The artwork ''Virgen de Tobed'' by Jaume Serra, dated in 1359, is seen in this undated picture provided by the Prado Museum in Madrid January 29, 2013.

MADRID | Tue Jan 29, 2013 12:23pm EST

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's Prado museum received its biggest private donation in decades on Tuesday with the gift of 12 medieval and Renaissance works by Spanish artists.

The paintings and sculptures include "The Virgin of Tobed", the central panel of the altarpiece of a church in northeastern Spain and an exceptional example of Catalan Italo-Gothic painting attributed to Jaume Serra.

The collection, donated by a businessman from Barcelona in a ceremony attended by Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, will join paintings by Spanish masters such as El Greco, Velazquez and Goya in one of Europe's most venerated museums.

"These aren't times of lavish state spending, so this donation is generous and tremendously timely," said Jose Pedro Perez Llorca, president of the Prado's board of trustees.

Spain is mired in a deep crisis which has forced the government to apply severe spending cuts to try to meet public deficit targets agreed with its partners in the European Union.

"The Prado is the memory of an ambitious nation that has never been stopped by hardship," Rajoy said.

"This donation enriches in an extraordinary way a museum...which is an indispensable element of our image as a country," he added.

The patron, Barcelona businessman and engineer Jose Luis Varez will receive the rare honor of having a room in the Madrid museum named after him.

The museum, which had 2.8 million visitors last year, did not say when the newly donated works will go on show.

(Reporting by Teresa Larraz; Editing by Fiona Ortiz and Paul Casciato)

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n">(Reuters) - Vienna's Leopold Museum will welcome naked viewers from the public in an after-hours showing of its controversial and popular exhibit "Naked Men", a spokesman said on Tuesday.

The Leopold, known for its unrivalled collection of works by Austrian artist Egon Schiele, was inspired to invite the public to get naked after an inquiry from a group of German nudists.

"There was a request by an association from Germany for a nude guided tour," the spokesman said. "We thought about it, and decided it would be a good idea to have a special nude viewing open to the public."

But he dissuaded any members of the public from dropping by just to gawk at the visiting nudists.

"If you are not a nudist you are welcome to come clothed. But we don't want voyeurs so it's better not to be clothed."

The exhibition, which has been extended to run until March 4, is designed to show the diverse and changing depictions of male nudity in art history.

Among its exhibits is a grotesque self-portrait by Schiele, and a photograph called "Vive La France" of three men of different races wearing nothing but blue, white and red socks and soccer boots.

Together with a special exhibition to commemorate the 150th birthday of Viennese painter Gustav Klimt, "Naked Men" helped boost visitor numbers at the Leopold by 17 percent to more than 364,000 last year.

"We noticed a large increase in young people attending the museum, about 10 percent more," said the spokesman. "Having both "Naked Men" and "Klimt: Up Close and Personal" brought a lot of people in this past year."

A German museum-goer was even inspired to imitate the art and strip naked while walking around the exhibition in December. Visitors appeared undisturbed, assuming he belonged to the show.

However, "Naked Men" has caused controversy among more conservative elements of Austrian society.

In October, the Leopold bowed to pressure and covered up the genitalia of the three nude male soccer players used on large publicity posters around the city after they caused outrage among parents and religious groups.

"Their reaction is not a part of liberal thinking in the 21st century," the spokesman said.

"This is an unprecedented exhibition of male nudity here in Austria, something no other country has done," he added. "Hopefully it will be replicated around the world."

(Reporting By Derek Brooks)

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VIENNA | Sat Jan 5, 2013 11:24am EST

VIENNA (Reuters) - Vienna's Jewish Museum holds hundreds of books and works of art that may have been stolen by Nazis, a newspaper reported on Saturday.

A screening program that started in 2007, years after other Austrian museums began combing their collections for works taken from their rightful owners, has determined that about 500 works of art and 900 books are of dubious origin, Der Standard said.

It cited in particular paintings by Jehudo Epstein, who while abroad in 1936 entrusted 172 works to industrialist Bernhard Altmann for safekeeping.

Altmann fled the country in 1938 when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, and his factory was "Aryanised", the paper said.

The widow of Epstein, who died in South Africa in 1945, tried in vain after 1947 to track down the paintings, some of which were later routinely sold at auction in Austria, it said.

Several are now in the Jewish Museum's collection, it said, citing information it got from the museum after many requests.

It quoted Danielle Spera, who became director in 2010, as saying the museum had, despite tight finances, for the first time hired in December 2011 a part-time researcher to check the provenances of its artworks.

"Anything that was acquired illegally ought to be returned. There will not be a hint of hesitation," Spera told the paper.

Der Standard said leaders of Austria's Jewish community, whose collections are on permanent loan to the municipal museum, voted in October to return an Epstein painting called Italienische Landschaft (Italian Landscape) and a work in a separate museum to the painter's heirs, who now live in England.

That transfer could take place as early as this month, it said.

The Jewish Museum is closed on Saturdays and no one there could be reached immediately for comment.

It contains, among others, the Jewish community's own collection, bequeathed in 1992, a Max Berger collection bought by the city in 1988, the Sussmann collection, on loan since 1992, and donations from a collection by Martin Schlaff.

Other Austrian museums have already had to grapple with the issue of returning looted art to the proper owners.

A painting by Egon Schiele, which was seized by the Nazis on the eve of World War Two, was shown in public for the first time in more than a decade last year after the Leopold Museum reached a settlement with claimants that cost millions of dollars.

The dispute was the second of two restitution cases the Leopold settled with the help of funds raised by selling another Schiele painting, "Houses with Colourful Laundry, Suburb II", for 24.7 million pounds ($39.6 million) at auction in 2011.

($1 = 0.6236 British pounds)

(Reporting by Michael Shields; Editing by Louise Ireland)

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WASHINGTON | Thu Sep 27, 2012 9:51pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Virginia auction house on Thursday canceled the sale of a Renoir painting bought at a flea market for $7 after signs the work was stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art decades ago.

The painting "Paysage Bords de Seine" by Pierre-Auguste Renoir was to have gone under the hammer on Saturday but ownership questions halted the sale, said Lucie Holland, a spokeswoman for Potomack Co, the Alexandria, Virginia, auctioneer.

"The rest of the auction will go on, but the Renoir has been withdrawn," she said.

A Virginia woman bought the signed French Impressionist painting at a West Virginia flea market a year or two ago, hoping the frame would be of some use.

She ignored the work until it turned up again while housecleaning and had it appraised by Potomack in July. The auctioneers verified it as a Renoir and estimated its worth at $75,000 to $100,000.

The Baltimore Museum of Art told Potomack on Wednesday that its records indicated "Paysage Bords de Seine," or "Landscape on the Banks of the Seine," was stolen while on loan to the museum in 1951, the auction house said.

Potomack told the FBI and a federal probe is under way. There is no known police report on the theft.

BOUGHT IN PARIS

The Renoir came to the Baltimore museum through one of its leading benefactors, collector Saidie May. Her family bought the painting from the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris in 1926.

The Washington Post found records in the museum's library on Tuesday that showed May had lent the paintings and other works to the museum in 1937, Potomack said.

After the newspaper told it of the findings, the Baltimore museum checked its files and found a loan record showing the Renoir had been stolen on November 17, 1951. What happened to it after the theft is unknown.

Doreen Bolger, the museum director, said the museum's probe into what happened to the painting was in early stages but was centered on May.

She died in May 1951 and the art collection was willed to the museum. As its ownership was going through legal transfer, the painting was stolen while still listed as on loan.

"At this point we just want to make sure that the painting winds up where it belongs and that we provide all the information we can to law enforcement about this issue," Bolger said.

Potomack said the painting had not turned up when it checked London's Art Loss Register, a database of stolen and lost art. It also consulted the FBI's art theft website to confirm it was not listed as stolen.

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

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Arty brief encounters in contemporary Vienna.

Locarno Film Festival

Mary Margaret O’Hara, Bobby Sommer, Ela Piplits

Jem Cohen

LOCARNO -- Wintry Vienna provides the picturesque backdrop for this engrossing U.S.-Austrian co-production, a lightly experimental fusion of drama and documentary that has just premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. The writer-director Jem Cohen has built his career largely outside the commercial mainstream, though his work has been shown in the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney. Museum Hours is an unorthodox hybrid beast, but still the 50-year-old New Yorker’s most conventional dramatic feature to date. Full of charm, intelligence and dry humour, it deserves to find a discerning theatrical audience beyond Cohen’s usual festival-circuit following.
The cult Canadian singer and occasional actor Mary Margaret O’Hara gives an engagingly natural performance as Anne, a first-time visitor to the Austrian capital, where her distant cousin lies in a coma. There she meets urbane art museum guard Johann, played by non-professional actor Bobby Sommer, who kindly offers his services as a local guide and translator. The two form an easy non-sexual bond, walking and talking their way across the city like a middle-aged version of the couple in Richard Linklater’s Viennese rom-com Before Sunrise.
Cutting unobtrusively between 16mm and digital, Cohen interweaves this fragmentary plot with close-up studies of paintings from one of Vienna’s main art galleries, plus footage he gleaned while walking the city’s streets, random snapshots of minor characters and discursive musings on the social context of art. The focus is fuzzy and the pace leisurely, but deliberately so, as the director’s high-minded intentions slowly become clear.
One of the inspirational seeds of the film was the work of the 16th century Dutch painter Pieter Breughel, which figures prominently throughout the film. Breughel’s egalitarian approach to painting, giving background figures equal prominence with nominal headline stars, is discussed at length in a slightly stilted lecture scene. Cohen clearly admires this proto-modernist attitude to plot and character, adopting it himself in Museum Hours, with its diffuse and elliptical narrative.
Cohen has worked on promo videos, concert films and live collaborations with musicians including REM, Patti Smith, Fugazi and the late Vic Chesnutt. He cites punk rock as a career-shaping influence, which shows even in contemplative culture-vulture works like Museum Hours. Indeed, Smith and Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto have producer credits, and the film is dedicated to Chesnutt. O’Hara is a singer too, of course, and her character breaks into song in several scenes. Sommer is also a musician and former rock promoter who now works for the Viennale film festival, where Cohen has been a regular guest for many years.
Museum Hours demands patience and engagement from viewers, and Cohen could comfortably cut 20 minutes without lessening its intellectual or aesthetic impact. But the film’s more arid and arty touches are offset by an appealing thread of understated humour, including deadpan musings on heavy metal and the lazy leftist notion of “late capitalism."
At the heart of the film is an absorbing argument that dusty old artworks have plenty to tell us about contemporary life -- especially about money, politics, power, social class and sex. Cohen makes this point in a brief but inspired fantasy sequence, filling the art gallery with naked customers. Later, he reiterates the message by framing modern Viennese street scenes as animated paintings that Johan then deconstructs in the language of art criticism. Cerebral stuff, but all delivered with warmth, wit and quiet confidence.
Venue: Locarno Film Festival
Production companies: Little Magnet Films, Gravity Hill Films, KGP GmbH
Cast: Mary Margaret O’Hara, Bobby Sommer, Ela Piplits
Director: Jem Cohen
Producers: Paolo Calamitra, Gabriele Kranzelbinder, Jem Cohen, Patti Smith, Guy Picciotto
Cinematography: Jem Cohen, Peter Roehsler
Editor: Jem Cohen, Mark Vives
Sales companies: Little Magnet Films
Rating TBC, 107 minutes

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