Rotting Onions = Art

ART HISTORY - One man's stink is another man's major art project.

A piece by Belgian conceptual artist Jan Fabre at the Antwerp's Muhka contemporary art museum is challenging the nose as well as the eyes.

The installation "Spring is on its way" consists of onions and potatoes hung from the ceiling in condoms. And the vegetables are, well, spoiling.

"Like many of his works, it is about transformation and metamorphosis," Muhka's Kathleen Weyts said of Fabre, who had a solo show at the Paris Louvre earlier this year.

Weyts claimed that one museum worker complained. Local media reported that plenty of visitors and museum guards were protesting. By Monday, the smelly, rotting onions and potatoes were the talk of the town.

"Protest Against Fabre's Stink Art," headlined Het Nieuwsblad newspaper.

"Fabre's stinking work raises tempers," the VRT television network said on its website.

Some shoots have broken through the condoms and other condoms have crashed to the ground from the weight of the vegetables.

"It smells of onions but I would not call it a stink," Muhka director Bart De Baere told VRT.

The museum has no plans to remove Fabre's installation, which runs until the start of spring 2009, but it is removing any vegetables that hit the ground.

Eight years ago, Fabre covered some university pillars in Ghent in ham. Sure enough, after a while, the complaints came.

"Fabre always says that art must be a bit smelly," said Weyts.

Daphne Odjig Honoured in Canada

Daphne Odjig `one of Canada's finest living artists,' and her life's work is now on display in Kleinburg

At 89, with a retrospective of her work on display at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Daphne Odjig is not bothered by lofty descriptions of her art as having Cubist and Surrealist influences.

"It doesn't bother me. If that's what they (art critics) want to write about, that's fine. I still go ahead and do my own thing," said Odjig, whose exhibit at the Kleinburg gallery is on display until Jan. 4.

The native artist does admit to being a little surprised by all the fuss, which includes an Order of Canada, seven honorary doctorates and a 2007 Governor General's Award in Visual Arts.

"I am (surprised) because I didn't have the encouragement or the promotion years ago because they (critics) said it was ethno-graphic. But I didn't give a damn, I just kept painting the way I wanted to," Daphne Odjig added.

McMichael executive director and CEO Tom Smart called Daphne Odjig "one of Canada's finest living artists."

"She is able to also tell her stories and uses a particular, unique style. She also brings in European modes of representation, particularly Cubism. So she marries different styles and different modes and different traditions," Smart said.

As a child growing up in the village of Wikwemikong on Manitoulin Island, Odjig's interest in art was sparked by her grandfather, Jonas, a tombstone carver who also liked to sketch.

"My companion was my grandfather so I followed him around. I was just like a little shadow. I mimicked everything he did. So I would sit with him on the porch and sketch. And it all starts from there," she said.

With no formal training – "I never went to art school" – Odjig said she has gotten her inspiration over the many decades from visiting art galleries, from people she's met, from omnipresent nature and from extensive travel. "All artists should travel. I love being with people and I love the environment. You draw your inspiration from anything, from everywhere, from many people," she said.

Daphne Odjig said her native background is also a major influence on her work, despite a childhood in which her Ojibway heritage was suppressed.

"I grew up not being able to dance or to know the sweetgrass ceremony and other things because that was forbidden by the church at the time. It was still underground," she said.

But Odjig is optimistic that native culture is alive and well and in no danger of disappearing in a Western-dominated society.

"The native psyche is very strong and we'll always be here. A native person, if he's given the chance, he can prove himself. I don't think our culture will be lost," she said.

Odjig, who lives in Penticton, B.C., said nature is so important to her she takes a break from her art during the summer.

"I love birds. I love my swallows. In the summertime, I don't paint, I'm too busy learning about nature, all about nature. I'm feeding my birds," Odjig said.

As an ardent environmentalist, Daphne Odjig said she is dismayed to see the effects of man-made activity that have "upset the whole balance of nature."

Smart said Odjig's concern for the environment and her representation of it through her drawings and paintings makes her exhibit "a very timely and contemporary story."

New technique for seeing hidden paintings

A team of European scientists unveiled a new method for extracting images hidden under Old Masters' paintings yesterday, re-creating a colour portrait of a woman's face unseen since Vincent van Gogh painted over it in 1887.

For years, art historians have been using X-rays to probe artworks hidden under other paintings, a technique resulting in a fuzzy, black-and-white image. But Joris Dik, a materials scientist from Delft University, and Koen Janssens, a chemist from the University of Antwerp in Belgium, combined science and art to engineer a new method of visualizing hidden paintings, using high-intensity X-rays and an intimate knowledge of old pigments.

The pair used the new approach on Patch of Grass, a small oil study of a field that van Gogh painted in Paris while living with his brother Theo, who supported him.

While not exact in every detail, the image produced is a woman's head that may be the same model van Gogh painted in a series of portraits leading up to the 1885 masterpiece The Potato Eaters.

The new method will allow art historians to obtain higher quality and more detailed images underlying old masterpieces. In Van Gogh's case, it could reveal details of works that were painted over. For other works, it could provide new insights into the studies that the artist built a painting on.

Painting by Winston Churchill for auction

I like Winston Churchill. He was overall my kind of leader. But apparently he also painted, and wasn't bad at either. A painting by Winston Churchill of a Moroccan sunset – a view he loved so much that he invited President Franklin D. Roosevelt to see it years later – is going on the auction block next week.

Sunset Over the Atlas Mountains, a vibrant landscape painted in 1935 from Churchill's balcony at the Mamounia Hotel in Marrakech, is expected to bring at least $600,000 (dollar figures U.S.) at Bonhams New York on April 23.

Churchill invited Roosevelt to travel with him to Marrakech after a conference in Casablanca in 1943 so he could experience the beautiful view for himself.

After Churchill's death in 1965, the 20-by-24-inch oil went to a daughter, Lady Sarah Audley, who sold it to a private collector in Texas, who in turn sold it in 1992 to the family of the current San Francisco owner, whose name Bonhams did not disclose.

Malcolm Walker, European paintings specialist at Bonhams, said the value of Churchill's paintings has skyrocketed in the past year and a half. "He was as good as an amateur artist will get," he said.

Churchill, who began painting for relaxation and loved working in brilliant colors, often did not sign his work so as not to influence judges, Walker said. Sunset Over the Atlas Mountains is not signed.

Walker said Churchill loved Morocco, which he visited often.

Marrakech, a work depicting the city's gates against the backdrop of the Atlas mountains, was painted by Churchill in 1948 and presented to President Truman in 1951. It sold at auction for $949,918 in December 2007. Earlier that year his painting Chartwell Landscape with Sheep sold for $2.06 million – a record for the artist & politician.

Killer's art for auction

The prison artwork of a notorious Canadian killer is being offered for sale on an American website that promotes criminals as celebrities.

More than half a dozen items produced by cult killer Roch Theriault at the Dorchester Penitentiary in New Brunswick are up for auction on MurderAuction.com, which specializes in so-called "murderabilia."

Collectors can bid for oil paintings, pastels, signed handprints and even short poems written out and coloured by Theriault, who's serving a life sentence after being convicted of a brutal murder in 1993.

The charismatic leader of a tiny religious group near Burnt River, Ont., between 1977 and 1989, Theriault chopped off the hand of one of his concubines and killed his wife by disembowelling her.

A television movie about his bizarre cult, which was modelled on Old Testament themes and attracted up to a dozen adult followers, was titled Savage Messiah. It was broadcast in 2002, the same year the National Parole Board turned down his first bid for day parole.

"Cult leader Roch Theriault is one of the craziest and sickest criminal(s) in Canadian history," the anonymous Canadian-based seller of the artwork – identified only as Redrum's Autographs – declares on the website.

"Theriault's artwork is extremely rare as he doesn't write to anyone but family."

The art being auctioned is abstract or contains inoffensive images such as flowers, and dates from October and November 2007. Minimum bids range from $20 to $500 (U.S.).

The three-year-old website is one of the earliest to create a specialized marketplace for crime memorabilia, which has generally been banned from mainstream sites such as eBay.

MurderAuction.com founder Tod Bohannon makes no apologies, saying it's merely a branch of the well-established hobby of collecting celebrity autographs.

Bohannon, 30, began collecting criminals' signatures at age 13, when he first wrote to notorious prisoners. His large collection now includes a few choice Theriault pieces, as well as some prison memorabilia from Canadian child-murderer Clifford Olsen.

"More than anything, it's about getting to know someone who's looking for a friend," Bohannon said in an interview from his home in Cornelia, Ga., where he teaches kindergarten by day.

His advice for crime victims who might object to the website? ``If my site's hurting you, just don't go to it."

So-called "Son of Sam" laws in the United States, designed to prevent criminals from profiting from their notoriety through big film and book deals, have been challenged on constitutional grounds and in any case do not target crime memorabilia.

A bill was introduced in the U.S. Congress last fall to try to curtail the trade in crime memorabilia, although observers say it's unlikely to have much impact even if it's passed.

A spokesman for Corrections Canada said there appear to be no similar laws in this country preventing the trade in ``murderabilia."

"I don't believe there's any legislation in Canada that goes to that effect," Guy Campeau said in an interview.

Corrections Canada does have the legal authority to forbid a prisoner from producing works that are obscene or offensive, constitute hate literature, or pose a risk to safety or security.

"We're aware of the website, but it's not within our mandate or jurisdiction to deal with these issues," Campeau said. "After it's out in the public, well obviously the Correctional Service doesn't have any mandate or jurisdiction to intervene on this."

Campeau added that the department is nevertheless reviewing the case.

Theriault is still visited regularly by some of his former cult ``wives," who have moved to New Brunswick to be close to him and have borne him more children following conjugal visits.

One of Theriault's best-known victims, Gabrielle Lavallee, was not immediately available for comment. Lavallee, who had her hand chopped off by a meat cleaver, wrote a best-selling French-language account of her time with Theriault, L'alliance de la brebis, or The Alliance of Sheep, in which she denounces him as an incurable, sadistic psychopath.

Theriault's poems for sale are brief and in French, such as Le regret, c'est de ne plus jamais recommence (Regret is to never be able to do it again), dated last October.

Bohannon's website says Theriault, who believed himself to be a reincarnation of Moses, was in a coma for a month last fall. Campeau said he is restricted by law from providing any personal information on individual inmates.

MurderAuction.com also offers a signed prison letter from Clifford Olsen. Bohannon said his personal collection includes some awards Olsen received in prison for winning 100-metre and 500-metre races.