Art Kaleidoscope Foundation
Louise Bourgeois, who is now 96, in "Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine."

From an art historical perspective, the work of Louise Bourgeois effects a startling synthesis of traditions. In the 1930s Ms. Bourgeois fell in with the Paris Surrealists, and their touch (totemic, irrational, biomorphic, uncanny) can be felt on her sculptures, installations and drawings to this day. Other Modernist influences — the elemental rigor of Brancusi, the archaic vigor of Picasso — fused, in the postwar era, with her experiments in unorthodox materials and techniques (fabrics, knitting) and disquieting new forms (distorted anatomies, giant spiders) in sync with emerging ideas of the body, gender and sexuality.

A true (and sometimes terrifying) original, Ms. Bourgeois, now 96, is more than the sum of her parts. The uncommonly elegant and evocative portrait “Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine” reveals much about this haunting and haunted master while leaving intact what Georges Braque once wrote was the only thing that mattered in art: the thing you cannot explain.

At Ms. Bourgeois’s Brooklyn studio, the filmmakers Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach attend to her rambling, entrancing ruminations on the archetype of “the runaway girl”; the necessity of silence; and the power of fear and the primacy of memory in her work — of the mangled bodies of World War I veterans, of her mother twisting fabrics in a stream, of abandonment, of dreams.

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Richard Misrach
Untitled 1132-04 [Flippers], 2004
chromogenic print
Collection of the Artist.

For more than thirty years, the American photographer Richard Misrach (b. 1949) has made provocative work that addresses contemporary society's relationship to nature, especially the American West. Since 2001, he has made a series of large scale (six by ten feet), lushly colored photographs of swimmers and sunbathers in Hawaii.

Looking down from a hotel room directly adjacent to the beach, he has eliminated all references to the horizon and sky to record people immersed in the idyllic environment. Yet, despite the beauty of the scene, a strange sense of disquietude pervades these photographs.

Made in the days immediately after September 11, 2001, these photographs speak of the unease and sense of foreboding that pervaded the country after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The title of the series, On the Beach, is drawn from Nevil Shute's cold war novel about nuclear holocaust. This exhibition will present 19 of these photographs.

According to Bloomberg.com -- The Russian government will spend more than 4 billion rubles ($170 million) to expand and modernize the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the museum's director said.

The Pushkin Museum is Moscow's leading collection of Western European art, and owns about 650,000 items. It attracts about 1 million visitors a year, and has one of the finest collections of French Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, with major works by Matisse, Monet, Picasso, and Van Gogh.

The museum has the backing of the Foundation for Support of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, a private organization headed by Dmitry Medvedev until he became President of Russia in May.

``President Medvedev has been deeply involved in getting this support, for which we are very grateful,'' Irina Antonova, the museum's director, said in an interview. The money, given over three years, ``will help us expand and reconstruct the museum as part of plans to mark our centenary in 2012.''

In November, the museum approved plans by U.K. architect Norman Foster to add 110,000 square meters (1.2 million square feet) to the museum's current 40,000 square meters. The Pushkin aims to mark its centenary in 2012 with four new buildings on adjacent land within sight of the Kremlin, and the renovation of several decrepit czarist-era structures.

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Damien Hirst may not have bought Francis Bacon's $86 million (£44 million) triptych in New York last week, as some at first thought, but he did acquire Jeff Koons's stainless-steel sculpture Jim Beam-Box Car at Christie's for $1.9 million.

Artist Damien Hirst (left) has bought a Jeff Koons.

This may be linked to Hirst's reformed attitude to drinking. The car is filled with a fifth of bourbon, but sealed. "You can drink the bourbon," said Koons in a 1992 statement, "but if you break the seal you destroy the soul of the piece."

The three paintings by Bacon sold in New York last week totalled $119 million, making him the highest-grossing artist of the week, outstripping Andy Warhol, who came in second with $110 million for 56 works.

• Do New Yorkers have something against Banksy? At Sotheby's last week, there were cheers when the British graffiti artist's painting Sale Ends Today, estimated to fetch $600,000, failed to sell.

• A former cartoonist and graphic designer for film directors Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg had a spirited opening of his latest paintings at the Catto Gallery in north London on Sunday.

advertisementAlain Bertrand has made a series of photorealist paintings of jazz musicians and Fifties American cars. Thirteen of the paintings were swiftly sold for prices of up to £20,000 each, and several commissions were received from proud owners of vintage automobiles.

• The three Ds (death, debt and divorce) have always been important factors in the supply chain for auctions, and this week come into the spotlight when Sotheby's offers one of Edward Hicks's many versions of his American folk-art icon, The Peaceable Kingdom, with an estimate of $6 million to $8 million.

The painting belongs to beleaguered jeweller Ralph O Esmerian, who used art and jewellery as collateral to buy a jewellery business in 2005. He now reportedly owes Sotheby's $11.5 million and Christie's $7.5 million.

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According to ASMARA (Reuters) - When Italian architect Giuseppe Pettazzi inaugurated Eritrea's plane-shaped "Fiat Tagliero" service station in 1938, he stunned onlookers by pulling out a gun.

There, the story behind Africa's finest piece of Futurist architecture goes hazy.

In one version, Pettazzi stood defiantly on one of his 18-metre (59 ft) concrete "wings" -- used as decorative shades for cars entering the garage -- and threatened to kill himself should the structure collapse as wooden supports were pulled away.

In another, the excitable architect held the gun to the head of a disbelieving builder, who had hesitated to pull away the struts for fear the long slabs would tumble down.

Either way, the wings stayed up, nobody was shot, and Pettazzi's design skills were vindicated.

Seven decades on, this extraordinary piece of Italian Art Deco, which resembles a plane at takeoff, is still standing in Asmara, the central capital of this former Italian colony.

The "Fiat Tagliero", named for the car firm and the old gas station's owner, is one of 400 buildings that make the remote Eritrean capital one of the world's most fascinating centres for Art Deco and other architectural styles.

One of a tiny number of books on the subject -- "Africa's Secret Modernist City" by three Asmara-based writers -- calls Asmara "the Miami of Africa" in reference to the U.S. city's fame for Art Deco, a design in the Modernism trend known for stylish geometric shapes, bold curves and soft colours.

"The Italians felt they would be here for hundreds of years, so they built and built, and left us this remarkable legacy," said Samson Haile Theophilos, who has written about Eritrean architecture, as he purred lovingly over the Fiat building.

"But I want to stress the workers, skilled and unskilled, were all Eritrean, so we consider this architecture ours."

Asmara's Art Deco boom came during 1935-41, the last six years of Italian colonial rule of the vast Horn of Africa region then known as Abyssinia.

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