HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) – Decades of local history lie almost forgotten in a warm, musty basement downtown.

Doors that once swung open to show off new bungalows or even mansions are neatly stacked, waiting to be refurbished. Windows that looked out on Huntsville’s evolution from watercress to Wikipedia are piled high, ready to move back out in the sunshine.

At the bottom of a steep staircase, architectural doodads like doorknobs and light fixtures plus more than a century of history fill the dusty basement of Harrison Brothers Hardware on the Courthouse Square.

Access to these treasures was once limited, but now the Historic Huntsville Foundation Architectural Warehouse is open to the public. Warehouse hours are 10 a.m. to noon on the first and third Saturday of each month, other times by appointment.

It helps to descend into the basement with an appreciation of the past—but also some imagination.

Donna Castellano, a member of the Historic Huntsville Foundation board, saw an old solid-wood door not as a simple barrier between rooms but a quaint, quirky headboard for her Newman Avenue home.

In the kind of funky do-it-yourself project you’d see in decorating magazines, Castellano bought the door for $30 and had it refinished to hang horizontally on the wall over the bed.

Like most items in the warehouse, the door didn’t come with a written history. Castellano estimates it to be about 75 years old. She used other old doors from the warehouse, purchased for less than $50, during a renovation of her 1929 home.

Three curved pieces of walnut sparked another inspiration.

“I brought home these three legs, and my husband was like, ‘What are you doing?’ With the proper craftsman, it can become a table.”

And so it did, restyled by a local artisan with rich, new pieces of cherry and walnut.

“I paid lots more for that table than I would have at a store, but it’s a custom antique piece,”she reasoned.

Items in the warehouse have been accumulating since the 1970s, Castellano estimates. Volunteers often would go out and take architectural trim from homes being demolished or moved. “It’s been a while since they took apart a house,” she said.

The historic foundation, which owns and operates the warehouse, hopes the treasures will find new homes and uses.

“This was such wonderful material,” said Jim Marek, foundation chair. “Why limit it to the purist? They can either use it as a part of their home for the purpose it was intended, or some reuse.”

Marek said proceeds go to local preservation and education; the foundation owns the corner building next to Harrison Brothers. Their efforts are green, too.

“When you think about the materials required to make a new wood door—isn’t it a more effective use of our resources to find a way to use an old door from a tree that has already been harvested, with energy that has already been expended?” Marek asked.

When people step into the basement’s two rooms of reclaimed architectural items, they generally have two reactions, Castellano said. They’re surprised at the volume. Then their minds start to click with how to use it.

“You get over seeing this is a door or a window or a set of shutters,” she said. “You can see how those pieces can be reworked.”

Some items like doors—about $25 to $35—are marked with exact dimensions so homeowners can see if they will fit a particular entryway.

Other finds: glass panels/prisms for $4, spindles from one of the local fabric mills, transom windows for $7, furnace grates, newel banister posts, mantels, sinks, shutters, flooring, brass hardware, two shimmering mercury (silvered) glass lampshades with herringbone green glass for $50 each.

Warehouse volunteers are hearing that many pieces are not being reused in their traditional sense. A door becomes a table. A window becomes a frame or side table.

One person used 9-foot pocket doors as garage doors. Wide pieces of molding can be painted with chalkboard paint for an unusual message board. Old doorknobs can become hooks.

“You generally have to make two visits, to see what is there, go off and your mind starts percolating,” Castellano said.

To showcase how a door is not always a door, the foundation is planning a fundraiser in May that will exhibit what local artisans can do with some of the items. They can connect buyers with local craftspeople interested in repurposing the items.

“Some purists are looking to replace a lock on a home, others are renovating to their own demands,” said John Cline, chair of the foundation’s warehouse committee.

Pieces in the warehouse sell for $15 to $1,500, Cline said. That $1,500 item was a staircase. Last year sales generated more than $6,000 in six months.

Cline said people can bring in items for donation (preferably at least 50 years old) or call Harrison Brothers to arrange for pickup when possible. Items there now came from around North Alabama and southern Tennessee.

Occasionally, you’ll find a treasure with a pedigree. In a karmic twist, several things in the warehouse right now have labels saying they came from the White Street home of one of the Harrison brothers—real brothers who ran the circa-1897 hardware store upstairs.

In another example of history coming full circle, developers of the $11.5 million Belk Hudson Lofts on Washington Street are incorporating items they found in the Harrison Brothers warehouse. Two walls of the 1920s-era Belk store will remain as part of the new building.

Charlie and Sasha Sealy’s purchases at the store include a transom window, a Celluloid Starch wooden box for under $50 and iron covers to a wood-burning stove. They used pieces from the warehouse to decorate a Christmas tree display in Big Spring International Park. Modern construction codes prohibit using some of the items for their original purpose in the new development, but decorative things such as tiles will become part of a 75-apartment complex opening in September or October.

“For old antique doors and windows it’s a great place,” said Charlie, who likes the idea that their project “incorporates the new and the old.”

“Include a piece of Huntsville history in your own home,” Sasha said.

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-03-06-12 1826GMT

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

---

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Dogs seem to be as popular on a canvas these days as they are on a leash, with paintings of dogs drawing big bucks and big crowds.

At the annual “dogs only” art auction held after the Westminster Dog Show, two price records were broken this year, said Alan Fausel, vice president and director of fine art at Bonhams, the auction house that runs the event.

“Dejeuner,” a painting that shows dogs and cats eating from a large dish, set a record for the artist, William Henry Hamilton Trood (1860-1899), when it sold for $194,500, Fausel said. That record was broken an hour later when Trood’s “Hounds in a Kennel,” showing a half-dozen dogs staring at a bird outside their cage, sold for $212,500.

Bonhams’ Dogs in Show & Field auction is the only one in the country devoted solely to dogs. It was the best auction in years, Fausel said, adding: “The dog art market is certainly turning a corner.”

The William Secord Gallery in Manhattan is the only gallery in the nation dedicated exclusively to dog art. “We have had an increase in visitors over past years, but also a substantial increase in sales compared to this time last year,” said Secord, widely considered the world’s foremost authority on 19th century dog paintings. Through March 24, the gallery is exhibiting and selling 150 dog pieces that Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge bequeathed to St. Hubert’s Animal Welfare Center in Madison, N.J.

Secord has written six dog art books and has collected over 2,500 works dating to 1805. He is also the founding director of the only art museum in the country dedicated to dogs, the American Kennel Club’s Museum of the Dog. Secord opened his gallery because he didn’t want to move when the museum relocated from New York to St. Louis.

The museum has over 700 paintings, drawings, fine porcelains and bronzes on display, and gets about 12,000 visitors a year, a number that’s been increasing steadily each year, said Barbara McNab, the museum’s executive director.

The highest price ever paid for a dog painting belongs to George Stubbs (1724-1806). He painted mostly horses, but a 6-by-7-foot portrait of a Newfoundland sold for $3.6 million in 1999, Secord said.

Most of the dog art sold at the annual auctions are 19th century pieces, Fausel said, but there are a number of contemporary artists who have made names for themselves, such as Robert K. Abbett, 86, who lives in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Several years ago, Abbett was commissioned by dog art collector Bill Nicholson of Atlanta to paint a portrait of his beloved Beauregard, a beagle who died in 2001. “Beauregard was a soulful and loving dog,” Nicholson said.

Abbett’s 21-by-28-inch painting “is my most prized, most cherished. It’s the one that goes over the fireplace,” Nicholson said.

Nicholson has about 50 paintings. When he started collecting about 16 years ago, he spent a lot of time at antique stores and estate sales and kept an eye online. He finally decided the auction was his best bet. But he adds that he’s “very disciplined” when bidding. “You can easily spend a lot more than you are planning to,” he said.

“I am a collector who just buys charming things and puts them on the wall and enjoys them,” he said.

Abbett, who started as an illustrator, painted hundreds of dogs through the years and has had work sell for as much as $50,000.

“Animals have always been a popular subject,” Abbett said, although “you have to do what turns you on or it won’t be your best work.”

It always helps to meet the dog, Abbett said. Unlike early artists, contemporary painters have the advantage of cameras. “Photography was a godsend to an artist who could capture a scene and take it home and work on it at leisure,” Abbett said.

American painter Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (1884-1934) was known for his whimsical, cartoonlike images of dogs playing poker. The Doyle Auction House in New York sold one of them in 2008 for $602,500. But while Coolidge’s paintings and prints of gambling hounds have their devoted fans, they are not considered part of the canine art market, Secord said, because they are not realistic.

Bonhams used to include cats in its auctions, but a lack of cat paintings (and low prices) got them the boot, Fausel said.

For nearly two decades, Bonhams held its yearly auction in England, but it got “musty.” About 13 years ago, the business moved it to New York, teamed up with Westminster and renamed it, Fausel said.

The bulk of the auction pieces are 19th century and feature purebred hunting dogs like setters, pointers and retrievers, Fausel said.

Contemporary artists go for what’s popular. A half-century ago, because of television’s “Lassie” and “Rin Tin Tin,” collies and German shepherds were popular, Fausel said. Today, it’s Labrador and golden retrievers. Historically, the Cavalier King Charles spaniel is the most popular dog ever painted, Secord said.

Secord sells original etchings for around $850 and oil paintings starting at $4,000. But dog art is not a good investment, he warned. “Buy it because you love it. If you want an investment, go to the stock market.”

#   #   #

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

---

NEW YORK (AP) – Nine stainless steel, multicolored sculptures of various geometric shapes will tower over Manhattan’s Park Avenue in an art project by Venezuelan sculptor Rafael Barrios.

The works, each one weighing about 2,200 pounds and standing more than 20 feet tall, will be installed from 51st to 67th street starting Saturday, organizers said. They’ll be up until June 30.

“I feel very proud and happy that we were able to do this project,” said the 64-year old artist.

“This shows that Latin American art is beginning to have an international impact,” Barrios told The Associated Press by telephone from Miami.

The sculpture installation is a project by the Fund for Park Avenue, the Park Avenue Malls and the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, which every year chooses an artist’s work to showcase along the stately avenue.

Barrios, who was born in Baton Rouge, La. and grew up in Venezuela, said he hopes New Yorkers “will have fun looking at them.”

He was asked to do the project last November during an art fair in New York, and “we did it in seven weeks,” said the artist, who divides his time between Miami, Paris and Caracas.

He worked with a team of artists in Miami led by Olivier Haligon, whose great-grandfather was involved in building the Statue of Liberty.

“The idea is to avoid monotony,” Barrios said about the pieces. “That’s why I used many colors like shades of silver, grays, whites, purples, iridescent blues or opal-like reds.”

The colors are light sensitive so they change with the sunlight, he said.

Barrios’ works have been shown in other urban spaces such as Coca-Cola International Headquarters in New York and Philippe Stark’s Murano Grande building and the Sunny Isles Park in Miami.

His sculptures are also found in private collections such as those of King Juan Carlos of Spain and Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis of Germany.

Other artists who have had their sculptures shown on Park Avenue include Will Ryman and Yoshitomo Nara.

___

Online:

http://rafaelbarrios.com

http://fundforparkavenue.org

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

AP-WF-03-05-12 1523GMT

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

---

BEESKOW, Germany, (AFP) – Piled-up, forgotten and gathering dust, 23,000 artworks from the former East Germany fill a vast warehouse 90 kilometres from Berlin, testimony to an oppressive past.

From busts of Karl Marx to paintings glorifying the Heroes of Socialist Labour, this communist art in a rundown building formerly used to store animal feed arouses little interest in today’s Germany.

One enormous picture among the many catches the eye—it shows Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader, posing with long-term leader Erich Honecker on East Germany’s 40th anniversary.

Several weeks after the meeting, the Berlin Wall would fall and communism be swept away in eastern and central Europe.

“Very poor quality,” comments Kristina Geisler, who is in charge of the Beeskow art archives collection, amid the 1,500 paintings and myriad propaganda objects crammed, floor to ceiling, over three floors.

Dismissive of socialist kitsch, the art historian chooses to focus instead on the East German artists who managed to find a creative space somewhere between artistic freedom and the constraints of dictatorship.

“We also have here works of great artistic quality,” said Ilona Weser, who heads the archive.

To illustrate her point, she opens one of the drawers holding 13,000 graphic paintings by Bernhard Heisig, a major artist from the communist era renowned both in the former East and West Germany.

Works by many other figures of socialist realism are also stored in Beeskow, a quiet town southwest of the German capital. Some are covered in bubble wrap while others just lie on the linoleum floor.

Nearly 2,000 drawings, 1,300 photos, 4,000 medals and 300 busts lie in the space filled with the din of a dilapidated air-conditioning system.

Artworks such as Celebration of Miners, Industrial Landscape and Album on the History of the Soviet Army once adorned the walls of Houses of Culture and offices of the National People’s Army or the ruling Socialist Unity Party.

When these vestiges of the party’s 1949-1989 grip on power vanished with the fall of the Wall, East Germany’s last culture minister managed to save some of the artworks shortly before national reunification in 1990.

Anchored in a political ideology now consigned to the history books of Europe, they were stored in Beeskow and quickly forgotten.

“Art played a particular role in the GDR (German Democratic Republic),” said Geisler. “It was not just about decorating the walls. The art reflected the evolution of society and is today a historical source.”

Juergen Danyel, deputy director of the ZZF institute of historical research of Potsdam, has been trying for three years to draw up an inventory of the    East German artworks with the help of other cultural bodies.

“Art acts like a seismograph and makes visible the erosion of communist power in the 1980s, for example,” he said.

However, nobody seems especially interested in this heritage. At the end of last year, the European Union turned down a request for funding to renovate and modify the warehouse.

Thus, at the end of her workday, Geisler takes one of the big keys she carries and closes up the building, leaving a large gold-framed painting of Lenin, a gift to the GDR from Czechoslovakia, to gather dust in the stairwell.

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

---

LONDON (AFP) –Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei has sold part of his Sunflower Seeds installation to Britain’s Tate Gallery, it said on Monday.

The London gallery has bought around eight million of the 100 million porcelain seeds, which covered the floor of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2010, for an undisclosed figure.

The public was initially able to walk over the 1,000 square meter carpet of seeds when they went on show, but the work was later cordoned off when dust created by the porcelain raised health fears.

“The 10 tons of seeds can be displayed in the form of a 1.5 meter (5 feet) high conical sculpture, stretching five metres in diameter,or as a 10 centimeter-deep square or rectangle,” the Tate said in a statement.

The Tate Modern displayed the 8 million seeds in the cone shape from June until last month.

Ai, whose activism has made him a thorn in the side of China’s communist authorities, was held in custody for 81 days last year as police rounded up dissidents amid online calls for Arab Spring-style protests in China.

Upon his release in June, the 54-year-old was charged with tax evasion, charges he maintains are politically motivated attempts to silence him.

The gallery said the seeds, which were individually hand-made by artisans in Jingdezhen, eastern China, carried associations of the Cultural Revolution, the chaotic period of Chinese politics between 1966 and 1976.

“Propaganda images depicted Chairman Mao as the sun with the mass of people as sunflowers turning towards him,” the Tate said.

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

---

LONDON — Two major British art galleries have raised 45 million pounds ($72 million) to buy a Renaissance masterpiece that has been in the U.K. for 200 years and keep it on public display — a purchase announced Thursday as a substantial cultural victory in tough economic times.

Britain’s National Gallery contributed 25 million pounds to buy Titian’s Diana and Callisto, which it will own jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland. The rest of the money came from an art charity, lottery profits and private donors. The galleries did not appeal to the public for funds.

National Gallery Director Nicholas Penny said the purchase had used up most of the gallery’s 32 million pound reserve fund, accumulated from a century of bequests.

“It’s true we’ve depleted our resources very considerably by the acquisition,” he said. “But if we hadn’t taken this opportunity I think we would diminish our chances of further bequests in the future.

“I know some people might think, why not buy 10 lesser things, but I think the National Gallery was founded primarily as a collection of great masterpieces.”

The purchase means the painting will be reunited with its companion piece, Diana and Actaeon, which the two galleries bought for 50 million pounds in 2009.

The prices, agreed with owner the Duke of Sutherland, are only about a third of what the paintings have been estimated to be worth on the open market.

Robert Korzinek, a fine art underwriter at insurer Hiscox, said the paintings are among a select group of artworks whose market value is potentially sky-high.

“These incredibly rare pictures so infrequently come to market, and when they do there are oil-rich nations that are seeking to put masterpieces on the walls of their museums, and they have infinite buying power,” he said. “It has totally reset prices.”

John Leighton, director-general of the National Galleries of Scotland, said they were “two of the greatest paintings in the world” and had always been meant to hang together.

Both works depict scenes from classical mythology. Diana and Callisto shows a nymph, impregnated by the god Jupiter, being expelled from the circle of Diana, goddess of the hunt.

It and Diana and Actaeon were painted by the Venetian master for King Philip II of Spain in the 1550s and came to Britain in 1798. They have been in the same aristocratic family ever since and form part of the Bridegwater Collection of Old Masters that have been loaned to the National Galleries of Scotland since 1945.

The Duke of Sutherland offered in 2008 to sell the works to public galleries, sparking a government-backed fundraising campaign. The galleries said he had agreed to knock 5 million pounds off the 50 million pound asking price for Diana and Callisto.

Penny said trying to buy both paintings had been a gamble, especially given the dismal economic climate. Britain is experiencing rising unemployment, sluggish growth and government austerity.

“There have been many times when we thought, we’ve started something we can’t finish,” Penny said.

He said failure “would have been awful, but it would have been shameful not to try.”

Diana and Callisto goes on display in London Thursday. The galleries said that in the future they would take turns showing the paintings together in London and Edinburgh.

__

Online:

National Gallery: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk

National Galleries of Scotland: http://www.nationalgalleries.org

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

---

HONG KONG (AP) – Britain’s White Cube gallery, known as an early champion of provocative British artists Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, launched its Hong Kong branch on Thursday, becoming the latest Western gallery to open an Asian outpost in pursuit of China’s booming art market.

White Cube unveiled a 6,000-square-foot space in a new building in Hong Kong’s central business district. With its first branch outside Britain, White Cube follows other British as well as French and American galleries that have set up shop in Hong Kong in recent years.

As their home markets plateau, they’re pinning hopes for future growth on Asia, particularly China, where a strong economy has been minting millionaires at a rapid clip.

“Obviously there’s a new generation of collector that is emerging in China,” said Graham Steele, White Cube’s Asia director. But he added that Taiwan and South Korea are also major markets for contemporary art, while Japan, India, Indonesia and Australia have significant pockets of collectors.

China was the world’s biggest fine art market in 2011 for the second year in a row, accounting for 41.4 percent of global sales of paintings, sculptures, installations, photography and drawings worth $4.8 billion, according to market information provider Artprice.

“On a day-by-day basis, there’s more Chinese collectors coming to London, coming to Miami and Switzerland—coming to the international art fairs—in groups, individually, with artists, with other collectors, with curators,” said Steele. “There’s an amazing level of interest.”

The arrival of White Cube in Hong Kong underlines the sophistication and increasing influence of the region’s art collectors. Founded in 1993, White Cube has had a long association with Hirst and Emin, the most prominent of a group known as the Young British Artists that emerged in the 1990s.

Hirst, one of the world’s wealthiest artists, is notorious for installations that feature sharks and other dead animals suspended in formaldehyde and human skulls encrusted in diamonds. One of Emin’s most famous works is a recreation of her disheveled bed—complete with soiled clothing and empty vodka bottles.

Hong Kong, a former British colony that is now a semiautonomous region of China, is a major financial center and has become the center of Asia’s art business. It’s the world’s third biggest auction center after New York and London, driven by demand for art and collectibles. A painting by Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang sold for $10 million at a Hong Kong auction last year, setting a record for Chinese contemporary art.

In 2009, British contemporary art dealer Ben Brown Fine Arts opened a Hong Kong gallery. Edouard Malingue of France opened an Impressionist and Modernist-themed gallery in 2010. Well-known U.S. art dealer Gagosian Gallery added a branch to its global network last year.

Steele said the gallery is looking forward to developing relationships with new Asian artists.

“We’re trying to find the next generation,” he said.

________

Follow Kelvin Chan at twitter.com/chanman

___

Online: www.whitecube.com

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-03-01-12 1243GMT

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

---

LAS VEGAS (AP) – It’s a desert oasis that hangs its priciest paintings on casino walls, where neon signs are a point of a pride and theme hotels pay tribute to architecture’s golden eras. Still, Las Vegas’ cultural offerings have long taken a back seat to the glamour and crudity of its most notorious vices.

Now a new $470 million arts complex is daring to challenge that. The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, a gleaming art deco-inspired jewel, hopes to reintroduce Las Vegas as a cultural destination.

It will host touring Broadway shows, jazz artists and classical singers, as well as the Las Vegas Philharmonic and Nevada Ballet Theatre, two local institutions often drowned out by the wealth and flash of the Las Vegas Strip.

Much is resting on its March 10 opening. Business owners, elected officials, casino executives and local artists are counting on the Smith Center to bring new life to the city’s struggling economy and arts scene. Nevada has the nation’s highest unemployment and foreclosure rates, and community leaders hope art-seeking tourists will help broaden the state’s appeal and job market.

“This will change the world’s perception about the place we live in,” said Myron Martin, president of the Smith Center.

The attractions and restaurants along the Strip have cultivated a creative class of dancers, chefs, photographers and musicians. But until recently, there was no infrastructure to support them.

The philharmonic performed in a campus concert hall where the acoustics were so poor the musicians couldn’t hear themselves. Art houses shuttered because the city’s blue-collar workers didn’t buy anything. The ballet held its annual Nutcracker performance at a casino.

But now, Las Vegas is becoming much more urban. Meanwhile, the housing collapse has made the city more affordable for striving artists. With some studios renting for as little as $250 a month, galleries, playhouses and dance workshops are flourishing. There were 30 art galleries within Las Vegas in 2007. This year, 144 are operating, according to city records.

There are other signs of growth. Emergency Arts, an abandoned medical center converted into a cultural haven, has attracted more than 40 tenants, including artists, galleries, filmmakers and graphic designers. The city’s four-year-old Shakespeare troupe is scheduled to open its first theater in April. And at least three museums are opening or undergoing significant renovations this year.

“Every well-rounded community has an arts community that is part of the fabric of that city, and that’s exactly what is now happening in Las Vegas,” said Rob McCoy, chairman of the city’s arts commission.

The Smith Center, a temple of visual and performing arts, is easily the most grandiose of Las Vegas’ new cultural institutions.

Its inaugural season will feature cellist Yo-Yo Ma, author David Sedaris, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Broadway hits Wicked, Mary Poppins and The Color Purple. Its campus includes a jazz cafe, a children’s museum, a small park earmarked for outdoor concerts and an ornate bell tower that has transformed downtown Las Vegas’ skyline.

More than 10,000 season subscriptions have been sold, exceeding the Smith Center’s early projections. In a nod to the city’s many low-income workers, tickets start at $24.

“We’ve been very careful to make sure we are not building something for the rich and famous,” said Martin.

The Las Vegas Philharmonic plans to expand to a 10-concert season under its residency at the Smith Center. An upcoming show will feature the score from Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 romantic comedy City Lights as the silent film is shown.

“Most people in the world, in our country, don’t have any idea that we have culture,” said Jeri Crawford, president of the professional orchestra. “If we ever have a change, it will be with the Smith Center.”

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-02-29-12 0100GMT

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

---

BRNO, Czech Republic (AFP) – The UNESCO-listed Tugendhatvilla, a Bauhaus-style architectural gem in the southern Czech city of Brno, reopened Wednesday, following a complete renovation.

The clean-lined 20th-century villa nestled in a vast sloping garden is the work of German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), head of the celebrated Bauhaus school that sought to accentuate architecture as an art.

“The radical ideas used by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe here influenced to a great extent the entire evolution of 20th-century architecture,” Pavel Ciprian, head of the Brno municipal museum, said at the reopening ceremony.

In the design, the architect abandoned the idea of separate rooms, opting instead for a vast open space of 250 square metres (2,691 square feet), from which giant windows frame views of the sprawling gardens and the city.

The villa was built in 1929-1930 for Jewish entrepreneur Fritz Tugendhat and his wife Greta.

In 1938, the family fled for Switzerland and then Venezuela to escape Nazi Germany’s occupation of the country during World War II.

“A house built for a family has become a work of art,” said Daniela Hammer Tugendhat, one of the four children of the builders.

Since the start of the war, the villa’s fate echoed that of the country—it was seized by the Nazis to serve as a studio for the German Messerschmitt aviation factory, and then it was confiscated by the Soviet army.

After the war, the villa became the property of the Czechoslovak state in 1955. It was modified to serve as a re-education center for children before being revamped for representative purposes in the 1980s.

The villa was the setting for key talks between the Czech and Slovak prime ministers, Vaclav Klaus and Vladimir Meciar, in 1992 in the run-up to the peaceful split of the former Czechoslovakia into two countries a year later.

UNESCO put the villa on its world heritage list in December 2001.

“The renovation was carried out by a Czech company but under the supervision of the whole world,” said Roman Onderka, the mayor of Brno, which lies 200 kilometres (125 miles) southeast of the Czech capital Prague.

He said that the renovation had cost 170 million Czech koruna (6.8 million euros, $9.2 million).

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

---

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) – The city of Cedar Rapids wants to restore a Depression-era mural that has been hidden under old paint on a wall in what is now the City Hall council chamber.

The Gazette reports the mural had been painted by an artist or artists supported by the Works Progress Administration, a back-to-work construct of the Franklin Roosevelt administration in the 1930s.

The council chamber was once a courtroom in the former federal courthouse.

A mural on the room’s north wall was uncovered a year ago. A $50,000 grant being sought from the National Endowment for the Arts would be spent on restoring the mural on the room’s south wall.

The murals were painted over, uncovered, and then painted over again in the 1960s.

___

Information from: The Gazette, http://www.gazetteonline.com/

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-02-28-12 1236GMT

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

---