Chateau dubbed mini-Versailles partially destroyed by fire
Fri Jan 3, 1:19 PM ET
By MARIE-FRANCE BEZZINA, Associated Press Writer
LUNEVILLE, France - An overnight fire swept through an 18th-century chateau in northeast France built to resemble Versailles, destroying part of the elegant structure and many of the treasures it housed. The south wing of the chateau known as "the little Versailles of the Lorraine," about 30 kilometers (20 miles) from Nancy, was gutted by a fire that erupted Thursday evening, firefighters said. It took more than four hours for the blaze to be brought under control, a task made more difficult by strong winds whipping the region. However, the fire remained confined to the chateau, and a nearby theater, newly renovated, remained untouched. A military museum in the south wing and part of valuable collection of Luneville earthenware, antique furniture and other treasures were destroyed, authorities said. "When I saw the south wing burning and the museum disappearing, I felt a violent shock," said Michel Closse, the mayor of Luneville, a town of 25,000. As smoke drifted from the chateau, residents gathered behind police barriers that blocked access to the site, some wiping away tears. Set amid French gardens, the chateau — an immense mansion patterned after the world-famous Versailles palace outside Paris — is classified as a historic monument and houses a tourism office, a museum and a chapel.
The cause of the fire, which appeared to have originated in the chapel roof, was under investigation. The chateau was built by architect Germain Boffrand and was home to the Duke of Lorraine, the father-in-law of Louis XV. Culture Minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon visited the site Friday and pledged financial aid after touring some of the wing's charred rooms. Only the outside walls, blackened by smoke and flames, remained standing.
Art reproduction scandal has Botero in blue funk
BY TIMOTHY PRATT Special to The Herald
Colombian artist Fernando Botero, according to biographer Ana Maria Escallon, is one of the most widely exhibited artists alive. But Botero could borrow Rodney Dangerfield's phrase when it comes to his homeland: he can't get no respect. Two events -- one of them with a South Florida link -- in the past few months have cooled the artist's love-hate relationship with the country of his birth, at least for now. The local incident involves unauthorized reproductions from Botero's paintings for sale in South Florida and elsewhere in the United States. The reproductions are of works in the Museum of Antioquia in his hometown of Medellín, part of a donation the artist made to Colombia in 2000 that is worth an estimated $200 million. When news of their sale by a Boca Raton-based firm reached Botero at his home in France, he was furious. His subsequent angry phone calls to the museum and an interview with a Miami-based reporter working for a Colombian newsweekly have stirred a tempest even in Bogotá's Congress. ''Colombia hasn't treated me very well,'' Botero deadpans in Spanish over the phone from Paris in his signature sing-song accent. ''But when it's your country, it's your country,'' he continues. ``You know, I walk the streets of Paris, and I admire them. But when I come to a street in Colombia, it's ugly and all, but I love it.'' Still, the reproductions popping up from Florida to New York raised his ire, he says. ``You can't imagine the damage caused by the cheapening of an artist's work.''
As for the museum, he holds it responsible. Says Botero: ``I gave them my hand and they took an arm.''
http://www.miami.com/
Van Gogh painting prank hitch ends in arrests
January 03 2003 at 07:06AM Amsterdam -
Dutch police have arrested two men suspected of trying to extort money from the Van Gogh Museum following the theft of two works in December. Among the works stolen was the first painting by the Dutch impressionist master, Amsterdam police said on Thursday. "We arrested two men on New Year's Day who contacted the Van Gogh Museum demanding a substantial sum of money for the return of the two paintings stolen on December 7, 2002," said police officials. Police had investigated the matter and did not believe the pair had actually stolen the two Van Gogh works. 'It was meant to be funny, but the prank definitely went bad' A spokesperson for the two suspects said the extortion attempt was a New Year's joke gone bad. "It was meant to be funny, but the prank definitely went bad," the spokesperson explained. The two men are apparently members of a group of 15 from the northern province of Groningen who each year think of a New Year's prank in order to make headlines in the Netherlands. This time they wrote a letter to the museum demanding a ransom of about R420 000 for the stolen paintings. The thieves apparently used a ladder and a rope to make off with the two works from the heavily-secured museum. Van Gogh's early masterpieces - the 1882 View Of The Sea At Scheveningen and the 1884 Congregation Leaving The Reformed Church In Nuenen - were taken and had not been found despite a massive police hunt. Because Van Gogh's paintings are so well known, it has been virtually impossible to put a market value on the uninsured works, although one of his paintings - Portrait Of Doctor Gachet - sold at a New York auction in 1990 for what remains the world record of $82,5-million (about R714-million). The sea view piece is the first painting ever by the Dutch artist, who lived between 1853 and 1890, while the congregation of the reformed church was dedicated to his mother. His father was the minister in Nuenen. - Sapa-AFP
Iraq's Cultural Capital
With war in Iraq looming, many in the art historical world are worried about what might be damaged or destroyed
By DEBORAH SOLOMON
The ancient kingdom of Mesopotamia, which flourished in the region that became Iraq, is what textbooks like to call the birthplace of urban civilization. The Mesopotamians were the first to record their thoughts in writing, the first to divide the day into 24 hours, the first to eat off ceramic plates. Iraq is home to some of the most important landmarks of the Judeo-Christian tradition, including the reputed Garden of Eden and Ur, the birthplace of the patriarch Abraham. The area had a second flowering in the Middle Ages, when it became a capital of the Islamic world and mosques sprang up everywhere. With war in Iraq looming, many in the art historical world are worried about what might be damaged or destroyed. Here are some of the country's most significant sites.
The Arch at Ctesiphon. This hundred-foot arch on the outskirts of Baghdad is one of the tallest brick vaults in the world. A fragment of a 1,400-year-old royal palace, it was damaged during the gulf war. Scholars warn that its collapse is increasingly likely.
Baghdad. Site of the National Museum of Iraq, which has the world's pre-eminent collection of Mesopotamian antiquities, including a 4,000- year-old silver harp from Ur and thousands of clay tablets. Nineveh. The third capital of Assyria. It is mentioned in the Bible as a city whose people live in sin. A whalebone hangs in the mosque on Nebi Yunis, said to be a relic from the adventures of Jonah and the whale.
Nimrud. Home of the Assyrian royal palace, whose walls cracked during the gulf war, and of the tombs of Assyrian queens and princesses, discovered in 1989 and widely considered the most significant tombs since King Tut's.
Samarra. Major Islamic site and religious center 70 miles north of Baghdad, very close to a main Iraqi chemical research complex and production plant. Home to a stunning ninth-century mosque and minaret that were hit by allied bombers in 1991. Erbil. Ancient town, continuously inhabited for more than 5,000 years. It has a high ''tell,'' an archaeological marvel consisting of layered towns that were built one on top of the other over thousands of years.
Nippur. Major religious center of the south, well stocked with Sumerian and Babylonian temples. It is fairly isolated and thus less vulnerable to bombs than other towns.
Ur. Supposedly the world's first city. Peaked around 3500 B.C. Ur is mentioned passingly in the Bible as the birthplace of the patriarch Abraham. Its fantastic temple, or ziggurat, was damaged by allied troops during the gulf war, which left four massive bomb craters in the ground and some 400 bullet holes in the walls of the city. Basra Al-Qurna. Here, a gnarled old tree, supposedly Adam's, stands on the supposed Garden of Eden.
UrUk. Another Sumerian city. Some scholars say it is older than Ur, dating to at least 4000 B.C. Local Sumerians invented writing here in 3500 B.C.
Babylon. The city reached the height of its splendor during the reign of Hammurabi, around 1750 B.C., when he developed one of the great legal codes. Babylon is only six miles from Iraq's Hilla chemical arsenal.
Karbala. About 60 miles south of Baghdad, the Karbala Shia shrine to Husein, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, is the most famous of Iraq's sacred attractions. It lies near a chemical-weapons plant and a missile range that were bombed in 1991.
http://www.nytimes.com/
In Baghdad, art thrives as war hovers
Iraq remains a Mideast force in painting, sculpture and poetry
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer
Baghdad -- Thick with cigarette smoke, the scene at the Hewar Art Gallery has a familiar feel.
Long-haired artists with goatees and three-day stubble. Elegant women with distracted eyes and languid hauteur. Highbrow bohemians gossiping and glancing at the latest paintings and sculptures. The discreet clinking of coffee cups. For a while, at least, in this nondescript middle-class neighborhood of eastern Baghdad, you can imagine being closer to Berlin, Paris or New York, unencumbered temporarily by the deprivation, oppression and fear that haunt the country. You also are in the presence of some of the Mideast's most prized artworks - - from abstract oil painting to powerfully gaunt bronze sculpture to quasi- primitivist assemblage. The Hewar probably has Iraq's hippest arts scene, but the gallery is not as unusual as it appears. While the country is increasingly coming under siege, dozens of galleries have sprouted up in Baghdad. Iraqi painting and sculpture have become a thriving, if clandestine, export industry, filling museums and private collections throughout the Mideast and even Europe. The theater also is booming, and even the nation's beleaguered symphony orchestra is drawing packed crowds. All of this despite -- or in deliberate obliviousness to -- the country's harsh dictatorship and the prospect of another potentially devastating war. Notable in its almost complete absence from the galleries and museums is any representation of this nation's recent history: the deaths of millions in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 and the 1991 Gulf War, the international sanctions and the privations of dictatorship. While Iraq has had more than its fill of pain, violence, loss and sorrow, little of it registers in the country's artwork. For Baghdad's cultural elite, however, this is not simple escapism. It is a deliberate rejection of the mundane, they insist.
NOT JUST 'WAR OR OIL
' "We are not just a country of war or oil," said Qasim Alsabti, a painter who runs Hewar with his wife, Iman Al-Showg, a prominent sculptor. "We are a proud culture that goes back 6,000 years to the Sumerians. We have been making art for longer than anyone. This is what gives us identity. This is what will make our art last another 1,000 years, when all this war is forgotten." Some visitors also might expect Iraqi art to be imbued with a Stalinist socialist realism typical of a totalitarian dictatorship. But apart from the omnipresent government-sponsored paintings and statues of President Saddam Hussein, Iraqi art displays a sometimes refreshing, if eerie, independence.
HUSSEIN A NOVELIST
Hussein himself is believed to have written three novels in recent years under pen names -- works viewed by most non- Iraqi critics as amateurish and forgettable. He apparently sees himself as a patron of the arts and has given strict instructions to the nation's cultural authorities to avoid dogmatism. "The last time anything deliberately political happened was in the 1980s, when an artist made paintings with the blood of soldiers who were fighting in the war against Iran," said an official in the Ministry of Culture, who asked to remain anonymous. "It was horrible, just the thought of it, and that sort of thing was not encouraged." Of course, painting with blood might seem like a natural for some Western artists, for the shock value alone. For the Iraqi literati, however, it is merely retrograde. "We have to forget the black side of life," said Reem Kubaa, a poet, as she sat with the Alsabtis and a group of friends one recent afternoon, sharing a masgouf, or traditional Iraqi fish fry, in Hewar's leafy courtyard. "If our art is black, that means we are stopped. We are not doing our job as artists." When a visitor remarks that Iraqi artists might have ample inspiration to produce a latter-day "Guernica," -- Picasso's anguished masterpiece on the Spanish Civil War -- Kubaa snapped back: "Times have changed. It's very important for us to not cry over spilt milk. We have to prove to the world that we are a culture. We are greater than our suffering."
PAINTING, SCULPTURE, POETRY
Although Iraq has never been known in the Mideast for producing high- quality fiction or film -- fields that are dominated by Egypt and Iran -- it is viewed as the region's leader in painting, sculpture and poetry. In these fields, Iraqi artists reached their modern-day zenith in the 1950s and 1960s, then declined in the 1980s and finally revived in the 1990s. Although the international economic sanctions on Iraq have reduced artists' contacts with the outside world, many say their influences are eclectic. When asked which foreign artworks have influenced his work, sculptor Ahmed Al-Safi mentioned the Popol Vuh, the epic poem of Central America's Mayan Indians, as well as Italian sculptor Alberto Giacometti, the ancient Sumerians and Irish singer Enya. Al-Safi's bronze sculptures are among the most socially conscious -- thin figures walking in hoops, never going anywhere, always solitary, imbued with what Al-Safi calls "a lack of hope." However, some of the artistic choices stem from simple market economics. With the Iraqi economy in shambles, many artists depend on the tastes of foreign buyers. Haider Wady, a sculptor who, along with Al-Safi, is a leader in Iraq's new generation of artists in their 20s and 30s, admits that "nearly all" of his clients are foreigners -- either diplomats and aid workers living in Baghdad or people who buy his works when he shows them at exhibitions in Amman, Damascus and Cairo. "We are selling for an international audience. We have to go farther than Iraq, farther than our small problems," he said.
BOOM TIMES FOR ACTORS
There also has been a boom in domestic art appreciation, in part because imported entertainment has become harder to get. Since 1990, when U.N. sanctions were imposed, nearly all foreign movies have been unavailable. As a result, most of Baghdad's cinemas have been converted to stage theater. Now, with about 30 theaters producing everything from slapstick burlesque to serious drama, times have never been better for Iraqi actors. Government largesse also has helped. The Ministry of Culture gives handsome salaries to many artists and actors -- even those who have yet to achieve prominence, said Mais Kumer, lead actress in a long- running Baghdad stage comedy, "I Saw It With My Own Eyes," and a prominent figure on state-run television. Kumer's play, which mixes slapstick with high melodrama, is an example of how political content increases as one descends the artistic ladder toward mass taste. "I Saw It With My Own Eyes" tells of Martians who arrive on Earth to warn the oblivious, happy-go-lucky Earthlings that an evil empire named America is plotting to wage nuclear war and enslave the world. And when asked about political boundaries -- for example, whether Hussein is off-limits as a target for jokes -- Kumer answered in a way that suggested how deep the roots of authority penetrate, even among artists. "There's no reason to ever criticize the president, of course," she said. "But he met with us several weeks ago, and he told us that nothing is off- limits, not even government ministers. He told us to be artists, to be comedians, to say what we want to say and not worry about the consequences. But yes, there are two things we never criticize -- teachers and parents." Asked why those are sacred cows, Kumer answered: "Because the president gave us strict instructions that they cannot be criticized. The children might be watching, and they might be influenced. We are a high culture, with high responsibilities."
E-mail Robert Collier at rcollier@sfchronicle.com.
January 1, 2003
A Piece Here, a Piece There: An Ancient Temple Is Rebuilt
By SETH MYDANS
SIEM REAP, Cambodia — Forty years ago, a team of French archaeologists decided that the best way to save the Baphuon temple was to destroy it.
They began to take apart the fragile temple block by block, keeping meticulous records of their work, planning to put it back together again as a more stable structure. Then came war. As the Communist Khmer Rouge approached, the restorers fled the Angkor temple complex in 1972. In the chaos that followed, all their written records were destroyed. When they returned in 1995, all they found was 300,000 heavy stone blocks strewn among the trees — the biggest jigsaw puzzle in the world. It is a puzzle without a key, but it does have a solution. Block by block, layer by layer, the Baphuon temple is rising again as one of the towering monuments of Angkor. When it was built in the 11th century, the multi-tiered sandstone pyramid was the most impressive building of its day — "a truly astonishing spectacle," according to a 13th-century Chinese traveler, Zhou Daguan. Like the other Angkor temples, Baphuon was consumed by the jungle after the great empire fell 500 years ago, and it was only in the last century that French archaeologists began tinkering with it.
But the Baphuon, clumsily built on sand with a poor drainage system, was teetering and collapsing in chunks, too unstable to repair like its neighbors, Bayon, Angkor Wat and others. The solution: anastylosis, the sort of disassembly ambitious mechanics sometimes do with car engines. Work began in the 1960's. Half the temple was in pieces when it was abandoned, scattered across 25 acres of land like shredded documents. "So we have a puzzle, but we are missing the map of the puzzle," said Pascal Royère, an architect who heads a team of 200 working for the École Française d'Extrême-Orient, a cultural organization with financing from the French government. Philippe Peycam, executive director of the Center for Khmer Studies here, said: "It's really crazy, this temple, so complex and baroque. It's a nightmare to restore." The French team was confronted with a variety of challenges that included the reconstruction of a reclining Buddha that was added in the 16th century and the reinforcement of the structure with a concrete core that was begun in the 1960's and is now considered outmoded. But the most fascinating challenge came in the puzzle pieces themselves.
Worn by centuries of sun, monsoon and jungle growth, the stones of Baphuon were chipped and roughened, each slightly different from all the others. Without mortar to cushion the construction, each block must be returned to nestle precisely among those beside, above and below it. "One place for one block, one block for one place," Mr. Royère said. "That's the rule." Like any jigsaw puzzle, there is no forcing a piece into a place that is almost right, but not quite. "You'll laugh, but if you are off by ten millimeters here, 20 meters farther along, everything is wrong," Mr. Royère said. "It happens regularly, but when it happens you know right away. That's the difficulty and also the insurance against mistakes. The monument corrects itself." Apart from the temple's own dynamic, the restorers had three things to guide them. Jacques Dumarcay, the French architect who had worked on the Baphuon project in the 1960's, had since retired but was able to offer some institutional memory. The second guide was a cache in Paris of almost 1,000 photographs the French had taken of the temple over the years. Their chief value was to show which sections had already collapsed before the temple was dismantled, saving the workers from fruitless searches for missing stones. Third was the remaining half of Baphuon, which was to be dismantled after the first half was rebuilt. By studying this second half, Mr. Royère's team created stylized drawings of the carved profiles of the blocks in each row of each tier of the temple. Early on, an attempt was made to computerize these shapes and create a reconstruction model. But given the eroded shapes of the stones, the computer's generalized solutions were of little use. "So we looked for a more simple solution, which was the man-made solution," he said. In other words, memorization. There are about 500 different shapes, Mr. Royère said, but by now nobody needs to refer to the drawings. Each team knows just what shapes it is looking for. "We have people who walk around all day," he said. About 70 percent of the blocks have now been identified, and Mr. Royère said he was confident that none were missing. At times, as with any puzzle, some small sections are fitted together on their own, and the woods are dotted with what look like mini-temples awaiting their moment to be put in place. "This is not a high-tech project," Mr. Royère said. "It's just a question of paying attention to what you do, and don't sleep."
http://www.nyt.com/
Thursday, 2 January, 2003, 07:48 GMT
Elgin Marbles make 'virtual' return
The exhibition will show pieces reunited
The return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece has been simulated in a new exhibition. The virtual reality simulation shows how the Parthenon marbles would look if the treasures were returned to Athens. The Elgin Marbles are in the British Museum but the Greek government and a number of British MPs are campaigning for the artefacts to be returned. The exhibition was first presented to the UK during a recent visit by Greek culture minister Evangelos Venizelos. The Greek government is building a £29m museum to display the marbles, which they hope to complete in time for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.
'Half empty'
The marbles, ancient sculptures which once adorned the Parthenon in Athens, have been held in the British Museum since 1811. Richard Allan MP, a former archaeological student who heads a British campaign to return the marbles, said: "We want to see the marbles together in a museum that has been purpose-built for the Parthenon Marbles. It will be half empty without them." The display includes a computer-simulated walk through the museum showing the reunited marbles displayed in glass cases. The exhibition has been organised by the British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles and will be held in the Houses of Parliament on 27 January.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/