Month: April 2010

Grace Kelly’s fashion on display

Modern(ish), Museums

The Victoria & Albert Museum is putting on an exhibit of Grace Kelly as a style icon. Several of her most recognizable gowns from movies like Rear Window and High Society are part of the exhibit, as well as later dresses she wore as Princess of Monaco. In total 40 gowns are on display along with some of her gloves, bags, sun glasses and jewelry, so basically the full gamut of the glamorous 50s woman.

The exhibit is divided, much like Gaul, into 3 parts: Actress, Bride and Princess. Most of the clothing comes from her films, however.

It sounds like every small girl’s clichéd dream. Yet there is a steely minimalism about many of Kelly’s costumes, and her modus operandi, that brings respect. Her slim pale-green gown, which she wore to receive her Oscar for The Country Girl, is there, under a matching satin evening coat. She wore the same dress for the premiere, and on the cover of Life magazine, an economy that would horrify the 21st-century actress.

Black organza dress from Rear WindowFast was never a word that applied to Kelly. She was the un-Marilyn, the other blonde, who appeared to have less fun while getting away with a great deal under her patrician exterior. At a thin 5ft 7in, she contrasted with the va-va-voom Hollywood hourglass. A cream lace dress by Oleg Cassini (a favourite of Jackie Kennedy and a boyfriend of Kelly) shows that the actress had a 21in waist, according to the exhibition’s curator, Jenny Lister.

Next is the little black frock from Rear Window. Hitchcock fans will recognise the pleated silk organza number, with translucent cap sleeves, that pops up, darkly, “at the pivotal point in Rear Window when Kelly starts to believe they are watching a murderer”, Lister says.

I love that little black dress. (I have a thing for pleats, especially really teeny organza ones.) My favorite, though, is the gown she wore during the drunk scene in High Society. I love the embroidery but mainly I just really love that movie.

High Society gown on display at the Victoria & Albert Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra in High Society

1913 silent movie about Lincoln found in a barn

Modern(ish), Multimedia, Treasures

Francis Ford as Abraham Lincoln in 'When Lincoln Paid'Contractor Peter Massie was cleaning out an old barn in New Hampshire destined for demolition when he found a complete set of reels of the long-lost 1913 picture When Lincoln Paid, starring Francis Ford, director John Ford’s brother, as Abraham Lincoln. He also found the original projector for the nitrate film.

Massie brought the whole kit-n-kaboodle home and kept it in the basement for a while until it occurred to him to contact Keene State College for help with preservation. The college contacted the George Eastman House film preservation museum in Rochester, N.Y., and found out that this copy is the only one known.

Nitrate films from the dawn of cinema have not survived well, so a great many pioneering films we only know about today from contemporary descriptions or the occasional clip. They have a distressing propensity to burst into flames, for one thing, and they need careful conservation to last.

This film has endured a century thanks to New Hampshire’s horrendously cold, long winters, and thanks to the shade-casting trees around the barn. Even so, the film has shrunk over the years and the sprocket holes that used to guide it through the projector are torn through.

The National Film Preservation Foundation gave Keene State a grant to restore the picture. They sent it to a lab in Colorado, and it took them a year to put humpty dumpty back together.

“What the laboratory had to do was remanufacture the sprocket holes to a new dimension, make it in strips, adhere it to the image, and then run it through a printing process where they would print it, frame by frame,” [Keene State College film professor Larry] Benaquist said.

Benaquist thinks the film was discovered in Nelson because the town is on Granite Lake, the site of many summer camps through the years. He said there was a boys’ camp in the area of the barn and believes the films were shown to entertain the children, then put away and forgotten.

Helping the restoration was Mark Reinhart of Columbus, Ohio, author of “Abraham Lincoln on Screen.” He had a crude video copy of the film that had been made from an 8-mm copy and included a few scenes that were missing from the film found in the barn. The college combined a DVD of the restored film with a DVD taken of Reinhart’s film for its final version.

The college plans to screen the picture in the Putnam Theater in the Redfern Arts Center on Tuesday, April 20, at 4 p.m.. Attendance is free, so if you’re in the New Hampshire area, here’s your chance to watch a movie that hasn’t been seen in almost a hundred years.

You can see a clip of a climactic scene below where Mrs. Wade, the mother of a dead Union soldier asks Lincoln to pardon the Confederate soldier she once turned in.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/JMk_M5TaP2A&w=430]
Mrs. Wade pleads with Abraham Lincoln (played by Francis Ford) for the life of a young Confederate soldier in Francis Ford’s When Lincoln Paid.

Roman-era mummy found at Egyptian oasis

Ancient, Treasures

Roman era mummy found at Bahariya OasisArchaeologists excavating Egypt’s Bahariya Oasis, 185 miles southwest of Cairo, have uncovered 14 Greco-Roman tombs dating to the 3rd century B.C. In one of them they found an intricately-carved gypsum sarcophagus in the shape of a woman dressed in Roman robes. Preliminary investigations indicate there is a mummy still inside.

The sarcophagus hasn’t been dated yet, but the burial style suggests she’s from the Roman era which started in 31 B.C. and continued for a few hundred years after that. At first archaeologists weren’t sure if it’s a woman or a girl mummy because the sarcophagus is so tiny, only 38 inches long. The decoration and features suggest an adult, however, so she was probably a small but grown woman.

There’s no writing that names who she was, but judging from the quality of the sarcophagus and the other artifacts found in the tomb she was definitely a wealthy, prominent person.

Gold relief of four sons of HorusThey also found four anthropoid masks made of plaster, a collection of coins, clay and glass vessels of different shapes and sizes, and a sheet of gold depicting Imsety, Duamutef, Hapi and Qebehsenuef — the four sons of the ancient Egyptian sky god Horus.

According to [Mahmoud Affifi, director of Cairo and Giza antiquities], the tombs have a unique interior design. They consist of a long stairway leading to a corridor which ends in a hall. Each corner of the hall contains mastabas (rectangular structures found above many Egyptian tombs) that were used in burning the deceased.

This isn’t the first time extraordinary finds have been made in Bahariya Oasis. In 1996, Zahi Hawass uncovered 17 tombs with 254 golden masked mummies, hence its being known as the Valley of the Golden Mummies. There’s a lot more to be found, too. Experts think there may be as many as 10,000 mummies buried in the oasis, making it the largest Egyptian cemetery ever uncovered.

UK to sell Symes’ looted antiquities to pay tax bill

Ancient, Social policy, Treasures

Robin Symes was once a very rich art and antiquities dealer who had houses all over the continent and chauffeur-driven Bentleys. He sold multi-million dollar pieces to major museums and private collectors, many of which turn out to have been looted. Among his sources was the notorious Giacomo Medici, currently appealing his 10-year prison sentence for smuggling stolen antiquities. Among his buyers was former Getty curator Marion True, currently on trial for acquiring said stolen antiquities.

His beautiful house of cards came falling down in 1999 when his personal and professional partner of almost 30 years, Christo Michaelides, fell on the stairs, hit his head on the radiator and died. Michaelides’ heirs expected to inherit 50% of Symes’ business, but Symes, in a truly scuzzy dick move, claimed that Christo had been employee, not a partner, so he owed the family nothing. The family was not happy. The family is also hugely wealthy (shipping fortune, like Onassis). The family sued. The family won. Symes went bankrupt and spent 2 years in prison for contempt of court for repeatedly lying about his assets. Read more about the whole sordid story in this excellent article.

Bonhams in London was forced to withdraw a Robin Symes lot from its sale of the Geddes Collection in October of 2008 when the Italian government claimed ownership. In fall of 2009, Bonhams held an art sale of Symes’ collection, but it was all contemporary pieces because any antiquities Symes touched are disputed due to his long history of illegally exporting and selling looted antiques.

You’d think the Home Office would therefore avoid all of Symes’ filthy (sometimes literally; many of the artifacts still have dirt encrustations proving they were recently torn from the ground) lucre, but instead it has chosen to take a radical 180 degree turn and force the sale of 1,000 antiques from Symes’ vast collection. The government has a big ol’ tax bill to recoup, after all, and Symes has no money left, just thousands of looted antiquities.

In documents seen by the Observer, Paolo Giorgio Ferri, the relevant prosecutor in Rome, has repeatedly asked Britain to return the Symes antiquities to their “rightful owner”. The UK government has caused fury by stating that the antiquities could instead be bought.

Symes’s collection includes objects dating back 3,000 years, which Rome says form a vital part of Italian heritage. Ferri said: “It’s like the Italian government making a profit from the mafia selling drugs.”

Renfrew said: “These illicitly exported objects are being sold to pay Robin Symes’s debts, which means that they are being sold for the benefit of the British government. This does reflect unfavourably on the British Treasury and Revenue and Customs, as they are encouraging the sale of material that the Italians say is looted.

“Many of the antiquities are Etruscan and could only have been found in Italy. They left Italy illegally because they would require an export licence. I can’t see how the Home Office can dispute that.”

One of the items up for sale is a fragment from a vase the Getty was recently, um, persuaded to return to Italy because it was looted. How shameless can you get?

The estimates are insanely low, too, because it’s a liquidation sale. The expected income from the sale of 1,000 rare antiquities is a meager £100,000 ($155,000). Symes, shady sumbitch that he is, squirreled away his stash of antiquities in over 30 warehouses, selling them on the quiet during his legal troubles, selling them loud and proud to museums and collectors worldwide before then. According to Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini’s outstanding book The Medici Conspiracy, Symes kept 17,000 objects worth an estimated £125 million ($210 million) in those warehouses. So you see that £100,000 figure is a joke.

The Home Office has so far dragged its feet in responding to Italian requests for legal records on the antiquities’ arrival in Britain. By international law, these records should be provided before any sale, but instead the government is pulling one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s favorite tricks and asking for proof that the artifacts were stolen.

Neither the liquidator nor the Home Office will comment publicly. There’s not even a set date for the sale yet. Here’s hoping the stink Italy is raising now will prevent it from happening at all.

Etruscan bronze mask of river god Acheloos from Symes collection

Garner Museum theft solved: It was Monty Burns!

Looting, Multimedia

'The Concert' by Johannes Vermeer, 1658-1660I sometimes wonder why I still watch The Simpsons, a full decade after it stopped being any good at all, but a couple of times this season there’s been a pale, blurry shadow of a reminder of its former glory. Tonight’s episode we saw Monty Burns getting busted for having commissioned the infamous 1990 art thefts at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Vermeer’s The Concert features prominently, one of only 36 known Vermeers in the world, as does Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the only known seascape Rembrandt ever made. They were stolen from the Gardner along with 11 other Renaissance and Impressions masterpieces, plus two rare artifacts. The total value of the stolen pieces was estimated at $500 million. If they were put on the market now, even that staggering figure would likely be rapidly eclipsed.

On the night of March 18, 1990, men dressed like police officers argued their way in the door, handcuffed the night security guards and made off with 3 Rembrandts (and a Flinck that had been attributed to Rembrandt), the Vermeer, five Degas gouaches, a Manet, a 3200-year-old Chinese bronze vessel and a Napoleonic eagle finial.

It’s the largest art theft in history. Despite the $5 million reward for information leading to the retrieval of the pieces in good condition, the case remains unsolved. UNTIL NOW THAT IS.

There’s no clip online yet, but you can catch whole episodes on the Fox website. Keep your eye open for the episode called “American History X-Cellent” to see Homer’s thoughts on Vermeer’s beautiful symmetry and his shameful treatment of Rembrandt.