Art News - August 13, 2012

By Charles Kessler

Monumental Iron Age statue discovered in Turkey.
The NY Times reports archaeologists in Turkey discovered the top part of a statue of a Neo-Hittite king that's about 3,000 years old and may have been more than 10 feet high.  They say the piece indicates artistic creativity flourished in Iron Age small cities and kingdoms. 

Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay stands near a 3,000-year-old statue of the Hittite king Suppiluliuma.

Lost Raphael Portrait Found.
The Art Newspaper reports Poland’s long lost Raphael, confiscated by the Nazis in 1939 for Hitler's Führermuseum, was recently found in a bank vault.

Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1513-1514, 28 x 22 inches, (from the Czartoryski family collection in Crakow).

LA MoCA Update:
In an interview with the LA Times, MoCA director Jeffrey Deitch denies he "courted celebrity sizzle and populist appeal at the expense of serious scholarship."

Meanwhile, as first reported in Bloomberg News (The LA Times seems to have been cut off from MoCA press releases probably due to Christopher Knight’s criticism), MoCA will be replacing Paul Schimmel as chief curator after all -- IF they raise the money. Deitch will not take over the job himself. 

And on a disturbing note, Eli Broad (above), MoCA's questionable savior, halted promised payments to MoCA. He says they have $2.1 million in grants they haven't put toward exhibitions. Why that has anything to do with his multi-million dollar pledge is beyond me. 

Art Critic Robert Hughes died.

Robert Hughes rose to star status by introducing television audiences to the development of 20th century modernism in The Shock of the New: A Personal View in 1981. (Helmut Newton)

There are several justly laudatory obituaries. Jonathan Jones wrote a heartfelt one for the Guardian here.

Many episodes of his groundbreaking and perceptive television series about modern art can be found on YouTube. Here are the first five:

Episode 1: The Mechanical Paradise  

Episode 2: The Powers that Be
Episode 3: The Landscape of Pleasure
Episode 4: Trouble in Utopia
Episode 5: The Threshold of Liberty

The Philadelphia Weekly asks why so many Philly art galleries are closing.
Travis Heck, director of one of those galleries, Extra Extra, suggests one possibility:  "There was just really no support from larger institutions to get the collectors to the galleries." 

Artists and small art galleries sometimes have an inflated sense of importance and entitlement, but I don't think it's too much to ask larger art institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art to occasionally bring a group of collectors to local art galleries, or to at least find other ways to encourage their members to go to local galleries.

Paula Cooper portrait by Rudolf Stingel based on a 1984 Mapplethorpe photograph.

Interview with legendary art dealer Paula Cooper.
Classy Cooper talks about what Soho was like in the seventies and eighties, and notes some major changes in the art world since then.