Obama Joker Artist Revealed – Part 1

We now know that the portrait of President Barack Obama painted as the Joker from the Batman film The Dark Night was the handiwork of a 20-year old Chicagoan, Firas Alkhateeb. Mr. Alkhateeb is an American of Palestinian descent, who is a senior at the University of Illinois. With some free time, boredom and Adobe [...]

Arthur Okamura, RIP

This morning I received an email from Stephen Beal, President of California College of the Arts, bearing sad news: FROM PRESIDENT STEPHEN BEAL Dear CCA Community, I’m very sad to report the death of Professor Emeritus Arthur Okamura. He passed away on July 10 near his home in Bolinas. He was 77. Arthur taught at [...]

Mona Lisa Revealed

An exhibit entitled Joconde: From the Mona Lisa to the Nude Gioconda is on display from June 14 through September 30, 2009, at the Museo Ideale Leonardo Da Vinci in Vinci, Italy, Leonardo’s birthplace. It features 5,000 paintings, sculpture and new media created over the past 500 years, inspired by Leonardo’s immortal portrait of Mona [...]

Yale, Van Gogh, Lenin and the Nationalization of Art

At first Chairman Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized private land and “redistributed” it to the Russian peasants. They nationalized the banks and industry. Personal property was confiscated for the state, including the art collections of the Russian industrialists. General Secretary of the Communist Party Josef Stalin sold off some of the “nationalized” art treasures [...]

Damien Hirst, Dead Cows and Cradles of Hope

“I have a really good business manager,” said Damien Hirst. “He told me a long time ago ‘You’d better make sure that you’re using the money to chase your art ideas rather than the art to chase your money ideas.’ Which is a very important thing to never forget.” That is sound advice coming from [...]

Hitler Paintings Sell At Auction

A British auction house sold a series of 13 watercolors on Thursday, April 23, 2009, painted by Adolph Hitler during the years 1908 and 1914, when the young man lived in Vienna. Richard Westwood-Brookes, of Mullock’s Auctioneers, speculated that had Mr. Hitler been “accepted into the Vienna Academy, which was where he wanted to be, [...]

Nazi Looted Art Returned on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Max Stern did not live to see the day. In 1937, the Jewish art dealer was ordered by the Nazis to sell his collection of 228 paintings. He then fled to England and later moved to Canada. One of the paintings from Dr. Stern’s collection was a 1632 Dutch Old Master called “Portrait of a [...]

Happy Birthday to David Gilhooly

On any given April 15th, many Americans are sweating out last minute tax returns. But my thoughts always turn to my good friend David Gilhooly. He was born April 15, 1943, in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California. A sculptor, painter, printmaker and all-around fine artist, David rose to prominence in the 1960s as a [...]

Arnold Schwarzenegger Returns California’s Nazi Loot

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was on hand on April 10, 2009, when two paintings belonging to the state were returned to the grandchildren of their original owners. Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer, who owned a gallery in Berlin, fled to France in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution. The Nazis auctioned off 100 paintings from the Oppenheimer’s [...]

Castrobama

The first major group show of American artists in Cuba opened on Saturday, March 28, 2009. It’s called “Chelsea visits Havana.” No, not that Chelsea. Even though Ms. Clinton’s father was sympathetic to the frequent visits to Cuba by American art dealers, this show got its name from the Manhattan district where the 30 artists [...]