How the defence of bad restorations spawns shadowy, secretive Committees-of-Exoneration

November this year marked ArtWatch International’s thirtieth anniversary and May 26th next year will mark the fifteenth anniversary of the death of its founder, James Beck, Professor of Renaissance Art History at Columbia University. 

Jacques Franck concludes a three-part demolition of the once attributed but now deposed, $450m New York/Russian/Saudi Leonardo da Vinci Salvator Mundi.

Jacques Franck explores the damaging restorations and mis-attributed works that follow art historical studies and scientific essays made in ignorance of actual historical artistic practices.

Dalya Alberge reports a negative result on Artificial Intelligence comparisons of the Samson and Delilah’s brushwork with that on 148 uncontested Rubens paintings.

There are no fewer than seventy-six works of constant, unsettling power in this show – every one of which is monumental in its effect regardless of size.

“The thrilling focus put by Ann Pizzorusso’s research on the geology of Leonardo’s landscapes in works such as the Virgin of the Rocks and the Louvre’s The Virgin and Child with St. Anne is of foremost importance…”

A century on from Klimt’s death scarcely a single picture has survived restorations true to its original self.

Museum staffs invariably and hubristically claim that their expert and state-of-the-art picture restorations render all earlier studies obsolete.

The notoriously disappeared picture is set to become a musical in 2022 in which “artistic liberties will be freely taken to make an enlightening and entertaining experience”. Amazon is offering T-Shirts showing the Salvator Mundi as it had looked in 2011 when part-restored.

The Leonardo Salvator Mundi controversy turns on which artist’s hand is – or which artists’ hands are – present on the painting. While many scholars agree that more than one hand is present, as is demonstrated here, neither belongs to Leonardo.

After a dozen art historians had bet the art historical farm on a “from-nowhere” Salvator Mundi being an autograph Leonardo painting, it first fetched $450m in 2017 and then disappeared.

Showing how the drawn construction of “La Bella Principessa’s” eye bears stylistic affinities with of eyes encountered in Cubist artists like Juan Gris and is anatomically incompatible with Leonardo’s own drawn and painted eyes.

The unsung – and free – delights of London’s non-museum, private art gallery network, as encountered in two memorable exhibitions on one street in St James’.

The Estorick Collection’s ground-breaking Anders Rådén and Matt Smith show Umberto Boccioni: Recreating the Lost Sculptures

Recent additions to the fast-growing and least-estimable art-book publishing genre – The Partisan Book of Art Attribution Advocacy.

The downgrading of the $450million, supposedly long-lost, Leonardo-painted prototype Salvator Mundi by the Louvre Museum in its catalogue for the blockbuster exhibition “Léonard de Vinci”.

An indecent, inferno-facilitated rush by the French State to rebuild “anew” a long-neglected and disparaged Gothic Cathedral as a “contemporary art gesture”.

The Notre-Dame Cathedral inferno was not an act of God. It arose within a particular restoration programme under a singular (ambivalent) French heritage ethos that has spawned many fires.

The attribution of the world’s most expensive painting – the $450 million Louvre Abu Dhabi Salvator Mundi – has collapsed under the combined weights of two scholars’ findings and the picture’s own artistic and art historical implausibility.

New revelations send the Louvre Abu Dhabi Salvatore Mundi towards a pear-shaped fate.

At left, a previous “Leonardo” Salvator Mundi contender. At right, the Louvre Abu Dhabi Salvator Mundi as sold in 2017. The seller is now suing Sotheby’s for fraud in connection with the sale to him of the painting.

Chartres cathedral stone work in its pre- and post-restoration conditions.

left to right: screenshot of 2005 state; as exhibited as an autograph Leonardo painting in Dec 2011 at the National Gallery; as sold at Christie’s, New York, in Nov 2017

Édouard Manet, Woman in Striped Dress (before and after treatment – DETAIL), 1877–80. Oil on canvas, 174.3 x 83.5 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Thannhauser Collection, Gift, Justin K. Thannhauser, 1978. Photo: Allison Chipak. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2018.

Image: infra-red reflectogram of Louvre Abu Dhabi “Salvator Mundi”; detail of the London National Gallery’s “Christ among the Doctors” by Leonardo’s assistant, Bernardino Luini

Check the facts before critiquing the professionals.

Image: Art deaccessioned from the Berkshire on view at Sotheby’s. Courtesy: Two Coats of Paint blog.

Image: Tom Wolfe as photographed in New York in 1968 by Sam Falk for The New York Times.

Image Courtesy: Abigail Sharp.

Image Courtesy: Drew Angerer / Getty Images – as published 2 Apr 2018 in “Buffalo News”.

On view at Focal Point Gallery through April 22nd (Southend-on-Sea, England).

Image: The two Arab princes who settled into a bidding war for the work. Courtesy: Getty Images.

Image Courtesy: The Sunday Times Magazine (Oct 2011)

Image: Clay Cofer, an Art Team member at the Barnes Foundation, does a pop-up gallery talk for visitors. Courtesy: SYDNEY SCHAEFER, Barnes Foundation Staff Photographer.

Image: Simon Schama fronting the scathingly-received 2018 multi-voiced Civilisations outside Itimad-ud-Daulah’s Tomb in Agra, Uttar Pradesh. Courtesy: BBC.

Image: Jackson Pollock Number 1, 1949 (1949). Enamel and metallic paint on canvas. Courtesy: MOCA LA.

Image: French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe with Shiekh Hamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, CEO of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, during inauguration of BNP paribas Abu Dhabi Global market Branch on February 10, 2018. Courtesy: Karim Sahib for AFP / Art Daily.

Michael Daley considers Georgina Adams’ new book “The Dark Side of the Boom”.
Image Courtesy: Amazon

Image Courtesy: Bank of America Art Conservation Project.

Image Courtesy: La Salle University (Philadelphia, PA).

Image Courtesy: artnet News.

Image courtesy: Mandel Ngan / AFP.

Images: Heydenreich’s 1964 study “Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’”.

Image courtesy: Saadiyat Cultural District website.

AWUK Feature by Alexander Adams.

Image: Dance Examination (Examen de Danse), 1880. Courtesy: Denver Art Museum.

Image: Salvator Mundi (detail)

A memorial lecture, two journals and an assault on scholarship.

Image: Bartolomeo Manfredi, Mars Chastising Cupid, 1613. Courtesy: Art Institute of Chicago.

Image: detail of “Joconde nue” (as published showing prick marks when the design was transferred for use on panel). Courtesy: Musée Condé, Chantilly.

Image: Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, MA.

Image: Mucha installation in 2011, which will now be shifted across two more continents. Courtesy: The Art Newspaper.

Image: Orson Wells in “F for Fake” (1973).

Image: Auguste Rodin’s “L’Absolution” on display. Courtesy: Musée Rodin Paris.

Image: “The-Slavs in Their Original Homeland” (1912). Courtesy: Mucha Foundation