This September, EXPO CHICAGO, the International Exposition of Contemporary and Modern Art, will once again present over 120 leading international galleries at Festival Hall at Navy Pier. 

Out on the 96th Street beach in the Rockaways on Wednesday, over a dozen New York artists donned swim trunks and painted en plein air to benefit Smallwater, a local community building charity established in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, in an event organized by the New Art Dealers Alliance. Daniel Heidkamp turned in a shimmering portrait of Bridget Finn, co-owner of Cleopatra’s gallery in Greenpoint, lounging on a beach towel; Chuck Webster’s abstract piece, seemingly modeled on the parachute tent that the artists gathered beneath, was adorned with the word “ROCKAWAYS,” written in reverse. Talia Schulze’s canvas featured a red bikini bottom and an anonymous midriff, plus half a breast and a nipple — not modeled on anyone’s anatomy in particular, she said, but rather a sort of “Ur-nipple.”

Ellen Altfest set up a camp a bit further down the beach, beginning a realistic depiction of a few pieces of weathered wood jutting out of the sand. While none of the art got too outré or conceptual, a piece by Jeffrey Tranchell pushed the boundaries a bit: A dazzlingly decorated empty frame ornamented with one of the red safety marker flags dotting the beach.

These works — along with canvases by Tyson and Scott Reeder, who helped organize the group of artists, Gina Beavers, and others — will be auctioned off in mid-September at a to-be-determined Manhattan location. The money will go toward further community programming and events hosted by Smallwater, which from its post-Sandy early initiative to provide food and necessary staples to Rockaways residents has since morphed into a broader DIY institution handling outreach and education.

To see photos from the NADA beach painting party, click on the slideshow.

In a Broadway increasingly dominated by tedious spectacle, one of the most inventive, witty, and refreshing productions of the past few years has been the bare-bones “Peter and the Starcatcher,” based on the 2004 bestselling children’s novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. After its 2012 run on Broadway, the Tony Award-winning play, adapted by Rick Elice in collaboration with co-directors Alex Timbers and Roger Rees, is now ensconced at off-Broadway’s New World Stages. This prequel to the Peter Pan myth, created by James M. Barrie in his 1904 play, recently had a triumphant regional premiere at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, where it remains in rep through October 18. It will also launch a 21-city national tour in Denver, beginning on August 15. 

These new developments for “Starcatcher” come in the shadow, as it were, of several new plays and musicals that are attempting their own spin on Barrie’s timeless story of Peter, Wendy, and the Lost Boys.  Robert Wilson’s dark take on the tale with the Berliner Ensemble and with songs by CocoRosie premiered last April in Berlin and will be remounted in December in Paris; “Fly,” the new musical directed by Jeffrey Seller with songs by Bill Sherman and Kirsten Childs, recently had its world premiere at the Dallas Theater Center; and “Finding Neverland,” the theatrical producing debut of film mogul Harvey Weinstein, is in the process of receiving a major overhaul. After a less than auspicious world premiere in Leicester, England last fall, the musical, which is based on the 2004 film about Barrie and his relationship to the Llewelyn-Davies family, which inspired his classic, is now aiming for a re-launch in London next spring with a new creative team. Weinstein has brought in director Diane Paulus, who recently won a Tony Award for her current revival of “Pippin,” to replace Rob Ashford, as well as Brit James Graham (“This House”) to rewrite Allan Knee’s libretto. Weinstein has also enlisted songwriter Gary Barlow to augment the score written by Scott Frankel and Michael Korie (“Grey Gardens,” “Far From Heaven”).

In the wake of this Peter-mania, ARTINFO spoke with Elice about the timeless allure of Barrie’s play, which itself has had no less than seven Broadway productions since 1904 — it was the basis of a 1954 Jule Styne musical, which has had five Broadway revivals and several network broadcasts in the 1950s and ’60s, and there was the seminal 1953 Disney animated version.

Elice, by the way, has not been idle since “Starcatcher” opened to rave reviews on Broadway after developmental runs at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and the New York Theatre Workshop. With Bill T. Jones, he has adapted the 1972 film “Super-Fly” into a soul-funk musical with songs by Curtis Mayfield culled from the original blaxploitation movie. The show was co-written with Seth Zvi Rosenfeld, and it will receive a workshop this summer at Montclair State College in New Jersey.

What do you make of the fact that Barrie’s “Peter Pan” keeps artists going to drawing board?

I can only speak to what interested me and, that is, I wanted to make it a story about community. At this particular political and sexual moment in our lives, we are operating on a razor’s edge and the idea of somebody who discovers that life is better when you are part of something that is larger than yourself was very appealing. Like a lot of people, I’m fed up with “me-firstism” and “not-in-my-backyardism” and all the other “isms” that make us separate and put walls around us. And that’s what I love about theater. It brings down those walls.

The character in the play is not known as Peter, just The Boy. What’s the significance of that?

That’s all he is — a feral, filthy, silent, and surly creature with none of the advantages of being socialized. He’s been an orphan for so long and is treated so badly that he is the least likely person to do anything with his life. And by the end of the story he finds out that life is better when you’re part of a community, something he discovers because he meets this girl.

Who here, again, is not called Wendy but Molly.

That’s in the novel. Of course, Peter Pan without Wendy is like a day without sunshine. More to the point, our Peter without his Wendy is nobody. As created by Barrie, he is the eternal outsider. Mrs. Darling, when she leaves the children, warily, under the guard of Nana, thinks she sees a face in the window and, as Dickens did in “Oliver Twist,” Barrie gives us the sense of a child of want who is separate, who can’t get in, who doesn’t have a place at the table, who’s outside.

Is that why Barrie’s tale is so affecting?

He keeps coming back to that. It’s this thing that Peter needs, that he can’t express articulately, a thimble that’s a kiss, or his desire to be told a bedtime story, or the camaraderie of the female of the species, some long ago echo of when he had a mother — all those things that create an emotional pull to some long-ago barely remembered place where he didn’t feel like an outsider.

Your Molly appears to be a lot stronger than the Wendy in Barrie. How did that develop?

I didn’t want to write a puppy trailing after Peter. I wanted to write a wolfhound. I remembered that when I was kid reading “Tom Swift,” “The Hardy Boys,” and “Treasure Island,” the girls were reading about Scout Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Jo in “Little Women,” and Anne in “Anne of Green Gables.” I wanted to write a female character that was not heroically redundant or merely in support. This is really a two-hander. It’s Peter and the Girl: proto-feminist, super-articulate, very bright, and thus disenfranchised in her own way. She’s as bereft of human companionship as this feral creature and they’re bound together in that way. It’s the hero’s journey but it’s not Joseph Campbell. It’s Joseph and Jane Campbell.

When you went about adapting the novel, were you at all intimidated by the mythic nature of the story?

I didn’t think about it. If I’d thought about it, maybe I’d have thought, “Gee, what if I screw it up?” For me, the lonely pursuit of fingers on a keyboard is difficult enough without having to frighten yourself with the mythology. And I think anything that has lasted this long must be strong enough to withstand my messing it up.

Did you have to take into consideration what expectations audiences might have?

I think the common shared knowledge of Peter Pan is really fuzzy.  Some people know it very well, some people know it only as a peanut butter, some people think of him as a woman flying around in green tights. Hardly anybody knows that the brothers are Michael and John and that Hook was an Etonian!

Do you think, for men at least, the Peter Pan complex is a strong part of the attraction?

For a while maybe. When we were boys, we think, “How cool not to have anybody telling you what to do, no chores, no homework, no bedtime. How fabulous it would be to fly and never grow up.” But think of aging as a rollercoaster ride. What if you stopped at the top of that first, steep hill? You’d never get the rest of the ride. You’d be this oddity — a Moses child never allowed entry into the Promised Land.  The Promised Land isn’t eternal youth. The Promised Land is adulthood. Would I rather be 12? Not anymore. That’s why I wrote “Peter and the Starcatcher.” I was writing it for this lonely boy that Barrie created a century ago. “Come on in! There’s a seat at the table for you.”

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Carey Mulligan, reports Deadline, is in talks to star in “The Fury,” a movie about the British suffragist movement that was originally titled “Suffragettes.” It has been scripted by Abi Morgan, whose film “Brick Lane” was a bona fide feminist drama and whose “The Iron Lady” was not.

Morgan also co-wrote “Shame,” which co-starred Mulligan as the sex addict protagonist’s suicidal sister, and adapted the upcoming “The Invisible Woman” from Claire Tomalin’s biography of Ellen Ternan (Felicity Jones), who was an 18-year-old actress when she became the secret mistress of Charles Dickens. Ralph Fiennes, who directed the film, plays Dickens.

“Brick Lane” helmer Sarah Gavron will direct “The Fury.” The Playlist announced in April 2011 that the film will be an ensemble drama. It has not been disclosed if Mulligan would play a fictional character or a real person. At 28, she is theoretically too young to play Emmeline Pankhurst, 40 when she founded the all-women suffrage organization the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1898, or Emily Davison, 4o when she became the movement’s martyr. Pankhurst’s daughters, Christabel (born 1880) and Sylvia (born 1882), both prominent suffragists, would be intriguing possibilities for Mulligan.

A potentially crucial movie, “The Fury” can scarcely avoid replicating, or including, one of the most important slivers of film in existence. One hundred years ago last month, a Pathé newsreel camera photographed Davison stepping onto the racetrack of the Epsom Derby in Surrey where she was struck by King George V’s horse, Anmer.

A militant suffragist who had been jailed nine times for violently protesting for women’s right to vote, Davison is believed to have been attempting to pin a WSPU flag on the horse rather than to kill herself. However, she died of a fractured skull and internal injuries four days later, on June 8, 1913. British women over 30 were finally granted the right to vote in 1918, those over 21 in 1928 — 56 years after the suffrage campaign began.

No footage exists of Gavrilo Princip shooting Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his pregnant wife, Sophie, a year afterward. It’s fair to say, therefore, that the horrific images of Davison’s collision with Anmer were, 50 years before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Zapruder footage of the world going up in flames in 1914.

A poignant footnote to Davison’s fatal protest was its effect on Anmer’s jockey, Herbert Jones, a British Triple Crown winner, who was mildly concussed in the accident. “Haunted by that poor woman’s face,” as he said, he laid a wreath “to do honour to the memory of Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Emily Davison” at the former’s funeral in 1928. In 1951, he committed suicide in a gas-filled kitchen. Nearly 700 years after the first Parliament, he may have been the last indirect victim of non-enfranchisement.

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Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing,” which opened last Friday, is one of the most jarring films that will be released this year. The self-proclaimed “documentary of the imagination” focuses on Anwar Congo and other death squad members who perpetrated the mass murder of suspected communists and ethnic Chinese in Indonesia starting in 1965. While one might expect these men to feel remorse for their actions, the film shows that the reality is the opposite — they are proud of what they’ve done.

The seed for the film was planted while Oppenheimer was shooting a documentary about Indonesian plantation workers trying to unionize during the early 2000s. It was then that he met survivors of the 1965 killings, many of whom were still too afraid to talk about what had happened. But as one of the subjects of that first film pointed out, in order to tell the story, Oppenheimer needed to talk to the boastful perpetrators themselves.

“I would approach them with some circumspection, and the answers I would get, immediately, they would answer with gruesome and boastful stories of the killings,” the director said of the subjects in his latest film. “This shocking openness in front of their children and grandchildren. I started to ask, what is this openness? Why are they boasting?”

The perpetrators, many of whom had been gangsters before being conscripted by the military regime, view themselves as heroes who helped shape their country. The death squads they were members of would eventually evolve into a powerful right-wing paramilitary group, Pancasila Youth. And this is why Congo and his friends were so willing to speak to Oppenheimer, gleefully recreating their crimes while he filmed: They are the winners.

“We’d get to the place where they’d killed,” Oppenheimer told ARTINFO, “and they’d launch into these spontaneous demonstrations of how they’d killed, then they would complain that they hadn’t thought to bring along a machete, or some other member of their squad to play a victim.”

But as proud as the culprits may be of what they’ve done, their actions are less likely to be viewed similarly outside their sphere of influence. And this, the film’s main purpose, put Oppenheimer, co-director Christine Cynn, and the rest of their crew at risk. The criticism they were opening their subjects up to could easily cost them cooperation and more.

“I would only screen footage back to people if I really thought it was important, because I knew there was a risk of losing my access, them saying, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, this makes me look bad,’” Oppenheimer said about showing footage to Congo. “And indeed at that moment I had an Indonesian production manager at the airport with cash, ready to buy tickets for the whole crew to leave, if he did not receive a text message saying everything was OK. Because I thought he would watch that footage, say, ‘I’m not going to do this, this makes me look bad,’ and call the police.”

But Oppenheimer could tell that the footage got to Congo. It actually caused the former death squad leader to confront the consequences of his actions, something he’d spent the proceeding years avoiding. “He’s never been forced to admit what he did was wrong, so he doesn’t dare do so,” the filmmaker said. “Because the moment you say this is wrong, you have to wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and see a murder.”

And while Congo may still not be willing to accept that he is a murderer, the film makes it clear, especially during a final harrowing, retching segment, that he’s been affected.

Many viewers will want to know what Congo thinks of the film, and in statements made after it screened at the Toronto Film Festival last year, he distanced himself from “The Act of Killing” and its director, saying that he’d been misled. But since then, according to Oppenheimer, Congo has viewed it and appreciates it.

“He was very moved by the film,” said Oppenheimer. “He cried when he saw the film, he was silent for a long time, and then he said, ‘This film shows what it’s like to be me, and I’m glad I was able to feel honest in the film and I will always remain loyal to our film.’ And in fact since he’s seen it, he has.”

“The Act of Killing” isn’t enjoyable, but it’s powerful — the kind of documentary that has a lasting effect. Oppenheimer wanted to bring attention to what happened in Indonesia during the mid 1960s, and by getting the men who carried out these atrocious crimes to talk candidly about the experience, that’s exactly what this “documentary of the imagination” does.

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The male nude has been a traditional art subject for as long as its female counterpart, yet few shows are entirely dedicated to a genre, seemingly deemed too sexy, or controversial. Things are changing, though, and this autumn, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris is inaugurating “Masculin/Masculin. L'homme nu dans l'art de 1800 à nos jours,” an exhibition which showcases over two centuries of male nudes from artists ranging from Jacques-Louis David to Kehinde Wiley. Modern Painters caught up with its curator, the museum’s president Guy Cogeval, to discuss taboos, the gay marriage debate, and his ambitions for one of France’s best-loved institutions.

Could you tell me about the starting point for this exhibition?

Actually, for about 15 years I’ve been meaning to do a show on this subject and thought about it without ever putting anything down on paper. And then a year ago, I opened up the newspaper and saw that in Vienna [at the Leopold Museum], there was a big show on the male nude. I said to myself: they’ve really got guts, this is extraordinary, and I should finally do it. This was last fall.

So it happened very quickly.

I spoke with two curators and we decided to start working on it last December-January. The Vienna show was very interesting, and it gets credit for being the first one to tackle this subject head-on, but at the same time it was a bit unsatisfying. Some great painters were missing, such as the French neoclassical artists, especially David, Girodet, Guérin, Gros, Géricault, etc. And there were no French symbolists such as Gustave Moreau — we have a great symbolist collection at the Musée d’Orsay and symbolism is my specialty.

During my whole career, I’ve brought together people as different as Francis Bacon, Pierre et Gilles, Kehinde Wiley — whom I’ve known for about a year or two — and none of them were in the Vienna exhibition. The exhibition came together very quickly because there were very few museums in the world who refused us loans. Everyone thought that doing a show on the male nude at the Musée d’Orsay was unexpected and that it had to be done someday.

You mentioned that the Vienna show had guts. Do you think that the male nude is still taboo?

I definitely think that there is still a taboo. I wouldn’t have believed it a year ago, but when you’ve been in Paris for six months with the city in havoc from the dispute between supporters of and opponents to gay marriage, you realize that there are still a lot of taboos to be abolished in French society, even though we thought that it was the most liberal and open society in the world.

Given the political context, is this an activist exhibition?

People can take it as they wish. I’m actually not a born activist, but in this very particular perspective, I think something had to be done. We started to come up with the exhibition last year, so it was not at all about the fight over gay marriage. I would never have believed that some politicians on the right would have taken up the cause of opposing gay marriage, but what we saw in Paris is absolutely incredible. I think the rest of the world was amazed, because even in a conservative country like England, the law was voted last week without any big debate in parliament. It passed unanimously. Ten years ago, when gay marriage was legalized in Canada, it was all concluded in six months — both the right and the left voted for it. I don’t understand why the right [in France] chose to make it a divisive issue.

The situation gives this project a special resonance.

It’s always interesting when an exhibition is a little bit connected to what’s happening in the country at the same time. The Musée d’Orsay’s mission isn’t to put on shows for old ladies. At the same time, they’re a large portion of our audience and we’re able to do that kind of show, but we’re also able to do shows that take you by surprise, like Crime et Châtiment [Crime and Punishment] four years ago, which was a totally modern exhibition, and L’Ange du Bizarre [The Angel of the Odd] this year, which touched on really deep things, because we had an audience that was much younger. We even saw people in the Musée d’Orsay whom we never see — goths with big black shoes, people in the absolute weirdest outfits — and it was really good because the museum is not limited to a small elite group of people who know how to behave. Above all, it seemed important to me that a prominent classical museum would do a show like this. It shouldn’t be limited to contemporary art museums or galleries.

The Musée d’Orsay isn’t a contemporary art museum. Why did you decide to include art of today?

To show that it’s an issue that affects us deeply today. This isn’t obvious! The proof is that it was hard to agree on a poster for this show. I wanted to use the same poster as in Vienna. Actually, it’s one of only eight works that we have in common with the Leopold show: soccer players without their uniforms, an extraordinary photo by Pierre et Gilles (Vive la France, 2006). The city of Vienna made the Leopold cover up the three men’s genitals. That wouldn’t have flown in the Paris subway. In a way we censored ourselves from the beginning because we knew that people wouldn’t talk about the show if we used a provocative image. We chose a really great photo by Pierre et Gilles with a young man seen from behind, representing Mercury, alongside a really great neoclassical nude of Paris relaxing in nature, by [Jean-Baptiste Frédéric] Desmarais, who was a pupil of David.

What are some of the key works or moments in this show?

I’m very impressed by the works of François-Xavier Fabre, who was awarded the Prix de Rome around 1787. He was close to David and he broke with him because during the French Revolution he was more of a monarchist. In the 1770s, he did some academic nudes that are just amazing. When I showed them to Pierre et Gilles and Kehinde Wiley, they were amazed. We will also have Fabre’s Saint Sébastien (1789) and an important painting by Gustave Moreau, Prométhée (1868). Then we have some lesser-known works by David Hockney and George Platt-Lynes. I really wanted to have Platt-Lynes, who is one of the forerunners of homosexual photography. He worked in the ’30s and did some photos of ballets, especially a ballet by Stravinsky called “Orpheus,” in the ’40s, in Stravinsky’s very neoclassical vein. He took absolutely spectacular photos, but obviously he mostly took photos of half-naked, male dancers. George Platt-Lynes is Mapplethorpe’s role model. You can’t understand Mapplethorpe’s photos in the ’80s and ’90s without knowing the precedent of Platt-Lynes.

You’ve thought about this show for over 15 years. When you see the works together, are there still things that surprise you?

You know, I’m 58, and at my age, it’s hard to be surprised by anything. But I think that certain juxtapositions and clashes between photographs and very classical sculptures that we brought from museums in the provinces are going to be the big surprises of this show. We will also have better-known, more famous, and more directly exciting photos by David LaChapelle, who is very happy to be shown in this kind of exhibition.

Is the Musée d’Orsay going to continue emphasizing these trans-historical exhibitions in the future?

I’ve tried to do it as much as possible because that’s the way I see history, but we also need to do shows on a single artist from time to time. In fact, I’ll open this show that I curated, “Masculin/Masculin,” and the following week I’ll open another show at the Grand Palais that I put together with Isabelle Cahn, head curator at the Musée d’Orsay, on [Félix] Vallotton. It’s a single-artist show, and I hope it’s not too staid — I hope it will be a bit crazy, like “Masculin/Masculin.” A museum is supposed to surprise you. It’s not meant to doze off and imprison itself in certainties.

In the end, it was London mayor Boris Johnson who stole the inevitable comic moment at the unveiling of  this year’s Fourth Plinth artwork  in Trafalgar Square.

Ahead of the July 25 reveal of the high-profile commission — Katharina Fritsch’s Hahn/Cock, a giant blue cockerel, about which the jokes really write themselves — Johnson took a pop at his long-term friend and British Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent crackdown on internet pornography.

“If you were to Google it in a few years’ time you would not be able to find it because of the collapse of the search engine at the Prime Minister’s behest,” he said, referencing the well-known phallic euphemism attached to the bird’s shortened nickname — a pun that failed to escape the multitude of jokers making the same gag on Twitter all morning.  

“I think from such occasions politicians should refrain from artistic interpretation,” he added, though went on to speculate that the work could symbolise “French sporting pride” or that it “serves as a reminder of the perils of genetically modified food.” According to Fritsch, however, the work is supposed to be a symbol of the “art of regeneration, awakening and strength...reflecting our image of ourselves.”

“We are not only the sporting capital of the world, we are also the artistic and cultural capital of the world,” said Johnson to laughter before asking for the “big blue…bird,” to be uncovered to the applause of onlookers, whose number included Jay Jopling, Tim Marlow, Gregor Muir, Ekow Eshun, Jeremy Deller and Jon Snow, huddling beneath the threat of rain amid a gallery of assembled tourists.

Fritsch, whose work is represented in permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Schaulager, Basel, and the Glenstone Collection, Maryland, acknowledged both the serious and humorous sides to the work in an interview afterwards.

“The decision was to make a sculpture,” she said. “It wasn’t a political decision, it was made in terms of art. The square is not easy to make something for; it has got this architecture, so many levels... Also it was a very male place. I always wanted to do a cockerel and here I got my chance.”

She added, “I thought the colour would go very well. It’s also an animal and people are emotional about animals. I thought about it as a male symbol, and it has a humorous side. Normally we see things from a male point of view and here we see a picture of a male from a female point of view. It’s a sign of the times.”

Asked what Lord Nelson, who towers over the sculpture on Nelson’s column, would think of her work, she responded, quizzically: “I don’t know. Maybe he would have laughed.”

The commission, which stays in the square for 18 months, is no stranger to humour or subversion, previously being won by Elmgreen & Dragset’s boy on a rocking horse, Antony Gormley’s empty performance space, and Yinka Shonibare’s oversized ship in a bottle – all to the chagrin of more traditional institutions nearby.  

– Another Banksy Mural Boosted: The Banksy mural "No Ball Games," which had adorned the side of a store in Tottenham in north London since 2009, was removed on Thursday, and though the company that sold "Slave Labor" — the previous mural by the elusive street artist to be stolen — Sincura Group, could not say who was responsible for its removal, it will say that it has been approached to sell it. "The Banksy was an important cultural feature of the area and if it has been removed it will be another indication that local people's wishes come second to the interests of profit," said Keith Flett, secretary of Haringey Trades Council. [BBC]

– Guess Jeans Founders Building L.A. Museum: Maurice and Paul Marciano, the co-founders of Guess Inc., have bought the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple on Los Angeles's Wilshire Boulevard for $8 million, with plans to renovate the nearly 90,000-square-foot and turn it into a private museum for their contemporary art collection. "We have been looking for a home for the collection," William F. Payne, a spokesman for the Beverly Hills-based Maurice and Paul Marciano Art Foundation, said. "It's a legacy project for the family." [LAT]

– Met Launches Global Museum Directors Summit: From April 7-18, 2014, the Metropolitan Museum will host its first-ever Global Museum Leaders Colloquium, at which 12-15 directors, deputy directors, and chief curators from major museums throughout the world, as well as public officials who oversee museums, will meet at the Manhattan institution to discuss issues related to museum administration and collections management. "Given the breadth and depth of our holdings, it is our responsibility to encourage a dialogue that can benefit museums worldwide, one that reinforces their relevance and encourages their appropriate stewardship," said Met director Thomas Campbell. Participants will be announced in November. [Press Release]

– National Gallery Goes Shopping: The National Gallery of Art has acquired dozens of new artworks for its permanent collection, including a pair of sculptures by Robert Smithson, photographs by Edward Weston and Sally Mann, and its first pieces by 17th-century Dutch painter Cornelis Bega and 19th-century French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. [Washington Post]

– Calle Contemplates Gardner Heist: Two works by Sophie Calle in which she ruminates on the loss of the artworks stolen during the infamous 1990 heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston — 1991's "Last Seen" and 2012's "What Do You See?" — will be on view in the Gardner's new wing from October 24 through March 3, 2014. [NYT]

– St. Louis Slams NYC Critic: Artforum freelancer Michael Wilson recently visited St. Louis on a press trip paid for by the city's taxpayer-supported Convention and Visitors Commission, only to blast the city, its attractions, his accommodations, and the weather in his Artforum Diary entry, earning him a pointed response from not one but two local journalists, including Riverfront Times writer Chad Garrison, who proposes a thought experiment. "Close your eyes for a moment and picture the snobbiest art critic possible," he writes. "Got it? Good. Now somehow make that person ten times douchier than you imagined, and you still won't arrive at anyone quite as pretentious as Michael Wilson." [Riverfront Times, KSDK]

– The American sculptor and Land Art pioneer Walter de Maria has died at age 77. [Helsingin Sanomat, LAT]

– Connecticut-based collectors Andrew and Christine Hall are loaning their holdings of works by Malcolm Morley to Oxford's Ashmolean Museum for an exhibition curated by Norman Rosenthal. [NYT]

– On Friday the JCC in Manhattan will unveil its new Sol LeWitt mural, the 36-foot-tall "Wall Drawing #599" (1989), which is on long-term loan from the artist's estate. [DNAinfo]

– The Springfield Art Museum has reunited 19th century portraits of Lewis Allen Dickens Crenshaw and his wife Fanny Smith Crenshaw painted by George Caleb Bingham that have been apart for more than 100 years. [Springfield News-Leader]

–  In an unusual rags-to-riches story, cleanup worker Darryl Kelly found artworks worth a small fortune while cleaning up deceased photographer Harry Shunk's New York City apartment. Six years later, the recovered works raised nearly $250,000 at auction.

The artist Walter De Maria, best-known for his large-scale installations, minimalist sculptures, and earthworks pieces like “The Lightning Field” (1977) in New Mexico, died on Thursday at age 77, his studio told the Los Angeles Times.

Born in the Bay Area, De Maria earned an MA in art from UC Berkeley in 1959 before relocating to New York the following year. Even before gaining acclaim for his takes on the dominant Minimalist aesthetic of the 1960s, de Maria was firmly embedded in New York’s downtown scene. He and the artist Robert Whitman opened a gallery on Great Jones Street in 1963. The same year he was the drummer for the band The Primitives, which, after several evolutions, would become Lou Reed’s The Velvet Underground. After experimenting with box-like wooden sculptures in the early '60s, he began to make his first works in metal in 1965, and was included in the Jewish Museum’s landmark exhibition “Primary Structures” in 1966.

By the end of the decade he seemed to have moved beyond sculpture and became known as a pioneer of the Land art and earthworks movements. In 1968 he created “Mile Long Drawing,” a pair of parallel lines inscribed on the ground in the Mohave Desert, which he first conceived in 1962. He continued to create such large-scale outdoor installations throughout the following decade, culminating in 1972’s “Three Continent Project,” “The Lightning Field,” and the “Vertical Earth Kilometer,” which he created for Documenta in 1977.

“I think he’s one of the greatest artists of our time,” former Dia Art Foundation director and current LACMA chief Michael Govan told the L.A. Times. De Maria’s large installation “The 2000 Sculpture” (1992) — which consists of 2,000 white metal rods arrayed in a geometric pattern on the floor — was installed at LACMA last fall for six months.

During the last half-century he exhibited extensively overseas, especially in Europe: He had a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome in 2003 and large-scale solo shows at the Centre Pompidou, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, and the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, among others. In the U.S., he remained best known for his permanent public installations. His first major solo show at an American museum, the Menil Collection’s “Walter De Maria: Trilogies,” opened in 2011.

In addition to the legendary “The Lightning Field” — whose restoration his dealer, Larry Gagosian, helped to restore last year— his pieces “The New York Earth Room” and “The Broken Kilometer,” which are also managed by the Dia Art Foundation, remain on view in Soho. His work “Apollo’s Ecstasy” (1990), an installation of about two dozen bronze poles laid on the ground in a slanted pattern, is one of the largest pieces in Massimiliano Gioni’s exhibition “The Encyclopedic Palace” at this year’s Venice Biennale.

This week the Art Southampton fair returned to Long Island for its sophomore outing, having nearly doubled in size since its inaugural edition last year. Now the fair, which continues through Sunday, boasts more than 90 galleries and a lineup of stand-out attractions including an Andy Warhol exhibition and a retrospective of New York Academy of Art alumni (ranging from Jean-Pierre Roy to Alyssa Monks) curated by Eric Fischl. The highlights even extend beyond the fair's tent, to outdoor installations of sculptures by Steinunn Thorarinsdottir, Alexandre Arrechea  and Albert Paley.

In the booths, a playful, colorful aesthetic dominates. Los Angeles-based artist Desire Obtain Cherish's lollipop sculpture "Sugar Cane Meltdown" greets visitors to Unix Gallery's booth, while Dean Project has bright, shimmering popsicle sculptures by the artists Tim Berg and Rebekah Myers. Miami's Kavachnina Contemporary went with a slightly grungier aesthetic, highlighting a hyperrealist sculpture of a bare-chested biker, "All American" (2012), by Marc Sijan.

To see these and other highlights from Art Southampton 2013, click the slideshow.

Watch ARTINFO video of 60 Works in 60 Seconds at Art Southampton HERE. 

Cultural life is heating up in the Hamptons. Art Southampton welcomed thousands to its VIP opening Thursday night.

Following the success of its inaugural edition, the fair took on an even bigger space near the mouth of the Hamptons, the tony villages that comprise Long Island’s east end. 

“The fair has doubled in size, and more importantly, it’s much more international,” says Nick Korniloff, the director of Art Southampton as well as its much bigger parent in Florida, the 23-year-old Art Miami.

This year, the fair is presenting eleven countries outside the U.S., with 21 of its participating galleries coming in from abroad. 

Korniloff says Art Miami created Art Southampton after determining there was an underserviced market for “true investment-quality works of art” in the area.

Proceeds from the fair will benefit the Southampton Hospital. Many exhibitors have chosen to donate 5 percent of the sales of the works to the hospital. 

Blouin ARTINFO spoke with Korniloff Thursday night, as well as gallerists Wilhem Grusdat from Munich’s Galeria Terminus, Ryan Ross of East Hampton’s Gallery Valentine and Dutch artist Marcelo Segall, represented by Amsterdam’s Leslie Smith Gallery.

LOS ANGELES – Woody Allen delivers his best movie in years with “Blue Jasmine,” a tragi-comic look at a fallen Park Avenue Grande Dame.

In the title role, Cate Blanchett embodies a modern-day Blanche DuBois, a delirious elitist forced to confront the harsh realities of a life without unlimited cash reserves as she settles in with her working-class sister in San Francisco.

Stand-up comedian Andrew Dice Clay returns to the big screen for the first time in over a decade as her former brother-in-law, a handyman who suffers a devastating financial setback that ruins his marriage, and Peter Sarsgaard co-stars as a gentleman from Washington who Jasmine identifies as her ticket back to the high life.

Here, Sarsgaard talks about working with the legendary Woody Allen and how auditioning can be more edifying than being handed a role, while Clay discusses his fortunate encounter with Allen and reviving a long-dormant career.

Watch Jordan Riefe's interview with Andrew Dice Clay about "Blue Jasmine":

Watch Jordan Riefe's interview with Peter Sarsgaard about "Blue Jasmine":