The Week That Was (April 18 – 25, 2008)

NEW YORK—The art market continued to surge last week, but in museum news, it was a case of you win some, you lose some. Los Angeles may see an increase in arts funding from the county and a decrease from the city. Russian painter Kazimir Malevich's heirs settled a suit with the city of Amsterdam such that the heirs get five paintings and the city gets to keep the (undisclosed number of) others in its Stedelijk Museum. And though it took the sale of two Thomas Eakins paintings to institutions in Colorado, the Philadelphia Museum of Art — along with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts — have finally raised the full $68 million needed to keep Eakins's arguably most famous painting, The Gross Clinic, out of the hands of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and collector Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, which had agreed to jointly buy it from Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson University two years ago.

Of course, sometimes you just lose, as museums that took out auction-rate bonds are discovering. Meanwhile, a survey by a British agency found that poor returns on stocks and bonds are driving more investors to art and antiques. And, just in time to serve these folks, the Armory Show, New York's annual contemporary art fair, is expanding.

Transport hubs continue to thrive as makeshift museums. In London, images of artworks from the National Gallery's collection went on view on large plasma screens in a Eurostar terminal. And where can three artists get a $1.5 million budget to create site-specific works? Why, an airport, of course!

In crime news, it turns out a painting missing from an exhibition of Ferdinand Hodler had been stolen from the private collector who had agreed to loan it. From the sound of things, the thief pretended to be picking up the painting for the exhibition. And a 19th-century porcelain centerpiece that failed to sell at Sotheby’s is the subject of accusations of theft, with ties to the Russian mafia.

“The debtor does not have the confidence of the creditors,” sums up the latest chapter in the unfolding tragedy of former Manhattan art dealer Lawrence Salander. The words, quoted by Bloomberg, were spoken by a lawyer representing one of Salander's debtors, Renaissance Art Investors, and were said in support of an independent trustee assuming control of Salander's finances — which a court in Poughkeepsie, New York, approved. But artist and college professor Steven Kurtz was finally cleared of charges, brought four years ago, that he committed mail and wire fraud. The fake memoir–esque incident at Yale University involving an artist who claimed to have repeatedly artificially inseminated herself and then induced miscarriages in the name of art is swelling to James Frey proportions — the artist will not be able to display the work until she announces, in writing, that it was a fiction. Another artist says he has received death threats from animal rights activists over an installation involving a stray dog that the activists claim died of starvation due to the artwork. And a painting made in 1935 by a late artist who at the time was a frustrated backbencher in parliament, but within a few years became leader of the United Kingdom, sold for 420,000 at Bonhams auction house in New York.