Dali House

All we’re trying to say here is that if Pablo Picasso were alive today, boy oh boy, would Las Vegas casino czar Steve Wynn ever be in trouble.

Pablo’s girlfriend, Marie-Theresa “Le Reve” Walter, 21 going on 74, took a hit for the cubist team on Tuesday when Wynn hauled off and thumped her, severely injuring her arm.

Eyewitnesses including the late Baba Wawa and Nora Ephron, still tragically unable to sleep in Seattle, looked on in horror as Wynn became overly excited about scoring the biggest art sale in history by selling off Marie-Theresa, known as “The Dream” in Vegas, for $139 million, which is $4 million more than that shiny Gustav Klimt woman went for in July.

Wynn claimed the assault was accidental, something about having an eye disease that hampers his peripheral vision, and while flailing his arms around, he didn’t see the girl, who he’d rented for $48.4 million in 1997.

Police are investigating.

UPDATE October 2008: Who doesn’t love a happy ending, even if the happiest bloke in this story happens to be filthy rich?

Britain’s Daily Mail has reported that Steve Wynn took his sob story to the US District Court in Manhattan, suing Lloyd’s of London for £26 million — the amount it had wiped off the painting’s original value. The combatants ended up settling on a £15-million payout. (You can convert the pounds to dollars — I couldn’t be bothered.)

The Mail, citing “sources”, said Wynn paid New York-based “expert” Terrence Mahon £61,000 to patch up the hole in the canvas “by realigning the threads of the canvas, sewing them together and then painting over the tear”.

Art dealer David Nash reckoned the painting was now once again worth £70 million.

A quadracentennial Rembrandt relapse, second of three parts

A little more biography, then, but first, the painting above. “Belshazzar’s Feast” from 1635 was Rembrandt trying to get on the A-list of baroque historian-artists who did mammoth canvases, and he really went for it.

From the Book of Daniel he pulled the moment when the King of Babylon adds the fatal last straw to his bulging hoard of sins by drinking wine from the cups stolen from Jerusalem’s temple. The writing is on the wall, and though Rembrandt inscribed the Hebrew in columns rather than right to left, likely in a comment on its age and its indecipherability to all but the prophet Daniel, the message was clear: “Get out of town by sundown.” Belshazzar did better than that: He was murdered within hours.

With Caravaggio’s dramatic lighting effects and a passionate cha-cha of chiaroscuro, Rembrandt clad his operatic cast in anachronistic but sublimely rendered togs, every gem and tassel a subtle craftwork. And rarely do you find him so flamboyant in his facial expressions.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born on July 15, 400 years ago, in Leiden. Unless you’re Dutch it’s a funny middle name, but a fun one, and anyway his dad’s was Gerritszoon, and mom was Neeltje van Suijttbroeck, so it was family of sound effects, and he painted them often. See the rest.

A quadracentennial Rembrandt relapse in three parts

Surely the truth about someone who’s 400 years old depends on which biography you read, but Sylvia Hochfield of ARTnews, who has the always enigmatic job description “editor-at-large”, seems quite certain about Rembrandt in her terrific essay on the quadricentennial of the old boy’s death, which is just coming to a close.

This assurance despite the nasty testimony about him that she surveys en route to judging Rembrandt a fine fellow after all.

Witness for the prosecution #1, artist Abraham Breughel (not the proto-surrealist): Told by a collector for whom he bought paintings that the recently desceased Rembrandt was the ace of half-length portraits, and could he find a new one, please, Breughel pointed out that Rembrandt had been good for nothing other than heavily draped spectres lurking in the shadows, “save for a point of light at the tip of the nose”. See the rest.

Right down to his little goatee, Mark Ryden has stepped from an Old Dutch painting. From there it was apparently a stumble through Haight-Ashbury (a “trip”, I think they used to call it) and far, far too many hours in the museum of natural history with the fox skulls and the stuffed opossum.

We welcome almost anyone at Dali House, so open are our minds, but Mark Ryden, who we’ve given The Room at the End of the Hall for now, wants keeping an eye on, and not necessarily because he’s destined for great things, if you catch our drift.

He wasn’t born until 1963, so chances are his parents took care of all the love-groovy things while he was still growing up in Southern California. They obviously gave their kids some great books to read, though, as hippie parents always did.

Another bizarro act championed by Juxtapoz Magazine, like Banksy of the booming brick wall, Ryden is in a whole ‘nother universe, a “parallel universe”, as folks are wont to say about him. There are messages in his paintings, yes, and definitely a neck-twisting rush, but as for getting a headlock on the attention span, it’s all a little … too … cute.

Cute?! See the rest.

I could remember only a couple of things about futurism from my art history course at university – speed, and Umberto Boccioni’s fast little statuette, “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space”, of which I made a drawing at the time.

I was never quite sure of the fuel behind this flamboyant bunch of hard-nosed Italians who seemed to love the fascists as much as they worshipped motion and, being quick, burned out just as fast as Mussolini.

Gino Severini’s “Armoured Train in Action” from 1915

Reading again about them lately, it surprises me that some didn’t end up like Il Duce, hung by the heels, quite dead, and spattered with rotten tomatoes. It’s eseential to be passionate about one’s art, but these guys would beat you up, noisily and with great gusto, if you disagreed with their point of view.

Then again, the futurists created some wonderful paintings, sculpture, poetry and prose, and if my art history prof had had the time, he might have placed this in front of me:

“We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts.” See the rest.