1 of 30. A man uses cross-country skis to make his way across the snow-covered Champs de Mars near the Eiffel Tower in Paris January 20, 2013. Several inches of snow fell in the French capital halting some transportation and closing some public parks.

LONDON/PARIS | Sun Jan 20, 2013 3:36pm EST

LONDON/PARIS (Reuters) - London's Heathrow Airport canceled a fifth of flights on Sunday and airlines scrapped 40 percent of flights to Paris's main airports as snow blanketed parts of Europe, with more forecast.

Air France predicted more cancellations on a similar scale for Monday.

Heathrow Ltd, owned by Spain's Ferrovial, said the reduced schedule - amounting to around 250 fewer flights - would help it cope with the snowfall without making further cancellations.

As snow continued to fall through Sunday, the airport operator said Monday's flight schedule would be cut by 10 percent. That number could rise, depending on conditions at other European airports, Heathrow said.

The Paris airport operator, ADP, said airlines scrapped 40 percent of flights in and out of the two main airports on the outskirts of Paris, Charles de Gaulle and Orly, primarily reducing short-haul services.

London's smaller Stansted and Gatwick airports said they were operating as normal on Sunday morning but that delays and some flight cancellations were likely.

Weather forecaster the British Met Office said snow was likely to continue into Monday. As much as eight centimeters was expected in southeast England on Sunday, it said.

On average, some 1,300 flights leave Heathrow daily. The airport, Europe's busiest, operates at close to full capacity after Britain's coalition government blocked development of a third runway in 2010.

"Many airports have plenty of spare runway capacity so aircraft can be spaced out more during low visibility without causing delays and cancellations," said Heathrow, whose owners have campaigned hard for more capacity at the London hub.

"Because Heathrow operates at almost full capacity, there is simply no room to reschedule the delayed flights," it said.

Heathrow has spent 36 million pounds ($57 million) on upgrading its winter weather equipment since 2010 - a year that saw it face heavy criticism after it almost shut down when snow hit just before Christmas. It now has 130 snow-clearing vehicles.

More than 400 flights were canceled on Friday, while on Saturday 111 flights, most of them operated by IAG's British Airways, were canceled and hundreds of passengers spent the night in Heathrow's terminals.

BA said there had been a knock-on effect because many of its planes were in the wrong place after Friday's snow.

"Like other airlines at Heathrow we have complied with a request to reduce our schedule by 20 percent on Sunday and we continue to work with Heathrow Airport to help keep the airport running as smoothly as possible," BA said in a statement.

"We are doing everything we can to help customers whose flights have been disrupted by severe weather."

Services by Air France-KLM, Ireland's Aer Lingus and Germany's Lufthansa have also been affected.

France's SNCF rail firm announced delays of up to 40 minutes on many lines as drivers cut speed in a safety measure.

Some 25,000 homes lost power supply in southwestern France.

Emergency services were drafted in to rescue around 100 people from an urban train carriage that got stuck on a track which passes in open air over the Seine river in Paris, said Frederic Grosjean, a spokesman for city's emergency services.

(Additional reporting by Rosalba O'Brien in London, and Brian Love and Gerard Bon in Paris; Editing by Louise Heavens and Myra MacDonald)

View the original article here

LONDON | Tue Jan 29, 2013 7:48am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - London's theatres earned 530 million pounds ($830 million) in 2012, a marginal rise on 2011, and although the Olympic Games had a noticeable impact on the West End during the summer it was not the "bloodbath" one leading producer had predicted.

Figures released on Tuesday by the Society of London Theatre (SOLT) showed 2012 gross ticket sales at 52 major theatres in the capital rose 0.27 percent on the year before while attendances, at 14 million, were up 0.56 percent.

The increases would have been greater had it not been for the London Games, SOLT officials said, with public attention surrounding the opening ceremony dampening demand and warnings of transport disruptions putting off theatre-goers.

London's flamboyant Mayor Boris Johnson was singled out as a factor, after his recorded messages warning of travel congestion on public transport during the Games were quickly dropped when the concerns proved unfounded.

"I don't think most of the (SOLT) members were relishing the Games and the impact of the Olympics was viewed with trepidation," said SOLT president Mark Rubinstein.

"It's surprising, amazing, wonderful we are standing here today saying 2012 was another record-breaking year."

Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, one of the most influential theatre impresarios in Britain, had predicted a box office "bloodbath" during the summer due to the Games.

Rubinstein said there was a sizeable drop in takings during the third quarter of the year due to the Olympics, but that overall the figures were better than many had predicted.

In outright terms, the revenue figure was a new record, while attendance was not far from its 2009 peak of 14.3 million.

REGIONAL CUTS A WORRY

Producers showed restraint, perhaps with an eye on economic gloom in Britain and much of Europe, with average ticket prices last year at 37.86 pounds compared with 37.97 pounds in 2011.

Musicals dominated the West End again, accounting for eight million attendances, a fall of three percent on 2011, while play attendances were up nine percent at 4.1 million.

Hits last year included the Royal Court's transfers of "Posh", "Jumpy" and "Constellations" and the success of the National Theatre's "War Horse" and "One Man, Two Guvnors".

While London showed resilience in the face of competition from the Olympics and a stagnant economy, there was greater concern for regional theatres, some of which face major spending cuts from central government and local authorities.

Newcastle City Council in northern England, for example, announced it planned to cut all funding to arts organizations in the city, and other regions including Derby and Darlington have been badly hit.

Rubinstein said cuts to arts spending in the regions could have a devastating impact on theatres which were "part of the ecosystem" of British stage and helped make the West End great.

"We need to support those theatres and make sure the politicians support those theatres," he said.

Advance ticket sales for 2013 suggested another strong year ahead, he added.

Julian Bird, SOLT's chief executive, also announced that commercial channel ITV would broadcast the Olivier Awards for West End theatre on April 28.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

View the original article here

1 of 8. A visitor looks at ''Madame Manet in the Conservatory'' from 1879 by Edouard Manet in an exhibition entitled ''Manet: Portraying Life'' at the Royal Academy in London January 22, 2013.

LONDON | Tue Jan 22, 2013 12:17pm EST

LONDON (Reuters) - Bold claims have been made on behalf of 19th century French painter Edouard Manet - that he invented modern art, or was the man who bridged realism and impressionism.

A major exhibition of his work, dubbed a "blockbuster" by the media for its scale and some euphoric early reviews, opens at London's Royal Academy on Saturday and seeks to underline Manet's importance which few recognized during his lifetime.

The gallery will stay open until 11 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays to cope with anticipated demand, and the Academy is organizing "exclusive" Sunday evening viewings in March and April to allow visitors to see the show with smaller crowds.

Those tickets, including a drink and media guide, will cost 30 pounds ($47), double the normal rate, and the exhibition ends on April 14.

For Lawrence Nichols, co-curator of the show from the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, where it was first displayed last year, seeking to define Manet's place in the history of European art risks missing the point.

"Was he the father of modern art? Was he the first impressionist? My answer to you is he was a creative, talented, self-reliant individual," he told Reuters at a press preview of the first major show in Britain to focus on Manet's portraiture.

"Cezanne loved him, Picasso loved him. He knew who he was. I'm quite convinced that many artists will come to this show over the next 12 weeks and equally be responding to this man's talent," Nichols told Reuters.

More than 50 paintings adorn the walls of the Academy's main gallery space, showcasing Manet's taste for black, white, grey and muted blues that are in stark contrast to the bright colors of the impressionists who followed him.

He portrayed Parisian society and the world in which it moved, blending genre painting with portraiture and succeeding more than most in capturing an era of transition.

Less celebrated than successors like Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet, Manet nonetheless helped pave the way for their bold brushwork and sense of movement.

PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE

Manet's nod to the past and eye for the future is clear to see in two small portraits of artist and friend Berthe Morisot.

In the 1872 version, black is typically dominant, including his subject's eyes which were in fact green. The portrait is pretty, Morisot is composed and looks arrestingly at the viewer.

In an 1874 picture of similar size, Morisot is depicted in mourning. Her eyes are sunken, her cheeks hollow, and the brushstrokes are fast and loose, yet the painting manages to capture her sorrow and fragility.

Manet was a friend to the impressionists, and painted Monet and his family at Argenteuil. He once said of the younger artist: "Who is this Monet whose name sounds just like mine and who is taking advantage of my notoriety?"

He described Monet as "the Raphael of water" and yet distanced himself from the impressionists, refusing to exhibit with them and focusing instead on the Paris Salons which would reject his work as often as they accepted it.

Manet defied the critical preferences of his day, declining to give viewers a clear narrative in pictures like "Music in the Tuileries Gardens" and "The Luncheon", in which 16-year-old Leon, who may or may not have been the artist's son, stares blankly past the viewer.

Perhaps the greatest artistic scandal of his life, however, came with his infamous "Olympia" (1863), depicting the goddess Venus as a Parisian prostitute and exhibited at the Salon, though not loaned to the Royal Academy for the exhibition.

"Insults are beating down on me like hail," he wrote to his friend, the poet Charles Baudelaire. "I've never been through anything like it."

Another literary friend, Emile Zola, wrote an article defending Manet and his Olympia, support which led Manet to paint the novelist in a major portrait in 1868.

Manet appeared to understand that his status as a titan of modern art would come only after his death.

"Their vision will be better developed than ours," he said of future audiences.

Edgar Degas, one of the pallbearers at his funeral in 1883 along with Zola and Monet, was moved to say: "He was greater than we thought."

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White)

View the original article here

LONDON | Fri Oct 12, 2012 7:10am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - Christie's raised 41.2 million pounds ($62 million) from its combined London sales of post-war, contemporary and Italian art late on Thursday, towards the lower end of pre-sale estimates and down on the equivalent auctions of 2011.

The world's biggest auctioneer had expected to sell art worth 36.6-51.9 million pounds, and when buyers' premium are deducted, Thursday's total comes in at around the low estimate.

Last year the combined tally was 55.7 million pounds.

The auctions coincided with the start of the Frieze Art Fair which opened to the public on Thursday and has become an important fixture in the contemporary art market calendar.

Rival auctioneer Sotheby's holds its sales late on Friday, and in addition to more than 170 galleries exhibiting at Frieze, dozens more are selling top works across the city to capitalize on the presence of hundreds of wealthy collectors.

The top end of the art market has performed strongly in recent years despite global economic weakness and concerns over unemployment, the euro and faltering Chinese growth.

But Sotheby's saw its Hong Kong autumn sales of Asian and Chinese artwork and luxury goods fall well short of last year's levels, fetching $258 million or 37 percent less than in the same period of 2011.

At Christie's, the top price was for Martin Kippenberger's "Untitled", which fetched 3.1 million pounds, a new auction record for the artist. Piero Manzoni's "Achrome" realised 2.6 million pounds in Italy.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White; Editing by Steve Addison)

View the original article here

LONDON | Mon Oct 8, 2012 7:12pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - A man was arrested on Monday on suspicion of defacing a painting by the Russian-American artist Mark Rothko in London's Tate Modern museum.

The 26-year-old was detained at about 9 p.m. in connection with a case of criminal damage, London's Metropolitan Police said.

The words "Vladimir Umanets, a potential piece of yellowism" were daubed in black onto the bottom-right corner of the painting, "Black on Maroon", on Sunday.

The popular gallery, located in a converted brick power station on the River Thames, issued a statement confirming that "a visitor defaced one of Rothko's Seagram murals by applying a small area of black paint with a brush".

Rothko, a key figure in 20th century abstract painting whose works sell at auction for tens of millions of dollars, was commissioned to paint the Seagram Murals in the 1950s for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York.

Several of them ended up in the Tate collection after being given as gifts, and Tate describes the series of soft-edged, colored rectangles as "iconic".

Tim Wright wrote on the Twitter micro-blogging site that he had witnessed the incident and posted a photograph of the damaged canvas online.

"Very bizarre, he sat there for a while then just went for it and made a quick exit," Wright wrote. "This guy calmly walked up, took out a marker pen and tagged it. Surreal."

In May, Rothko's "Orange, Red, Yellow" sold for $86.9 million, a new auction record for the artist, at Christie's in New York.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

View the original article here

1 of 10. Visitors look at Raphael's ''Auxiliary cartoon for the Head of a Young Apostle from 1519-1520 which has an estimated value of £10 to £15 million (US$16 - $24 million) at Sotheby's London October 8, 2012.

LONDON | Tue Oct 9, 2012 10:02am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - The most surprising thing about this year's Frieze art week, which puts London at the cutting edge of the contemporary art world every October, is that there is so much old art around.

The annual Frieze Art Fair will go ahead as usual in a giant marquee in Regent's Park, a grid of 175 galleries teeming with potential buyers and thousands of contemporary art lovers keen to keep up with the latest trends in a fast-moving world.

And there are the spin-off events across the capital designed to lure the world's wealthiest buyers - auctions, rival fairs, parties, gallery openings, exhibitions and discreet viewings far from the hullabaloo.

But unlike previous editions, the October 11-14 fair this year comes with a separate Frieze Masters event featuring 96 galleries offering works from across the last 4,000 years.

The reasons for the shift are both commercial and cultural.

Organizers and exhibiting galleries are hoping for more crossover business between contemporary art collectors and those more interested in older works.

They also want to explore art's relationship with the past, representing an acceptance that what came before should be appreciated as well as challenged by iconoclastic young artists.

"I suppose what makes it interesting is what's come out of conversations with contemporary artists," said Victoria Siddall, director of the new fair. "It becomes apparent that a lot of them are looking at works that were made a long time ago.

"All galleries are interested in meeting new clients," she told Reuters. "There are old master and contemporary galleries, and I hope there will be a crossover. It would be great to broaden people's horizons in terms of what they collect."

"MEDICI" BUYERS

That crossover is already happening.

Among the most coveted clients for auction houses and galleries are so-called "Medici"-style buyers who acquire art across different periods and genres.

Sotheby's said 30 percent of buyers at its old master drawing sales had also bought art at its contemporary auctions, compared with seven percent in 2007.

It is no coincidence that it is displaying Raphael's 1519 "Head of an Apostle", which is worth up to $24 million, alongside Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon and Gerhard Richter at its London headquarters this week.

Artists are also embracing Frieze's shift to the past.

The fair has organized a series of conversations bringing together leading contemporary artists with major curators.

On Thursday, London-born contemporary painter Cecily Brown talks with National Gallery director Nicholas Penny who is more used to talking about Raphael than Richter.

For Matthew Slotover, who with Amanda Sharp started Frieze Art Fair in 2003 and launched a New York edition this year, the new-look format was a way of keeping the event fresh.

"We think it's always good to innovate and try new things, as it keeps people interested and excited and us interested and excited too," he told Reuters.

"What we thought we could do with (Frieze Masters) was to animate all of this art that was radical when it was made."

RIVAL FAIRS

Rival fairs like PAD London, held in the exclusive Berkeley Square from October 10-14 and best known for showcasing 20th century art and design, will also delve into the past.

Galerie Mermoz, based in Paris, will present tribal art including a ceremonial head of Hacha representing the god Xipe Totec, dated 450-750 AD, from Mexico.

Modern PAD highlights include Alexander Calder's 1943 "Constellation with Red Knife" valued at $3.5 million.

Sotheby's offers Richter's "Abstraktes Bild (809-4)" for $14-19 million at its contemporary auction on October 12.

The painting has the added buzz of belonging to guitarist Eric Clapton who bought it and two other works by the German artist for $3.4 million in 2001.

That kind of price rise underlines how the top end of the art market has largely defied broader economic gloom.

Auction records have tumbled as buyers from the Middle East, Russia and China snap up top lots for private collections, long-term investments or to fill new museums and galleries.

"There's a lot of confidence in London at the moment," Slotover said of the art market. "London is a brilliant gateway to the rest of the world."

Not everyone is celebrating the boom.

Benedict Silverman, whose $160 million collection of works from early 20th century Germany and Austria is being sold for charity, blamed "speculators" for driving prices higher and making life difficult for collectors like himself.

"The prices paid these days are for trophies, not for art," he said.

"I think there is a bubble and I can't wait for it to break as real collectors are interested in the art, not the price."

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

View the original article here