Category: Art

Munch Paintings Stolen From Norway Museum
OSLO, Norway – Armed men stormed into an art museum Sunday, threatened staff at gunpoint and stole Edvard Munch’s famous paintings “The Scream” and “Madonna” before the eyes of stunned museum-goers.
The thieves yanked the paintings off the walls of Oslo’s Munch museum and loaded them into a waiting car outside, said a witness, French radio producer Francois Castang.
Police spokeswoman Hilde Walsoe said the two or three armed men threatened a museum employee with a handgun to give them the two paintings, including one of four versions of “The Scream” ó Munch’s famed depiction of an anguished figure with its head in its hands.
“No one has been physically injured, and the suspects escaped in an Audi A6. We are searching for the suspects with all available means,” Walsoe told The Associated Press. “We found the escape car, and we have found many pieces of the frames.”
Many museum visitors panicked and thought they were being attacked by terrorists.
“He was wearing a black face mask and something that looked like a gun to force a female security guard down on the floor,” visitor Marketa Cajova told NTB public radio.
“What’s strange is that in this museum, there weren’t any means of protection for the paintings, no alarm bell,” Castang told France Inter radio.
“The paintings were simply attached by wire to the walls,” he said. “All you had to do is pull on the painting hard for the cord to break loose ó which is what I saw one of the thieves doing.”
Castang said police arrived on the scene 15 minutes later. Visitors were ushered into the museum’s cafeteria.
“We don’t have all the details on the situation, but we are searching for the suspects in the air and on land,” Police Spokesman Kjell Moerk told the public radio network NRK.
The stolen “Madonna” was painted in 1893-1894, depicting an eroticized madonna with a blood-red halo in a dark, swirling aura. Munch later produced woodcut lithographs with a similar depiction.
There are four versions of “The Scream.” The Munch Museum had two of them, a private collector owns the third and the fourth is on display at Oslo’s National Gallery.
“They were all painted by Munch, and they are all just as valuable,” museum spokeswoman Jorunn Christoffersen told the AP. “Still, these paintings are not possible to sell, and it is impossible to put a price tag on them.”
It was the second time in 10 years that “The Scream” has been stolen. In February 1994, the version on display at Oslo’s National Gallery was taken and remained missing for nearly three months. Police ultimately recovered the work, which is on fragile paper, undamaged in a hotel in Asgardstrand, about 40 miles south of the capital, Oslo. Three Norwegians were arrested.
At the time, investigators said the trio tried to ransom the painting, demanding $1 million from the government. it was never paid.
Munch, a Norwegian painter and graphic artist who worked in Germany as well as his home country, developed an emotionally charged style that was of great importance in the birth of the 20th century Expressionist movement.
He painted “The Scream” in 1893, as part of his “Frieze of Life” series, in which sickness, death, anxiety and love are central themes.
The National Art Museum owns 58 paintings by Munch, who died in 1944 at the age of 81.

Springsteen car imagery in exhibit
NEWARK, N.J. — From Thunder Road to Racing in the Street, in pickups and pink Cadillacs, Bruce Springsteen spent the last 30 years riding shotgun with his fans down life’s highways, dirt roads and dead ends.
On June 17, the Newark Museum opens its first major exhibition dedicated to the poet laureate of the Garden State Parkway, Springsteen: Troubadour of the Highway.
The show includes more than 60 photographs, videos and other memorabilia that explore “the artist’s use of cars and highways as motifs in his music and in related visual imagery,” according to the museum.
With elements that include Annie Liebowitz’s American flag photos for 1984’s Born in the USA cover and copies of a handwritten draft of Springsteen’s Prove It All Night, the show is sure to please fans who otherwise might never set foot in Newark.
“We’re really hoping that this exhibit introduces a whole new generation of New Jerseyans to the Newark Museum,” museum director Mary Sue Sweeney Price said.
But the show is also a serious examination of Springsteen’s automotive imagery, placing him in a tradition of American artists who employed the highway as a metaphor for Americans’ alternately optimistic, restless and rootless spirit.
The show runs through Aug. 29 in Newark, the final leg of a four-city tour that began in September 2002 at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis. Springsteen viewed the show there that year during The Rising tour.
Springsteen fan Colleen Sheehy, the Weisman’s director of education, put the show together over two years after attending an E Street Band reunion concert in 1999. Sheehy, 50, an American studies scholar with roots in the Minneapolis music scene of the 1980s, wrote the title essay in the show’s program, which reads like a fanzine for musicologists.
“In Thunder Road, recorded on his breakthrough 1975 album, Born to Run, the highway is a path to liberation,” she wrote. “When Mary’s screen door slams at the beginning of the song, the car door opens, giving the lovers an escape from a dead-end town.”
By the time of 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad, Sheehy wrote, “the highway promises nothing. It’s illusory, confusing, heartbreaking.”
Sheehy said a contemplative Springsteen didn’t say much while viewing the show in Minneapolis, but then dedicated a song to her while performing that night. “It was a little bit of an out of body experience,” Sheehy said of her time spent with The Boss.
Unique to Newark’s leg of Troubadour of the Highway, the museum attempts to connect Springsteen to his artistic forebears represented in its permanent collection.
Highlighted works in the museum’s Road Map to Picturing America include artist Frank Stella’s eerily incandescent Factories of the Night, a 1929 work that summons the “refinery’s glow” cited in the opening line of Springsteen’s State Trooper.
That Troubadour of the Highway ends its tour in Springsteen’s home state is a lucky accident, said Sheehy. Born in Freehold, N.J., the 54-year-old Springsteen still lives in Monmouth County.
His 1972 debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park, re-created a vintage postcard from the seaside resort where Springsteen has often performed at The Stone Pony.
The city’s crumbling grandeur is a physical embodiment of the failed dreams and faded glories of Springsteen’s subjects; in his song Something in the Night, Springsteen wrote of driving down Asbury’s Kingsley Avenue “just to get a drink.”
Amid exhibition photographs by David Gahr, Joel Bernstein, Frank Stefanko and sibling Pamela Springsteen, a text panel describes Springsteen’s role as New Jersey’s ambassador.
“Springsteen has made the state of New Jersey a richly mythological place,” the panel reads, “raising it from a local landscape to a symbolic realm that people around the world recognize as familiar territory.”
Just like The Boss himself.

Mona Lisa’s Deterioration Causes Concern
PARIS – The Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of the unknown woman with the enigmatic smile, is sparking a new kind of mystery: What is causing the Renaissance masterpiece to deteriorate so quickly?
The thin, poplar panel on which the Mona Lisa is painted in oil has changed shape since conservation experts last evaluated it, the Louvre Museum said. Leonardo’s masterwork ó now nearly 500 years old ó is inspected every one to two years.
The Louvre said the “state of conservation” of the most famous artwork in France’s most famous museum “has aroused some worry.”
The state-run Center for Research and Restoration of Museums of France will conduct a study to better determine what materials the painting is made of and evaluate its vulnerability to temperature changes.
Some seasoned visitors say they have noticed changes.
“We lived in Paris in 1962 and 1963 ó she seemed brighter back then,” said Enid Kushner, 74, a retired lawyer from Cleveland.
First-time visitor Kristy Vander Ploeg, 23, of Toronto, said: “I didn’t expect it to look like that ó it’s a lot more faded than I thought it would be.”
The painting has yellowed from layers of varnish applied over the centuries, but the Louvre has resisted pressure to touch it up. The last real work on the Mona Lisa dates to the mid 1950s, when experts removed several age spots.
The Louvre says the most recent analysis can be done without taking the painting out of the public eye. The Mona Lisa now has its own wall; next year it will get its own room.
For the museum’s crown jewel, little is left to chance: The painting is housed in an air-conditioned glass case, and visitors are held back by a waist-high barrier.
The Mona Lisa is seen each year by nearly all the 6 million people who visit the Louvre. Just last year, it was on the cover of Dan Brown’s best seller, “The Da Vinci Code,” and figured in the plot.
On Monday, as usual, rubbernecking tourists peered at the painting, and camera flashes went off with the speed and frequency of a Paris fashion show.
Louvre spokeswoman Aggy Lerolle said the flash photography ó which is “theoretically forbidden” at the museum ó is not believed to be the cause of the painting’s deterioration.
But some visitors, after hearing about the Mona Lisa’s woes, felt a little guilty for using their flashes.
“It’s our fault, I know,” said Mikhail Kouzmenko, a Moscow executive, after a friend snapped him, smiling, in front of the painting. “It’s bad for the picture, I know.”
Most days, security guards and ushers keep the flow of tourists to a regular pace. Often lines to see the Mona Lisa stretch for dozens of yards.
Experts believe Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa in Italy over a long period beginning about 1505. The identity of the model is not known.
The work is clearly a survivor. During World War II, French authorities hid the painting in small towns to keep it out of the hands of German forces. In 1911, an Italian house painter stole the masterpiece, saying he planned to return it to Italy; it was recovered two years later in Florence and sent back to France.
The admiration that the painting has evoked has been attributed to fascination with Leonardo’s genius; the painting’s stunning realism and technique; the mystery of the Mona Lisa’s identity; and the twists and turns in its history.
Some tourists say the Mona Lisa now is simply feeding off its own fame. And nearly everyone seems to have an opinion about it.
“Her popularity is just based on what has happened over the years,” said Joanne Rosini, 40, an animal trainer from Brooklyn. “It’s really a boring painting, she’s just sitting there.”
Her father-in-law, retired police officer Eugene Rosini, said he finds meaning in the Mona Lisa’s smile.
“It’s a smile to tempt her lover,” he said with a wry grin ó acknowledging that the come-hither look might have worked on him.