— Protestor Destroys Ai Weiwei Vase in Miami Museum: A local Miami artist smashed a colorful vase worth around $1 million by dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei that was in the artist’s “According to what?” exhibition at the Perez Art Museum Miami. Artist Maximo Caminero, who has been charged with criminal mischief, told a police officer that he was acting in protest of the gallery’s decision to display only international art. “The protest itself may be valid,” said Ai in response, “but to damage somebody’s work to do that is questionable.” [CNN]

— Cornelius Gurlitt Sets Up Website in Defense of Seized Art: Octogenarian Cornelius Gurlitt, who inherited a cache of hundreds of works of art from his father, a Nazi-era art dealer, has created a website to set the record straight about himself and the trove of works. The site provides specifics on the collection, like its structure, a chronology of events, and an online form through which visitors can contact Gurlitt’s lawyers. “Some of what has been reported about my collection and myself is not correct or not quite correct,” Gurlitt wrote in a letter posted to the site. “Consequently my lawyers, my legal caretaker and I want to make available information to objectify the discussion about my collection and my person.” [NYT]

— Pussy Riot Members Detained in Sochi: Two recently freed members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot, who were the main attraction at Amnesty International’s “Bringing Human Rights Home” concert, were arrested by Russian police in Sochi. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina, who had come to Sochi to hold a concert at the Winter Olympics, said they were just walking down the street when they were grabbed. “They told us we are suspected of theft,” Tolokonnikova said from the police station. “Of course there has been no theft.” [The Guardian]

— Impressionist Masterworks from Private Collections Go On View in Paris: Claude Monet’s rarely seen masterworks “Sur les Planches de Trouville” and “Hotel des Roches Noires, Trouville” are among the 80 paintings and 20 graphic works on view at Paris’s Marmottan Monet museum, in celebration of the museum’s 80th anniversary. [The Guardian]

— Six Claimants In Talks With Cornelius Gurlitt: Six claimants seeking artworks looted from their families by the Nazis are in discussion with Cornelius Gurlitt. The catalyst for the talks was the website recently launched by Gurlitt to give his side of the story. [The Financial Times]

— Long-Term Loan of Old Master Paintings in the National Gallery of Scotland Could Be Threatened: The long-term loan of significant Old Master paintings to the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, is potentially at risk if Scotland votes for independence in September. As of now, private collectors benefit from being under the UK tax system, which provides exemptions from inheritance tax if the works are of importance to the nation, if there is public access to them, and if they stay in the UK. If Scotland passes an independent tax system aimed at the wealthy, affluent collectors may move or sell their works. [The Art Newspaper]

— Former Indianapolis Museum Staffer Launches Web Series: On February 20, Sarah Urist Green, a former curator at Indianapolis Museum of Art, will launch a PBS Digital Studios web series titled  “The Art Assignment.” Green, who spearheaded popular exhibitions like “Andy Warhol Enterprises” in 2010 and” “Ai Weiwei: According to What?" in 2013, will create exercises aimed at motivating viewers to follow along. [Indy Star]

— Considering the heady sales in Impressionist and modern art at major London auction houses last week, one writer explores what it means to be a “collector.” [NYT]

— Actor Shia LaBeouf winds up his weird performance art installation “#IAMSORRY” at an LA gallery, and gives fans a group hug. [Mail Online]

— After a child was photographed scaling a $10 million Donald Judd sculpture at Tate Modern, two critics debate whether or not children should be banned from museums. [The Telegraph]

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Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

The Lotus 49, first introduced in 1967, not only launched the racing world’s most successful Grand Prix power unit – the Cosworth-Ford DFV V8 – into racing history, it was also one of the most renowned Formula One car designs by legendary Lotus head Colin Chapman.

The racer instantly set new performance standards, and won its debut race — the 1967 Dutch Grand Prix, driven by Jim Clark. In 1968 British World Champion Graham Hill won his second Formula One World Championship title in the developed Type 49 and 49B cars, and the chassis ‘R8’ became the new World Champion’s mount for the Tasman Championship races in New Zealand and Australia in January-February 1969.

Now, on June 27 at the Bonhams Goodwood Festival of Speed sale in Chichester, chassis number 49-R8 will go under the hammer for the first time. Built in October 1968 and one of a handful remaining of just 12 Lotus 49s produced, the iconic car has seen its fair share of races and owners. In 1969, it was adapted to latest Type 49B specification and raced by Hill at the 1969 British Grand Prix, finishing seventh. After retiring from the 1969 German GP due to a fuel leak, it was sold, first to Swedish privateer Joakim Bonnier, and then in 1970 to Dave Charlton, who used it to clinch the first two of his six consecutive South African Formula 1 Championship titles, 1970-75.

The Lotus 49-R8 was eventually acquired in damaged condition by Australian resident and British Lotus enthusiast John Dawson-Damer, who painstakingly restored the vehicle to race-worthy condition. It is the last in his fleet of eight Dawson-Damer Lotus Collection cars, six of which were sold by Bonhams in Sydney in 2008.

"By every standard, Colin Chapman’s Lotus 49 concept is an absolute landmark in Formula One design. It simply raised the bar for every rival manufacturer," said James Knight, Bonhams group motoring director, in a statement. "Add the excellent provenance of it being offered direct from the famous Dawson-Damer Collection and plainly ‘R8’ is an iconic car."

The U.K.-based Paul Aitken was working in tech start-ups during the market crash in the fall of 2008. The resulting credit crunch inspired him to found Borro, an Internet-based lender offering up to $1 million against personal assets like art, watches, wine, and jewelry. He spoke with Sarah P. Hanson about how going small is paying off.

What spurred you to create this service?

In 2008 it was clear that consumers needed alternative ways of accessing financial liquidity. There are plenty of people who have luxury assets worth from a few thousand up to a few hundred thousand dollars who really didn’t have any way to gain cash from those assets aside from selling them outright. I saw there was an opportunity to take what was in essence the old pawnbroking model and put a new spin on it.

Your service was featured in a 2011 documentary about pawnbroking. Is that your background?

That was too bold. They kind of framed us as a high-end pawnbroker. Before this I hadn’t done anything related to finance in my life. For 11 or 12 years I was focused on operations and marketing strategy at tech start-ups.

So what does Borro offer those with moderately valuable art or collectibles?

The high-end version is what the private banks do. If you’ve got a million dollars in art they’ll happily write you a line of credit on it, but what about the people who only want $5,000 to $250,000? Our average loan is about $10,000. The interest rate depends on the size of the loan and varies between a flat rate of 2.99 and 3.99 percent per month.

How else does your service differ from securing a loan from a bank?

Speed. We can write loans very, very quickly. For jewelry and watches, it’s same-day; if it’s a car, the next day; if it’s fine art or decorative arts, it takes more time to research, so 72 hours.

What other categories besides art do you lend against?

Lots of collectibles—things like sports, music memorabilia. The most fascinating thing we’ve lent against, to me, was the Beatles’ first record contract. I’ve seen an Oscar statuette coming in for a loan, Grammys, guitars used by famous rock musicians, Super Bowl rings.

So you have a team of experts who will evaluate a potential asset to put a value on it. Would you also accept outside valuations by a certified appraiser?

Sometimes we get third-party appraisals to support our view. Clearly we can’t have expertise in all areas, so we do look to partner with experts. We do a variety of things. For example, last November I presented at the Appraisers Association of America’s annual conference in New York. We work with a number of those types.

What happens to the asset once the loan is made?

We take possession. We use storage partners like Cadogan Tate for fine art. We’ve got a company that specializes in cars, and a firm called Malca-Amit does our watches and jewelry logistics. We are looking after the goods in the same ways the auction houses do.

Are you seeing more interest in this type of loan? Who are your clients?

We lent $25 million in 2012 and $50 million in 2013, doubling year on year. We’re in the U.K. and the U.S., and I think we’ve got our hands full. We work with quite a lot of dealers who are using it as a sort of currency when they have an opportunity to acquire.

What’s next for the company as it grows?

We’ve got some new consignment loan products that are just starting to get some traction. We can advance money ahead of an item’s being sold at auction. Most of the houses offer that at a certain level for big clients, but we’re happy to write those loans for smaller clients. We launched it only last fall, but in six weeks we got about $1 million worth of these sale-advance loans, so that’s been a pretty good start.

And if the item fails to sell?

We would have advanced only 50 to 60 percent, so we would find an alternative route for selling the item, working with the auction house and the private channels that they have.

Why has Borro become an attractive way to secure a loan?

I think first and foremost it is the speed component. There is no credit risk, your house isn’t at risk. And you don’t have to sell—a lot of people don’t want to sell. If you have a piece that’s going up in value but you’re in a tight situation, often people don’t want to go there.

A version of this article originally appeared in the February 2014 issue of Art + Auction. 

Ahead of the celebrated Concours d’Elegance in the West Coast, Gooding & Company is showcasing a curated lineup of cars on the East Coast — at the Amelia Island weekend of collector events on March 7.

Offering 88 lots this year, Gooding & Company’s auction has more than doubled since its debut at the Florida event in 2010, and includes several rare and lovingly restored models, such as a 1933 Rolls-Royce Phantom II Henley Roadster (one of only eight built) and the 1932 Cadillac V-16 452B Madame X Imperial Sedan (one of only four built).

Boasting coachwork by Fleetwood, the Cadillac (est. $200,000-$240,000) was formerly the property of the Block Family and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum and is in superb condition, having had just three owners from new; while the Rolls-Royce (est. $1.25 million-$1.75 million) was formerly displayed at the Henry Ford Museum for decades with an original chassis, engine, and sporting Brewster coachwork, before being restored by New Jersey’s Stone Barn Restorations.

Other lots include some uniquely colored ones, such as the robin-egg blue 1957 Mercedes-Benz 190 SL (est. $170,000-$200,000) with both hard and soft tops; and a 1974 Ferrari Dino 246 GTS (est. $325,000-$375,000) in the rare factory paint color of disco purple, with low mileage and coachwork by Scaglietti.

To see these lots coming up at the Amelia Island and more, click on the slideshow.

In 1981 Thomas Lawson noted in a review of Group Material’s exhibition “The People’s Choice” that “the value of these artifacts lay precisely in their sentimentality, a quality that is absent from most artwork that strives to mean something to a general audience.” A similar thread runs through founding Group Material member Julie Ault’s “Macho Man, Tell It to My Heart” (through February 23). Composed primarily of pieces gifted to Ault, an artist, curator, editor, and writer heavily involved in both the creation and the historicization of New York’s alternative art spaces, the exhibition occupies a slippery cultural space. It’s a sort-of self-portrait of a radically minded collector, and a sort-of survey of the politically driven, collaborative circles Ault has run in since she co-founded Group Material in 1979.

The exhibition sprawls across Artists Space’s two SoHo locations, presenting viewers with a gleefully overwhelming array of work. While the display isn’t deliberately copped from how the works appear in Ault’s own home, there’s a domestic warmth to their salon-style hanging, in which, for instance, a pair of lightbulbs by Félix González-Torres illuminates Robert Kinmont’s 1967 photograph 8 Natural Handstands or Corita Kent’s silkscreens are densely clustered in the Walker Street location. Keeping track of works using the diagrams on the 14-page-long checklist becomes an arduous task, the list unintentionally inspiring acts of viewer subversion: After wandering the gallery, fumbling with the oversize printout in an attempt to maintain a sense of direction, I found stashing the guide and letting myself become unmoored a pleasurable change of pace.

It’s difficult not to view Ault’s collection as pure retrospective of her politically charged work with Group Material and the relationships that formed around it, particularly given the nature of the venue, one of New York’s first alternative spaces. But there’s also little evident concern for historical trajectory in the way works are arranged. In lieu of a curatorial statement or an essay introducing the show’s recurring, and evolving, characters—Andres Serrano, Kent, González-Torres, and Ault herself among them—the show opens with a Liberace documentary. Feminist and queer politics are a concern throughout, but their stories splinter: The canonical activist voice of Nancy Spero’s text-driven 1968 work on paper Kill for Mom, all violent ink scrawls, assumes an unusual texture when it shares a wall with Moyra Davey’s 2003 photograph Spiders, a delicate, unfocused close-up of a glistening spiderweb.

To return to Lawson’s observation, in this show Ault and her co-curators reject a linear narrative in favor of tenderness. This may be a less politically charged stance than it was in 1981, but it still feels like an important move, particularly at a moment when writers and curators are still working through how to historicize the era of Ault’s work and that of the artists she’s collected. Can we only conceive of “alternative”-obsessed countercultural production as a sealed-off historical phenomenon? Ault, like many others, including myself, seems to hope not. As Ault toys with display as she narrativizes the sites and objects of the alternative-space movement, and as she highlights her dual roles as an artist and “collector,” she advocates for a broader, more discursive analysis of visual culture. Illuminating the relationships—aesthetic, personal, political—that continue to evolve out of these networks serves not only to successfully revisit a set of concerns but to reopen them as well.  

Click on the slideshow to see images from “Macho Man, Tell It to My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault.”

A version of this article appears in the March 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.

— President Obama Apologizes to Art Historian in Hand-Written Note: President Obama penned a handwritten note to art historian Ann Collins Johns, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, apologizing for the “off-the-cuff remarks” he made on January 30 about the value of an art history degree. Obama made the comment at a Wisconsin General Electric plant where he spoke about education and employment in the U.S. “I was making a point about the jobs market, not the value of art history,” Obama wrote in his note to Johns. “As it so happens, art history was one of my favorite subjects in high school, and it has helped me take in a great deal of joy in my life that I might otherwise have missed.” [Hyperallergic]

— Banksy’s “Kissing Coppers” Sells at Miami Auction for $575,000: “Kissing Coppers,” a black-and-white stencil work by British street artist Banksy showing two police officers kissing and embracing, sold to an anonymous buyer at a Miami auction for $575,000. The work, which was taken from a wall of a U.K. pub in 2005, was featured along with other works of street art at Fine Art Auctions Miami’s “Major Street Art Auction.” “The potential of this market is incredible,” said Frederic Thut, the director of FAAM. “I was at the first sales of pop art and it was exactly the same people coming from nowhere and buying immediately.” [Reuters]

— Vase-Smashing Artist Says His Act Was “In Solidarity” With Ai Weiwei: 51-year-old artist Maximo Caminero, who was captured on video smashing a green vase by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei at the Perez Art Museum Miami, said Tuesday that he had shattered the vase in “an act of solidarity with Mr. Ai” to bring attention to Ai’s situation with Chinese authorities. “When I saw the installation,” said Caminero, “what I saw was a cry for help from Mr. Ai.” [NYT]

— An appraiser, considering the “power of red” at last week’s auctions in London where Gerhard Richter’s very red painting “Wand (Wall)” sold at Sotheby’s for $28.7 million, explores why red-colored art is big right now. [Forbes]

— After a five-year renovation and a $71 million refurbishment, Paris’s Picasso museum, which houses one of the most comprehensive collections of the artist’s work, is scheduled to open in June with an added 40,000-square-feet of exhibition space. [GMA News]

— Metropolitan Museum of Art chairman Daniel Brodsky and his wife, art historian Estrellita B. Brodsky, have established an endowment for two significant curatorships in the Modern and Contemporary Art department. The new positions will support expanded programming in the Fifth Avenue building as well as the Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue, which the Met will take over after the Whitney departs in 2015. [Artdaily]

— Filmmaker and healthcare advocate Julie Sokolow documents how the lives of over 40 Pittsburgh artists are affected by horrific medical debt in a new online video series “Healthy Artists.” [NYT]

ALSO ON ARTINFO

“Macho Man, Tell It to My Heart”: Julie Ault’s Tender Narrative

Q&A With Paul Aitken, Founder of Internet-Based Lender Borro

VIDEO: Robert Yasuda Carves A Luminous Frame At Sundaram Tagore

Theater Review: “1984” at the Almeida Theatre

Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

Thanks to a new capsule collection by achingly-hip retailer Opening Ceremony, you can now wear the surrealist eyes and lips of Belgian painter René Magritte on your body and feet. The Opening Ceremony x Magritte capsule collection, to drop in the summer, also includes footwear collaborations with three powerhouse brands: Manolo Blahnik, Vans and Birkenstock.

Previewing to the press at London Fashion Week on February 15 were 12 of Magritte’s works reproduced on clothing and accessories. Magritte's iconic painting Scheherezade (1950) is featured in the form of a dress, top and pearl-embroidered bomber jacket. Manolo Blahnik made a stiletto featuring The Blow to the Heart (1952), while an open-toe Birkenstock sandal interprets Double Reality (1936), and the classic Vans lace-up is a take on The King Museum (1966). Yet other styles paying tribute to the artist's poetically weird visual language include motifs from Ladder of Fire (1934) and the veiled heads of The Lovers (1928).

The use of unique fabrics, embroideries and innovative design details are also special features of the collection. The women’s clothing ranges from embroidered neoprene zip tunics, rayon jersey shell and seamed dresses to stretch denim jeans, denim skirts, handkerchief skirts, twill fluted skirts, fitted t-shirts, and Bermuda shorts. The men’s range includes neoprene sweatshirts, zippered t-shirts, printed twill pants and shirts, nylon coats, short sleeve knitted sweaters, nylon bombers, and reversible nylon/neoprene jackets.

According to a statement by Opening Ceremony, this capsule collection "continues a theme that Magritte was most interested in: extreme juxtapositions between combinations of objects, and the ordinary versus the abstract."

The Opening Ceremony x Magritte collection will be available at Opening Ceremony retail stores, openingceremony.us and in select international retailers mid May 2014.

MADRID — As ARCOmadrid opened to VIPs on Wednesday, the specter of Spain’s struggling art market was present not only on the minds of gallerists, but also candidly spoken of in the fair’s press materials. “ARCOmadrid 2014 expects to confirm the recovery of the art market,” the title of the fair’s main press release boldly declared. But is an art market recovery actually in the cards at the 33rd edition of Spain’s primary fair?

Although plenty of collectors crowded halls seven and nine at the Feria de Madrid on opening day, all of the gallerists ARTINFO spoke with said they would remain skeptical until the doors closed on Sunday. “It is never easy to sell here at ARCO, but we are very motivated,” said Violeta Janeiro, gallery manager at Madrid’s Galeria Helga de Alvear. Nothing had sold yet when we talked to Janeiro, but the gallery was offering works at a wide range of prices. Two large-scale Thomas Ruff photographs, “JPEG IR01” and “JPEG IR02” (both 2005), were available from an edition of three for €105,000 ($144,500) a piece, while Jorge Galindo’s “208 Ladbroke Gove Drawings (Sketches)” (2012) were being offered for a much more affordable €1,500 ($2,060) each.

In September 2012, the VAT (value added tax) rate in Spain rose from eight percent to 21 percent, making it the highest cultural tax in Europe and a formidable problem for dealers. Recent news that the tax had been reduced to 10 percent buoyed expectations for the fair, but it turns out that the tax hasn’t exactly been reduced as much as originally broadcasted.

“I don’t think it’s really lowered,” said Janeiro. “We are still fined at 21 percent. The only ones that have the VAT lowered are the artists. They can apply at 10 percent. This is kind of the strategy of the government in order to spread some good news. In the very beginning we didn’t understand it and we thought we were getting 10 percent. We are still very disappointed, but happy for the artists.”

Thomas Ruff's "JPEG IR01" and "JPEG IR02." Photo by the Ashtoon Cooper

While it was still too early to report many sales in the opening hours of the fair, Hamburg-based gallery LEVY had already sold three works from a presentation of 20th-century Surrealist objects titled “Meret Oppenheim and Friends.” Man Ray’s “Résurrection des Mannequins” (1938/66), a series of 15 photographs from an edition of 30, went for €15,000 ($20,640). “It sold already to a Spanish collection, which is strange because normally we are selling to mostly international clients, but it was Spain this time,” said Thomas Levy, the gallery’s founder. Levy acknowledged the country’s economic struggles, but said he was still committed to having a presence at ARCO. “We have to help the children even when they are ill,” he said.

But in spite of the economic challenges of selling in Spain, or perhaps because of them, many galleries took risks on the types of work they showed. A considerable amount of conceptual work, video pieces, and even performance art set ARCO’s presentations apart from art fairs as usual. This reporter was shocked (and relieved) to not see a single Jeff Koons on view anywhere. 

“It’s about content, not only about investment,” said Florian Ludde of Berlin’s Esther Schipper Gallery. Schipper presented a themed booth of works all dealing with sound, including “Small Music Listening Station” by Angela Bulloch, where fair-goers were invited to change the record on a turntable; and an audio presentation of Karin Sander’s “…hitting the high notes” from 2006.  

Karin Sander's "...hitting the high notes." Photo by Ashton Cooper
 

Galerie West from the Netherlands, which has been attending ARCO for six years, presented a single video work by American artist Reynold Reynolds. From existing storyboards, script notes, and a small amount of footage, Reynolds recreated a censored 1933 German vampire film called “Die Verlorenen.” “We have one piece in the whole booth — it’s a big risk,” said gallery owner and director Marie-José Sondeijker. “We are dependent on the larger collectors and the museums.” Sondeijker explained that the presence of museum professionals made the fair “very attractive.” Indeed, ARCO fosters a reputation for bringing in museum professionals with its so-called “Professional Meetings” that will be attended by Sculpture Center curator Ruba Katrib, SITE Santa Fe director Irene Hofmann, and Serpentine Gallery co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist, among others this year.

Another thing that sets ARCO apart is its commitment to showing art by Latin American artists. Luciana Brito Galeria from São Paulo brought a series of large-scale photographs by São Paulo-based artist Caio Reisewitz and a video installation by Hector Zamora. Founder Luciana Brito said that despite Spain’s economic slump, ARCO has always been beneficial for the gallery and they have been every year since 1998. “ARCO is a very good spot for Latin American artists so we are here for many years,” she said. “We use it to sell for museums so it is really good for our artists.”

While it’s still too early to tell if this year’s edition of ARCO will be the comeback the fair is angling for, hopes were high, but not unchecked, among exhibitors.

The icing on the delicious cake that was London’s Fall 2014 collections came in the form of a riot of surface play, with designers enlivening looks with all variety of embellishments, from a jacquard of badges at Mary Katrantzou to Roksanda Ilincic’s confetti dress. 

Katrantzou ditched her signature digital prints to striking effect, as new ingredients such as pleats and lace came into play. The star looks were a series of sweatshirts, minis and floor-length dresses honed from a guipure-style patchwork of badges and crests that with their geometric formations and tones, like bottle green, dark blue and ruby, had an Art Deco feel. LBDs carried asymmetric strips of pleats flowing from the shoulder, and suits shimmered with subtle animal prints. Katrantzou’s transition into new surface expressions went through an awkward phase a couple of seasons ago, but here she hit her stride.

An Arte Povera undercurrent flowed through Ilincic’s unique collection via materials like felted wool, fabric collages, patchworks, and a bits-and-bobs approach to embellishments. Silhouettes alternated between sophisticated pencil-thin ones with peplums, and full-skirted peasant shapes and culottes. The vibrant tones were inspired by conceptual artist Mel Bochner, and sculptor and installation artist Jessica Stockholder — ideas that were particularly felt in the line’s textured confetti dress covered in colored squares and circles.

Christopher Kane, who delivered one of the season’s darker collections, piped industrial black nylon dresses with licks of fur following the shoulder line, or edging deep v-necks and hems. A soft pink tailored coat carried a sprinkling of black crystals on its skirt, like raindrops, and clean-cut pastel mini dresses incorporated sculptural waves of fabric as sleeves. The fabric fusions on some of the looks were innovative, merging pink lace with black nylon material, for instance, but most impressive were the final group of monochrome dresses, made from wispy sheets of chain-stitched organza that folded open like a book, positioned at an angle to expose all the layers, or forming sculptural peaks on the two slam-dunk finale cocktail numbers. The designer also unveiled his first full collection of leather goods, bedecked with the signature “safety buckle” fastening that featured in his first collection in 2007.

(l-r) A look from Christopher Kane, Roksanda Ilincic, and Mary Katrantzou.
(l-r) Courtesy the designer/ Photo by Anthony Harvey/Getty Images, Courtesy the designer

Colorful bonded patchwork-based compositions evoking the bold designs of the Memphis movement carried Jonathan Saunders’ eclectic collection, which married oversized menswear-inspired outerwear and knits with lovely feminine creations (think a dove-gray sequin skirt and languid pink silk dress in an all-over checkerboard motif). The collection had a lot of personality, folding in quirky accents, such as a strip of metallic blue glitter edging the hem of an asymmetric two-tone smock in black and caramel, and mashing up prints and volumes.

Matthew Williamson’s debut collection with Danielle Scutt as head of design proved another graphic moment, presented on a black-and-white starburst carpet that later surfaced on a gown and mini dress, the latter shot with lines of hologram stars. Known for his Ibiza-scented boho creations, this collection, with its skinny leathers, crystal-studded sweaters and tinted furs, trod more of a disco path rooted in the Seventies. In a league of their own, however, were the brocade tapestry coat inspired by Turkish carpets, and a polka dot ostrich feather mini dress said to be the most expensive piece ever created by the label.

Knitwear genius Mark Fast’s young-at-heart, spongy, grungy creations cut a different, winter-appropriate mood from his body-beautiful cobweb creations of yore. In the mix were chunky robes, long straight skirts and draped off-the-shoulder dresses in a weighty chevron knit. The styling, with its creepers and unkempt hair, added a cool rock-cum-Mod edge to the mood. Fast’s workmanship shone in a series of knitted floor-length dresses that had athletic vest-style tops and wild skirts honed from free-flowing threads, which added great movement to the show.

(l-r) A look from Jonathan Saunders, Matthew Williamson, and Mark Fast.
(l-r) Photo by Tristan Fewings, Ben A. Pruchnie, Anthony Harvey / Getty Images

Creations by architect Carlo Scarpa and designs by Ercole Barovier are the main draw at the Murano Glass sale at Munich’s Quittenbaum on February 25. The top lots include “a canne sommerso a bollicine,” a rare oval cased glass vase with pricked air bubbles and a spiral of blue and purple, which Scarpa designed in 1934 at the start of his collaboration with the Venini workshop. That piece is estimated to sell for €30,000-€40,000 (about $41,000-$55,000). A number of works in murrine glass, the millennium-old Venetian tradition, will be on offer, such as the 1936 “Murrine Romane,” a vase with red rings that is expected to bring in €9,000-€12,000 ($12,000-$17,000) and “Murrina del serpent” bowl, which represents a classic model of the Venini workshop. The bowl, which was produced some time between the 1940s and the early 1960s, is expected to sell for €11,000-€14,000 ($15,000-$19,000). 

The sale will also feature works from the Barovier & Toso workshop, which, along with Venini, is another important glass manufacturer, even today. While Scarpa’s works were more architectural, the designs of Ercole Barovier, who headed the firm from the 1920s to the 1960s, were more playful and poetic. Rare “Oriente” objects designed with patterns that hinted in their color and structure at Oriental fabrics, and used a multi-layered, polychromatic technique, will be on offer, including a square vase that is expected to sell for €3,000-€4,000 ($4,000-$5,500).

This sale of nearly 200 lots will offer some additional classics of 20th-century Muranese glass art, including Fratelli Toso’s murrine vases circa 1910, which will sell in the range of €200 ($275), Vittorio Zecchin’s amber vases from the 1920s, selling for €300-€800 ($412-$1,100), and works by Napoleone Martinuzzi, Archimede Seguso, and Dino Martens.

— Kiev Museum Ransacked as Situation in Ukraine Escalates: Storage and administrative facilities of the Kiev History Museum in Ukrainsky Dom have been ransacked as violence in the country’s capital mounts. One museum employee posted a photograph to her Facebook page of an upturned box containing fragments with the caption: “Our archaeology in storage.” Ukraine’s acting culture minister, Leonid Novohatko, said that with regard to cultural losses, “nothing tragic has yet happened,” but that it was too early to gauge the damage. [TAN]

— Denver Museum Returns Artifacts to Kenyan Government: On Wednesday, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science returned 30 artifacts to the Kenyan government in a ceremony attended by three Kenyan dignitaries. The return of the wooden spiritual carvings, known as vigango, was the culmination of five years of discussion and consideration within the museum on how to handle the artifacts. Stephen Nash, chairman of the Denver Museum’s Anthropology department, said, “It is the museum’s hope that their return will bring healing to the families and communities that have suffered from their absence.” [NYT]

— Presence of Israeli Artist Keren Cytter at Marrakech Biennial Stirs Protest: The planned inclusion of Israeli artist Keren Cytter at the fifth edition of the Marrakech Biennial in Morocco, “Where Are We Now?”, has ignited a controversy among “anti-normalisation” activists who are against having open relations with Israel in any arena, including culture. Involving the artist would be “a crime,” according to Azziz Hanawi, the secretary general of the Moroccan Observatory Against Normalisation. Citing the biennial’s mission to “build bridges” between cultures, Marrakech Biennale founder and president Vanessa Branson said, “Keren Cytter is participating in this biennale as an individual speaking from her own personal perspective.” [TAN]

— German Researchers Under Investigation for Vandalizing Great Pyramid of Giza: After being accused of theft and vandalism, Dominique Goerlitz and Stefan Erdmann, two German researchers, are now under investigation for having scraped pigment samples from the cartouche of King Khufu in the chambers of the Great Pyramid, which they claim they were doing in an attempt to prove the cartouche to be a forgery. [TAN]

— Here’s a report from the College Art Association Conference in Chicago last weekend where thousands of art educators, museum curators, and art historians descended on the Hilton hotel for a four-day shindig of panels, workshops, a book fair, and other events.  [Hyperallergic]

— The NormanRockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, received a gift from the Famous Artists School, including several original works by Norman Rockwell. [Boston.com]

— “To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee settled her lawsuit against an Alabama museum over sale of knickknacks that featured her name. [USA Today]

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Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

Sotheby’s, gearing up for its April 7 Magnificent Jewels and Jadeite Spring Sale in Hong Kong, has unveiled its star lot: the Hutton-Mdivani Necklace.

Named for Barbara Woolworth Hutton (heiress to the retail tycoon Frank Winfield Woolworth) and the first of her seven husbands (the self-styled Georgian prince Alexis Mdivani), the green necklace comprises 27 gigantic jadeite beads — with diameters ranging from 19.2 mm to 15.4 mm — of magnificent color, excellent translucency, and extremely fine texture, said Sotheby's. 

The necklace, given the size and quality of its jadeite, suggests an origin in the Qing Dynasty in the 18th century, when Imperial court necklaces in particular were worn by Qing emperors and senior officials. The Hutton-Mdivani necklace made its way to Europe, along with many other Imperial treasures in the late 19th century, ending up in the hands of Cartier, which in 1933 designed a special clasp for the Hutton family to complement the beads. The necklace was then presented as a wedding gift in the same year to Barbara Hutton from her father on the occasion of her marriage to Prince Mdivani.

Hutton was one of the wealthiest women in the world by the time of her 21st birthday, and known for her distinguished taste, lavish lifestyle, elegance and beauty. Her enviable jewelry collection encompassed unique commissioned pieces by the most celebrated jewelers, as well as important royal and noble jewels, among them a pearl necklace formerly belonging to Marie Antoinette, Queen of France.

This jadeite bead necklace, in particular, has a storied past that “is an epitome of the mysterious and captivating beauty of jadeite, the most revered oriental gemstone, and evokes the glamour of distinguished style icons of both China and the West at the turn of the last century,” said Quek Chin Yeow, deputy chairman and head of Sotheby’s Asia’s jewelry department, in a statement.

The Hutton-Mdivani Necklace will be showcased in traveling exhibitions in Shanghai (March 5-6), Beijing (March 8-9), Taipei (March 22-23) and Kaohsiung (March 25-26) — as well as in public exhibition of all properties on offer at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre from April 3-6.

Oppression breeds paranoia. Such is the cycle of mistrust in “Omar,” the new film from Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad (“Paradise Now”), which opens in New York and Los Angeles on February 21. Every day Omar (Adam Bakri), a baker by day and revolutionary by night, avoids bullets as he climbs over a separation wall to visit his girlfriend, Nadja (Leem Lubany), and close friends Tarek (Eyad Hourani) and Amjad (Samer Bisharat). After Omar is arrested following the death of an Israeli soldier, the group of friends begins to splinter apart as they all suspect the others of working for the enemy. A tense, spirited thriller, “Omar” twists and turns, spiraling out of control toward its final, startling climax.

In a recent conversation, ARTINFO spoke with Abu-Assad about the movie, its real-life and film inspirations, and how increased visibility in the West will affect his filmmaking in the future.

Do you view “Omar” as a political film?

Partly yes, mainly not. I think mainly I see it as a tragic love story in a kind-of action-thriller. It’s a different action-thriller.

Does it bother or surprise you that people immediately focus on the political elements in the film?

No. I tried to do a movie that would survive the conflict. You don’t want the movie to die with the conflict. Every filmmaker wants to make a film that will stay in history and will be seen after 30 years, and still can work. This is why I think, and history can prove if this is true or not, but the film is bigger than the conflict. It’s really a movie about love, friendship, and trust, and how if there is no trust this will affect friendship and love. But, sure, the decor is Palestine, and people want to talk about it. I have no problem at all talking about it.

Looking at it as a genre film, what were you looking at for inspiration?

First of all, I love the thriller genre. I find it one of the most interesting genres because it lets you live for a while with one question: Who’s the killer? Who’s behind me? Who’s the traitor? [Laughs] I think there are three traditions of thriller. The Americans have a different kind of thriller from the French and the Egyptians. I was exposed to all three of them. From the American side, I was inspired by “No Way Out” [1987] and “The Firm” [1993]. From the French side, it was Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Cercle Rouge” [1969] and “Le Samouraï” [1967]. From Egypt, it was the filmmaker Henry Barakat. I tried to give a human side to “Omar,” like the Egyptian thrillers, a mystique like the French, and make it dynamic like an American thriller.

You mentioned the breakdown of trust that is central to the film. What I found interesting about “Omar” is that it shows how that lack of trust breeds paranoia, which spreads like a virus.

Paranoia, or the feeling that governments give to their citizens — we’re watching you — is a very old trick. They don’t want you to commit the crime. The cheapest trick is to make you paranoid, to make you feel that your neighbor can spy on you, your brother can spy on you. The new trick is to put cameras everywhere. To let you feel that this device [points to his laptop] can spy on you. This is very important to every government in the world, the west and the east. Now, in countries where there is political oppression — like Palestine — it was more important not just to prohibit you to commit a crime, but to prohibit you to think differently, to challenge the ideas, the ideology. For sure, we live as Palestinians constantly in a paranoia situation. I lived in this situation. When I was doing “Paradise Now” I was thinking they were spying on me. Now I think it was paranoia. With “Omar,” it was based on a story of a friend of mine who was pressured by the secret service to work with them; for the ending, it was something I read in the newspapers. All these elements — my own experiences, the experiences of my friends, things I read, things I heard about — I put together to tell the story.

“Omar” is your second film to be nominated for an Academy Award. How do you think this commercial exposure in the West will affect your future films? Are you afraid of being sucked into the Hollywood machine?

When I was nominated the first time, for “Paradise Now,” I thought things would be easier. But they weren't. The more you are successful the more pressure is on you not to experiment. I think the more people are expecting for you the more you can fail, and this is a great pressure. This will not give you the feeling of freedom. I prefer to be less successful and have more freedom.

Will you continue to make films in Palestine?

I have a project in United States, a Dutch project, and a Palestinian project. I’m developing my own movies; nobody is going to stop them, they’re dependent on me.

Offering rich contrast to the Fall 14 season’s graphic trend, a compelling nature-inspired storyline is weaving its way through the collections.

Leading the charge was  Burberry Prorsum with its to-die-for Bloomsbury Set-inspired florals, recalling vintage wallpapers, in London. Offering a more baroque mood the same week, Erdem presented some impressive workmanship, best executed in a chinoiserie-inspired black mini dress covered in exotic embroidered flowers and lace appliqués. 

Birds of all variety have fluttered across the New York, London and Milan collections so far. Alberta Ferretti earlier this week showcased beautiful craft in her woodland-inspired collection that was filled with feathered friends depicted in prints and embroideries. Most breathtaking were the line’s bird plume dresses, with one in particular covered in glossy black feathers with a bed of blue and emerald peacock feathers interwoven on its skirt.

Showing off their colors, meanwhile, were two embroidered parrots captured in flight on an angular cropped black cape in Marchesa Voyage’s collection in New York, which added a note of exoticism. In London, Giles opened his show with a trio of embroidered humming birds that served as one of the show’s leitmotifs, surfacing on skirts and tuxedo jackets, or patterning silk dresses. A sequin orchid motif surfaced on cocktail dresses later down the line, its form echoed in their folds, with white beetles crawling up another style. Those, along with the line’s thistle-print dress, sat more comfortably within the designer’s macabre-edge universe.

(l-r) Fall 2014 looks from Burberry Prorsum, Marchesa Voyage and Giles
(l-r)Getty Images, Courtesy Marchesa, Getty Images