News & Topics

In the summer of 1610, the 39-year-old painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was on the run, sleeping with his hand on his sword. He had risen from selling his art on the streets of Rome to the heights of national fame. Now, he was traveling through Tuscany, hoping the law didn’t pick up on his trail before he reached Rome, ... Read More »

  News comes today that the somewhat controversial “La Belle Ferronnière”, a painting most likely from the 18th Century and once questionably attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci, has sold through Sotheby’s auction house at the princely sum of $1.5 million, about twice what it was expected to garner. Beautiful as it is, “La Belle” has been through the critical ringer ... Read More »

Perhaps you remember yesterday when we noted that Chinese officials of Wulingyan National Park had renamed one of the famous peaks in that Hunan-province natural reserve after the “Hallelujah Mountains” in “Avatar”, a movie that apparently used the unique landscape to create their CGI environment. Well not so fast now. Seems that officials speaking through the State’s Xinhua news agency ... Read More »

  For a couple of dead fellows, they do get around. News from the art world has masterpieces by two of Museyon’s favorites headed to new climes. First, a selection of 112 works from Paris’ renowned Musée D’Orsay are currently on display at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, including Paul Gauguin’s “Tahitian Women on the Beach” (1891) and ... Read More »

  Miramax, the once-pugnacious arthouse Hollywood indie studio that fought and clawed its way into mainstream success, quietly closes today after 31 years of bringing the great vistas of the world to American moviegoers. It’s been a long, slow death for the firm that, under the direction of the uncompromising, often combative Weinstein brothers, went from a small distributor, to ... Read More »

BLDGBLOG has turned us on to a New Year’s Eve musical performance with an ingenious, arty twist. Instead of counting down to midnight at a dance club, for the last few years a brave clutch of New Yorkers has been heading over to Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, to watch as the Pratt Institute’s steam power plant is transformed for one night ... Read More »

In Vienna, Austria, today, the Kunsthistorisches Museum unveiled a masterful restoration of Joannes Vermeer’s legendary masterwork, “The Art of Painting” (c.1666, left). More than just an example of one of time’s greatest painters portraying the practice of his own craft while at the height of his powers, the work is a political and historical hot potato—a national treasure of a ... Read More »

  Back when “Avatar” was just a gleam in James Cameron’s eye, a photographer took some shots of China’s “Southern Sky Column” (above, right), a series of finger-like mountain peaks in Zhangjiajie in the country’s southern Hunan province. Somehow, the story goes, pictures of this natural wonder and UNESCO World Heritage site made their way to the director, who recycled ... Read More »