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The portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, the 16-year-old mistress of Ludovico Sforza (also known as Ludovico il Moro), Duke of Milan from 1489 until his death in 1508, is not only captivating—popularly known as "Lady with an Ermine" (pictured)—but the most valuable work of art in Poland. Painted by Leonardo da Vinci, it hardly ever leaves the country. But the Bode Museum in Berlin has been able to include it in a fascinating show, "Masterpieces of Renaissance Portraiture". This despite the painting’s fragile state and the fact that German Nazis stole it when they invaded Poland in 1939. The American Allies returned it to the Krakow Czartoryski Museum in May 1945.

This exhibition is sensational. More than 150 portraits, sculptures and medals from the early Italian Renaissance are on view. Thanks to its curators, Stefan Weppelmann from Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery) and Keith Christiansen from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, we can now admire all at once outstanding centuries-old works by Sandro Botticelli, Leon Battista Alberti, Desiderio da Settignano, Filippo Lippi, Pisanello, Gentile Bellini, da Vinci and others. The list of lenders includes Britain's Royal Collection, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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"Degas and the Ballet”—now there’s an exhibition title to put a person off. It just screams of being an inevitable blockbuster, and who wants to feel like a lemming? I planned to skip the show, which opens at the Royal Academy of Arts on September 17th. I wanted to avoid any tooth and mind decay from sugar overload. All those soft, pretty colours and all those girls in their tutus—an all too apt illustration for the genre called, not very sweetly, chocolate box. On top of all this loomed the grim fact of Edgar Degas’s anti-Semitism.   

And yet I went. My change of heart had a very unlofty trigger: I was invited to the preview party. As Bank NY Mellon sponsored the show, this reception promised more than the RA’s typical spread of cheese-flavoured bread sticks. I am glad I was seduced. The party was fine, but the show is terrific. Not all of it, but plenty. And despite what has sometimes felt like over-exposure to Degas, there are welcome surprises, too.  

In addition to some 90 examples of the artist’s drawings, pastels, paintings and sculpture, there are photographs, sculptures and films by his contemporaries, as well as three photographs he took. The lead curators of the show, Richard Kendall and his wife Jill DeVonyar (an ex-ballet teacher), have researched the relationship between Degas and those experimenting with still and moving images. The show's forays into these parallel developments are sometimes engaging, but without question it is the art of Degas that makes this a show worth seeing.      read more »

Last week Michael Crichton's collection of contemporary art sold at Christie's for a whopping for $93.3m. Every work sold, including a record-breaking Jasper Johns flag for $28.6m. Though partly the product of trigger-happy Hollywood types and the return of consumer confidence, the success of this sale lies in Michael Crichton himself, who collected not what was trendy but what he loved. For Crichton, a popular novelist and screenwriter who died from cancer in 2008, writing was his day job; he would lock himself away with a typewriter and take records of how many pages he wrote, how many days it took. But art was his passion. He treasured his paintings, placing them around the house to fit his mood and projects so often that he had to change the walls to cover the pockmarks.

The late writer of "Jurassic Park", Crichton also often wrote and spoke about art, offering an insightful outsider's take on the Los Angeles art scene and his experiences as a collector. He even wrote the exhibition catalogue for his good friend Jasper Johns's 1977 retrospective at the Whitney Museum. Courtesy of the Christie's catalogue of his collection, we've culled five ways Crichton found meaning in art:

On pop art:
"I was beginning to work in the visual medium of film, and I was struck by the fact that American painters employed much more modern, if mundane imagery than American filmmakers in the 1960s. I wanted this print imagery around me, and I was interested to see what, if anything would change in my work as a result."  read more »

In a narrow space on Manhattan's Upper East side, Hauser & Wirth's new New York outpost seems ready to assert itself. The contemporary art gallery has just unveiled "White Snow", a new show of work by Paul McCarthy, a controversial American artist. On view are drawings inspired by the tale of Snow White, though McCarthy adds a very sexual and violent twist.

Gathered at the press opening was a crowd of posh uptowners--women with good hair and men with good shoes, everyone sipping coffee out of fine white china. Few seemed flustered by the brazen cartoon porn. The effect drew to mind the story of the emperor and his new clothes. Though the drawings hang beautifully--potent, provocative works against a gallery's white backdrop--we could have easily been examining the work of a psychopath. Ten minutes in I felt compelled to put my dainty cup down. These graphic drawings turned my stomach.  

The first floor features McCarthy's drawings and collage on a grand scale. Over-tanned porn clippings compete with the clean lines and odd beauty of his juvenile scribbles, his well rendered princesses and dwarfs. In the background a six-hour loop plays of the artist banging and clanging at work in his huge, boxing ring-like studio. "You should hear the noises he made as he put up the artwork," said a gallery representative cheerfully. There is little pleasure in this voyeurism. Exposed to the sick exuberance of the artist's hand, I found myself stunned.  read more »

In an era of digital cameras and mobile phones that can instantly zap images to the internet for public consumption, it seems as though the traditional way of enjoying photography—on paper—is becoming endangered. But if you still relish the sort of fine-art photography books that can be handled and leafed through, several covetable ones are debuting this autumn. From counterculture celebrities to historical archives in miniature to the best of contemporary photography, we profile five of the season's most sought-after photography books:   read more »

For the most part, the crowd attending the recent launch of Paper Monument’s pamphlet “I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette” were polite indeed–a relief for an elbow-averse attendee squished into a dimly lit artist space in Brooklyn. To explain the nature of this politesse, to unpack the intricacies of class, affect and social rank at play in the overheated yoga studio, could span volumes. So it is a clever feat to boil this insight down into a trim monograph.  read more »

Audio Visual Arts (AVA), a small and rare New York gallery that specialises in sound art, recently unveiled new work by Reuben Lorch-Miller. Called  “Anamnesis of the Interstellar Father”, it considers the use of recollection as a means of connection. Anamnesis, according to Lorch-Miller, is the literal “loss of amnesia”. Though not an example of sound art, the current show plays on themes of sensual subjectivity and shifting perspectives. On view are three paintings that vary in colour. Framed behind richly coloured Plexiglas, the “disinhibiting images”, as Lorch-Miller describes them, leave room for interpretation--like Rorschach’s inkblots.

A chain-like structure resembling a DNA helix stands in the gallery corner, offsetting the more obscure work lining the walls. Opaque and white, the sculpture “plays axis to the paintings, landing somewhere between Brancusi and a radio transmission antenna,” according to AVA’s press release. As light streams through the paintings’ colour filters and bounces off the gallery's white walls, viewers can manipulate their experience of the works by shifting their stance or angle of perception. The effect is unexpectedly evocative.
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Our friend and colleague Sarah Dallas, editor of Cities Guide on Economist.com, sends us a first letter from Paris:

“La rentrée” is a serious matter in Paris. From late August, as families reappear after three-week holidays, and shops and bistros gingerly roll back their shutters, the city begins to bristle with a back-to-school charge. This year, the sense of anticipation is especially palpable: President Nicolas Sarkozy made a stunning three-month debut; what will the man, dubbed “the human bomb” by the New Yorker, do next? And then there is the matter of the mayoral elections. Will Bertrand Delanoë, the environmentally-minded socialist mayor, sail into a second term next March, or will Mr Sarkozy’s UMP party come up with a candidate sparkling enough to swing this essentially conservative city back to the right?

On the cultural front, this autumn’s leading exhibitions include a display of paintings at the Musée du Luxembourg by Arcimboldo, an unnervingly surreal 16th-century court painter who made his name with portraits composed of still-life objects (fruits, grains, books). If that doesn’t tempt (some of the paintings are oddly unappetising), the Musée Jacquemart André has an astonishing collection of works by Frangonard in its 19th-centry palace, while the Musée d’Orsay is profiling Gustave Courbet, a 19th-century pioneer of Realism. The show includes the groundbreaking “Burial at Ornans”, a huge canvas which Courbet saw as his “burial of Romanticism”.

On the other side of the river, two orchestras currently in dazzling form swoop into the refurbished Salle Pleyel: Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (October); and Antonio Pappano’s London Symphony Orchestra (November). Opera and ballet fans will have to wait until 2008 for this season’s big hitters (such as a visit from the Bolshoi Ballet), but French-speaking theatre-goers should note a daring new production of “Cyrano de Bergerac”, which will be performed in 20 different venues in Paris, including Sainte-Chapelle (of the famous stained-glass windows) and the city’s Oscar Niemeyer-designed communist party headquarters.

After a drizzly summer, the sun is shining and there is promise in the air. France is back on the global stage, and Parisians are sashaying into September looking decidedly jaunty. Many will have tucked into their bags a copy of the season’s most talked-about paperback: "L'aube, le soir ou la nuit" ("Dawn, Evening or Night"), a portrait of the limelight-loving president during his election campaign, by Yasmina Reza, a French playwright (whose works include "Art"). The New York Times calls it "fall’s literary sensation".  read more »

GAWKER hosts Elizabeth Currid's refreshingly lucid musings on the international urban art scene. She illuminates the tension between underground heroes who have found mainstream success—Bansky, Swoon, Ryan McGinley—and their young, art-schooled detractors, a disgruntled and increasingly vocal minority. Her examples include New York's pet villain, "the splasher", and an artist named Laura who executed an amusing parody of Damien Hirst's "For the Love of God".

"A stroll through the art districts of New York or Los Angeles or London gives you a sense of the buzz surrounding the contemporary street art movement," Ms Currid writes, "something unseen since the days of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat."

But the commercial success of those artists is controversial, even today. Juan Puntes, a director at New York's nonprofit White Box gallery, put it this way to an Economist
interviewer in July: "The work of Basquiat bores the hell out of me. This guy was the typical thing--was from New York, made friends with Andy Warhol, and everybody loved him. They killed him. They gave him too much money, too much coke. They fucked him too much. And then he was gone. Right? Let's cry. And then let's sell the work, and everybody makes millions."  read more »