For hundreds of years, art critics have mused over why the Mona Lisa’s smile seems so mysterious. Now the Harvard neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone has a fascinating answer: It’s because Da Vinci painted her face in colors that play tricks on the eye.

Livingstone’s work has long examined the way that different cells in the visual system process different types of information — such as form, color, depth and movement. When she analyzed the Mona Lisa, she found that Da Vinci painted her smile almost completely in low spatial frequencies, and these are best picked up in your peripheral vision. The result, as she notes on her web site, is a nifty illusion:

These three images — [pictured above] — show her face filtered to show selectively lowest (left) low (middle) and high (right) spatial frequencies.

So when you look at her eyes or the background, you see a smile like the one on the left, or in the middle, and you think she is smiling. But when you look directly at her mouth, it looks more like the panel on the right, and her smile seems to vanish. The fact that the degree of her smile varies so much with gaze angle makes her expression dynamic, and the fact that her smile vanishes when you look directly at it, makes it seem elusive.

{ Collision detection | Continue reading }

{ Richard Avedon, Lyal Burr, coal miner, and his sons Kerry and Phillip, Utah, 1981 }

{ Avedon’s instructions to his printer | scanned from Evidence: 1944-1994 }

In what experts described as the largest private sale of art ever, the heirs of the legendary dealer Ileana Sonnabend have parted with some $600 million worth of paintings and sculptures in two transactions to cover their estate taxes.

Ever since Ms. Sonnabend died in October at 92, the auction giants Sotheby’s and Christie’s have been vying with some of the world’s most powerful art dealers — Larry Gagosian, William Acquavella, Robert Mnuchin, the team of Giraud Pissarro Ségalot — to get at least a piece of the collection to sell.

Ms. Sonnabend’s art trove, which includes seminal works by artists like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, is valued at more than $1 billion. Taxes on the estate amount to more than half the value of the assets, experts said.

After months of deliberations Ms. Sonnabend’s son and daughter settled this week on the two private sales. “We did sell two blocks of works,” said Antonio Homem, Ms. Sonnabend’s son, who along with her daughter, Nina Sundell, inherited the collection.

Citing confidentiality agreements, Mr. Homem declined to identify the buyers. But experts close to the transactions who insisted on anonymity, also because of those agreements, said that the dealers Franck Giraud, Lionel Pissarro and Philippe Ségalot, who have offices in New York and Paris, bought $400 million worth of art on behalf of several clients, including some of the collection’s finest works. A second group of artworks, all Andy Warhols, was sold to the Gagosian Gallery for $200 million, the experts said.

Experts said the cache sold to GPS Partners included Jeff Koons’s 1986 sculpture “Rabbit”, which has been valued in excess of $80 million. (…)

The experts said they could not identify all the buyers to whom GPS Partners would in turn sell the works. But they said they had been told that several very wealthy collectors were involved, among them François Pinault, the French luxury goods magnate and owner of Christie’s; Sammy Ofer, the Israeli shipping magnate; and Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecommunications billionaire, whom Forbes listed last year as the world’s third-wealthiest man. Mr. Gagosian is said by the experts to be representing several American and Russian collectors in the deal. (…)

Known for a shrewd eye and sure taste, Ms. Sonnabend was among the world’s most powerful dealers in the 1960s and ’70s, as was her first husband, Leo Castelli. (…)

Perhaps the most famous painting she owned — Mr. Rauschenberg’s 1959 “Canyon” — will never leave the collection, Mr. Homem said. In its center is a stuffed bald eagle that cannot be sold because of a federal prohibition on trafficking in endangered species.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

artwork { Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon, 1959 | mixed mediums with taxidermy bald eagle and pillow }

related { Due to a recent court order, bald eagles in the Sonoran Desert of central Arizona are again protected as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.  }

{ Professor Robin Wilson | Continue reading }

artwork { Piero della Francesca, Diptych of Battista Sforza and Federico da Montefeltro, 1472 }

{ Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, 1962 | previously }

Mary Boone is a NYC art dealer with galleries in Soho, Chelsea and on 5th Avenue above the men’s Bergdorf Goodman department. She used to represent Jean Michel Basquiat. Problems between the equally charismatic Basquiat and Mary Boone have been a constant part of their relationship.

Mary Boone represented Mr. Basquiat for four years. She called him a talented but erratic artist, often distracted by the glittery art world that seized on his work in the early 1980’s.

‘’He was too much into what people said about him. If your goal is to make great paintings, then you listen to an internal voice, to yourself,'’ she said.

‘’He was ambivalent about his work and his success. The only thing he wasn’t ambivalent about was being a painter,'’ said Miss Boone, who added that he often expressed concern about whether his works were popular and selling well.

By the time he joined Miss Boone in 1982, she said, he also had become a regular user of addictive drugs, although he denied having a habit. Other acquiantances said Mr. Basquiat picked up a heroin habit in the early 1980’s, and increased his use after he became wealthy. Several friends and business associates said the artist was frequently offered drugs, both by dealers and private collectors, in exchange for his work.

Miss Boone said Mr. Basquiat’s use of drugs made him an inconsistent artist and sometimes rendered him virtually incapable of working.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Mary Boone as a punching bag), 1984-85 }

{ Madonna photographed by Steven Meisel, Vanity Fair, 1992 | more | “As she nears 50, Madonna is searching for her true self.” }

{ Jeff Koons, Girl with Dolphin and Monkey, 2006 }

When Jeremy Wolfe of Harvard Medical School (…) wanted to illustrate how the brain sees the world and how often it fumbles the job, he flashed a slide of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Study for Colors for a Large Wall” on the screen, and the audience couldn’t help but perk to attention. The checkerboard painting of 64 black, white and colored squares was so whimsically subtle, so poised and propulsive. We scanned every part of it, we loved it, and, whoops, time for a test.

Dr. Wolfe flashed another slide of the image, this time with one of the squares highlighted. Was the highlighted square the same color as the original, he asked the audience, or had he altered it? (…) We had gazed on Ellsworth Kelly’s masterpiece, but we hadn’t really seen it at all.

The phenomenon that Dr. Wolfe’s Pop Art quiz exemplified is known as change blindness: the frequent inability of our visual system to detect alterations to something staring us straight in the face. (…)

“The basic problem is that far more information lands on your eyes than you can possibly analyze and still end up with a reasonable sized brain,” Dr. Wolfe said. Hence, the brain has evolved mechanisms for combating data overload, allowing large rivers of data to pass along optical and cortical corridors almost entirely unassimilated, and peeling off selected data for a close, careful view.

{ NY Times | Continue reading | Pop-Art quiz }

unrelated { The Six Million Dollar Man }

Dorothy Podber, a wild child of the New York art scene in the 1950s and ’60s who is probably best known for brandishing a pistol and putting a bullet through the forehead of Marilyn Monroe’s likenesses on a stack of Andy Warhol’s paintings, died at her apartment in the East Village on Feb. 9. She was 75. (…)

On an autumn day in 1964, Dorothy Podber did the thing for which she will largely be remembered. Dressed in black leather, white gloves and accompanied by a Great Dane called Carmen Miranda (or, perhaps, Yvonne de Carlo – as with much of Podber’s life, the story varies), she walked into Andy Warhol’s Factory on East 47th Street in New York and asked to shoot some paintings.

Assuming she meant with a camera, Warhol agreed to her request, and the self-styled feminist and “witch” peeled off her gloves, drew a small German pistol from her handbag and put a bullet through a stack of silk-screens of Marilyn Monroe. According to one Factory hanger-on, Billy Name, “she got Marilyn right between the eyes”. The scarred works were henceforth known as “The Shot Marilyns”, and Podber was barred from the Factory for life.

One of the paintings, Shot Red Marilyn, with a repaired bullet hole over the left eyebrow, sold for $4.07 million in 1989, at the time setting a record at auction for a Warhol work. They are now said to be worth around $17 million apiece.

{ The Independant | NY Times | Telegraph }

photos { Red Shot Marilyn | Dorothy Podber }

Ilona Staller, a former European porn star and politician, has sued her ex-husband, artist Jeffrey Koons, for millions of dollars in child support.

In papers filed in Manhattan’s state Supreme Court, Staller says Koons owes about 1.5 million euros, or about $2.4 million on Wednesday, for support of their 15-year-old son, Ludwig Maximilian Koons.

Staller’s papers, filed late Tuesday, say the child support payments of 15,000 euros a month were ordered by an Italian court in June 2007. Koons was represented in that court, which ultimately gave custody of Ludwig to his mother, court papers say.

The amount Koons owes covers October 1998 through December 2007, court papers say. They say the artist has paid 191,426 euros for child support, leaving a balance owed of about 1.5 million euros.

The Hungarian-born Staller made X-rated films in Italy under the name La Cicciolina before becoming a member of Italy’s parliament for five years. She and Koons, 53, met in the early 1990s, when he hired her to pose for sexually explicit photos, paintings and sculptures. They married in Budapest, Hungary, in June 1991.

Following their divorce in New York in 1994, Koons was given custody of the then-infant Ludwig. A judge ordered that the child stay in New York, but in June 1994 Staller evaded Koons’ security guards and fled to Italy with the boy.

{ AP/1010 WINS | Bloomberg }

photo { Jeff Koons, Made in Heaven, 1989 | Lithograph billboard }

{ Andy Warhol, Oxidation Painting, 1978 | urine and metallic pigment in acrylic medium on canvas }

{ Andy Warhol, Piss Painting, 1978 | urine on gesso on canvas }

{ Andy Warhol, Cum Painting, circa 1978 | semen on gesso on canvas | Gagosian Gallery | more }

related { Union officials in Colorado say a Qwest supervisor tried to cut down on lengthy bathroom breaks by telling workmen to use disposable urinal bags in the field }

artwork { Damien Hirst, Ho, Ho, Ho, 1999 }