Annigoni portrait of Queen Elizabeth added to exhibit

LONDON – One of the greatest royal portraits of the 20th century, Pietro Annigoni’s 1954-5 painting of the queen is to go on public display for the first time in 26 years at the National Portrait’s Gallery’s “The Queen: Art and Image” exhibition, it was announced Wednesday.

It will be shown on the same wall as the artist’s second celebrated full-length portrait of the queen commissioned by the gallery in 1969, the first time these portraits will ever have been seen together for over a quarter of a century and only the second time ever.

Since it was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1955, the painting has only been loaned twice, in 1958 and 1986, by its owners The Fishmongers’ Co. from Fishmongers Hall, where the painting occupies a prominent position. This refined painting in tempera, oil and ink on paper on canvas, reflects the artist’s fascination with Italian renaissance techniques. When shown at the Royal Academy, it drew crowds said to be 10-deep with viewers fascinated by the portrait’s idealized yet penetrating character.

This addition to the gallery’s touring exhibition, opening in London on Thursday ahead of the queen’s diamond jubilee weekend celebrations, will be displayed alongside some of the most remarkable and resonant images of Elizabeth II across 60 years of her reign, including those by Lucian Freud, Gilbert and George, Cecil Beaton, Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz and Lord Snowdon.

Annigoni’s grand, full-length painting Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Regent, shows the recently crowned, 28-year-old Elizabeth wearing her magnificent Garter robes, and depicted against a pastoral landscape. The painting was prompted by an observation made by the queen while the artist was making a preparatory sketch in Buckingham Palace: "When I was a little child, it always delighted me to look out of the window and see the people and traffic going by." The resulting work shows a monarch in a sylvan idyll yet outward looking and connected to her surroundings.

It is seen next to Annigoni’s life-size 1969 commission for the National Portrait Gallery depicting the monarch again in ceremonial robes but now standing against an ambiguous, spare and gloomy, plain background. While both portraits were greeted by enormous public and press interest, the later work adopted a radically different approach from the romantic view of the earlier portrait. Annigoni said: “I did not want to paint her as a film star, I saw her as a monarch, alone in the problems of her responsibility.”

Also exclusive to the London showing of the exhibition is a 1967 portrait of the queen by Gerhard Richter, widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest living painters, and never previously loaned from Museum Wiesbaden in Germany. It can be seen alongside one of the artist’s two 1966 lithographs of the queen.

Visitors to the National Portrait Gallery will also be able to see for the first time, the world’s first ever lenticular image of the queen, resulting from a holographic process that conveys an illusion of three-dimensional form, Equanimity, by artist Chris Levine and holographer Rob Munday was recently given to the gallery by the People of Jersey who originally commissioned the portrait.

"The Queen: Art and Image" is the most wide-ranging exhibition of images in different media devoted to a single royal sitter. Combining traditional portraits and controversial contemporary images with newspaper photographs, film footage, postage stamps and satirical material, the exhibition highlights important developments and events in the queen’s reign from her ambiguous relationship with the press, to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the advent of new technology.

"The Queen: Art and Image," organized by the National Portrait Gallery, comes to London following a highly successful tour to Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff.

“The Queen is the most represented individual in history, but she remains an enigma. All we really have are images. This exhibition explores the creation of the queen’s public persona and the way such images reveals a world of changing ideas and values,” said Paul Moorhouse, curator of "The Queen: Art and Image," and 20th-century curator at the National Portrait Gallery.

O'Keeffe museum curator Barbara Buhler Lynes resigns

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) – Few people in the world know as much about the life and art of Georgia O'Keeffe as Barbara Buhler Lynes, who resigned Friday after years as curator and director of the research center at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.

Museum officials declined to say why Lynes stepped down, and Lynes could not immediately be reached for comment.

Lynes said in a statement issued by the museum that she enjoyed her time there and leaves with deep admiration for the director, staff and board members.

“Serving the museum has been an illuminating experience, and I look forward to pursuing new projects and opportunities,” she said.

Lynes resignation came on opening day of a new exhibit that highlights the importance of O'Keeffe's camping and rafting trips through the Southwest and the inspiration the treks provided for her art.

For more than a decade, Lynes was the driving force behind more than 30 of the museum's exhibitions. She organized several symposiums at the research center that attracted scholars from across the country and became the museum's first curator in 1999, two years after its opening.

The museum is the largest single repository of O'Keeffe's work in the world. Its collection is made up of more than 3,000 works, including 1,149 O'Keeffe paintings, drawings and sculptures that date from 1901 to 1984, the year O'Keeffe was forced into retirement due to failing eyesight.

O'Keeffe is best known for her iconic flower paintings and colorful landscapes.

The museum has a wealth of materials from the artist's estate. At the time of her death in 1986, O'Keeffe's two homes in northern New Mexico and most everything in them were set aside for preservation.

That included her clothes, paint brushes, paint chips with notes jotted on the back, sketch books, canvases and hundreds of rocks and bleached animal bones she gathered over decades of exploring the high desert.

Lynes and Agapita Judy Lopez, the museum's director of historic properties, recently completed a book about the artist's two adobe homes.

Lynes told The Associated Press in previous interviews that despite her intimate knowledge of O'Keeffe, she learned something new about the artist with each exhibition she put together.

Lynes also put together a prize-winning, two-volume catalog that documents and authenticates O'Keeffe's extensive body of work. The publication was a project of the National Gallery of Art and the now dissolved Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation.

Anne Marion, founder and chairman of the museum's board, described Lynes' contributions to the museum and art community as “enormous.”

The museum said it is planning to conduct a national search for a new curator.

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Follow Susan Montoya Bryan on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/susanmbryanNM

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-05-11-12 2050GMT

In Memoriam: children's author Maurice Sendak, 83

NEW YORK (AP) — Maurice Sendak didn't think of himself as a children's author, but as an author who told the truth about childhood.

"I like interesting people and kids are really interesting people," he explained to The Associated Press last fall. "And if you didn't paint them in little blue, pink and yellow, it's even more interesting."

Sendak, who died early Tuesday in Danbury, Conn., at age 83, four days after suffering a stroke, revolutionized children's books and how we think about childhood simply by leaving in what so many writers before had excluded. Dick and Jane were no match for his naughty Max. His kids misbehaved and didn't regret it, and in their dreams and nightmares fled to the most unimaginable places. Monstrous creatures were devised from his studio, but none more frightening than the grownups in his stories or the cloud of the Holocaust that darkened his every page.

"From their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions — fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can," he said upon receiving the Caldecott Medal in 1964 for Where the Wild Things Are, his signature book. "And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming wild things."

Rarely was a man so uninterested in being loved or adored. Starting with the Caldecott, the great parade marched on and on. He received the Hans Christian Andersen award in 1970 and a Laura Ingalls Wilder medal in 1983. President Bill Clinton awarded Sendak a National Medal of the Arts in 1996 and in 2009 President Obama read Where the Wild Things Are for the Easter Egg Roll.

Communities attempted to ban him, but his books sold millions of copies and his curmudgeonly persona became as much a part of his legend as Where the Wild Things Are, adapted into a hit movie in 2009. He seemed to act out everyone's fantasy of a nasty old man with a hidden and generous heart. No one granted the privilege could forget his snarly smile, his raspy, unprintable and adorable dismissals of such modern piffle as e-books and publicity tours, his misleading insistence that his life didn't matter.

"I didn't sleep with famous people or movie stars or anything like that. It's a common story: Brooklyn boy grows up and succeeds in his profession, period," he told the AP.

Sendak's other books, standard volumes in so many children's bedrooms, included Chicken Soup With Rice, One was Johnny, Pierre, Outside Over There and Brundibar, a folk tale about two children who need to earn enough money to buy milk for their sick mother.

"This is the closest thing to a perfect child I've ever had," he told the AP.

Besides illustrating his own work, he also provided drawings — sometimes sweet, sometimes nasty — for Else Holmelund Minarik's series Little Bear, George MacDonald's The Light Princess and adaptations of E.T.A. Hoffman's The Nutcracker and the Brothers Grimm's King Grisly-Beard. His most recent book that he wrote and illustrated was Bumble-Ardy, a naughty pig party which came out in 2011, based on an old animated skit he worked up for Sesame Street.

In recent months, he had said he was working on a project about noses and he endorsed — against his best judgment — Stephen Colbert's "I am a Pole (And So Can You!)", a children's story calculated to offend the master. Colbert's book was published Tuesday.

"His art gave us a fantastical but unromanticized reminder of what childhood truly felt like," Colbert said in a statement. "We are all honored to have been briefly invited into his world."

Somebody up there has a sense of humor: As of Tuesday evening, I Am a Pole was No. 14 on Amazon.com's best-seller list, outranking Where the Wild Things Are at No. 19.

Sendak also created costumes for ballets and staged operas, including the Czech opera Brundibar, which in 2003 he put on paper with his close friend, Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner. He designed sets for several productions at New York City Opera and he wrote the libretto for composer Oliver Knussen's opera adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, which premiered at Brussels' Theatre de la Monnaie in 1980 as Max et les Maximontres. A revised final version debuted in 1984 in London.

He designed the Pacific Northwest Ballet's Nutcracker production that later became a movie shown on television, and he served as producer of various animated TV series based on his illustrations, including Seven Little Monsters, George and Martha, and Little Bear. He collaborated with Carole King on the musical Really Rosie.

None of Sendak's books were memoirs, but all were personal, if only for their celebrations of disobedience and intimations of fear and death and dislocation, sketched in haunting, Blakean waves of pen and ink. "It's a Jewish way of getting through life," Kushner said last fall. "You acknowledge what is spectacular and beautiful and also you don't close your eyes to the pain and the difficulty."

"He drew children in a realistic way, as opposed to an idealized way," children's books historian Leonard S. Marcus said Tuesday. "His children weren't perfect-looking. They didn't resemble the people seen on advertising or in sitcoms. They looked more like immigrant children. It was a big change for American children's books, which tended to take the melting pot approach and present children who were generic Americans."

Revenge helped inspire "Where the Wild Things Are," his canonical tale of the boy Max's mind in flight in a forest of monsters, who just happen to look like some of Sendak's relatives from childhood. "In The Night Kitchen," released in 1971, was a forbidden dance of Laurel and Hardy in aprons and the flash of a boy's genitals, leading to calls for the book to be removed from library shelves.

"It was so fatuous, so incredible, that people would get so exercised by a phallus, a normal appendage to a man and to a boy. It was so cheap and vulgar. Despicable," Sendak said last fall. "It's all changed now. We live in a different country altogether. I will not say an improved version. No."

His stories were less about the kids he knew — never had them, he was happy to say — than the kid he used to be. The son of Polish immigrants, he was born in 1928 in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. The family didn't have a lot of money and he didn't have a lot of friends besides his brother and sister. He was an outsider at birth, as Christians nearby would remind him, throwing dirt and rocks as he left Hebrew school. The kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh's baby son terrified him for years.

He remembered no special talent — his brother, Jack, was the chosen one. But he absorbed his father's stories and he loved to dream and to create, like the time he and his brother built a model of the 1939 World's Fair out of clay and wax. At the movies, he surrendered to the magic of "Fantasia," and later escaped into "Pinocchio," a guilty pleasure during darkened times. The Nazi cancer was spreading overseas and the U.S. entered the war. Sendak's brother joined the military, relatives overseas were captured and killed. Storytelling, after the Holocaust, became something more than play.

"It forced me to take children to a level that I thought was more honest than most people did," he said. "Because if life is so critical, if Anne Frank could die, if my friend could die, children were as vulnerable as adults, and that gave me a secret purpose to my work, to make them live. Because I wanted to live. I wanted to grow up."

Sendak didn't go to college and worked a variety of odd jobs until he was hired by the famous toy store FAO Schwarz as a window dresser in 1948. But illustration was his dream and his break came in 1951 when he was commissioned to do the art for "Wonderful Farm" by Marcel Ayme. By 1957 he was writing his own books.

"He began to be honest in the '50s," said "Wicked" author Gregory Maguire, one of Sendak's closest friends. "He was laceratingly honest at a time when few others were."

Claiming Emily Dickinson, Mozart and Herman Melville as inspirations, he worked for decades out of the studio of his shingled 18th century house in Ridgefield, Conn., a country home reachable only by a bumpy road that seemed designed to keep away all but the most determined. The interior was a wonderland of carvings and cushions, from Disney characters to the fanged beasts from his books to a statuette of Obama.

Sendak spoke often, endlessly, about death in recent years — dreading it, longing for it. He didn't mind being old because the young were under so much pressure. But he missed his late siblings and his longtime companion, Eugene Glynn, who died in 2009. Work, not people, was his reason to carry on.

"I want to be alone and work until the day my head hits the drawing table and I'm dead. Kaput," he said last fall. "Everything is over. Everything that I called living is over. I'm very, very much alone. I don't believe in heaven or hell or any of those things. I feel very much like I want to be with my brother and sister again. They're nowhere. I know they're nowhere and they don't exist, but if nowhere means that's where they are, that's where I want to be."

Associated Press writers Dave Collins in Hartford and Samantha Critchell in New York contributed to this report.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Top photographers auction work for slain journalist

The Friends of Anton auction at Christie's in New York on May 15 aims to benefit the slain photographer's three children, organizers said.

Hammerl, from South Africa, was killed last year during a freelance assignment to cover the violent overthrow of longtime Libyan strongman Moamer Kadhafi.

For 44 days, Kadhafi officials at the time said Hammerl was alive. "The truth is he was left to die in the desert. A campaign is currently under way to locate and recover his remains," the Friends of Anton group said.

The auction will offer signed prints by photographers including Sebastiao Salgado, Tim Hetherington, Yuri Kozyrev, Larry Fink, Ron Haviv, Joao Silva and Samuel Aranda. Agence France-Presse is also contributing four photo prints to the auction.

"The upcoming Friends of Anton auction at Christie's is a milestone in contemporary photojournalism," said New York-based collector Alan L. Paris.

"The contributors are top notch, the photos are of the highest quality, the material is fresh to the marketplace, and it is all for a very good cause."

Slave Robert Smalls piloted little-known course in Civil War

Smalls would return to Charleston a year later to pilot a Union ironclad in an attack on Fort Sumter, while after the war he served in the South Carolina General Assembly, the U.S. Congress and later as a federal customs inspector.

“His story, I think, is lost in the larger picture of the Civil War—Grant and Lee; Appomattox and Gettysburg. It's important locally, but I would say it's a story often overlooked,” said Carl Borick, the assistant director of the Charleston Museum.

May 13 is the anniversary of Smalls' daring escape aboard the CSS Planter, and a series of events are planned next weekend to mark the event and celebrate Smalls' life. Events begin at the museum Saturday with recollections from Smalls' descendants and conclude Sunday evening with a harbor tour tracing the route the planter took.

Commemorative signs marking where Smalls took the vessel, near what is now the city's High Battery, and where he picked up family members, in what is now Waterfront Park, will also be unveiled.

Helen Boulware Moore, Smalls' great-granddaughter, says she heard about Smalls not through books, but family stories.

Her grandmother, a toddler at the time, was one of those family members who made it to freedom aboard the Planter.

“She lived with us the first 22 years of my life, so I heard through her voice a lot of the stories,” Moore said from her home in Florida. Moore estimated there are about 75 direct descendants of Smalls still alive.

A traveling museum exhibit about Smalls that she helped put together with the help of the South Carolina State Museum is currently on display at the Charleston Museum.

Smalls was born in the Beaufort area and brought to Charleston in the 1850s. There, he became a harbor pilot—a valuable skill in Charleston with the dangers posed to shipping by a bar offshore, shoals and the tidal creeks in the area. He was later conscripted by the Confederates to serve as a pilot on the Planter, a Confederate side-wheel ammunition ship.

Smalls took the Planter about 2 a.m. May 13, 1862, after the white officers aboard left the ship for a night in town.

“An interesting thing about those officers is they were not part of the Confederate Navy—they were actually civilian contractors,” Borick said. “The military really couldn't take much recourse against them for leaving their posts.”

With the officers gone, Smalls faced another challenge. Not every black on the Planter crew was in on the plot. Those who weren't went ashore but never raised an alarm. Smalls and the seven crewmen headed back up river to pick up the nine family members and friends. The group included his wife, Hanna.

Smalls knew the harbor channels and the signals to make it past the Confederate batteries.

“It didn't look like he was doing anything unusual. The biggest challenge he faces is when he gets past Fort Sumter, he has to go past the federal Navy. And as far as they know, it's a Confederate ship coming out to attack them,” Borick said.

But here Smalls got some help from nature and his bride.

It was foggy, so the Planter couldn't be made out distinctly. And Hanna Smalls, who worked in a local hotel, brought a bed sheet with her.

“My great-grandmother hasn't gotten enough credit for this,” Moore said. “A federal ship turned its cannon on the Planter. At that point my great-grandmother got her bed sheet out and gave it to the men to take the Confederate flag down and run the white sheet up. At that point, the Union forces began to realize this wasn't a Confederate ship.”

Smalls and the Planter left Charleston for Philadelphia.

But less than a year later, he was back in Charleston Harbor, piloting the ironclad USS Keokuk in an assault on Fort Sumter, held by the Confederates. The attack was unsuccessful, and the Keokuk took 90 hits before withdrawing. It was so badly damaged, it sank the next day.

“There's no question about his bravery from commandeering the Planter and getting it out of the harbor to being in a pretty major action in this ironclad,” Borick said.

After the war, Smalls worked to help people of both races, working on legislation that mandated the first compulsory public schools in South Carolina. He also helped lay the groundwork for the establishment of the Parris Island Marine Corps Recruit Depot near Beaufort, Moore said.

She said her great-grandfather hired a tutor when he was in Philadelphia to teach him to read and write, one of the few skills he had not acquired as a slave. His legacy has been the importance of education.

His nine children, seven of them women, who survived to adulthood all went to college, and that has been something that has been passed down.

“That was his legacy. That has come down through all the generations,” Moore said. “Going to college is not a question. It is what we do.”

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-05-05-12 1441GMT

Artist got his start painting designs on WWII aircraft

Some 70 years later, the resident of the Grand Rapids Home for Veterans is still at it with an exhibit of his work that recently opened at Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital. It will remain on exhibit, among pieces from several other artists living in the home, until Sept. 4.

Victoria Marnich-Reynolds, 60, an art teacher at the home, has grown to appreciate both the artist and his passion as she watches him carry on what has been a lifetime mission.

“He is sort of a living legend that nobody knows about,” Marnich-Reynolds said. “He had national acclaim at one point. It's kind of like he outgrew all his contemporaries.”

Indeed, Bailey, 88, made clear some years ago just where art stood among his priorities as he told a reporter: “If you're in the arts, you can't be married. Art is much more important than family.”

Bailey's eclectic work was most recently on display in 2008 at Eastern Michigan University, when its Ford Gallery featured a retrospective of his drawings, paintings, computer art, lithography and ceramic painting, along with articles and photographs.

For this Kansas native, there was much to draw upon.

Bailey served from 1943 to 1946 in the Army Air Corps, first as a belly gunner and then as a mechanic.

Following the war, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago and built a reputation in that city for photography and sculpture as well as active promotion of the arts scene. In the 1950s, he helped build the gallery for the Chicago Society of Artists. Over the years, his works were exhibited in galleries and public spaces throughout Chicago as well as the East Coast and in Michigan.

He traveled to Mexico in the late 1950s with a grant from the Mexican government to photograph Mayan children, villages and schools. The images were displayed in a photographic exhibition in Mexico City.

Bailey in 1972 moved to Dexter, outside Ann Arbor, where he lived until moving into the veterans home about eight years ago. A series of strokes diminished, but could not halt, his artistic output.

A niece of Bailey, Indiana resident Wendee Bailey, 58, said her uncle always found ways to support himself—working as a crane operator and later as groundskeeper and caregiver at a home for the mentally impaired—so that he could pursue his art.

“That's always what he lived for, to put his ideas on canvas, to share his ideas with everybody around. I think it means a lot to him to get out there one more time.”

Bailey uses a wheelchair now.

Art teacher Marnich-Reynolds says he is still exploring new ways to express himself. She can only hope to remain as productive as an artist herself.

“He still works with a computer, with computer-aided designs. He transfers the concepts with a pen or pencil to ceramics and takes dishes or large bowls and draws his designs on them.

“It is inspiring. It's a demonstration how a person must create. He will do it until his last breath, I'm sure.”

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Information from: The Grand Rapids Press, http://www.mlive.com/grand-rapids

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-05-04-12 0936GMT

LiveAuctioneers taps Jamie Dwelly for UK Business Development post

NEW YORK – Julian R. Ellison, CEO of the global Internet technology company LiveAuctioneers.com, has announced the appointment of Jamie Dwelly, M.A., to the newly created position of Business Development Director, UK. Dwelly will divide his time between LiveAuctioneers’ offices in Greater London and Folkestone, Kent.

“Our company has been experiencing an exponential level of growth over the past few years, and the market that seems most receptive to LiveAuctioneers right now is the UK,” said Ellison. “Jamie will act as a liaison between the New York-based parent company and the many auctioneers in Britain who are asking about Internet live-bidding services available through LiveAuctioneers.com.”

Dwelly, 43, is originally from Kingston upon Thames, in Surrey. He has had a lifelong interest in fine art. After receiving a B.A. degree in the History of Drawing and Printmaking, Dwelly went on to earn a Master of Arts degree in History of Art from the prestigious Goldsmiths University of London. For his thesis, Dwelly investigated surrealism through the genius of Hans Bellmer.

Following his academic endeavors, Dwelly spent 15 years as a non-executive director in the arts sector. He also worked for the BBC.

A talented writer, Dwelly was a contributor to the British periodical The Idler. He is also an accomplished motorsports journalist who enjoys riding and racing classic motorcycles in his free time.

Dwelly has traveled extensively across Europe. “I am a fan of the Italian Renaissance and have driven long distances to view church frescoes that can only be seen in situ. My greatest passion, however, is Northern Renaissance art – particularly the works of Brueghel and Hieronymus Bosch,” Dwelly said.

Dwelly’s fine arts background makes him a natural for his new position, Ellison said. “I have known Jamie for 18 years, now. He is deeply absorbed in art and antiques, and I can’t think of anyone better suited to represent LiveAuctioneers in the United Kingdom. With his educational background and experience, he thoroughly understands the world of art and auctions. He will be a tremendous asset to our company.”

To contact Jamie Dwelly within the UK, tel. 0773-442-4520, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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Brazilian architect Niemeyer hospitalized in Rio

RIO DE JANEIRO (AFP) - Renown Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who turned 104 last December, was hospitalized in a Rio hospital overnight but his condition was not deemed serious, local media reports said Thursday.

Niemeyer was admitted to the Samaritano hospital in Rio's Botafogo district with severe flu but his condition "is not serious," according to a spokeswoman quoted by the R7 website of the TV channel Record.

"He is fine," she added.

In 2010, the star architect, who won the 1988 Pritzker Prize -- "architecture's Nobel" -- was hospitalized for a urinary infection.

During his seven-decade career, Niemeyer has designed more than 600 projects around the world, and is famous for some of Brazil's most distinctive buildings.

His works include a suite of the government building in the national capital city Brasilia and the headquarters for the United Nations in New York.

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George Rodrigue again Louisiana's artist laureate

Jindal says Rodrigue is worthy of the honor of being named the artist laureate because he is an internationally acclaimed Cajun artist "whose works are in major museums and collections across the country.''

Jindal also praised Rodrigue as a community activist. The artist has raised funds for Hurricane Katrina rebuilding.

In Louisiana, the governor appoints an artist laureate to serve during the governor's term of office.

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Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Woodstock wake held for The Band's Levon Helm

Musicians, friends and fans gathered in the board-and-batten barn where Levon Helm staged his Midnight Ramble concerts to remember the influential singer and drummer for The Band, who died of throat cancer last week at age 71.

Nearly 2,000 people attended his wake, not far from where The Band played at the Woodstock gathering in 1969, said a spokesman for the school bus company that shuttled mourners from the village to the wooded grounds of Helm's home and studio.

Helm's closed casket, in the second-floor studio of the barn, was surrounded by flowers and flanked by his drum kit and a piano.

"He was so down to earth," said Roland Mousaa, a folk musician who performed with Bob Dylan and other artists at Woodstock.

Sporting long gray hair, sequined sunglasses and a tie-dye shirt under a funereal black topcoat, Mousaa said, "The greatness of Levon Helm was the impact he had on people."

Visitors greeted family members and walked down a corridor lined with photos and memorabilia, including Helm's Grammys in a lighted case. Upstairs, they filed silently past the coffin and glimpsed a family photo slideshow before security staff urged them toward the back exit.

"He was an icon, but also the guy next door," said Al Caron, of Woodstock. "The Rambles were like a revival meeting. There was just a sense of euphoria from the minute you arrived at his home and he will be missed."

Helm, Danko, Garth Hudson, Robbie Robertson and Richard Manuel's first album as The Band was 1968's "Music From Big Pink." That album and its follow-up, "The Band," remain landmark albums of the era, and songs such as "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "Up On Cripple Creek" are rock standards.

Early on, The Band backed Dylan on his electric tours of 1965-66 and collaborated with him on the legendary "Basement Tapes."

"He was my idol," said Dan McCabe, a college student pursuing a career in music production who played in a jazz band at one of Helm's Rambles.

The son of an Arkansas cotton farmer, Helm was just out of high school when he joined rocker Ronnie Hawkins in 1957 as the drummer for the Hawks. That band eventually recruited a group of Canadian musicians who, along with Helm, would join Dylan and ultimately become The Band.

Helm inspired the 1971 song 'Levon,' co-written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. John and his civil partner, David Furnish, named their adopted son "Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John.

The Band bid farewell to live shows with "The Last Waltz" concert in 1976. Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Dylan were among the stars who played the show, filmed by Martin Scorsese.

Helm recorded "Dirt Farmer" in 2007 and "Electric Dirt" in 2009. Both albums won Grammys. He won another this year for "Ramble at the Ryman."

"He used his fame for good," said Pat McCabe, Dan's father. "He took time to give benefits for schools all over the area. He had a level of humanity over and above a mere rock star. Plus, he was a hell of a musician."

After a private funeral Friday, Helm will be buried in Woodstock Cemetery next to Rick Danko, The Band's singer and bassist, who died in 1999.

Auction Central News contributed to this report.

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Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

In Memoriam: Irish artist Louis le Brocquy, 95

DUBLIN (AFP) - Ireland's president led tributes Wednesday to Louis le Brocquy, one of the country's foremost artists who has died aged 95.

Dublin-born le Brocquy, who has received many accolades for his works, lived and worked in Britain and France before returning to his home city in 2000.

He is one of a small number of Irish and British artists whose works broke the million-pound barrier at auction during their lifetime.

A le Brocquy painting, "A Family," bought by a businessman for 2.75 million euros ($3.63 million) was donated to Ireland's National Gallery under a tax deal in 2002 and became the first work by a living artist acquired for the gallery's permanent collection.

President Michael D. Higgins said le Brocquy had left a "truly great legacy" and his works were among Ireland's "most cultural assets."

Higgins said his pioneering approach to art, influenced by the European masters, was highly inspirational.

"Through painting, tapestry and print Louis le Brocquy has provided us with individual works and collections that give the insight and response of an artist of genius to Irish history, culture and society," Higgins said.

Le Brocquy originally studied chemistry and in 1938, with no formal training, he left Ireland to study European art collections in London, Paris and Geneva.

His evocative portraits of literary figures, family and fellow artists, including W.B. Yeats, James Joyce and his friends Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon, Seamus Heaney and U2 frontman Bono, have been widely acclaimed.

He was awarded France's highest honour, the "Legion d'Honneur," in 1975.

In 1998 he was the first artist to receive the IMMA/Glen Dimplex lifetime Achievement Award for a "sustained contribution to the arts in Ireland" and he also received Dublin's highest accolade, the freedom of the city.

He is survived by his wife, the painter Anne Madden, and two sons.

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IFAE names David Setford director of fine art fairs

Setford returns to IFAE —where where he served as director of the Palm Beach International Art and Antique Fair from 2002 to 2005—to serve as the senior executive in charge of IFAE’s two February fine art fairs. In that capacity, he will be responsible for exhibitor solicitation and selection in conjunction with key dealers, supervise curatorial and vetting activities; execute strategic partnerships and direct fair programing.

“We are especially pleased to have David Setford rejoin IFAE,” said David Lester, principal of IFAE. “He brings a wealth of museum and fair expertise to our executive management team. David is quite well respected by the dealer community and has the skills to assume the leadership role that our fairs need as they change and evolve. He has been a longtime friend and professional associate, and this is like having another family member join our firm.”

Setford brings over 20 years of art industry experience to IFAE. He served as chief curator of the Norton Museum of Art for nine years before accepting the position as director of Palm Beach! America’s Fine Art & Antique Fair, then owned by London-based DMG. The fairs were reacquired by founders David and Lee Ann Lester of IFAE in 2009 and rebranded as ArtPalmBeach and the American International Fine Art Fair. In 2005 Setford assumed the position of director of curatorial affairs at the Naples Museum of Art where as the senior museum professional he was the principal in charge of program planning, exhibitions and educational development. Most recently, Setford served as executive director of the Hyde Collection in New York, where he managed a substantial budget and full-time staff of 23-plus volunteers.

“We have known David Setford for many years and have a great respect for both his professional expertise and personal skills,” said Jonathan Green, managing director of London’s Richard Green Gallery and co-chair of AIFAF’s Palm Beach Dealers Committee. “He will bring a fresh leadership approach to the Palm Beach fair where we have enjoyed outstanding success over the years, and we welcome his return.”

For more information on IFAE fairs visit www.ifae.com.

Art world recalls American painter Jackson Pollock

Pollock, who would have turned 100 this year, is being remembered at a New York City fundraiser later this month honoring a charity that aids struggling artists, along with the Academy Award-nominated actor and filmmaker Ed Harris who spent nearly a decade making the 2000 film Pollock.

There also are exhibitions in Washington, D.C., and at the home Pollock shared with his wife, artist Lee Krasner, in the Springs community of East Hampton—now a museum and study center. And shoe manufacturer Crocs is releasing a Pollock-inspired shoe this June, fashioned after the paint-splashed floor that visitors can still see in the artist's barn.

“I think Pollock's art is incredible,” Harris told The Associated Press in a recent telephone interview. “I think it was revolutionary at the time and I think it kind of holds up that way and it is really exquisite.”

The fundraiser honoring Harris, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which has given $56.3 million in grants to artists in 72 countries since 1985, is intended to help finance and expand the work of a separate Stony Brook University-based organization that runs the Pollock-Krasner home.

“What we try to give people here is insights into who these people were, what it was that stimulated them creatively and where that took them in terms of their art,” said Helen Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.

Harris said that before he started filming in 1999—the exteriors of the Pollock-Krasner home and scenes from a nearby general store were filmed on location in Springs; the interiors re-created on a Brooklyn sound stage—he spent a couple of nights sleeping in Pollock's bedroom.

“I was hoping for a visitation which didn't quite happen,” joked Harris, who was nominated for a best actor Oscar for his performance in the film, which also was his directorial debut.

“I can't even express how invaluable it was to me,” he said of the home. “I don't think the film would have really have had the richness and authenticity it did if we weren't filming there. Just on an emotional level, or a metaphysical level of some kind, you know you're filming a story about this man and this is where he lived.”

Pollock, a lifelong alcoholic who died behind the wheel in a drunken-driving crash at the age of 44, was a controversial artist reviled by some critics and lionized by others. His best-known paintings were created by dripping paint, seemingly haphazardly, across canvasses large and small. Some feature popping bright colors, others are stark black-and-whites.

“I like to describe his work as ‘energy made visible,’” said Pepe Karmel, a Pollock expert and assistant professor in the art history department at New York University. “The lines curving through space, changing direction, the colors; it is an amazing image of the world that could represent many things. It's totally opened ended. What they all have in common is the fantastic energy that characterizes modern society.”

Pollock was already an artist of some note working in Manhattan's Greenwich Village in the early 1940s, but the move to Long Island in late 1945 was the key to unlocking his genius, many experts say. They also agree Krasner's motive in separating Pollock from his drinking buddies in Manhattan succeeded in focusing his attention on his artwork, albeit temporarily. Marcia Gay Harden won a best supporting actress Oscar for her portrayal of Krasner, who was an artist in her own right, living in the home until her death in 1984 at age 75.

“He looks out and he sees Mother Nature, which is his great stimulation,” Harrison said. “And then he thinks back to his childhood in Arizona and California and the wide open spaces. These things all came flooding back to him, and he has an epiphany.”

Adds Karmel: “In a very general way, the landscape did inspire him. The immensity of the ocean, being on the beach; that is certainly feeling akin to being out west.”

Today, Pollock artworks sell for tens of millions—one painting in 2006 reportedly sold to an unidentified collector for $140 million—but when the couple lived in East Hampton in the late `40s and `50s, they struggled to pay their bills. Harrison says there was one bounced check found amid Pollock's papers for $4, and it was several years before the home was equipped with electricity and plumbing.

A key turning point came in 1949, when Life magazine did a profile of Pollock, asking the question, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”

The publicity “put him on the map in a huge way,” Harrison said, noting he sold $4,000 in paintings soon after the article appeared. “He called a plumber, shingled the house, paid off the mortgage. They were normal people except for the fact they were artistic geniuses. Other than that they lived a normal life.”

Pollock, who descended into a deep alcoholic haze and may have suffered from depression or other mental illness—he was never properly diagnosed, says Harrison—was having an affair with artist Ruth Klingman at the time of his death in August 1956. While Krasner was vacationing in Europe, Pollock smashed his Oldsmobile convertible in a drunken stupor about a mile from his home in Springs. Klingman survived the crash (she died in 2010), but a friend, Edith Metzger, was killed.

“I don't mind the fact that he was a mean son of a bitch at times, and had a lot of personal problems that he fought through,” Harris said. “The one thing that I feel harms his legacy is that he basically was responsible for the death of Edith Metzger.”

Besides the April 25 fundraiser in Manhattan, a centennial tribute of Pollock's art continues at the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery in Washington, D.C. until May 15. An exhibit, “The Persistence of Pollock,” will be on display at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center from May 3-July 28, and a lecture on Pollock and Krasner will be held at the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall in East Hampton on July 22.

Crocs will introduce a limited edition “Jackson Pollock Crocs Classic” shoe, featuring a replica of a photo taken from the floor of Pollock's studio in mid-June. The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center will receive a royalty on each pair, which list for $50, said Harrison.

She recalls working as a reporter for The New York Times in the late 1980s, and being sent to Springs when the paint-stained wooden floor was found under Masonite floorboards that Pollock installed in 1952.

“All of a sudden the conservators start to make little noises, ooh ah, oh,” Harrison said. “So we get down on our hands and knees and we start looking, and the colors keep coming and pretty soon we were all doing it. The joke was Jackson must have put it down when he was drunk, because the sticky side was up.'' Actually a handyman did the work, she later discovered.

“You think, it's just a paint-covered floor. It's just kind of a mess, really, but it's a fascinating mess because it's got all of the colors, all of the gestures and all of the energy that's in his poured paintings and there it is right there on the floor.”

It's impossible to put a price on its value, she said. “It's a document; it's not a work of art because it's an accumulation over time. This covers a seven-year period of his work, the most productive and innovative period.”

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

AP-WF-04-15-12 1609GMT

John Mellencamp paintings in museum exhibition

The exhibit called “Nothing Like I Planned: The Art of John Mellencamp” opened on Thursday and will run through June 10. The popular musician who has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and been nominated for 13 Grammy awards has seriously pursued painting throughout his musical career.

The exhibit consists of 52 paintings from a wide range of years and will be his first museum exhibition, although his artwork has been in gallery exhibitions.

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-04-12-12 0733GMT

Winston Churchill paintings going on exhibit in Wis.

Churchill is best known as Great Britain's no-nonsense prime minister during World War II. But he was also an accomplished painter who picked up the hobby at age 40.

The Post-Crescent of Appleton reports that the exhibit opens Friday at the Trout Museum of Art. It runs through July 29.

Museum executive director Timothy Riley says Churchill preferred landscapes and nature scenes. But he says one painting that stands out is a 1938 work titled Beach at Walmer. It shows several people playing in the water while a cannon sits in the foreground.

Riley says it foreshadowed Churchill's ability to rally British citizens to resist the German attack.

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Information from: The Post-Crescent, http://www.postcrescent.com

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-04-09-12 1153GMT