Modern Art

The word was heard round the world that Edvard Munch's "The Scream" sold at Sotheby's this month for $119.9 million, the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction, but word of who purchased the world's most recognized painting is yet to be heard. The purchaser was described by the auction house as "anonymous," but it could likely be the royal family of Qatar, the tiny oil-rich Persian Gulf state, which was rumored before the May 2 auction to have shown strong interest in the pastel on board expected to bring in excess of $80 million.

A modern art collection, including works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Salvador Dali, will be sold next week in London, Sotheby's said Saturday. The works were collected by German-born photographer Gunter Sachs, best known for his playboy lifestyle and brief marriage to French actress Brigitte Bardot. He committed suicide at the age of 78 in May 2011. Sachs had collected hundreds of art works over his lifetime and was friends with many key artists of the 20th century, including Warhol, Dali and Georges Mathieu.

Michael Taylor, one of the country’s most respected curators of modern art, is moving from the Philadelphia Art Museum to become director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. An expert in Dada and Surrealism, Taylor has organized a wide array of ambitious shows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he began working in 1997. Since 2004 he has served as curator of modern art and department head of modern and contemporary art, and has overseen a substantial number of important acquisitions by the likes of Guston, Gorky, Johns, Kelly, and Kentridge.

The word was heard round the world that Edvard Munch's "The Scream" sold at Sotheby's this month for $119.9 million, the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction, but word of who purchased the world's most recognized painting is yet to be heard. The purchaser was described by the auction house as "anonymous," but it could likely be the royal family of Qatar, the tiny oil-rich Persian Gulf state, which was rumored before the May 2 auction to have shown strong interest in the pastel on board expected to bring in excess of $80 million.

NEW YORK -- William Rubin, who as director of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art played a central role in shaping the museum's collections and exhibitions, has died. Mr. Rubin, whose health had been declining for some time, died at his suburban Pound Ridge home on Sunday, the museum said. He was 78. Mr. Rubin joined the museum in 1967 and was named chief curator of the painting and sculpture collection a year later. Among the many influential exhibitions he organized was a Picasso retrospective in 1980 that filled the entire museum.

New York is sprinkled with barely visible old ads painted on the sides of buildings — remnants of lost eras of urban life. Now, they're making a comeback as a nostalgic art form. Painters known as "walldogs" work on scaffolds, dipping brushes into a lineup of open paint cans. Then come the details, carefully brushed in gleaming color onto walls that are sometimes hundreds of years old. "So it's like, 'Make me a bucket of soup,"' says Art Pastusak, 61, a master mentoring apprentice walldogs.

A modern art collection, including works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Salvador Dali, will be sold next week in London, Sotheby's said Saturday. The works were collected by German-born photographer Gunter Sachs, best known for his playboy lifestyle and brief marriage to French actress Brigitte Bardot. He committed suicide at the age of 78 in May 2011. Sachs had collected hundreds of art works over his lifetime and was friends with many key artists of the 20th century, including Warhol, Dali and Georges Mathieu.

NEW YORK - Dorothea Tanning, a leading Surrealist painter of the 1930s whose path had led her from the small town of Galesburg, Ill., to a whirlwind life in the international art world, died Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 101. Her death was confirmed by Mimi Johnson, a niece. Married for 30 years to Surrealist painter and sculptor Max Ernst, Ms. Tanning became well known in her own right for her vivid renderings of dream imagery. Much later in life, after she had reached 80, she gained a different kind of...

Jerome Liebling, one of the nation's foremost documentary photographers and for many years an influential teacher of photography and film at Hampshire College, died Wednesday at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton. A longtime resident of Amherst, he was 87. The cause of death was bladder cancer. In 2004, Hampshire named its film and photography building the Jerome Liebling Center for Film, Photography, and Video. Mr. Liebling taught at Hampshire from 1970, the year the college opened, to 1990.

HARTFORD ­— The people in many of Andrew Wyeth's paintings look away. We see their backs, the edges of their faces. We cannot look in their eyes. They are small and solitary, and the world beyond them vast and somehow unreachable. You can see it in "Chambered Nautilus," one of a handful of Wyeth's exquisite, gritty tempera paintings in a penetrating show, "Andrew Wyeth: Looking Beyond," now at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The painting, made in 1956, depicts his mother-in-law, Bess James, confined to her bed. She sits up, bony hands wrapped...

New York is sprinkled with barely visible old ads painted on the sides of buildings — remnants of lost eras of urban life. Now, they're making a comeback as a nostalgic art form. Painters known as "walldogs" work on scaffolds, dipping brushes into a lineup of open paint cans. Then come the details, carefully brushed in gleaming color onto walls that are sometimes hundreds of years old. "So it's like, 'Make me a bucket of soup,"' says Art Pastusak, 61, a master mentoring apprentice walldogs.

Edvard Munch's "The Scream" is not, as many assume, a picture of a person mid-scream. Rather, it depicts a person reacting with defensive horror to a scream – "an endless scream passing through nature," as the artist himself put it. Last night at around 8, some people reacted with defensive horror, others with squeals of delight when the last of four versions of "The Scream" still in private hands broke an all-time record for a work of art...

HARTFORD ­— The people in many of Andrew Wyeth's paintings look away. We see their backs, the edges of their faces. We cannot look in their eyes. They are small and solitary, and the world beyond them vast and somehow unreachable. You can see it in "Chambered Nautilus," one of a handful of Wyeth's exquisite, gritty tempera paintings in a penetrating show, "Andrew Wyeth: Looking Beyond," now at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The painting, made in 1956, depicts his mother-in-law, Bess James, confined to her bed. She sits up, bony hands wrapped around...

The New England Quilt Museum is preparing a tribute to the Boston Red Sox and Fenway Park to mark the 100th anniversary of the ballpark's opening. On Thursday, the Lowell museum opens an exhibit of about 30 quilts that portray the players, the park or the game that's been played at Fenway since it opened in April 1912. The museum's Maureen Smith says the quiltmakers are all Red Sox fanatics who wanted to capture some of what's made Fenway special over the last century. The quilts are modern art, and they're made as wall hangings, not bed covers.

BUENOS AIRES - Businesswoman and philanthropist Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat, who built a billion-dollar fortune with her late husband's Argentine cement companies and became a leading art collector, died Saturday, her family said. She was 90. She died in her luxury apartment in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires, "accompanied by her entire family," according to the family's statement. It did not give a cause of death. Mrs. Fortabat became one of Argentina's wealthiest women at age 54, when her second husband, Alfredo Fortabat, 27 years her senior, died in 1976.

NEW YORK - Dorothea Tanning, a leading Surrealist painter of the 1930s whose path had led her from the small town of Galesburg, Ill., to a whirlwind life in the international art world, died Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 101. Her death was confirmed by Mimi Johnson, a niece. Married for 30 years to Surrealist painter and sculptor Max Ernst, Ms. Tanning became well known in her own right for her vivid renderings of dream imagery. Much later in life, after she had reached 80, she gained a different kind of attention when...

Murdock Pemberton wrote tens of thousands of words for The New Yorker in the 1920s and '30s. He was the magazine's first art critic, and thus the first in a line of classy, independent-minded writers of high repute, from Harold Rosenberg to Adam Gopnik and Peter Schjeldahl. Pemberton - perhaps to his advantage - had no training in art. He was a journalist, press agent, publicist, and self-described "Sunday painter. " In those days, the magazine he wrote for had little time for art, reflecting the tastes of its founding editor, Harold Ross.

Former state senator John "Jack" Fitzpatrick of Stockbridge and his wife, Jane, founded the nation's first mail-order curtain company on their dining room table in the 1950s. With the help of ruffled unbleached cotton muslin, they built Country Curtains into a small empire of Berkshires companies, including the Red Lion Inn on Main Street in Stockbridge. It was slated to make way for a gas station when the Fitzpatricks bought it in 1968. They later became renowned supporters of the arts and education in Western Massachusetts.

Murdock Pemberton wrote tens of thousands of words for The New Yorker in the 1920s and '30s. He was the magazine's first art critic, and thus the first in a line of classy, independent-minded writers of high repute, from Harold Rosenberg to Adam Gopnik and Peter Schjeldahl. Pemberton - perhaps to his advantage - had no training in art. He was a journalist, press agent, publicist, and self-described "Sunday painter. " In those days, the magazine he wrote for had little time for art, reflecting the tastes of its founding editor, Harold Ross.