IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) – The University of Iowa Museum of Art intends to have its Jackson Pollock masterpiece restored.

Mural is almost 70 years old and is showing it.

Museum director Sean O’Harrow told the Iowa City Press-Citizen that varnish applied in the 1970s has aged, toning down the colors.

The painting has been valued at nearly $150 million.

O’Harrow says he’s talking to several agencies about securing money for the conservation work. He says he hopes funding will come soon but he didn’t elaborate.

The work could cost $300,000 or more.

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Information from: Iowa City Press-Citizen, http://www.press-citizen.com/

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 This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Franco in fridge sculpture stirs up Spain art fair

 

MADRID (AFP) – A sculpture of former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco set inside a refrigerator was a star attraction at a major contemporary art fair, which opened Wednesday in Madrid.

The work by Spanish artist Eugenio Merino depicts the general wearing a green uniform and dark sunglasses with his knees bent inside the fridge, which is decorated with a white and red design similar to the Coca-Cola logo.

Merino said his piece Always Franco is meant to be a comment on how the former dictator, who ruled from the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 until his death in 1975, continues to make headlines in Spain.

“It represents the idea that in Spain people are keeping the image of Franco alive. We don’t stop talking about him, debating about him. A fridge is where things are kept alive and fresh,” he told AFP at the ARCO art fair.

He cited the trial this month of top judge Baltasar Garzon for trying to prosecute Franco-era atrocities, and a controversy over the publication last year of a favorable biography of Franco by Spain’s Royal Historical Academy.

The sculpture—made of resin, silicon and human hair—was one of the most sought after by photographers, television crews and visitors to the five-day fair, which features works from 215 art galleries in 29 countries.

“There are people who really like it, others who can’t stand it. Spain is very divided on the topic of the dictatorship,” said Merino, who was born just months before Franco died at the age of 82.

Barcelona-based gallery ADN is asking 30,000 euros ($40,000) for the sculpture.

Merino has made headlines at previous editions of the art fair. In 2010 the Israeli embassy in Madrid protested over his sculpture Stairway to Heaven. It depicts an Arab man on his knees praying, with a Catholic priest on the Arab’s back also knelt in prayer and a Rabbi in turn standing on the shoulders of the priest. The artist also sparked controversy at the fair in 2009 with a sculpture depicting British artist Damien Hirst shooting himself in the head.

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OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) – A portrait of former U.S. President Zachary Taylor has been unveiled in the Oklahoma House.

The painting of the 12th U.S. president, known as “Old Rough and Ready” for his military service, was unveiled Tuesday during a ceremony in the Oklahoma House chamber.

Painted by Oklahoma artist Mike Wimmer, the portrait is a gift of former state Rep. Larry Rice and his wife, Peggy.

Taylor’s military service in the U.S. Army included a stint at Fort Gibson in eastern Oklahoma, and he helped establish Fort Washita near the town of Nida.

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

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LONDON (AFP) – With its four white chimneys and solid brick base, Battersea Power Station is London’s most iconic industrial building. But 30 years after closing down, it still eludes efforts to give it a future.

There has been no shortage of ideas or candidates to renovate the building, which was erected in 1933 on the south bank of the River Thames and immortalized on the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album “Animals.”

But whether the aim was to create a commercial center or a leisure park, every grand plan has collapsed, usually in a sea of debt.

Irish developers REO were the latest to try their luck with a £5.5-billion ($8.7 billion, 6.6 billion euro) project to turn the former coal-fired powerstation into shops, office space and leisure facilities.

They went into administration in December, owing debts of £324 million, leaving Battersea standing once again as a symbol of London’s industrial past and a rare bulwark against the relentless development of the British capital.

Some Londoners think the building’s time has now come.

“Knock it down!” said Stephen Bayley, one of the founders of the Design Museum, which once considered moving into the decommissioned power station.

“I live close by and, of course, I enjoy Battersea Power Station’s strange, melancholy presence. But cities have to evolve and change, otherwise they are dead.”

He condemned the “misguided and misdirected nostalgia” of those who wanted to keep it standing for history’s sake, telling AFP: “The brutal fact is no one can afford to restore Battersea Power Station.

“It is one of the biggest brick structures in the world and is in terrible condition: Every joint needs to be repointed.”

The land around Europe’s largest brick building is also polluted and would require expensive decontamination work to make it habitable.

Battersea was built by the architect Giles Gilbert Scott, the man behind Britain’s famous red telephone boxes and Bankside, another London powerstation which was reincarnated as the hugely popular Tate Modern gallery.

Battersea’s chimneys resemble antique columns, while inside are fine examples of art deco design, including a hall with walls of Italian marble.

Paddy Pugh, a planning director at conservation body English Heritage, is horrified at suggestions that it should be destroyed.

“Battersea Power Station is such a powerful architectural symbol in London that it’s almost inconceivable that it would be demolished,” he said.

Despite the work required, Pugh argues it is a “strong, robust building” and can be brought back into use, whether as a commercial centrr, flats or a leisure park.

Even top English Premier League football club Chelsea has expressed an interest in acquiring the site.

Pugh notes that Battersea, the area around the power station, is also becoming more attractive.

Sitting across the river from the wealthy Chelsea district, it will soon be home to the new U.S. embassy and there are plans to extend the Underground train network.

Several new developments of riverside flats have sprung up along the south bank of the Thames in recent years, but the site around Battersea Power Station remains an unattractive industrial zone.

“For us, the most important thing is that the power station should be repaired and brought back into some sort of use. Now what that use is, we are very open to suggestions,” Pugh told AFP.

The football stadium idea does not go down well with the community group set up when the power station closed in 1983.

“Battersea Power Station should be mostly about work and about culture,” said architect Keith Garner, a member of the group. “It is world-famous, and for companies, particularly in the creative or media sector, it is a very good address to have.”

He cited other renovations, including Fiat’s Lingotto factory in Turin and the Dean Clough factory buildings in Halifax, northern England, as examples of what can be achieved.

“In a rich city like London there is no excuse for the fact that in nearly 30 years nothing has been achieved,” he said.

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MADRID (AFP) – Spain on Tuesday opens one of the most extensive Marc Chagall exhibitions ever mounted, a feat that organizers say will not be repeated for many years.

From canvasses peopled with peasants, musicians and circus characters to illustrations of books and fables, a broad sweep of the Russian master’s works is on show in Madrid.

“It is extremely rare to have so many masterpieces together, to bring together so many paintings from all over the world is something that won’t happen again for many years,” the artist’s granddaughter Meret Meyer, vice president of Chagall committee, told AFP.

“It is the first time he has been shown in such a global way, the first exhibition which shows him in such a fluid, natural way, in which you discover innovative elements alongside the masterworks that make up his career.”

From the land of his birth in Russia to his death in France in 1985, passing through his high-spirited youth in Paris in the 1920s and U.S. exile in the 1940s, more than 150 works from 30 or so museums and private collections are on display from Feb. 14 to May 20.

Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza, one of the capital’s three major museums, organized the exhibition and is hosting Chagall’s earliest works up to his departure from the United States in 1948.

Fundacion Caja Madrid, a foundation linked to the struggling savings bank, is showing the later works, many of them on a larger scale and thus requiring more space for viewing.

“The idea is to discover a world that has nothing to do with the 20th century painting we know in Spain,” said exhibition organizer Jean-Louis Prat, comparing Chagall with Spanish contemporaries such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro.

Chagall was “atypical” because despite his contacts in Paris with cubism, fauvism and abstract painting “throughout the 20th century he developed a work that was outside any movement,” Prat told AFP.

When Chagall arrived in Paris in 1910, impressionism was ending, fauvism had ended, and cubism was taking its first steps.

“He discovers all these vanguards with joy but they don’t influence him: He uses them, certainly, but only a little, maintaining his independence,” Prat said.

In a 20th century art world that often preferred to work in tones, the Russian painter became a staunch defender of color, although the arrival of fascism in the 1930s opened a dark chapter in his work.

To reaffirm his identity, he created a world inhabited by characters from his Russian and Jewish culture: peasants, rabbis, musicians, which his imagination combined with a poetic and dream-like universe in which cows play the violin.

“It is the universe he always loved; dance, music, the circus, which made him dream of the child within,” said the organizer, responsible for the last great retrospective organised by Chagall in 1984 in France.

With this sample, “we wanted to show Chagall as friend of the poets,” he said of the artist, who in the early 20th century struck up a friendship with Guillaume Apollinaire and in the 1960s with Andre Malraux.

“Poets saw themselves reflected in him,” he added, showing a rare collection of etchings that the Russian artist made in the 1950s to illustrate the fables of Jean de la Fontaine.

Among the least known works in the exhibition are also the black-and-white Chagall illustrations of Russian author Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls” and even of the Bible.

But the darker character of these works fails to overshadow a message of freshness that is “charged with hope”, Meyer said.

“It is what the artist would have wanted, that you don’t see the difficulty, that it should flow simply like something that flows from within,” she said.

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SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) – A famous portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln has been labeled a fraud.

Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum curator James Cornelius said Saturday that a painting of President Abraham Lincoln’s wife that hung in the Illinois governor’s mansion for 32 years is a fake.

Illinois folklore says that Mary Todd Lincoln had Francis Carpenter secretly paint her portrait as a surprise for the 16th president, but he was assassinated before she had a chance to give it to him.

Cornelius says the portrait and the backstory appear to be a lie. He says an art restorer noted the signature on the painting appeared to have been added later.

The curator says the painting’s original subject is an anonymous woman.

Cornelius says he’ll continue to display the painting at the Springfield museum.

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

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PARIS (AFP) – A French mayor’s plan to erect a statue of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s former supermodel wife Carla Bruni in worker’s attire has angered the opposition and embarrassed the first lady.

Jacques Martin, the mayor of Nogent-sur-Marne to the east of Paris and member of Sarkozy’s UMP party, commissioned the statue to honor the mostly Italian immigrant women who used to work at a feather factory in the town.

But when French daily Le Parisien on Sunday revealed the plan for the statue more than two metres tall, at a cost of over 80,000 euros ($106,000), the opposition and even the first lady’s friends were up in arms.

A source close to Bruni-Sarkozy said she agreed to model for sculptor Elisabeth Cibot as she admires her work, but that “it was never suggested that her name would appear.”

Modeling “is her former job, she no longer does it commercially, but she’s often asked to do it, and she often agrees, and always without being paid,” the source said.

But the swiftly gathering scandal “is using something that has nothing to do with politics to political ends,” one of her friends said, requesting anonymity.

William Geib of the Socialist opposition said the idea of dressing up a likeness of the Italian heiress and pop singer as a worker was “grotesque.”

“It’s an insult to the Italian feather workers, to give them the face of an extremely rich person. I have nothing against Carla Bruni-Sarkozy but she does not represent the workers’ world.”

Michel Gilles, a local member of the right-wing opposition, slammed what he said was a “political coup” ahead of the April-May two-round presidential election, which opinion polls say right-wing leader Sarkozy is likely to lose.

Martin said he voted in favor of the statue at a council meeting last year.

“But it was never mentioned that it would have Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s features,” Gilles said.

The statue is reportedly costing 82,000 euros ($108,000 dollars), of which the town hall is paying 41,000 euros, and exactly what it will look like is being kept secret.

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ATLANTA (AP) – A northwest Georgia county has bought the garden where the late folk artist Howard Finster held court for tourists and art lovers from around the world.

Chattooga County, where Paradise Garden has been based since Finster began building it in 1961, used donations and grant money to buy the small plot for $125,000, said Jordan Poole, executive director with the Paradise Garden Foundation. The foundation will continue to work on restoring the quirky garden, which was featured in a 1983 R.E.M. video.

Finster, a bicycle repairman and preacher who turned to art to spread God’s word, has long been considered the grandfather of the American folk art movement. He filled the garden, located about 100 miles northwest of Atlanta, with primitive mosaics, sculptures and buildings. It was the setting for numerous weddings that Finster presided over.

The garden fell into disrepair after his death in 2001. The county’s ownership will protect it from ever being closed down, Poole said Wednesday.

“It means Paradise Garden is still owned by an entity—it can’t be snatched up by a private investor who goes in there and starts removing everything,” Poole said.

The county bought the four-acre plot in late December after receiving news it had won an Appalachian Regional Commission grant, said the county’s sole commissioner, Jason Winters. The county is in a much better position to apply for grants to help restore the crumbling structures in the garden than the nonprofit that bought the property from Finster’s family, he said.

Winters said he hopes to create a tourism economy around the garden, which drew more than 2,000 visitors last year with no marketing. The county will lease the garden to Poole’s foundation, which will be in charge of maintaining and restoring the property, Winters said.

“Finster was a citizen of Chattooga County first, and he was proud of his home and we need to be proud of him,” Winters said.

So far, volunteers have helped shore up the tier wedding cake-like World’s Folk Art Church and put on a new roof with money raised by auctioning off art from the garden. Volunteers also help guide tours of the garden for visitors who show up on its doorstep.

The foundation has also revived FinsterFest, a folk art festival that Finster held every year in the garden to help promote hundreds of unknown artists.

“It’s exactly what my father would have wanted,” Beverly Finster said Wednesday night.

Her father began creating what he called “sacred art” in 1976 after a vision appeared to him in a dollop of paint on one of his fingertips. His art, which featured everything from ants to Elvis, gained national fame after members of R.E.M. befriended him.

The artist painted the covers of albums for R.E.M., Talking Heads and other bands in the 1980s, and soon his primitive paintings and sculptures became famous, drawing thousands every year to his home near the Alabama-Georgia border.

His art spilled from the basement of his home into his backyard, where he carefully placed mosaic Bible verses into the sidewalk and turned objects like bicycles, car motor parts and dolls into sculptures. Some of the objects in the garden look like the contents of a child’s toy box or a recycling bin were dumped into piles of wet concrete, drying into a misshapen heap.

A shack is made out of bottles embedded in concrete. Trashcans are painted with messages about transforming trash into treasure. One wall is a scrapbook of family photos and clippings from newspapers, all preserved behind glass.

Everything about the garden is folksy, right down to the name, which is Paradise Garden or Paradise Gardens, depending who you ask. Howard Finster—who sometimes wrote his name as “Finister,” which is the way residents in Chattooga pronounce it—used both in legal documents, Poole said.

The artist eventually produced 48,000 pieces, including quirky wooden statues and sculptures made from other people’s trash. He awed architects with his complex folk art church, which seemed impossible for a man lacking formal engineering training.

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

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LONDON (AP) – There is a vast amount of flesh—clear and smooth or wrinkled and mottled—on display in the latest show at Britain’s National Portrait Gallery, a retrospective of the work of Lucian Freud.

Freud was the most renowned British portrait painter of the 20th century, and he found that clothes often got in the way.

The artist, who died in July at age 88, approached the human body the way his psychoanalyst grandfather Sigmund Freud approached the mind—determined to unmask its secrets.

The exhibition, which kicked of with a royal preview for the Duchess of Cambridge on Wednesday, features more than 100 paintings completed over 70 years, many of them nude studies of the artist’s friends and family.

Michael Auping, chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas—where the show will move after its London run—said Freud was often asked why he painted so many nudes.

“He would say, every time: ‘It’s the most complete portrait,’” Auping said.

The exhibition opens with early head-and-shoulders portraits from the 1940s and ’50s, then moves on to the to vast, monumental nudes for which Freud became famous. He painted standing up in his London studio, layering oil paint on large canvases with a broad, coarse-haired brush.

Many of the paintings have generic names—Naked Solicitor, Man in a Blue Scarf—but the portraits are revealing images of the artist’s inner circle, or sometimes Freud himself, often naked and looking vulnerably exposed.

Freud kept his focus on depicting the human body even when the prevailing fashion in art turned to abstraction.

National Portrait Gallery director Sandy Nairne said that for seven decades Freud looked at people with an “unrelenting, determined eye.”

“They sometimes feel in your face and very explicitly naked,” Nairne said of the paintings. “But that was always with the cooperation of the sitter. In the end, they were sympathetic.

“None of these are casual sitters. They are not figures—they are individuals.”

Berlin-born Freud, who moved to Britain with his family in 1933 when the Nazis came to power in Germany, painted his mother, his brother, his daughters Bella and Esther, and an eclectic array of acquaintances. The subjects of his paintings range from performance artist Leigh Bowery and supermodel Kate Moss to Brig. Andrew Parker-Bowles, a horse-riding friend (who got to keep his uniform on).

He was at work until the very end. The exhibition includes Freud’s unfinished final painting, Portrait of the Hound, which shows his assistant David Dawson and whippet Eli, and appears to have been cut off mid-brushstroke.

Most of Freud’s sitters seem to have loved the experience of posing for the master. Sue Tilley, subject of several nudes including Benefits Supervisor Sleeping—which sold at auction in 2008 for $33.6 million, a record for a living artist—remembers long sessions of chat and laughter.

She said Freud was “a complete one-off … exciting, interesting, funny and serious—every single personality trait wrapped up in one person.”

“Lucian Freud: Portraits” is open to the public from Thursday until May 27, then moves to Fort Worth from July 1 to Oct. 29.

Auping said he was eager to bring the show to the United States, where the fleshiness of Freud’s paintings initially came as a shock.

“We have nothing like this in America,” Auping said. “We are the land of Photoshop. We are the land of sleek models. We are the land of no wrinkles.

“It disturbed our sense of abstraction and minimalism. (But) over the years we came to embrace Freud.”

British society embraced him, too. Freud gained the ultimate sign of respectability in 2000 when he painted Queen Elizabeth II—fully clothed. The naturalistic portrait, dubbed daring by some and disrespectful by others, is not on display here.

But the show does have royal approval. The Duchess of Cambridge, wife of Prince William, is a patron of the National Portrait Gallery.

Tilley said she was looking forward to her preview—“I love the royal family”—and was not worried the former Kate Middleton would be put off by all the flesh on display, a roomful of it Tilley’s.

“I’m not embarrassed about her seeing me naked—I’m a human being,” Tilley said. “I may not be the most gorgeous one under the sun but that’s what I am.

“It’s art, you know. Poor woman, I’m sure she’s seen things before.”

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

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