Earlier this week, a lone thief wearing a mask broke into the Paris Museum of Modern Art through a window and stole five paintings worth an estimated 100 million euros, or 124 million USD. The paintings included a Picasso, a Matisse, and a Braque. One expert, Alice Farren-Bradley of the Art Loss Registry in London, said the heist “appears to be one of the biggest” ever. This made us curious. Was it? The FBI projects that as much as $6 billion is lost every year to art and culture property crime. Since both art and burglars have been around for as long as we can remember, we decided to take a look at other high-profile art heists throughout history to find out.
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Today at Flavorpill, we cringed when we heard Wal-Mart is plotting a Brooklyn retail foothold and recoiled at the new Shake Shack peanut-butter-and-bacon burger. We perused the list of music video directors who made the jump to the big screen – David Fincher did four videos for Paula Abdul; we had no idea! We geeked over the resemblance of that flying bat photo to Nicolas Poussin’s 1634 painting Rape of the Sabine Women and felt kind of bad for chuckling over In-and-Out Beiber (for the record, no we can’t). We debated over buying a full-color print of a new infographic charting color and culture (click through for larger version). We clipped out Fast Company’s handy checklist for where Apple devices fit into modern life and tried to force our interns to bake 31 flavors of cupcakes. We tapped our toes to a seven-piece ukelele cover of MGMT’s “Kids.” And last but not least, we squealed over the crying portraits taken during Marina Abramović’s performance at MoMA. Read More »
Starting out with a loose rendition of The Last Supper (in which Matisse seems to have painted a sky above Leonardo’s iconic fresco), French-American band Hold Your Horses takes viewers on a head trip through art history in their new video for the track “70 Million.” Janson’s this is not; instead we see members of the band playing instruments in reconstructed paintings from the operating table to the boudoir. Watch the video after the jump and then follow along on the world’s most entertaining art history lesson.
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Julius Shulman, who died this summer at age 98, was the photographer who put California architecture of the 1950s and ’60s on the cultural map. No surprise, then, that Shulman’s own home was a rough gem in the canon of modernist cool. Raphael Soriano designed the 3-bedroom home for Shulman and his first wife Emma at 7875 Woodrow Wilson Drive in Los Angeles. We have no idea what’s considered a reasonable home price in the Hollywood Hills (in fact, our primary source of information on the neighborhood is Lynchian and/or all those Shulman shots of homes from sixty years ago), but $2.5 million doesn’t seem too outlandish for such a well-preserved piece of design history pie. Find out what you get for all that dough, after the jump.
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Could Flemish Baroque painter Jan Brueghel the Elder be the missing link in the mystery of the telescope? The electromagnetically powered magnifying device isn’t attributed to any one person, rather three inventors with ties to refracting telescopes first seen in the Netherlands around 1608. Examination of several large-scale paintings by Breughel, the court painter for the Belgian Habsburg monarch, have revealed the first artistic depiction of a telescope. The catch is, the spyglasses in the Brughel works, assumed to be part of Albert VII’s personal collection, are actually Keplerian telescopes which weren’t invented until two decades later. Or were they?
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In an art history mystery straight from the pages of the latest airport thriller (or perhaps E.L. Konigsberg’s 1977 young adult book), researchers are hunting a lost work by Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci that is assumed to be hidden under a wall in Florence’s city hall. Dr. Maurizio Seracini is following a clue left by another 16th-century painter and mapping every centimeter of a room in the Hall of 500, a ceremonial chamber in the city’s Palazzo Vecchio. Lasers, radar, UV light, and infrared cameras — a modern Leonardo would certainly approve. Read More »
