The market for fine photography has had a pretty spectacular week in France. Last Friday night at Christie's 100 photographs by the legendary Henri Cartier-Bresson hit the auction block, sold by the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation and netting a hefty €2 million ($2.8 million). Ninety-one lots sold, and a 1946 silver print of "Derrière la Gare Saint-Lazare" ("Behind the Saint-Lazare Train Station") achieved an artist's record when it soared to €433,000 ($590,455), more than doubling its high estimate of €180,000. This sale was followed the very next day by a sale of 51 Irving Penn photographs from a private French collection, which achieved a rare 100 percent sell-through rate and totaled €2.1 million ($2.9 million).  

During the Cartier-Bresson sale, an anonymous telephone bidder won a five-way bidding war for "Derrière la Gare Saint-Lazare," which was one of the photographer's first silver prints. A 1999 print of "Alberto Giacometti à la Galerie Maeght, 1961" fetched the impressive price of €75,400 ($102,818), five times its low estimate of €15,000. An anonymous European collector purchased the photo, which shows the sculptor in blurred movement, looking very much like his "Walking Man" sculpture, which is in the foreground. A 1957 print of "Coronation of George VI, Trafalgar Square, London, 12 May 1937" sold for €70,600 ($96,273), and "Sringar, Kashmir, India, 1948" achieved the same price. Most of the buyers were European collectors, though an Asian buyer snapped up "Ubud, Bali, Indonesia, 1949" for €63,400 ($86,455). (The proceeds of the sale are go towards the Cartier-Bresson Foundation's move to a larger space in the Marais near the Pompidou Center.)

As for the Irving Penn sale, it may not have set any records, but it did mark the second-highest price ever for a Penn photo. The 1951 print, "Woman in Moroccan Palace (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn)," sold for €361,000 ($492,273), surpassing its high estimate of €300,000. (Penn's auction record was set at Christie's New York in April 2008, when his 1948 photo "Cuzco Children" fetched $529,000. ) While all the Cartier-Bresson images except for the top lot sold for less than €100,000, two other Penn photographs reached six figures. A 1979 print of "Harlequin Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn") sold for €265,000 ($361,364) and "Poppy, Glowing Embers, New York, 1968" achieved a price of €193,000 ($263,182).

What's that delicious smell wafting from the Museum of Modern Art's second-floor contemporary art galleries? Is it the smell of a fresh new re-hang (and rethinking) of the museum's contemporary art collection? Partly. But mostly, it's the installation of Rikrit Tiravanija's "Untitled (Free/Still)," a version of the artist's 1990 performance in which he cooked his family's traditional pad thai for visitors to the Paula Allen gallery. This time, Tiravanija is helping MoMA (who bought the original performance) dish up steaming cups of Thai green curry on rice.

There's much to experience before getting to the curry, though. In what is the museum's best installation to date in their previously vaguely-defined, messily-programmed spaces for contemporary art across from the atrium, MoMA curators give as comprehensive a look at contemporary art practice as is possible in a major museum. The work on view ranges from the '80s forward, a refreshing change from the galleries' earlier '70s starting point. The relevancy of the work — its newsy, risky quality — is what makes the new installation so powerful.

Starting off with Barbara Kruger's "Untitled (You Invest in the Divinity of the Masterpiece)" and continuing to Chris Wool's "Cats in Bag, Bag in River" and Allan McCollum's "Collection of Forty Plaster Surrogates" (those blank-faced faux-paintings that are a fixture in the Post-Modernism section of every art history textbook), MoMA's installation is best described as a series of art-historical vignettes anchored by iconic works. In one curatorial flourish, a series of Richard Prince prints of his scribbled one-liner jokes sits next to Sherrie Levine's series of copied Malevich and Egon Schiele drawings and a Louise Lawler photograph of an Andy Warhol work on a museum wall — it's the Pictures Generation in shorthand. In another planned collision, Jeff Koons's "Three Ball 50/50 Tank" (those basketballs floating in the aquarium) are set against a rabidly energetic Keith Haring piece that wraps around three walls. One celebrates life; the other, lifeless consumption.

Different rooms are devoted to different moments in art history. In one early space, curators explore the buzz around 1980s Cologne with Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, while another, labeled "Feminist Art in the 1980s" stars Senga Nengudi's erotic, exploitative "R.S.V.P. I" stretched pantyhose sculptures. One of the interesting curatorial tricks on view is a rotating set of solo gallery installations that showcase one artist's work at a time — these will rotate every few months, according to MoMA's chief curator of painting and sculpture Ann Temkin, exposing hidden corners of the museum's collection and providing a chance to look closer at single oeuvres. Currently, a sparkling candy field by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, an extensive installation of Andrea Zittel, and a spare group of works by Doris Salcedo take top billing.

In the penultimate gallery is the unabashed crescendo of the contemporary art installation, and an acquisition coup for MoMA. Museum-goers enter into a wooden architectural frame, like a house under construction, and are hit full in the face with the smell of something cooking. The source is a few steaming pots and boiling rice cookers full of the ingredients for Tiravanija's version of Thai green curry. That MoMA now owns art history's foremost work of Relational Aesthetics art (a term Temkin called "pretentious") is presented as if it were no big deal, but of course it is. Every day from 12:00 to 3 p.m. (Fridays from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.) a staff member will be on hand serving the dish, which is certainly worth the trip, with its mild hits of spice, fish sauce, and coconut milk. Visitors will eat the concoction, while socially interacting and experiencing the art, in a café setting with fold-out tables and stools. Relics from the original performance, including a decrepit fridge, round out the scene.   

The new installation ends with a post-2000 gallery that pictures the contemporary art world in its current globalized state. A Huma Bhaba bust looks on at one of Mark Bradford urban abstractions; two Ai Weiwei prints from his "Study of Perspective" series show the artist giving the finger to Hong Kong and Berne, respectively; Dieter Roth's epic video installation shows the daily routines of the artist's last year of life. This final environment is a formless, confused one, but then the museum can’t hope to peg now as well as it has the art of the '80s and '90s, which the museum has done in a clear, approachable, and above all interesting fashion. One can only hope that the installation stays as dynamic as Temkin and her fellow curators promise.

To see some of the highlights of MoMA's contemporary art re-hang, click here, or on 'view slideshow.' 

With this month’s opening of “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan” at the National Gallery in London there has been an enormous surge of interest in this archetypal Renaissance artist, in part because the exhibition is the most comprehensive show of his art to date and in part because it contains something of a secular miracle — the “Salvator Mundi,” an uncanny late painting of Jesus that Leonardo experts only rediscovered this year.

The Oxford scholar Martin Kemp, a leading Renaissance expert who wrote the recently reissued “Leonardo” biography and the soon-to-be published book “Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon,” bears the distinction of having helped authenticate both the “Salvator Mundi” and another recently discovered work, the so-called “Bella Principessa,” which remains contested.

To follow our conversation about the “Bella Principessa,” ARTINFO spoke to Kemp about the mysterious qualities of the “Salvator Mundi,” and how Leonardo remains relevant to contemporary artists working today.

Remarkably, the last year or so has seen the rediscovery of two important Leonardo portraits, the "Bella Principessa" and the “Salvator Mundi.” When was the last time a lost Leonardo came to light?

The last Leonardo painting to come up was the “Benois Madonna” in the Hermitage, and that was in the early 20th century. So it's over 100 years since a painting came up that will insinuate itself into Leonardo's work with general acceptance, and I'm confident that that will happen with the "Salvator Mundi." It is already beginning to happen. The owner there acted very shrewdly. He or she — I don't know who the owner is — secured the opinions of Leonardo scholars in a very systematic and quiet way, and we sat on it for two years. The idea of the owner or owners working very systematically, very quietly, was in marked contrast to what happened to the "Bella Principessa," which got a lot of premature publicity before the work was really done.

How did you first come to see the "Salvator Mundi"?

The director of the National Gallery in London, Nicholas Penny, emailed me and said, “Do you want to come in on such-and-such a date? We've got something I think you would want to look at," which is rather different from getting a jpeg in your email. And I felt, "Well, it's obviously something connected to Leonardo." And they were already thinking about a Leonardo exhibition, I think, at that point. So I went into the conservation studio, and there were already some Leonardo scholars there, and it was sitting on an easel over on the left-hand side. And I looked at it and thought, "Fantastic."

You knew immediately?

Yeah. It was quite clear. It had that kind of presence that Leonardos have. The "Mona Lisa" has a presence. So after that initial reaction, which is kind of almost inside your body, as it were, you look at it and you think, well, the handling of the better-preserved parts, like the hair and so on, is just incredibly good. It's got that kind of uncanny vortex, as if the hair is a living, moving substance, or like water, which is what Leonardo said hair was like. So it almost ceases to become hair, and it becomes a source of energy in its own right. It's a very characteristic way of doing hair, which Leonardo has. Then the blessing hand has got a lot of very understated anatomical structure in it. All the versions of the "Salvator Mundi" — and we've got drawings of the drapery and lots of copies — all of them have rather tubular fingers. What Leonardo had done, and the copyists and imitators didn't pick up, was to get just how the knuckle sort of sits underneath the skin. And the blessing hands of the ones in the copies are all rather smooth and routine, but this is somebody who actually knew what — and, you know, this is a young person, this is not an elderly person — knew how the flesh lies over the knuckles. So, that's pretty good.

What was striking for me was the orb, and I've subsequently researched it quite heavily. The "Salvator Mundi" obviously holds the mundus, the world which he's saving, and it was absolutely unlike anything I've seen before. The orbs in other Salvator Mundis, often they're of a kind of brass or solid. Sometimes they're terrestrial globes, sometimes they're translucent glass, and one or two even have little landscapes in them. What this one had was an amazing series of glistening little apertures — they're like bubbles, but they're not round — painted very delicately, with just a touch of impasto, a touch of dark, and these little sort of glistening things, particularly around the part where you get the back reflections. And that said to me: rock crystal. Because rock crystal gets what are called inclusions, and to get clear rock crystal is very difficult, particularly big bits. So there are these little gaps, which are slightly irregular in shape, and I thought, well, that's pretty fancy. And Leonardo was a bit of an expert on rock crystal. He was asked to judge vases that Isabella d'Este was thinking of buying, and he loved those materials. 

So when I was back in Oxford, I went to the geology department, and I said, "Let's have a look at some rock crystal." And in the Ashmolean Museum, in a wunderkammer of curiosities, there is a big rock crystal ball, and that has inclusions, so we photographed it under comparable lighting conditions I also began to look at the heel of the hand underneath the globe in the "Salvator Mundi"; there are two heels. The restorer thought it was a pentimento, but I wondered if he was recording a double refraction of the kind you get with a calcite sphere. If this proves to be right, it would be absolutely Leonardesque. I like these things when they're not just connoisseurship. None of the copyists knew that. They just transcribed it. Some of them do better than others, but none of them got this crystal with its possible double refraction. And one of the points of the crystal sphere is that it relates iconographically to the crystalline sphere of the heavens, because in Ptolemaic cosmology the stars were in the fixed crystalline sphere, and so they were embedded. So what you've got in the "Salvator Mundi" is really a "a savior of the cosmos", and this is a very Leonardesque transformation.
 
Another thing I subsequently looked at is that there's a difference from what we would call depth of field — the blessing hand and the tips of the fingers are in quite sharp focus. The face, even allowing for some of the damage, is in quite soft focus. Leonardo, in Manuscript D of 1507-1508, explored depth of field. If you bring something too close to you, you can't see it and it doesn't have a sense of focus. If you've got it an optimum point, it's much sharper. Then you move it away and it gets less sharp. He was investigating that phenomenon. So there are these intellectual aspects, optical aspects, and things in terms of these semiprecious materials that are unique to Leonardo.

How would you describe the countenance of the "Salvator Mundi"?

Well, in a way, you could crudely describe it as the devotional equivalent to the "Mona Lisa," because it's very soft. Above his left eye — on the right as we look at it — there are some of these marks that he made with the heel of his hand to soften the flesh, and the face is very softly painted, which is characteristic of Leonardo after 1500. And what very much connects these later Leonardo works is a sense of psychological movement, but also of mystery, of something not quite known. He draws you in but he doesn't provide you with the answers. Most Salvator Mundis are pretty straightforward. 

Now seeing it for the first time in the London show — in the demanding company of other Leonardos — it is a relief to see how well its stands up. It has that uncanny strangeness that the later Leonardo paintings manifest. I'm now thinking that it is closer to the late St. John in the Louvre than it is to the "Last Supper" or even the “Mona Lisa." This means that it should not really be in an exhibition about Leonardo at the court of Milan. But who cares?

You mention the uncanny quality of his portraits, like the "John the Baptist" — they really do have a disturbing, supernatural aspect.

Yeah, the "John the Baptist" is like that. It's terrifically dirty, but it's got that quality to it, I believe — the spiritual mystery, when John is saying, "There is one who cometh after me," and he's pointing upwards, smiling this somewhat smug spiritual smile. The "Salvator Mundi" is very much that kind of thing. It's designed to not just be a full frontal Salvator Mundi who's looking at you, but creates that ambiguity.

Before the “Salvator Mundi” was discovered, you said that the "Bella Principessa" was the most important rediscovery of a work by Leonardo in over a century. Does that still hold true?

I don't really want to wrangle — they're different sorts of things. The "Bella Principessa" is not a painting, it's not quite a drawing in the way we understand it, and it's not quite a manuscript illumination. It is exceptional. And the other one is a painting. I suppose, if you were interested in doing rankings, the "Salvator Mundi" is probably the more important thing to have come out, because people put paintings about drawings. But they're both special works, and I think at that level you're not doing ranking, frankly.

Reports have said the "Bella Principessa" may be worth as much as $150 million. The "Salvator Mundi" is put at being worth $200 million. Where do these figures come from? 

I absolutely don't know. They seem not to be well-founded. With unique objects like this, I don't know how you even begin to deal with that, but I don't really follow the market. I don't do evaluations. I don't know where those figures come from. 

The big question, of course, is will there be more discoveries? You write that more than four fifths of his overall output is unaccounted for.

Yeah. The best chance at discoveries is probably manuscripts and drawings, but the chance has become less, because people are so much more alert. No Leonardo painting has come along for a hundred years. There’s a British joke about buses that you wait half an hour for a bus and then two or three come together. Maybe Leonardo is like that. With Leonardo, I would never forecast anything.

What do you think happened with his famously lost “Leda and the Swan,” which was in Leonardo’s list of possessions when he died but which we now know only from his drawings and inferior copies by other artists?

Well, the last reference we had to that indicated it was on board that was splitting. It was painted on wood, as all Leonardo’s pictures were, and it was in the French collection. It had been in the bath at Francis I’s Appartement des Bains at Fontainebleau, not literally in the bathroom, but in the suite of rooms that included the bathing facility, and I think it probably deteriorated. 

People then had no reverence for deteriorated paintings. If it survived at all, then probably it met the fate of so many other paintings and was hideously over-painted, which is what happened to the “Salvator Mundi.” So it could just be that the “Lady” is under inches of hideous over-paint, but my feeling is it’s fallen to bits.{C}{C}

Then there’s the question of the bronze horse in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, which some claim to be a Leonardo. What do you think?

Doesn’t stand a chance. Leonardo knew horse anatomy. He knew how a rearing horse balanced and how you get a horse back on its haunch. And you don’t do it with the legs parallel to the ground and the rear hooves cocked in that way. It’s a terrific sculpture. It’s a good deal later. And, why, on what is quite reasonable scale from what we know of the horse, why would Leonardo suddenly forget all the anatomy? I don’t think it stands a chance.

Are there any sculptures extant that stand a chance of being by Leonardo? Are there any claims that you would say come close, or are on the fence?

There are two things in sculpture that are worth looking at. One is a terracotta bust of Christ and the other is a little white horse. The problem, though, is that we’ve got no sculpture to compare it with. The little wax study of a horse is very pretty, but in terms of method it’s a bit of a nightmare because we don’t have a single piece of Leonardo sculpture to work with.

What is your opinion of Maurizio Seracini’s search for the “Battle of Alighieri” in Florence’s Palazzio Vecchio, which has become the inspiration for a Hollywood thriller?

I hope sincerely that it succeeds. If I were a betting man, I would be betting money against him finding it.

Then you aren’t convinced by the theory that Giorgio Vasari covered it with a fall wall before painting over it, leaving only the words “Circa Trova” (“Seek and You Will Find”) concealed within his painting as a clue to the Leonardo’s location?

I don’t find that. Even if there is a gap in the wall that Vasari has built, if you think that this is on oil and it’s been sealed up, with all the changes of humidity and temperature I suspect that what would be left would be a pile of paint at the bottom of the gap. But if Maurizio finds it, I will rush over and kiss him.

As you point out in the book, Leonardo’s massive celebrity today is symptomatic for our age: he’s famous for being famous, even among those who have no interest in his achievements. At the same time he seems to prefigure so many modern preoccupations in art, just as he did with science and technology. As you point out, he created these artful caprices for the court, which Performa founder RoseLee Goldberg now calls early forms of performance art. Have you given this matter any thought?

The great feste, the celebrations he designed for weddings for the Duke of Milan’s family and other events elsewhere — yeah, they’re amazing. They would make some of the modern experts of stage machinery look on with awe. What we have today would look quite small-scale in comparison. It would have been just extraordinary. Leonardo was not a performance artist in that he’s using his own personal body or whatever as a performance, but he was mounting a show. He was an impresario of visual effects, if you like a slightly ponderous way of describing it.

Didn’t he also act out humorous and moral tales?

Well, yes. There are these tales and prophesies that he said were to be read out in a berserk manner. Whether he did that himself or he got somebody else to do them is unclear. But, yeah, he did court entertainment.

I’m sure that performance artists would be very interested in that.

Yeah. Perhaps we should give a lecture on Leonardo as a performance artist. The trouble is a lack of evidence. We have a few descriptions, and a few bits of drawings, but there’s a disproportionately tiny amount of visual evidence for what were the grand, very expensive events.

He also embraced the role of chance in his art-making in a way that somewhat prefigures Duchamp and Cage. How else could one argue that Leonardo was a modern?

I don’t much like the formula that Leonardo is a modern. You can say that he’s a man ahead of his time, but he’s deeply embedded in his time. I’d rather look at him in his time and say, “This is absolutely fantastic.” And to some extent, the danger of saying, “He’s a modern,” is that we apply retrospective and unhistorical judgments, the things he did which anticipate what we do, then become order of value. A historian, I think, should resist that. It’s judging the past by our own standards. Our own standards, perhaps, are not all they might be.{C}{C}

How would you say his artwork is relevant to the art being made today, aside from its extreme virtuosity?

He has an extraordinary communicative power that is both very overt but also very withdrawn and subtle, so each generation in a sense can find what they want. I think great art is essentially generous, that it invites you to have a role. Lesser art sort of tells you what to look at, but artists like Vermeer and Rembrandt and so on, they’re very generous. They say to the spectator, “I’m giving you this, I’m leaving you a lot of room.” So in a way, each generation can come in and see their own Leonardo, who is not, obviously, totally different from Leonardos of the past, but who allows each of us individuals, and each in our age collectively, to work imaginatively with what he provides, like all great artists, essentially generous in what he gives us.

Another specific aspect to his work that is relevant to artists today, however, is that he deals with the problems of hyper-naturalism, which is an idea now current due to computer animation and the “uncanny valley,” which is a fascinating thing.

I wrote an essay for a Met exhibition on Lombard painting and I did use the term “hyper-naturalism.” What he is doing is that he knows he can’t paint a leaf that is a real leaf, so he uses paint to make something that is probably even more convincing as a leaf than a leaf. So he’s trying to get that almost supernatural sense of the reality of leaf, of its existence, so it is more real than the real in a way. Because he’s remaking nature, he’s not copying nature. He’s not doing the kind of painted photograph. He’s trying to get the real substance of how nature is, what it looks like and how it works.

In your introduction to the second edition of your Leonardo book, you write that your "tone has become more 'literary' and personal," and that you’ve become more sympathetic to the “myth” of Leonardo. How would you explain the evolution of your relationship to the artist?

The relationship is not so much a relationship or evolutionary relationship with the artist, but with the reader. I now have a sense that when writing about such things it may be more honest not to say, “It has been noticed that,” but, “If we look at this, look at what we can see….” So it’s a kind of personal loosening up in my relationship with the reader, rather than something that is new in relation to the artist. In my new book “Christ to Coke,” I begin each chapter in a quite personal way. I’m not saying history should be like that, but I feel that as I’ve got later in my career that I’m willing to be more open and let my guard down more with the reader. And I think the readers on the whole like that because, while you present these objects in a sense as very dry, objective historical things, there’s a lot more going on. My next trade book is going to be called “Living with Leonardo,” and that’s actually going to be looking at the Leonardo business, and saying that behind this calm surface of scholarly objectivity there’s this stuff going on. There are crazy people. There are angels. There are lunatics. There are bullies. There are crooks. It will be saying that the process of history is actually a rather personal one.

– Legal Battle as Art Form: Is Ai Weiwei’s response to the $2.4 million tax bill recently levied against him by the Chinese government actually a work of art? According to the AP, Ai has turned the government’s demand into performance art by posting official documents online, tallying loans from supporters, and making a video of himself singing an anti-censorship song. “This has become a social performance and there are so many people involved. Even the Global Times. They are also playing a role in this,” said Ai, referring to the scathing commentaries against him in the official Chinese newspaper.  According to critic Barbara Pollack, “A lot of the work that Ai Weiwei's done with Twitter and his blog and all of that stuff that might look like just political protest in China, [but] many curators in the West have called it social sculpture.” [AP]

– Who Will Buy the "Salvator Mundi"?: Not the Getty Museum, according to the oil-rich Los Angeles institution, which claims the newly-rediscovered painting (said to have an asking price of $200 million) would prevent them from making other needed acquisitions. “Salvator Mundi” is one of two of the 14 surviving portable paintings by da Vinci not already in the Getty’s collection. (Read more about the work, and the man who helped authenticate it, here.) Currently the only other U.S. museum to own a Leonardo is the National Gallery in D.C.  [LAT]

– Clyfford Still Museum, a Permanent Solo Show: The Art Newspaper offers a peek at the highly anticipated Clyfford Still Museum, which opens tomorrow in Denver. The institution will house 95 percent of the artist’s life’s work, most of which has never been exhibited. In his brief but demanding will, the Abstract Expressionist master stipulated that his estate remain in storage until a U.S. city agrees to build a museum “exclusively” for his art, meaning that no other artist’s work will ever be permitted to go on view to compliment or supplement the museum’s holdings. Works are also not permitted to “be sold, given, or exchanged.” Despite these limitations, museum director Dean Sobel is confident that visitors will have an art experience “so rewarding that they want to come back.” [TAN]

– McCartney Letter Sells for $55,000: A handwritten letter from Paul McCartney in which the musician invites an unnamed drummer to audition for the Beatles sold at Christie’s in London for almost £35,000, or about $55,000 — well over the pre-sale estimate of £7,000-9,000 ($11,000-14,000). Still, McCartney has a long way to go to catch up to John Keats, whose love letter sold for $151,000 at auction in March. [NYT]

– Street Artists Sue King Tut Company: Three Los Angeles street artists are suing the real estate division of Anshutz Entertainment Group (the company responsible for sending the treasures of King Tut’s tomb around the world) for allegedly destroying five artworks on display in a penthouse at the Ritz-Carlton Residences at L.A. Live hotel. According to the suit, works by street artists Mear One, Chor Boogie, and Shark Toof, which were installed last January as part of a cross-marketing initiative between the L.A. Art Show and AEG, were improperly removed and subsequently lost. They are seeking $150,000 for each lost artwork, as well as punitive damages. [LAT]

– It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s an Artwork?: The latest contribution to an ongoing public art initiative in London’s Kings Cross neighborhood is an “IFO” (Identified Flying Object), a nine-meter glowing neon cage by French artist and architect Jacques Rival that hangs above King’s Cross station. By day, the work will rest on the ground for tourists and visitors to enter, and take a ride on the swing at the cage’s center. By night, the piece will be lifted into the sky by a tall orange crane. It will remain in the neighborhood for the next two years. [Independent]

– Lowry Circus Sells for $8.8 Million: A figure-packed scene of London’s Piccadilly Circus by 20th century painter L.S. Lowry sold for £5.6 million ($8.8 million) at Christie’s, just below the £6 million high estimate and equal to the highest price ever paid for a Lowry painting. The artwork came from a collection formed by late U.K. caterer and hotelier Charels Forte. [Bloomberg]

– A New Golden Age for Antiquities?: Is there a new spirit of international cooperation beginning to blossom in the field of antiquities? The Cleveland Museum of Art reinstalled its collection of Greek and Roman art in 2010, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is renovating its ancient coin and jewelry galleries. Creating a network “of institutions linked with ones abroad or archaeological sites in source countries” is “where the world is going” and will result in richer displays of antiquities, said former Association of Art Museum Directors president Michael Conforti. [TAN]

– Richard Phillips’s New Muse: For the launch issue cover of Interview Russia, the first foreign edition of the iconic New York City magazine founded by Andy Warhol, photorealist painter Richard Phillips has helped to create a portrait of cover boy Leonardo DiCaprio. Phillips said he wanted to “amplify visually the uncanny feeling of identification that compels us to share in the experiences of [DiCaprio's] characters." [ITA]

– RIP James Neal, British Cityscape Painter: James Neal is best known for his cityscape paintings, which combine the steady brushwork of English post-impressionism and the strong graphic element of German expressionism. The artist, who spent most of his life in Hull, in east Yorkshire, was 93. [Guardian]

In Italian clothing label Benetton’s ideal world, foreign dignitaries from opposing sides would lock lips. Think American president Barack Obama kissing Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas hugging Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or North Korean leader Kim Jong-il smooching South Korean president Lee Myung-bak. Benetton actually took the concept to heart, making it the subject of its controversial “Unhate” ad campaign, which features political enemies getting a little too close for comfort.

The Italian apparel company debuted the ads yesterday at its flagship Paris store — much to the chagrin of the world leaders it featured. White House spokesman Eric Schultz told the Huffington Post that, "the White House has a longstanding policy disapproving of the use of the president's name and likeness for commercial purposes." The Vatican spoke against the image the company created of pope Benedict XVI kissing Egyptian imam and Sunni Islam leader Ahmed el Tayyeb. "This shows a grave lack of respect for the Pope, an offence to the feelings of believers, a clear demonstration of how publicity can violate the basic rules of respect for people," said Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican's spokesman, in a statement.

The “Unhate” campaign is now planned to go on billboards, in Benetton retail outlets, and on Web sites around the globe, and the image of the pope and the imam has already been briefly hung from a Renaissance stone bridge near the Vatican as a part of a guerilla marketing ploy to display the ads where the featured leaders are based, according to the Daily Telegraph.

"The central theme is the kiss, the most universal symbol of love, between world political and religious leaders,"  said deputy head of the company, Alessandro Benetton, in a statement.

Benetton isn't breaking new ground here — making opponents kiss is an age-old method of provocation, from cartoonist Art Spiegelman's 1993 New Yorker cover showing a black woman and Hasidic man smooching during the height of the Crown Heights riots to Madonna's canoodle with a saint in her "Like a Prayer" video. Russian art collective the Blue Noses have turned the trope on its head with the group's famous "Kissing Policeman (An Epoch of Clemency)," showing two Russian cops making out. 

This isn’t the first time Benetton has stirred controversy. In the past its ads have depicted a nun kissing a priest and parents grieving over a man dying of AIDS.

Click on the photo gallery above to see images from Benetton's "Unhate" ad campaign.

It is widely known that the late, great Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein sourced much of his imagery from comic books and newspaper comic sections of yore, tweaking the scale to create the boldly painted compositions that made him world famous. But rarely do the collectors who pay millions for his paintings spare a thought for the Ben-Day artists who inspired his work.

This was likely the case last week at Christie’s when Lichtenstein’s classic bubble-captioned painting “I Can See The Whole Room!... And There’s Nobody In It!” sold for an artist-record $43,202,500 to New York private dealer Guy Bennett. The cover lot last sold at auction at the same house, also as the cover lot, in November 1988 for a then-dazzling $2,090,000 (est. $800,000-1.2 million), part of the fabled Tremaine Collection. The Connecticut-based Burton and Emily Tremaine, for their part, had acquired the work from the Leo Castelli Gallery in November 1961 — the year it was painted — for a discounted price of $450, according to gallery records provided by Barbara Castelli, the late dealer’s widow who continues to run the gallery.

Christie’s academically styled catalogue entry included a reproduction of the source image for the painting, culled from an August 6, 1961, panel of Saunders & Overgard’s syndicated comic “Steve Roper.” Apart from the word “Trooper!”, which began the bubble caption in the original, the text and image are virtually identical. Of course, the newspaper strip was black and white, and Lichtenstein added a yellow background to further dramatize the blown-up, sharply chiseled male visage staring through the peephole.

But there’s more to the story than a polite footnote about the Steve Roper source material.

In 1963 the painting was exhibited in the Guggenheim’s landmark exhibition “Six Painters and the Object.” Lichtenstein, then 39, had just been featured in a splashy Time magazine piece about the new Pop art craze, which included a comment about his use of real comic strips as models: “there is enough change so that he can claim to impose his own order on them.” A published letter to the editor by William Overgard, the then-36-year-old cartoonist and creator of the original drawing, followed.

“Sir: As a cartoonist, I was interested in Roy Lichtenstein’s comments on comic strips in your article on pop art,” went the letter. “Though he may not, as he says, copy them exactly, Lichtenstein in his painting currently being shown at the Guggenheim comes pretty close to the last panel of my Steve Roper Sunday page of August 6, 1961. Very flattering… I think?”

Overgard, the son of a silent movie star and a published author and screenwriter in the science fiction and horror film realm, died in 1990 at his 17-acre farm in Stony Point, New York. You might say Overgard had his Warholian 15 minutes of fame, but there’s also more to his legacy than that.

The cartoon artist was tracked and rediscovered in part by David Barsalou, the creator of the Web site Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein, a three-decade endeavor to track down the original cartoons that the Pop art icon supped on.

“A lot of these major collectors, they want a Lichteinstein, which is fine,” Barsalou said in a phone interview, “but the whole premise of Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein over the years is just to bring recognition to the original comic art that Lichtenstein copied.”

“If these collectors understood the intrinsic value of original comic art they’d be grabbing all of that stuff because its at bargain prices right now,” continued Barsalou, who studied Pop art as a student in the late ‘70s at the Hartford Art School. “Sooner or later the art world is going to catch up to it.”

Barsalou has his own auction story to tell, in fact, tying the frayed thread between Overgard and Lichtenstein. Last August, the cartoon aficionado found the original Overgard panel on eBay and outdueled four other remote bidders to snag the prize for $431. Overgard had donated his 3,000-plus cartoon archive to the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University, but that panel is not part of that protected trove.

“To me,” said Barsalou, “it was the steal of the century.”

Creative Time promised an atypical art event for last night’s “Flaming Youth” fall ball, and they certainly delivered — with wings, animal masks, and one inventive and hyperactive dude in a spacesuit. The setting was new SoHo nightspot The W.I.P., helmed by the owner of Greenhouse. Guests entered down a long hallway where they could have their faces and bodies painted by artist Shantell Martin, or take their pick from a wall of masquerade-ready accessories. ARTINFO chose a rubber flamingo nose and a set of silky purple wings, naturally, and joined an eclectic crowd that included Marilyn Minter, Mike Starn, Cory Kennedy, Anthony Haden-Guest, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Cecelia Dean, Grey Area’s Kyle DeWoody and Manish Vora, and many others.

There were no self-congratulatory speeches or announcements during the night, just a heady wallop of bass-heavy music (courtesy of DJ Mia Moretti), which included a surprisingly excellent remix of Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.” We Came In Peace, the firm who designed the entrance hallway’s decor, floated through the crowd bearing gourmet finger food suspended from a pole, all courtesy of Pinch Food Design. While many art-world mixers are about networking, it was definitely too loud to hobnob here, a truth realized by a young friend of Haden-Guest who climbed atop a banquette to dance the night away. Most of the masked, dandified, and bedazzled crowd followed suit, spending the evening on a sweaty dance floor — a plentiful river of Slovakian vodka certainly helped — where artist Jacolby Satterwhite stole the show in a unique spacesuit equipped with a video monitor playing animations. 

The most-talked-about stories on ARTINFO, November 14-18, 2011:

– ARTINFO editor Andrew M. Goldstein spoke with famous art historian Martin Kemp about the spooky, newly authenticated Leonardo da Vinci painting, "Salvator Mundi," which we dubbed the "Male Mona Lisa."

– Marina Abramovic’s L.A. MOCA gala, whicih had nude women draped in skeletons serve as human centerpieces for a glamorous crowd of the wealthy and well-connected, still had people talking. 

– Supercurator Hans Ulrich Obrist spoke with ARTINFO UK about his idea for a new movement, "Posthastism." 

– For Performa, actor James Franco and art provocateur Laurel Nakadate collaborated to channel Tennessee Williams onstage. 

– It's right around the corner, folks: We offered a Miami guide for those planning to head to Florida for Art Basel Miami Beach. 

– Billionaire art collector Roman Abramovich is in a legal battle with a fellow oligarch, leading to tantalizing glimpses of his personal quirks and the source of his giant fortune.

– Ray Turner, a descendent of J.M.W. Turner, is going to parliament at the end of the month asking for the country to honor the terms of his ancestor's will. 

– L.A. MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch spoke to ARTINFO style editor Ann Binlot about his vision for bringing art together with fashion. 

– The Brooklyn Museum opened "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," and we picked out 10 inspiring works from the show. 

– The Museum of Modern Art debuted its new rehang of its contemporary art collection, with a side of Thai curry.

– Judd Tully looked into the "Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein" project, which tracks down the source materials of the Pop artist's work — including the comic behind last week's painting that sold for $43 million at Christie's. 

Croatia-born, Munich-based artist Jadranka Kosorcic has spent most of her career organizing blind dates. The set up is standard romantic fare: two people who have never met set a time and place and chat for a few hours, getting to know each other in the process. But Kosorcic’s dates don’t happen at a bar or coffee shop, they unfold in her studio; the "couple" is composed of the artist herself and a brave volunteer subject; the entire conversation is recorded; and the tangible outcome is a seemingly rudimentary charcoal portrait. The sketch and the conversation are exhibited together, the voice of the sitter animating an unembellished, barebones drawing.

Kosorcic finds her subjects through a simple request that is both on her website and in emails she sends to potential candidates: “Artist is looking for people e m/f willing to pose for a portrait. Time spent: 1-3 h. Send photo to info@jadrankakosorcic.com.” The artist has been having “Blind Dates” since 1995 in Berlin, Munich, London, Malmö, and New York. She hopes to add Tokyo to the list in the future. This May, Kosorcic’s first U.S. solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery was well received and she is currently living in New York as an artist-in-residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) residency in Bushwick, a few blocks from 3rd Ward. During her time at the ISCP, Kosorcic is drawing portraits for a project on people working in the New York art world, a commission for Berlin-based contemporary art magazine Artinvestor, which will publish ten drawings alongside snippets of the recorded conversations she had while sketching her subjects.

In a spirit of journalistic inquiry, I responded to an email sent on Kosorcic's behalf by White Columns, who will be showing her work this December at NADA Miami. I met her at the studio without many expectations of how our date would unfold. Kosorcic is very tall, though not imposing; she wears her hair short and dresses practically and unassumingly. The artist's soft-spoken, accented English is good, but not perfect, making it easy enough to carry on a conversation for the nearly three hours I spent being drawn. She started by asking me where I was from and what trends I saw in the New York art scene, and I asked her about her work and her travels. She told me stories about growing up in Croatia, being invited at the last minute to Olafur Eliasson’s Christmas party in Berlin, and fishing trips to Greek volcanic islands.

We joked about Marina Abramovic and her MoMA staring contest "The Artist Is Present" while I was there, but the comparison is apt. Still, this was not a transcendental, tear-inducing experience with a silent, berobed artist-deity. It was a casual conversation with a very down-to-earth and well-traveled woman who just happened to be wielding a sketchpad. The conversation was long: at times funny, at times awkward, and at times entirely lost in translation.

In Kosorcic’s project, identity is captured in two different ways. I created my own identity in our conversation, constructing a semblance of my own personality that was recorded and archived on tape. She captured my image on paper, translating my features into a series of simple, sparse lines. But what is unique about Kosorcic's project is her emphasis on the experience — the sketch seems like an excuse for the conversation. Over-the-top artist-induced experiences, from the likes of Tino Sehgal or Mike Nelson, are standard fare, but here the experience was more personal, more tactile. Being sketched is an odd experience, easily yielding to miscommunication and misrepresentation. Kosorcic’s project captures both the futility and delight of the endeavor.

WHAT: “Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles”

WHEN: Through February 27, Monday & Friday 11AM-5PM, Thursday 11AM-8PM, Saturday & Sunday 11AM-6PM

WHERE: MOCA Grand Avenue, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles

WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: New York tabloid photographer Weegee relocated to Los Angeles in 1947, beginning a period in his career that spawned some of the most raw and humorous images of Hollywood’s golden age. His lens captured a twisted panorama of silver screen darlings and Sunset Strip entertainers, sequined costumes and flashy cars.

Weegee’s knack for creating compositions that are part Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive Moment” and part DIY dark room antics make for a Hollywood that appears distorted and fantastical. His wild portrait of Marilyn Monroe is like Francis Bacon translated into film, her face twisted and bent into something monstrous because of his experimental camera tricks. In a tattered black-and-white print, the paparazzi cameras point towards an actress at the microphone — but Weegee’s own is directed at their sea flashing bulbs. In another sepia-toned photograph, a beglittered and barely clothed performer sips a glass of water backstage, her invincible and otherworldly persona shattered by the human act. As the men in the background look away, Weegee’s camera is focused right on this disarmingly candid moment.

“Naked Hollywood” features over 200 photographs, some with crop-marks, printer notes, and captions included, giving us a glimpse at the photographer's creative process and vision for documenting Los Angeles as “Weegee The Famous.” 

To see a selection from "Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles" click here or on the slide show button above.