. (Leonardo, like many artists, got his hands into his work and left fingerprints in a number of paintings.)

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NEW YORK (AP) — A 1969 painting by Francis Bacon set a world record for most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.
"Three Studies of Lucian Freud" was purchased for $142,405,000 at Christie's postwar and contemporary art sale on Tuesday night. The triptych depicts Bacon's artist friend.
The work sold after "6 minutes of fierce bidding in the room and on the phone," Christie's said in a statement. The price includes the buyer's premium. Christie's did not say who bought the painting.
The price surpassed the nearly $120 million paid for Edvard Munch's "The Scream," which set a world record when it was sold at Sotheby's in a 2012 sale.
The previous record for Bacon's artwork sold at auction was his 1976 "Triptych." That sold for $86 million in 2008.
Among other highlights scheduled to be auctioned at Christie's is a bright orange-yellow and white oil painting by Mark Rothko. Reminiscent of a radiating sunset, the 1957 large-scale "Untitled (No. 11)" could fetch up to $35 million. In May 2012, Christie's sold Rothko's "Orange, Red, Yellow" for $86.8 million, a record for any contemporary artwork at auction.
Christie's also has an iconic Andy Warhol, "Coca-Cola (3)," estimated to sell for $40 million to $60 million. The Warhol auction record is $71.7 million for "Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I)," sold in 2007.
On Wednesday evening, Sotheby's is offering Warhol's "Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)," a provocative double-panel painting that could bring as much as $80 million.
Warhol produced four paintings in the "Death and Disaster" series. The other three are in museums.
Measuring 8 feet by 13 feet, the 1963 silver work captures the immediate aftermath of a car crash, a twisted body sprawled across its mangled interior. It has been seen in public only once in the past 26 years.
Other blue-chip offerings at Christie's on Tuesday include Jeff Koons' whimsical "Balloon Dog (Orange)," a 10-foot-tall stainless steel sculpture resembling a twisted child's party balloon. It is expected to sell for up to $55 million. It is one of five balloon dogs Koons has created in different colors. All are in private hands. It is being sold by newsprint magnate Peter Brant to benefit his Brant Foundation Art Study in Greenwich, Conn.
Also on tap is a masterpiece by German painter Gerhard Richter from the collection of Eric Clapton. Painted in gold and orange hues, the 1994 "Abstract Painting" is estimated to bring as much as $20 million. Richter's photo-based "Cathedral Square, Milan" brought $37 million at Sotheby's in May, setting a record for any living artist at auction.
Roy Lichtenstein's "Seductive Girl" could bring up to $28 million. The artist auction record is $56 million for "Woman With Flowered Hat," sold at Christie's in May.

How a Roman tombstone might have looked when it had been erected. They were painted, you see (we might say garishly).

Relax, the Metropolitan Museum Isn’t Instituting Mandatory Admission

• by Jillian Steinhauer on October 30, 2013

New York “The Wonder City,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vintage Color Postcards, 1930s–1940s (via Pamla J. Eisenberg on Flickr)

Last week the Metropolitan Museum of Art sent out a press release about a new lease amendment signed by the museum and the City of New York. The amendment concerns the museum’s admission policy, which is currently pay what you wish, and once it was announced, all hell broke loose.
“Mayor Bloomberg grants Metropolitan Museum of Art right to charge mandatory entrance fee,” went the Daily News headline. ”In Case You Were Wondering, The Met Can Charge For Admission,” said HuffPo. “Met Museum Could Start Charging Mandatory Admission Fee,” reported the L Magazine blog. NBC News took their fear-mongering to Twitter:

On his blog Modern Art Notes, critic Tyler Green went off on “New York’s 1% mayor secretly conspir[ing] with the director, 1%ers on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to give the museum the option to screw the 99% who want to visit the Met.” (To be fair, Green later dialed back and wrote a more level-headed post.)
SO MUCH PANICKING — over what? Here’s the press release:

The new amendment confirms and continues the 42-year-long agreement under which the Met and the City first established, and has since maintained, a discretionary admission policy for the institution.

So basically, the Met can continue its pay-what-you-wish admission policy, and said policy is totally legal. That’s it.
What probably freaked people out is the next line, which says,

… the new amendment authorizes the museum, should the need arise, to consider a range of admission modifications in future years, subject as in the past to review and approval by the City.

I asked Harold Holzer, the Met’s senior vice president for public affairs, about the confusion here. “The amendment codifies the policy we’ve followed with the city’s approval for the last 40+ years, and leaves a range of options for future if ever needed, and only with the city’s OK,” he told Hyperallergic. “All would require going back to City for consultation and permission if we wanted to explore.”
Yes, the door is now legally open on a change in admission policy, but the museum would need city approval for it, just as it always has. And the impetus for all this anyway is the ongoing, ridiculous lawsuits that claim the Met should be free and is deceiving people into paying admission. ”If, in some wild scenario, the lawsuit is successful and the law requires the Met repay people for admission for the last 40 years, I think we’d have to reconsider how we could keep our doors open,” Holzer told the Huffington Post. Ironic how the crusading lawsuits could end up being the reason we all have to pay.
In the meantime, Holzer assured me that the museum has ”no plans to change pay-what-you-wish at all.” So let’s please move on to worrying about other, actual cultural issues — like young white men who think dressing up like Trayon Martin for Halloween is OK.

        A Woman Sleeping, ca 1655
        Rembrandt van Rijn

 The Antikythera Shipwreck Exhibit

    Dated to 60-50 BC, the shipwreck was found off the coast of Antikythera. The ship carried cargo dating from 4th to 1st century BC and was sailing towards Italy carrying among other cargo bronze and marble sculptures, glassware and jewellery, and amonst these the famous “Antikythera Mechanism”. The finds reflect the new phenomenon of art trade, the first in the history of Western civilization.

    These marble sculptures have been severely eroded by stone-eating organisms of the sea, and only their parts trapped safely in the mud of the seabed have remained wonderfully intact.

    Scarred and deformed, the half-destroyed sculptures seem even more human, nearly demonic. No longer serving as images of idealised beauty, their artistic quality has reached a new dimension, distorted by nature’s interference. Their image haunts you long after you’ve left them behind.

A little early to post this...but fragments of the lives and feelings of the artists we study can be so valuable in understanding-connecting with their work.Historical "tid-bits" such as this helps us to remember their timeless humanity

Simonetta Vespucci
Simonetta Vespucci (1453-1476), “la bella Simonetta”, was the most beautiful woman in Florence, Italy in her day. She was so beautiful that men were still painting her more than 20 years after her death. She is the woman seen over and over again in Botticelli’s paintings, like “The Birth of Venus”.

Botticelli painted her as the Virgin Mary, Venus and Athena. Piero di Cosimo painted her as Cleopatra and Procris. Poliziano and Lorenzo the Magnificent wrote about her in verse – as did Gabriele d’Annunzio. Many other poets and painters honoured her as well with their works. She can still be seen on some money in Europe.

Tragically, the beauty died from pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 22 in April of 1476. The entire city mourned her passing and thousands followed her coffin to its burial. Boticelli was so enamored with Simonetta that he asked to be buried at her feet upon his death 34 years later.

Phalanx...as mentioned yesterday

Amazing...

Sarah Parcak believes that “today is the most exciting time in history to be an archaeologist”:

Space archaeology refers to the use of space- and air-based sensor systems to discover ancient settlements, cultural remains, and natural features (like relic river courses) otherwise invisible to the naked eye, or hidden due to vegetation and water. Archaeologists use datasets from NASA and commercial satellites, processing the information using various off-the-shelf computer programs. These datasets allow us to see beyond the visible part of the light spectrum into the near, middle, and far infrared. These spectral differences can show subtle differences in vegetation, soil, and geology which then can reveal hidden ancient features.
Satellite datasets like WorldView can see objects as small as 1.5 feet in diameter. In 2014, WorldView-3 will be able to see objects a small as a foot. Another important sensor system is LIDAR (which stands for Light Detection and Ranging). LIDAR uses lasers to scan terrain in fine detail and even penetrate dense rainforest canopy, allowing archaeologists to see beneath the trees to reveal features of interest, from large monuments to small, subtle remnants of ancient homes and road systems.

(Video: LIDAR in action at Stonehenge and surrounding areas)

The World as They Knew It

The Legacy of Greco-Roman Mapmaking

New York Public Library

A folio from a 15th-century Latin translation of Ptolemy’s influential “Geographia.”

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: September 30, 2013

Long before people could look upon Earth from afar, completing a full orbit every 90 minutes, the Greeks and the Romans of antiquity had to struggle to understand their world’s size and shape. Their approaches differed: the philosophical Greeks, it has been said, measured the world by the stars; the practical, road-building Romans by milestones.

The Morgan Library and Museum

An illumination from a 13th-century copy of the “Commentary on the Apocalypse and the Book of Daniel,” originally by the eighth-century Spanish monk and geographer Beatus of Liebana.

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American Numismatic Society

A third-century Roman coin shows Emperor Diocletian holding a globe, a symbol of power.

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Columbia University

A 15th-century copy of an ancient manuscript from Constantinople.

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Houghton Library, Harvard University

A diagram of the solar system from a popular 16th-century astronomy textbook by the French cartographer Oronce Fine.

As the Greek geographer Strabo wrote at the time: “We may learn from both the evidence of our senses and from experiences, that the inhabited world is an island, for wherever it has been possible for men to reach the limits of the earth, sea has been found, and this sea we call ‘Oceanus.’ And whenever we have not been able to learn by the evidence of sense, there reason points the way.”

Strabo’s words will greet visitors to a new exhibition, “Measuring and Mapping Space: Geographic Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity,” which opens Friday at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, at 15 East 84th Street in Manhattan. The show runs through Jan. 5.

Roger S. Bagnall, director of the institute, an affiliate of New York University, said the exhibition would not only cross ancient borders and cultures but also modern disciplines. “Our exhibitions and digital teams,” he said, “present a 21st-century approach to the ancient mentality concerning geographic space and how it is represented.”

The show brings together more than 40 objects that provide an overview of Greco-Roman geographical thinking — art and pottery, as well as maps based on classical texts. (Hardly any original maps survive; the ones in the exhibition were created in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance from Greek and Roman descriptions.)

“Geography is not just maps,” said the guest curator, Roberta Casagrande-Kim, a scholar of classical concepts of the underworld that go back well before Dante took his journey through the nine circles of hell. “There is also the cognitive side underlying mapping,” she said.

Making sense of the world’s dimensions must have seemed daunting at first. Plato wrote of Socrates saying the world is very large and those who dwell between Gibraltar and the Caucasus — in his memorable imagery — live “in a small part of it about the sea, like ants or frogs about a pond, and that many other people live in many other such regions.”

An early advance in Greek thinking was Aristotle’s discovery, in the latter half of the fourth century B.C., that the world must be spherical. He based this on observations of lunar eclipses, ships disappearing hull first on the horizon, and the changing field of stars observed as one travels north and south.

Then Eratosthenes, a librarian at Alexandria in the third century B.C., employed the new geometry to measure the world’s size with simultaneous angles of the sun’s shadow taken at widely distant sites in Egypt. That yielded a remarkably accurate measure of Earth’s circumference: it was clear that the world they knew — the three connected continents of Asia, Europe and Africa — was only a part of lands unknown, out of sight but not out of mind.

Other artifacts on view illustrate ancient methods of surveying and measuring lands, and some of the earliest efforts to measure longitude and latitude and to divide the world into climate zones. From north to south, both the Greeks and the Romans identified the frigid Arctic Circle, the northern temperate hemisphere, the torrid Tropic of Cancer, the southern temperate zone and the South Pole. The two temperate zones were believed to be the only habitable regions, but contact between the two was thought unlikely.

Across the wall of the first gallery is projected a digital replica of the Peutinger Map, more than 22 feet long and 2 feet high, illustrating how Roman mapping was at once practical and magnificent. It charts the empire’s roads, cities, ports and forts from Britain to India. Sketches of trees mark forests in Germany. Topography is minimal, roads are off-scale wide, towns are indicated by symbolic walls or towers — more of a traveler’s guide but much too large to serve as a handy road map.

In a study of the map, Richard J. A. Talbert, a historian at the University of North Carolina who specializes in cartography of the Greeks and the Romans, noted that in one sense it was an example of common Roman “journey” charts, much like the Greek “periploi” — mostly written descriptions of landmarks and ports mariners were likely to encounter.

Geographers then were less committed to drawing maps than to narrative wayfinding. Distances had priority over orientations; getting from here to there was more important than the lay of the land.

An early copy of the map came to light in the 17th century and was owned for years by Konrad Peutinger, a Hapsburg diplomat and map collector. It is now is in the Austrian National Library in Vienna.

The map, probably created in the early fourth century A.D., may have been intended to impress the emperor’s subjects and notable guests, Dr. Talbert has concluded. It was oriented with the capital at its center, showing that all roads indeed led to Rome.

Mapping was a tool of propaganda, just as many Roman coins showed the emperor Augustus, or Octavian or Diocletian, holding a globe, a symbol of the whole world in his power. Jennifer Y. Chi, the institute’s exhibitions director and a specialist in Roman sculpture, said that Augustus, in particular, “promoted his power systematically through many different media, and even the illiterate understood the globe’s symbolism.”

The rarely exhibited material is on loan from several American institutions, including the Morgan Library and Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the American Numismatic Society and the libraries at Columbia and Harvard. The show is supported by the Leon Levy Foundation.

All in all, whether guided by the stars or by imperial roads, the Greeks and the Romans did well in preparing the way to geographic knowledge of worlds known and unknown, real and imaginary. They anticipated modern concepts of mapmaking: anything that can be spatially conceived can be mapped.

The most influential of the ancient Greeks was Claudium Ptolemy, the foremost scholar at the Alexandria library in the second century A.D. Two of his books, one on astronomy, and another on geography, were finally translated into Latin in the Middle Ages.

Notes accompanying the exhibition point out that Ptolemy’s “Geographia” provided ample information on locations of ancient lands and cities, enabling Renaissance cartographers to prepare the first fairly modern world maps, the “Mappa mundi” style that was followed for the next couple of centuries. The maps were decorated with the eight classical headwinds; symbols taken from Aristotle’s conception of the primary elements of fire, earth, water and air; and a scattering of zodiac signs around the edges.

Even Ptolemy’s errors were influential. Instead of sticking to Eratosthenes’ more accurate estimate of Earth’s size, Ptolemy handed down a serious underestimate that later apparently emboldened Columbus to think he could sail west to reach China or Japan.

Instead, he reached landfall in what became known as the West Indies — about the distance from Europe that Ptolemy had led him to expect, but with no “Grand Khan” in sight.

So it was perhaps no coincidence that the rediscovery of Greco-Roman geography fostered the age of Western exploration. After 1492, there were new worlds to measure and map. Within two centuries, exhibition notes remind us, “the primacy of ancient geographic knowledge and mapping conventions came to an end.”

New discoveries and technologies had made Greco-Roman geography obsolete. But its influence helped shape the way we still look at the world.

How the Looming US Government Shutdown Will Affect the World of Art

• by Jeremy Polacek on September 30, 2013

(image via Flickr user Tommy Ironic)

By midnight this evening, we’ll finally know whether the government will be shut down — that’s the silver lining to be found in the otherwise bleak congressional budget debate. If the Beltway does not come to an agreement very soon, up to a predicted million government employees deemed unessential by their agencies may be furloughed. National HeadStart, the early childhood development program serving low-income families with children under five, will see its programs suspended.

For the arts, the privations are not as stinging, but no less sweeping. In the event of a shutdown all of the Smithsonian Institution’s 19 museums and galleries, including the National Zoo, National Air and Space Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and both Museums of the American Indian (in D.C. and New York City), would close. At the Library of Congress, the closures do not end with with just the buildings, even its website may not be spared the ax. The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, however, expects to remain open.

The disruptions posed by the possible shutdown vary. The Hirshhorn, where the Peter Coffin: Here and There show ends Octover 6, could conceivably find its exhibition coming to a unseen end. For the National Portrait Gallery, it’s the opposite, with the opening of its Dancing the Dream exhibit being threatened by a hold up. According to the New York Times, such a closure would come up a little short in its art pangs from the last time the government unceremoniously ground to a halt in 1995, “when the doors to the National Portrait Gallery closed at noon, leaving some visitors fuming outside a locked entrance after they had traveled to Washington to see a Winslow Homer exhibition.”

Another way itinerant artists, museumgoers, and assorted hangers-on may be affected is in the realm of international travel. This is because US passports and visas are one of the many services that will be put on pause during a shutdown. If the shutdown is brief, this won’t be a big deal, but in 1995, when the government shut down for nearly a month, between 20,000 and 30,000 visas applications went unprocessed every day while a total 200,000 passports applications sat unprocessed.

All the more reason for hope (or contact your representative) for the government to stay open.

Cleveland Museum of Art's Apollo sculpture is a star with intriguing past

By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer

Lisa DeJong, The Plain DealerThe Cleveland Museum of Art believes its ancient bronze sculpture “Apollo Sauroktonos, "Apollo the Lizard-Slayer," may be the only original bronze in the world by Praxiteles, one of the most famous sculptors of ancient Greece.

Michael Bennett is a confident man these days. The Cleveland Museum of Art's curator of ancient Near Eastern, Greek and Roman art believes that he made the purchase of a lifetime in 2004, when he persuaded the museum to buy a beautiful and controversial ancient bronze statue of Apollo Sauroktonos, or Apollo the Lizard Slayer.
Bennett is now more certain than ever that the Apollo may be the world's only original work by the great ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles, or a product of his workshop soon after his death in approximately 330 B.C. Only one other sculpture has been attributed to Praxiteles, a marble statue of Hermes with the infant Dionysus, found at Olympia in Greece in 1877, but some scholars say the work was completed after the sculptor's death. Today, Praxiteles is known chiefly through later Roman copies. "We may have here a work by his hand," Bennett said, raising his voice in excitement while examining the sculpture at the museum recently. "We're talking about Praxiteles!"
The sculpture, which stands 5 feet tall with a richly mottled green and dark-red surface acquired from having been buried for centuries, depicts a nude, adolescent boy preparing to spear a lizard with an arrow.
The sculpture's right arm is missing from above the elbow and the left arm is gone from the shoulder down, although the museum has the left hand and forearm -- and the tiny, squiggly lizard Apollo was getting ready to kill.
After several years in storage, the sculpture and its detached pieces are ready to play a starring role in the museum's newly renovated galleries of ancient and medieval art, scheduled to open Saturday.
The firmer attribution to Praxiteles signals that Bennett is moving on from the controversy that has dogged the sculpture since the museum acquired it from Phoenix Ancient Art, a dealership with offices in New York and Geneva, Switzerland.
Chief among the questions about the Apollo is the absence of evidence to eliminate concerns that it might have been looted in recent decades in violation of international agreements.
The museum said that a retired German lawyer, Ernst-Ulrich Walter, had reported that he found the sculpture lying in pieces in a building on a family estate he reclaimed after the fall of East Germany. Walter also reportedly remembered seeing the piece on the family estate in the 1930s, although no photographs of it exist from that time.
According to the museum, Walter said he sold the piece to a Dutch art dealer in 1994 but couldn't remember the dealer's name. The Dutch dealer then reportedly sold the work to at least one other anonymous collector, who then sold it to Phoenix.
Archaeologists have said that the story, which isn't backed up by anything other than the lawyer's word, sends a message to the antiquities market that museums are willing to acquire works with gaps in their ownership histories. This, in turn, encourages looting.
Yet another report, that the sculpture was fished out of the sea between Greece and Italy, was circulated by Agence France-Presse in 2007, though the unnamed Greek officials who made the claim have never presented any evidence or contacted the museum.
Bennett points to scientific tests that indicate the sculpture has been out of the ground for approximately a century, placing it well out of the reach of contemporary laws aimed against looting.
"This is a settled issue," Bennett said. "We've known for a long time that the statue has been outside its archaeological context for at least 100 years."
Labeling makes a telling reference
The museum always has asserted that the Apollo was probably Greek and probably by Praxiteles, but it allowed the possibility that it might have been produced as recently as A.D. 300, which would make it a less valuable Roman copy.
A new label installed with the work removes any suggestion of Roman origins and pushes the sculpture's creation back to a window from 350 to 275 B.C., giving it approximately a 20-year overlap with the lifetime of Praxiteles.
Bennett's attribution stemmed originally from the writings of Pliny the Elder, a Roman historian and philosopher, who described having seen a bronze sculpture matching the description of the Cleveland Apollo in the first century.
Tests performed on samples of metal removed from the sculpture in 2004 proved that the work was made in ancient Greek or Roman times. A half-dozen scholars who examined it before the museum purchased it were also sure it was ancient and not a forgery. But they weren't certain it was a Praxiteles.
Bennett's higher degree of certainty comes from having lived with the work for six years, and from having compared it with other ancient versions of the same motif at the Vatican in Rome, the Louvre in Paris and the Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.
Slight changes in details such as the wavy pattern in Apollo's hair, the position of his fingers or the crease on the outer edge of his right foot have convinced Bennett that the Cleveland version is the one on which the others were based.
Apart from the details, Bennett said that the overall impression conveyed by the piece, in comparison with the stiffness and heaviness of the other versions, which are carved in marble, is that it's the real deal.
"There's a buoyancy, there's a lightness to it," he said of Cleveland's bronze. "It's not heavy. It looks like it can almost elevate."
In addition to the comparisons, Bennett and other staff members at the museum used medical devices to peer inside the sculpture's cavities and take photographs. The images show, they say, that the sculpture was never exposed to the sea. There are no signs of marine life or corrosion.
Bennett hasn't published his findings yet. Nevertheless, at least one prominent expert in ancient Greek sculpture is prepared to accept his conclusions.
"From photographs I've seen, it does seem quite possible it's Greek," said Malcolm Bell III, an art history professor at the University of Virginia and an expert in ancient classical art, who has led an excavation at Morgantina in Sicily.
Part of the sensation over the work is that only about 30 large ancient Greek bronzes have survived antiquity. The rest were melted down to make everything from other sculptures or weapons to nails.
If Bennett is correct, the Apollo would fall into a truly rarefied category. It would be the world's only original Praxiteles, and the only large ancient Greek bronze attributed to a specific artist by an ancient writer.
Questions persist on provenance
Much as the museum would like to focus the conversation on Praxiteles, however, questions persist about the sculpture's provenance, or ownership history. That is in part, scholars say, because of the dealers involved and in part because the museum hasn't shared all the information it has collected about the work.
The museum doesn't reveal prices in private sales, but a source close to the museum said in 2004 it paid $5 million. The principals of Phoenix Ancient Art, brothers Ali and Hicham Aboutaam, have both had brushes with authorities.
Ali Aboutaam was convicted in Egypt in absentia in 2003 on charges of smuggling and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Hicham Aboutaam pleaded guilty in New York in 2004 to a misdemeanor federal charge that he had falsified a customs document.
Before the museum bought the Apollo, museum officials obtained a written statement from the German lawyer, in addition to the reports and written statements from the scholars it consulted. . But the museum has declined to release those items as well as the data from metallurgical tests performed at Oxford University.
Those tests showed that while the sculpture is indeed ancient in origin, the base to which it was attached is about 100 to 500 years old, the museum said.
However, in 2007, the museum did release a critical piece of information -- an analysis of the lead solder used to join the Apollo sculpture to its base.
That exploration, performed at the University of Tubingen in Germany, showed that production of the solder "must have occurred less than about [a] hundred years ago."
Bennett said the report means that the sculpture was joined to its base around 100 years ago, thus proving it was excavated well before modern laws aimed at the prevention of looting.
Still, the fallout over the Apollo continues. In 2007, under political pressure from Greece, the Louvre declined to exhibit the sculpture in a large exhibition on the influence of Praxiteles, preventing scholars from making side-by-side comparisons with other versions of the Apollo Sauroktonos.
Last year, the museum agreed to return 13 antiquities and a Renaissance-era artwork to Italy after the country showed they had been looted, stolen or handled by traffickers.
The museum also agreed to form a joint committee with Italy to examine scientific and technical evidence about the Apollo and a bronze, Roman-era chariot ornament depicting Nike, the goddess of victory. Italy has made no claim and presented no evidence about either piece, Bennett said.
While the committee pursues its work, the museum won't release any more information about the Apollo, said Bennett and Griffith Mann, the museum's chief curator.
An international symposium on the work, which the museum originally planned in 2006, has been postponed indefinitely.
Deborah Gribbon, the museum's interim director, said she is convinced the museum has revealed all pertinent information.
"The issue is not that there are things to hide, it's that some of this is ongoing research and other elements are proprietary information," she said.
But Patricia Gerstenblith, a law professor at DePaul University in Chicago and a leading expert on looting of antiquities, doesn't support the museum's position.
"It's a public institution supported by the taxpayers and the government," she said. "I think they should come forward with the evidence they have. I don't know who they're protecting by secrecy."

http://www.louvresamothrace.fr/en/#/actualite

WORDSWORDSWORDSWORDS...swords?

Some important art historical terms...

foreshortening
perspective
plan
value
mass
line
volume
contour
elevation
section
texture
hue
proportion
scale
chiaroscuro
bas-relief
iconography
subtractive sculpture
additive sculpture
primary colors
complementary colors
conceptual approach
perceptual approach
in situ
provenance
subject matter
content 
axis
chroma
chronological sequence

Cultural Indicator

Modern art was CIA 'weapon'

Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War

By Frances Stonor Saunders

Sunday 22 October 1995

VIEW GALLERY

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.
Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.
The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash" - arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.
The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.
The next key step came in 1950, when the International Organisations Division (IOD) was set up under Tom Braden. It was this office which subsidised the animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, which sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's international touring programme. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America's anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism.
Initially, more open attempts were made to support the new American art. In 1947 the State Department organised and paid for a touring international exhibition entitled "Advancing American Art", with the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert. But the show caused outrage at home, prompting Truman to make his Hottentot remark and one bitter congressman to declare: "I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash." The tour had to be cancelled.
The US government now faced a dilemma. This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy's hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. It also prevented the US government from consolidating the shift in cultural supremacy from Paris to New York since the 1930s. To resolve this dilemma, the CIA was brought in.
The connection is not quite as odd as it might appear. At this time the new agency, staffed mainly by Yale and Harvard graduates, many of whom collected art and wrote novels in their spare time, was a haven of liberalism when compared with a political world dominated by McCarthy or with J Edgar Hoover's FBI. If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.
Until now there has been no first-hand evidence to prove that this connection was made, but for the first time a former case officer, Donald Jameson, has broken the silence. Yes, he says, the agency saw Abstract Expressionism as an opportunity, and yes, it ran with it.
"Regarding Abstract Expressionism, I'd love to be able to say that the CIA invented it just to see what happens in New York and downtown SoHo tomorrow!" he joked. "But I think that what we did really was to recognise the difference. It was recognised that Abstract Expression- ism was the kind of art that made Socialist Realism look even more stylised and more rigid and confined than it was. And that relationship was exploited in some of the exhibitions.
"In a way our understanding was helped because Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticised that much and that heavy- handedly was worth support one way or another."
To pursue its underground interest in America's lefty avant-garde, the CIA had to be sure its patronage could not be discovered. "Matters of this sort could only have been done at two or three removes," Mr Jameson explained, "so that there wouldn't be any question of having to clear Jackson Pollock, for example, or do anything that would involve these people in the organisation. And it couldn't have been any closer, because most of them were people who had very little respect for the government, in particular, and certainly none for the CIA. If you had to use people who considered themselves one way or another to be closer to Moscow than to Washington, well, so much the better perhaps."
This was the "long leash". The centrepiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. It was the beach-head from which culture could be defended against the attacks of Moscow and its "fellow travellers" in the West. At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen magazines, including Encounter.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom also gave the CIA the ideal front to promote its covert interest in Abstract Expressionism. It would be the official sponsor of touring exhibitions; its magazines would provide useful platforms for critics favourable to the new American painting; and no one, the artists included, would be any the wiser.
This organisation put together several exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s. One of the most significant, "The New American Painting", visited every big European city in 1958-59. Other influential shows included "Modern Art in the United States" (1955) and "Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century" (1952).
Because Abstract Expressionism was expensive to move around and exhibit, millionaires and museums were called into play. Pre-eminent among these was Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As president of what he called "Mummy's museum", Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called "free enterprise painting"). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organise and curate most of its important art shows.
The museum was also linked to the CIA by several other bridges. William Paley, the president of CBS broadcasting and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members' board of the museum's International Programme. John Hay Whitney, who had served in the agency's wartime predecessor, the OSS, was its chairman. And Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division, was executive secretary of the museum in 1949.
Now in his eighties, Mr Braden lives in Woodbridge, Virginia, in a house packed with Abstract Expressionist works and guarded by enormous Alsatians. He explained the purpose of the IOD.
"We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War."
He confirmed that his division had acted secretly because of the public hostility to the avant-garde: "It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do - send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad. That's one of the reasons it had to be done covertly. It had to be a secret. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret."
If this meant playing pope to this century's Michelangelos, well, all the better: "It takes a pope or somebody with a lot of money to recognise art and to support it," Mr Braden said. "And after many centuries people say, 'Oh look! the Sistine Chapel, the most beautiful creation on Earth!' It's a problem that civilisation has faced ever since the first artist and the first millionaire or pope who supported him. And yet if it hadn't been for the multi-millionaires or the popes, we wouldn't have had the art."
Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA.
But look where this art ended up: in the marble halls of banks, in airports, in city halls, boardrooms and great galleries. For the Cold Warriors who promoted them, these paintings were a logo, a signature for their culture and system which they wanted to display everywhere that counted. They succeeded.
* The full story of the CIA and modern art is told in 'Hidden Hands' on Channel 4 next Sunday at 8pm. The first programme in the series is screened tonight. Frances Stonor Saunders is writing a book on the cultural Cold War.
Covert Operation
In 1958 the touring exhibition "The New American Painting", including works by Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell and others, was on show in Paris. The Tate Gallery was keen to have it next, but could not afford to bring it over. Late in the day, an American millionaire and art lover, Julius Fleischmann, stepped in with the cash and the show was brought to London.
The money that Fleischmann provided, however, was not his but the CIA's. It came through a body called the Farfield Foundation, of which Fleischmann was president, but far from being a millionaire's charitable arm, the foundation was a secret conduit for CIA funds.
So, unknown to the Tate, the public or the artists, the exhibition was transferred to London at American taxpayers' expense to serve subtle Cold War propaganda purposes. A former CIA man, Tom Braden, described how such conduits as the Farfield Foundation were set up. "We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we would say, 'We want to set up a foundation.' We would tell him what we were trying to do and pledge him to secrecy, and he would say, 'Of course I'll do it,' and then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it and there would be a foundation. It was really a pretty simple device."

DeKooning/Pollock

Julius Fleischmann was well placed for such a role. He sat on the board of the International Programme of the Museum of Modern Art in New York - as did several powerful figures close to the CIA.

Mark Rothko