A good recommendation I recently received: My friend put the 1988 film Crossing Delancey on an end-of-year recommendation list, and it turned out to be the perfect nightcap for a dreary winter's day: a wry romantic comedy of errors that doubles as an ode to Manhattan's Lower East Side. Its love interest is a pickle salesman-utterly charming!
But you no longer need to be a multimillionaire to own a Picasso for 100, anyone in the world has the chance to walk away with a painting by one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. The French charity Alzheimer's Research Foundation announced recently it was raffling Picasso's 1941 portrait, Tete de femme, which is worth more than 1m, to a single winner.
Just one painting but it is one of the world's very greatest, and most dangerous. The shock of the old hits you in front of a naked Cupid who has clearly been portrayed from life, his raw, laughing features apparently coming straight from the mean streets into the gallery. This young love god is an anarchist, and Caravaggio paints like the antichrist, mocking civilisation, symbolised by the musical instruments at Cupid's feet.
German police say they've broken up an international art forgery ring that tried to sell works purportedly by Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt, Frida Kahlo and others for tens of millions of dollars to unsuspecting collectors. The scheme was allegedly led by a 77-year-old German man from Bavaria with the help of ten accomplices, according to a press release from the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office.
At the core of Tate Modern's exhibition Theatre Picasso, opening this week, is a painting that Picasso esteemed more highly even than Guernica (1937). Picasso told Roland Penrose that he much preferred The Three Dancers (1925) to his anti-fascist opus, because it is "a real painting-a painting in itself without any outside considerations". Tate is marking the painting's 100th anniversary with a show that includes its entire Picasso collection as well as major loans, but with a fresh perspective courtesy of its staging by the artist Wu Tsang and the writer and curator Enrique Fuenteblanca. By inviting contributions from contemporary dancers and choreographers, the duo will open up fresh interpretations of a masterpiece that has already proved inexhaustibly fascinating.
