Tag: Featured

Willem de Kooning’s famed painting “Woman-Ochre,” estimated to be worth around $160 million, has had quite the journey over the years. On the morning after Thanksgiving Day in 1985, the artwork was ripped from its frame at the University of Arizona Museum of Art (UAMA). It remained missing for three decades — finally resurfacing in New Mexico in 2017. Now, after a complex and arduous restoration process in Los Angeles, the beloved abstract-expressionist piece is finally returning home. 

The painting is thought to have been stolen by a retired married couple, a theory that emerged when it popped up at an antique shop that had acquired items from the pair’s estate after their deaths. It was badly damaged, but not enough to evade the eye of an astute customer who suspected its real worth and offered to buy it for $200,000, CNBC reports. 

Startled by the sum, and unaware that he was in possession of a world-renowned masterpiece, shop owner David Van Auker decided to investigate. After discovering details of the decades-old theft on the internet, he knew he had to contact UAMA. Curator Olivia Miller remembers overhearing the details of his initial call. “My coworker and I just stopped our conversation and looked at each other,” she shared in a Getty podcast interview. “She said, ‘are we going to remember this moment for the rest of our lives?’” 

Not wanting to get her hopes up too quickly, Miller asked Van Auker to provide pictures so she could confirm the identity of the piece. “Every time he sent a photo, we were getting more and more excited,” she recalled, adding, “he said that the painting had lines across it as if it had been rolled up.”

Once confirmed to be the real deal, “Woman-Ochre” was on its way back to the museum. But it wasn’t ready for display just yet — the next step was finding the right experts to restore the damaged painting. In what Miller referred to as “the absolute best scenario,” the Getty Conservation Institute (CGI) accepted the challenge, and the painting was sent to be rehabilitated in California.

Conservators began by analyzing de Kooning’s original materials, mapping the pigments through the use of Macro X-Ray Fluorescence technology, CNN reported. “Every single little paint flake that had lifted up when it was pulled from that canvas during the theft had to be set down under the microscope, in a very painstaking and time-consuming process,” Ulrich Birkmaier, a senior conservator at the Getty Museum, told the outlet.  

After years of detailed work, the restoration was complete. “Woman-Ochre” was exhibited at the Getty Center over the summer in a show entitled “Conserving de Kooning: Theft and Recovery.” Now, the painting is being prepared to take up residency in Arizona once again. Eager art lovers will be able to view the piece during a special exhibition at UAMA beginning October 8. 

“I’m just overwhelmed by the honesty and the goodness of the people who found the painting and who did the right thing, right away,” Miller told CNBC. “And that feeling is just as wonderful as having the painting actually back in the museum.”

If you had a hammer, you could hammer in the morning, as the old song goes. But what would you do if you had 10,000 hammers? You’d open a hammer museum, of course. At least, that’s what collector Dave Pahl did in his tiny town of Haines, Alaska. 

Small and unassuming — aside from the giant 19-foot-tall hammer standing in front of it — the Hammer Museum sits on a green lawn and features a backdrop of Alaskan mountains. Not to be confused with Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum, which exhibits art and is named after its founder, this one has a simple mission: to preserve the history of hammers.  

Jimmy Emerson, DVM via Flickr under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

“There’s something for everybody here at the Hammer Museum,” Pahl told Smithsonian Magazine, emphasizing the ubiquitousness and necessity of the household tool. “Everybody uses a hammer, but a lot of us don’t even realize how often, or where we’d be without it.”

More than 2,000 hammers are currently displayed, representing the long and storied journey the instrument has taken to your toolbox. Rock hammers believed to have helped build the Pyramid of Menkaure in Egypt, Native American mallets, a meat tenderizer from the 1940s, hammers bank tellers once used to cancel checks in the 1880s, and more line the walls of the four-room museum. Another 8,000 are kept in storage. 

After moving to Alaska in 1980 to become a homesteader, Pahl began collecting tools he needed to “live off the land.” Eventually, though, he found himself with far more hammers than any one man requires. “Family vacations were hammer hunting,” he said, adding that he “​​was getting a lot of pressure from [my wife] Carol to get some of these hammers out of the house. She was getting tired of dusting.” But Carol eventually got into collecting too, according to the museum’s website. Her personal collection of glass hammers is currently on display. 

Jimmy Emerson, DVM via Flickr under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Considered the world’s first hammer museum when it opened in 2002, the shrine has since sparked similar iterations — one in Kentucky, another in Lithuania. In 2004, it became a nonprofit organization, even developing its own summer internship program, and Dahl has firmly established himself as an expert. A curator for the National Museum of American History once sought Pahl’s help in identifying hammers in the Smithsonian’s collections, Smithsonian reports, and the History Channel has reached out to inquire about the proper hammers to use in reenactments.

Pahl’s latest endeavor is the 200-page hammer “bible” he self-published in August, but he has blueprints for another idea that he’s constructing. Last month, he shared with Haines’ own Chilkat Valley News that he’s hoping to release a hammer day planner for 2023. “There’s a hammer for every day of the year,” he said.

The world’s longest book is enthralling but impossible to read — and that’s the point. At 21,540 pages and 37 1/2 pounds, artist Ilan Manouach’s conceptual work “ONEPIECE” is a single volume containing every edition of the world’s most highly circulated comic in the Japanese style known as manga, One Piece. Manouach says his sculpture is a commentary on the commodification of comic books. 

To make the colossal creation, Manouach printed out the entire digital catalog of One Piece and bound it together. The manga, written and illustrated by Eiichiro Oda, has been serialized in Shōnen Jump magazine every week since 1997, selling more than half a billion copies to date. The story follows protagonist Monkey D. Luffy, a boy whose body has the properties of rubber, on his swashbuckling adventures to find the world’s most valuable treasure, a “One Piece,” and become king of the pirates.  

Despite its literary contents, “ONEPIECE” isn’t meant to be read. In fact, opening it could damage the spine. Instead, it is an “unreadable sculpture that takes the shape of a book — the largest one to date in page numbers and spine width — that materializes the ecosystem of online dissemination of comics,” a spokesperson for publisher JBE Books told The Guardian. 

Manouach teamed up with JBE Books and his nonprofit, Echo Chamber, to create 50 signed and numbered copies of the artwork, priced at around $1,840 each. The books, featuring 31 1/2-inch spines with vivid illustrations, all sold within days of the September 7 release, Smithsonian Magazine reports.

According to JBE, “ONEPIECE” was inspired by the prevalence of online content and “rampant digitization” of comics, which “challenges the state-of-the-art comics craftsmanship.” It is also a commentary on the fact that comics are traded similarly to trading cards.

JBE Books

JBE Books

JBE Books

JBE Books

“Comics are dual objects. They have a use value — for readers — and an exchange value for collectors. Although these two functions are not operating along a clear-cut divide, they sometimes run opposite to each other,” reads the JBE Books press release. “‘ONEPIECE’ intensifies this duality as it can only be contemplated as a material instantiation of digital comics’ very own media-saturated digital ecosystem. ‘ONEPIECE’ exists only as an object of pure speculation.”

When asked if Oda had been consulted or involved in the creation process of the world’s longest book, a JBE spokesperson told The Guardian: “This piece is about Manouach’s work around ecosystems of comics, here as a sculptor who uses online dissemination as source material, not reading copyrighted content.” The spokesperson added that they do not believe there is any copyright infringement because the book is unreadable. Although Oda might not receive royalties, he is still the richest manga creator of all time, the publication reports, with an estimated net worth of $200 million. 

“ONEPIECE” is the latest iteration of Manouach’s practice of repurposing comics. He is well known for creating “Shapereader,” a tactile storytelling system initially designed for people with visual impairments.