1. Brits Fight for Arts Funding
British art-world heavyweights have begun a letter-writing campaign to the government protesting proposed budget cuts for arts funding. Famous patrons like Lord Stevenson argue that philanthropic gifts cannot replace government funds; gallery directors plead for a 10 percent, rather than 25 percent, cut.

Our take: Cutting funding for an industry that yields at least 2 euro for every 1 euro invested isn't just desperate-it's bad business.  
[The Guardian]

2. Medici Cold Case: Solved!
Scientists concluded that Francesco de Medici and his wife Bianca were not poisoned to death, as drama-loving art historians previously believed. After exhuming the bodies of the nearly 400-year-old art patrons in Florence, researchers confirmed the two died of malaria.

Our take: All this anthropological art news is fascinating, but it makes us wonder what Italian scientists could innovate if they weren't picking at the bones of dead Renaissance figures all day.
[Discovery News]

3. Rem Koolhaas to Receive Golden Lion
The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas-famous for creating buildings that evoke the sentiment, "The future is now"-will receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice.

Our take: The man has been one of Time's 100 Most Influential People and he was knighted into an order established by Napoleon Bonaparte. A Golden Lion just seems logical.

4. Picasso and Chagall Forgery Ring Busted in France
Twelve men involved in a French forgery ring were imprisoned and fined up to $1.2 million for trafficking over 100 fake versions Picasso and Chagall paintings between 1997 and 2005. They approached buyers as down-on-their-luck heirs in need of fast cash.

Our take: Attention, Russia: This is what an art crime looks like! (Clarification: It's not curating a show that includes Jesus with a Mickey Mouse head.)
[AFP]

5. Art World on the Move
More than six galleries will move to new, expanded locations this fall, including two of Chelsea's most prominent galleries, Lombard-Fried and Zach Feuer. Gallerists cite a number of reasons for the geographical shuffle, like low commercial real estate prices, marketing, and increased appeal to artists.
 
Our take: Some say mid-priced galleries are still struggling and paying for their expansions out of savings. It's unclear whether those investments will actually pay off.
[NYO]
 
6. Egon Schiele Restitution Dispute Resolved
After more than a decade of complicated legal action, the Leopold Museum in Vienna agreed to pay $19 million to buy an Egon Schiele painting from the heirs of a Jewish gallery owner from whom the Nazis stole the work in 1938. The painting was seized by the US government while on loan to MoMA in 1997 and held for the duration of the dispute.

Our take: The fact that the dispute took ten years to work out means the only ones really winning here are the organizations' lawyers.
[NYT]

7. Christie's Founds New Art Fair
Christie's will sponsor a fair devoted to contemporary prints, editions, and photographs during the week of London's Frieze Fair in October.  The fair will model itself after the annual Editions/Artists' Book Fair in New York.

Our take: Although the idea of yet another art fair is daunting, Chistie's smartly identified a gap in Frieze's programming and a good opportunity. 
[Bloomberg]

8. Rodarte Collaborates with Catherine Opie on Art Book
The sisters behind the fashion label Rodarte have invited artists such as Catherine Opie and Gregory Krum to interpret their designs through photography for the book "Rodarte: Mondo Rodarte," due out in November.

Our take: The "art-as-side-project" trend hits a new high. (Celebrity fashion lines: out. Fashion fine art projects: in.)
[Artinfo]

9. Aspen Gallerists Accused of Unethical Practices
Several Aspen art galleries were accused of unethical business practices, such as selling slightly altered imitations of work by established local artists signed with fake names and manipulating the market by selling works at a 70 percent discount. So far, the gallerists have been cleared of any wrongdoing; federal prosecutors declined to pursue the case, citing a lack of evidence.

Our take: The story is a case study of the effects of pricing on the art market as a whole. What the gallerists are doing may not be illegal, but it's definitely cheating.
[Aspen Daily News]

10. Art Market on the Rise
According to a survey released by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, art prices are rising in all sectors of the market except ceramics. Price increases in the $75,000-plus bracket doubled in the second quarter of 2010, compared with the first three months of the year.

Our take: Any market recovery is a good thing, but lower to mid-price segments of the market may still be looking at a rough road ahead.
[BBC]

subject of an important exhibition at the Jewish Museum, almost every reader of

this column is likely to have an opinion. Chagall was not only famous in his

time but remains popular today. His work is now as familiar to us as that of

Picasso and Matisse, and he lived longer than both. He wasn't much given to

shunning the limelight, either; he courted attention, and received it in large

measures.

In his later years, moreover, he was lavished with

commissions for murals and other ambitious decorative projects that made him an

international celebrity. These ranged from the Metropolitan Opera and the

United Nations in New York to the First National Bank in Chicago, to the

Knesset in Jerusalem, the Paris Opera and a couple of cathedrals in France. It

was no wonder that when he died in 1985 at 97, the front-page headline in The New York Times declared him to be

"One of Modern Art's Giants."

This is anything but a universal view of Chagall's

achievement today. For some of us, he is a decidedly more equivocal figure-an

artist of high accomplishment, to be sure, but one whose genius had in most

respects expired long before the man himself. For critics of this persuasion,

it has often been a tiresome chore to distinguish the quality in Chagall's

copious oeuvre from the quantities of

sentimental dross he also produced with such effortless facility. The dismal

murals he created for the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center are only

the most familiar of the many projects that proved to be damaging to his

reputation as an artist.

Whatever our critical judgment of Chagall may be, however,

there can be no question but that the exhibition which has now been organized

at the Jewish Museum is essential to any serious understanding of the man and

his work. For this exhibition of Marc

Chagall: Early Works from Russian Collections recalls us to a stubborn

fact: that until 1922, when Chagall was 35 and had already produced the bulk of

the work that is likely to retain a place among the classics of 20th-century

art, he had spent a total of less than four years outside his native Russia.

This is not to minimize his life as a Jew under the Czarist

regime or the specifically Hasidic influence on the kind of imagination that

Chagall brought to his work. About both of these subjects the curator of the

exhibition, Susan Tumarkin Goodman, provides an illuminating account in the

excellent catalog of the show. Yet as another contributor to the catalog,

Evgenia Petrova, reminds us: "Before 1930, no one who wrote about Chagall or

exhibited his works in museums and exhibitions ever separated him from Russia."

It was in Russia that Chagall became an artist. It was under

Russian teachers (two of them Jews) who had themselves been trained at the

Imperial Academy of Art in St. Petersburg-Yehuda Pen, Leon Bakst (originally

Lev Rosenberg) and Nikolai Roerich-that Chagall received his own training. And

it was in Russia that he acquired his first patron, whose support enabled Chagall

to establish his first period of residence in Paris (1910-14).

"During the spring of 1910," writes Ms. Goodman, "Chagall's

foremost teacher, Leon Bakst, left St. Petersburg for Paris to join Sergei

Diaghilev's ballet company. Chagall also felt the desire to visit the art

capital of Europe. In exchange for a single painting and one drawing, his

patron, Maxim Vinaver, offered Chagall a stipend that enabled him to spend

almost four years in Paris. And it was here, in the years before World War I,

that he developed his unique style." It was thus in Paris that Chagall became a

Russian modernist.

For even at this pivotal

turn in Chagall's development, he tended to frequent a distinctly Russian

milieu. He was particularly close to the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars, who had

lived in St. Petersburg for three years (1904-7) and spoke Russian. So did the

woman Cendrars married, Féla Poznanska, to whom Chagall was also close. He was

drawn into the circle of Sonia Delaunay, who was Russian, and her husband

Robert Delaunay-probably the most important single influence on Chagall's

painting in this Paris period. In the studio building-the legendary La

Ruche-where Chagall lived for a time, there were many Russians in residence,

not all of them painters. One of them was the writer A.V. Lunacharsky, who, as

Lenin's first Commissar of Education, subsequently appointed Chagall to the

position of Commissar of Art in his hometown of Vitebsk.

Over the last two decades or so, there have been a number of

exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic that examined certain aspects of

Chagall's early artistic development. As recently as 1992, the Solomon R.

Guggenheim Museum exhibited the murals that Chagall created for the State

Jewish Chamber Theater in Moscow in 1920, the first and certainly the finest of

all Chagall's mural projects, and these are once again included in the current

show at the Jewish Museum. Yet everything else in this exhibition of Early Works from Russian Collections ,

which covers the years 1908-20, is being exhibited in this country for the

first time, and it gives us an uncommonly close look both at an uncommonly

precocious talent in its early stages of development and then, in the last two

galleries of the show, at the first flowering of a modern master.

The show also gives us a

look at something else we haven't seen before: the paintings of Chagall's first

teacher, Yehuda Pen, a highly accomplished academic realist who specialized in

Jewish subjects. (Among Pen's other students, by the way, were El Lissitzky and

Ossip Zadkine.) Nothing could be further from Chagall's gift for poetic

invention in painting than Pen's meticulously prosaic attention to detail in

his portraits and landscapes. Yet he was obviously an inspired teacher who gave

Chagall (among much else) the courage and the means to pursue his artistic

dreams.

It is interesting to note, moreover, that from the outset

Chagall was never himself a realist. The gift for fantasy, caricature and the

folkloric is in evidence from the beginning, though not a command of the

complex pictorial structures that elevate Chagall's best painting to a higher

level of accomplishment. That had to wait for Chagall's encounter with Cubist

form and Fauvist color in Paris.

It is thus in the

next-to-last gallery of the exhibition that we encounter Chagall as a modernist

master for the first time-and, alas, almost for the last time. Except for the

murals he created for the Jewish Theater in Moscow during his Soviet period,

Chagall was never again to produce masterworks on the order of Over the Town , The Promenade , The Apparition

and Jew in Bright Red (all dating

from the war years 1914-18 in Russia). This was an amazing period for any

artist to live through, with the outbreak of war in 1914 and revolution in

1917, and yet the paintings Chagall produced during this period of violent

upheaval are among the most assured and, in the case of the pictures of the

artist and his bride-he married his sweetheart in 1915-the happiest he ever

made. Only a mind like Chagall's, which gave priority to fantasy and dream over

the harshest realities of history, could have produced such happy paintings in

the midst of such widespread carnage.

The murals for the Jewish Theater are far more somber, and

the largest of them, the Introduction to

the Jewish Theater (1920), is the only work of Chagall's that even

obliquely reflects the influence of the artist who became Chagall's principal

antagonist during his Soviet period, Kazimir Malevich. In the soft-edged arcs,

circles and other geometrical forms in this vast mural, Malevich's Suprematist

abstraction is itself rendered as a kind of dreamscape. One can only wonder how

conscious Chagall was of this influence on the mural, for he otherwise loathed

everything about Malevich and his ideas.

For these and other reasons, Marc Chagall: Early Works from Russian Collections has an

interesting story to tell, and it remains on view at the Jewish Museum, Fifth

Avenue at 92nd Street, through Oct. 14.

Given this outsize personality and the many stories about it that circulated in the art world in the days when it was not uncommon to encounter Kaldis on 57th Street or at the downtown Artists Club or at some gallery opening, it was often a shock for people to discover that the man's paintings were beautifully executed landscapes in a lyric mode. One hardly expected such a commanding pastoral style, all delicacy and nuance and romance, from the Falstaffian character that had been met on the street or at some art-world event. Where the public Kaldis seemed all but consumed in rhetoric and bluster, the painter had all the while been engaged in a highly poetic pursuit.

Some of the results of these highly poetic endeavors can currently be seen in two exhibitions: Kaldis Rediscovered: Paintings, 1941-1977 , at Lori Bookstein Fine Art; and Aristodimos Kaldis: Monumental Late Paintings, 1974-1977 , at the Foundation for Hellenic Culture. Together these two exhibitions offer 28 paintings that trace the artist's development from 1941, the year of his first solo exhibition in New York, to 1977.

I hadn't, before now, seen any of Kaldis' earlier paintings, of which there are several fine examples in the Lori Bookstein exhibition. Aegean Village (1941) gives us a more literal, more innocent, almost folkloric account of a subject that came to dominate Kaldis' imagination: the Greek landscape. The really pivotal picture in the Bookstein show is, however, the extraordinary Panhellenic Landscape (1951), in which the panoramic view of mountains and villages acquires the kind of painterly turbulence and lyric intensity that would form the foundation of all the artist's later work.

Many of the later paintings are sparer-more "abstract," if you like-in their account of the Greek landscape, and a lot freer in giving priority to the legendary white light of the artist's subject. Under the pressure of that light, color too becomes more luminous, less equivocal, more forthright in feeling. Yet everything in the later paintings seems to derive from that Panhellenic Landscape of 1951, which is surely one of the best American paintings of its period.

Who, then, was Aristodimos Kaldis? He was Greek, of course, born on the eastern coast of the Aegean between Pergamon and Troy. He immigrated to this country at 17, living first in Boston before settling in New York in 1930. Amazingly, he did not become a full-time painter until the late 30's. Yet, when the Poindexter Gallery in New York organized an exhibition called The Thirties in 1956, Kaldis was included in the company of Stuart Davis, John Graham, Willem de Kooning, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko. He seems from the outset to have been recognized as a significant talent by his fellow artists and in 1978 a group of 100 painters petitioned the Whitney Museum for a Kaldis exhibition. Needless to say, the Whitney's response was negative.

One of Kaldis' great advantages as a painter was that he was in thrall to a subject-the Greek landscape of his boyhood and youth-that never ceased to fire his imagination. Another advantage was his ability to respond to the changes that were occurring in American painting during the earliest years of his development-the changes that in the 1940's and early 50's produced the New York School. That he was also able to harness the expressive freedom of the New York School to the poetic subject that continued to dominate his imaginative life was a remarkable feat-and that, too, earned him the high esteem of his contemporaries.

Lest it seem odd that an American painter of Kaldis' generation should devote the bulk of his oeuvre to memories of a foreign landscape, it is worth recalling that Arshile Gorky did much the same thing in his late paintings, which are crowded with evocations of his Armenian childhood. But the parallel that I am especially reminded of in Kaldis' case is that of Marc Chagall, who produced in Paris in the early years of this century the wonderful paintings based on the village life of Vitebsk in his native Russia. It was indeed when Chagall strayed from that cherished subject that much about his art went wrong. In Kaldis' case, his cherished subject yielded him deeper and richer rewards as he grew older.

Kaldis Rediscovered: Paintings, 1941-1977 remains on view at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, 50 East 78th Street, through July 14. Aristodimos Kaldis: Monumental Late Paintings, 1974-1977 is on view at the Foundation for Hellenic Culture, 7 West 57th Street, through Aug. 29.