Embassy Art - 42 Missing

Paintings, prints and sculptures from the Government Art Collection, worth tens of thousands of pounds, have been stolen, lost or destroyed while on loan to British embassies or residences across the world. Information gained through the Freedom of Information Act shows that 42 works of art have vanished in the past 10 years - and none is insured. The art collection, which gets a £500,000 yearly grant and spends about half of it buying works of art, sends the pieces to foreign missions to "promote British art, culture and history". It said it was unable to put a value on the works. Apart from objects that were known to have been stolen, more than half the total art simply disappeared for no known reason. Others were lost in terrorist attacks.
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Irish Art

The Queen And Picasso's Art

When the Queen was given a private view of a Picasso retrospective, no one actually expected her to say: "Why does he want to put two eyes on the same side of the face?" The Queen's puzzled response to the work of one of the most influential figures in 20th-century art was recorded by the exhibition's curator, Sir Roland Penrose. The Queen was baffled by Picasso's cubist technique in art such as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Guernica and the portrait of his mistress, Dora Maar. "Why does he use so many different styles?" she is said to have asked at one point. Prince Philip, however, was more forthright: "These are the ones that make me feel a bit drunk, I'm afraid." Sir Roland was pleasantly surprised by the Queen's reaction. "To my delight she went in with an enthusiasm that increased with each step," he wrote to Picasso. The Queen, he said, was particularly taken with a still-life sculpture depicting Gruyère cheese and a sausage. "Oh, how delightful," she said. "I wish I could make things like that myself." Prince Philip, meanwhile, appeared less animated. "Do realise, darling, there are 270 paintings to see and we have hardly begun."
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Irish Art

70 Munch Paintings Missing

The location and ownership of more than 70 important paintings by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch are unknown, according to scholars working on his catalogue raisonné. The researchers have been unable to trace significant works such as Old Aker Church (1882), Kiss (1892), The Girls on the Bridge (1902) and Felix Auerbach (1906). Munch painted multiple versions of many of his works and, in several cases, the location of variants of his most famous art is not known. “We know that these pictures exist, but don’t have all the information we need about them,” says Gerd Woll, the chief conservator of the team working on the catalogue, to be published in 2008. Since 2003, she and two colleagues have been gathering as much information as possible about the 1,700 paintings that Munch is believed to have produced. The paintings which cannot be found are probably in private art collections. “In some cases we have an idea who owns the works, but they have not replied when we’ve contacted them.”
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Irish Art

The Art Of Kate Moss

A really bad artist can say something about the times in a way that often eludes genius. While the good artist gets lost in personal obsessions, the trite and sentimental hack has a way of showing us what we're all thinking. With his sculpture of Kate Moss, unveiled this week, Marc Quinn has done it again. And what he tells us is that we may as well put up our hands and confess that beneath our thin veil of modernism we remain an artistically conservative nation. British art has returned to its origins, we see on these pages. After all the sensations, after the brilliant careers and after the fire, we have arrived by some cyclical divine joke in 18th-century London, where portraiture is god and the leading artists of the day compete to depict Mary "Perdita" Robinson, Emma Hamilton - and Kate Moss. Quinn's portrait of Moss is the kind of monstrosity that, if it were exhibited in Tate Britain as 150-year-old period puce, would give us a good laugh at the bad taste of the Victorian bourgeoisie before modernism came along to clear the cobwebs.
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Irish Art