Monster Mash: Pompidou strike could spread to Louvre, Versailles; Warhol musical; 'Donuts' closing

-- Labor unrest: The strike at the Pompidou Center in Paris is poised to widen to other museums in France, including the Louvre and Versailles palace. (Bloomberg)

-- Off-Broadway skirmish: A battle is brewing at New York's Soho Rep theater after the overlapping booking of two productions. (Variety)

-- 15 minutes: A new stage musical about Andy Warhol titled "Pop!" opens this week at Yale Repertory. (Playbill)

-- Large-scale artwork: A more-than-6,890-square-foot painting in Hong Kong has broken a world record. (Xinhua)

-- Playing another lawyer: James Spader discusses his Broadway debut in David Mamet's "Race." (New York Times)

-- Check, please: The Broadway production of Tracy Letts' "Superior Donuts" has posted a closing notice for Jan. 3. (Playbill)

-- And in the L.A. Times: Architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne discusses the architecture of lowered expectations; looking ahead to the Art + Auction power issue; "Louis & Keely" heading for El Portal Theatre.

-- David Ng

Photo: Centre Pompidou in Paris. Credit: Eric Feferberg  AFP / Getty Images

Power is the issue for Art + Auction

What does the art world love to hate more than the Whitney Biennial? Annual lists of movers, shakers, spenders and makers published by art magazines. So look out for Art + Auction’s 2009 Power Issue, scheduled to hit newsstands Dec. 4.  It will bring 159 names to be debated.

Many are familiar, if not ubiquitous. Philanthropist and collector Eli Broad is cited in the new category of “uberpower” and as one of five “power patrons.” Dealer Larry Gagosian, who made the “uberpower” and “perennial power” lists, also scored as a “risk taker” because of “the expansion of his gallery empire to Athens and his venture into Madison Avenue retail during these precarious times,” the magazine says.

Gagosian is not named as a “power dealer,” but L.A.’s Tim Blum and Jeff Poe are. The team is also among the “risk takers” because they are steaming ahead with pre-recession plans to launch an astonishing new space for their gallery, Blum & Poe, on South La Cienega Boulevard.

Monster Mash: Kelsey Grammer looks Broadway bound; Olympic artists debate free speech; Warhol's 'Heinz 57'

 -- Star turn: Actor Kelsey Grammer appears set to return to Broadway in the revival of "La Cage aux Folles." (New York Post)

-- Creative liberty: A free-speech debate has arisen among artists who will be involved with the arts-festival portion of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. (Globe and Mail)

-- Art theft: More details emerge around the recent recovery of Andy Warhol's "Heinz 57" creation. (New York Daily News)

-- Temper, temper: British actor Ian Hart faced police action after he reportedly screamed threats at a theater patron. (Times Online)

-- Vertigo: Officials are exploring the idea of opening off-limits areas of the Golden Gate Bridge to tourists. (San Francisco Chronicle)

-- Toting signs in Paris: Workers at the Centre Pompidou in Paris have decided to prolong their strike over planned job cuts. (Agence France Presse)

-- Will she sing? Julie Andrews is scheduled to return to the London stage for a one-evening performance May 8. (Playbill)

-- Coda: Classical-music scholar H.C. Robbins Landon has died at age 83 in France. (Telegraph)

-- And in the L.A. Times: A photo showing a nude Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate is heading for auction; music critic Mark Swed reviews the Berlin Philharmonic at Disney Hall; a Sam Francis reunion at the Norton Simon Museum.

-- David Ng

Photo: Kelsey Grammer at a recent performance of Cirque du Soleil's "Kooza" in Santa Monica. Credit: Robyn Beck / AFP/Getty Images

Photo of nude Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate heading for auction

Proving once again that nothing sells like a controversy, Christie's said today that a print of a photo showing a nude Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate is heading for the auction block. The portrait was taken in 1969 in London by art-fashion photographer David Bailey.

The oversize print depicts Polanski and his then-wife Tate from the waist up locked in a nude embrace. (Tate's right breast is visible in the shot.) According to Christie's, the print was created in 1988 for a traveling exhibition called "The Art of Photography: 150 years, 1839-1989," which was shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Australian National Gallery, Canberra.

Milena Sales, a spokesperson for Christie's, told The Times that the print belongs to a private collection in London but she declined to reveal the name of the owner. She said that a similar print sold in London in 2006 for a little more than $17,000.

The current print, which will go on sale in New York Dec. 7, is expected to sell for $8,000 to $12,000, according to Christie's. The public can view the print, along with the other items in the auction, from Dec. 3 to 6. News of the print's sale was reported earlier this afternoon by Reuters.

Sam Francis reunion at the Norton Simon Museum

“Basel Mural I,” an abstract celebration of light, color and space painted by Sam Francis, has long been a highlight of the Norton Simon Museum’s contemporary art collection.

Stretching nearly 13 feet high and 20 feet wide, the free-spirited, dripped and splashed canvas commands a full wall at the Pasadena institution. But it’s only one of three panels made in 1956-58 for a stairwell at the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland.

The triptych will never again be whole. But two substantial sections of a panel damaged more than 40 years ago and salvaged by the artist have been reunited with the Simon’s painting. A gift of the Sam Francis Foundation, they will go on view Wednesday on a wall adjacent to “Basel Mural I.”

“That’s where they belong,” said Donna Stein, a foundation board member who has played a leading role in placing artworks from the artist’s estate in museums.

To read the full Wednesday Calendar story about the painting's history and find out what happened to the rest of the mural, click here.

-- Suzanne Muchnic

Photo: Curator Leah Lehmbeck oversees an installation reuniting "Basel Mural I" with two fragments of a damaged companion panel at the Norton Simon Museum. Credit: Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times

Jeff Koons' 'Train' nowhere near its final destination, or even a start date

When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced plans in 2007 to build Jeff Koons' massive, multimillion-dollar "Train," the news quickly polarized the art community. Some said it would be a monumental and important work of art for L.A. Others decried it as a potential eyesore and a money pit.

Nearly three years on, "Train" appears to be nowhere near completion -- or even a start date for construction. LACMA told The Times that the project is still somewhere between the feasibility and design phases, and that the public won't see the finished artwork until 2014.

"Train" was initially scheduled to be completed in 2011 or 2012. Designs for the quasi-sculpture call for an approximately 70-foot replica of a 1943 Baldwin 2900-series steam locomotive, suspended vertically from a 161-foot-tall construction crane.

"Train" has a rumored price tag of $25 million, but the museum declined to disclose figures except to say that it is budgeted in the "many millions" of dollars. If the rumored cost is true, "Train" would be among the most expensive pieces of art ever commissioned by a museum.

John Bowsher, the museum's director of special art installations, said the next phases for "Train" involve two mock-ups: one involving a full-scale steam component that will test the size of the steam plume, and another dealing with the nose of the train engine that will use real materials to determine how easy it will be to meet the artist's standards.

Neither mock-up has begun yet, according to Bowsher. He also said that there is no start date for the construction of the project.

Huntington and LACMA go shopping for a chair

Can a chair be a ravishingly beautiful, fascinating and revolutionary object as well as a place to sit?

That’s what art specialists at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art say about a recent joint acquisition. The elaborately carved mahogany chair, unveiled in 1885 at the “Inventions Exhibition” in Liverpool and subsequently known as a precursor to the Art Nouveau movement, is the work of Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, an English architect, graphic artist and craftsman.

The last of five known chairs in a set to come on the market, it will go on view in December at the Huntington in a suite of galleries devoted to the British Design Reform movement. Two years later, it will move to LACMA and join a new display of international Arts and Crafts furniture.  Acquired in a 50-50 ownership arrangement, the chair is expected to continue traveling across town every two years.

Sharing a desirable object may be a sign of the times, when few museums can buy what they want without passing the hat. But it’s also a way of avoiding local competition.

A “sensible” move, said John Murdoch, director of the Huntington’s art collections, in a statement released by the San Marino institution. “It simply seems the smartest way to build strength in depth when neighboring institutions collect in the same area.” 

Three other Mackmurdo chairs from the same set are in London, one at the Victoria and Albert Museum and two at the William Morris Collection. The fourth belongs to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

-- Suzanne Muchnic

Photo: Art Nouveau chair by Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo. Credit: Huntington and LACMA

Monster Mash: Google partners with Iraq's National Museum; Pompidou strike; nude model exonerated

-- Everything old is new again: Google plans to make thousands of images of ancient artifacts from Iraq's National Museum accessible online. (Reuters)

-- To the barricades: Employees at the Centre Pompidou in Paris go on strike to protest job cuts. (Agence France Presse)

-- Embezzlement?: The London Philharmonic Orchestra's finance director faces the allegation that he stole about $926,000 over a four-year period. (Evening Standard)

-- Officially kaput: The troubled stage production of "A Christmas Carol" that originated in Hollywood last year has canceled all of its planned performances for the season. (Chicago Tribune)

-- Baring it all, Part 1: The model who was arrested earlier this year for posing nude at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is off the hook after prosecutors drop the case. (New York Post)

-- Baring it all, Part 2: Actress Kim Cattrall will pose nude in an effort to save a painting by Titian on display in the U.K. (Zap2It)

-- Recovered: The discovery of Andy Warhol's lost "Heinz 57" crate leads to an arrest in New York. (Bloomberg)

-- No kidding: Artists are taking a beating in the current economic downturn, according to a new study. (Art Info)

-- And in the L.A. Times: The tagger/artist known as REVOK has been arrested; an L.A. photographer documents the U.S. military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy; Marc Shaiman is set to return as music director for the Academy Awards ceremony.

-- David Ng

Photo: Google chief executive Eric Schmidt tours the National Museum in Baghdad as part of an announcement that the company will be digitizing artifacts from the museum. Credit: Sabah Arar / AFP / Getty Images

L.A. photographer documents U.S. military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy

Why would you want to take a portrait of someone without showing his or her face? The essence of portrait photography, after all, is to capture the spirit of the subject and to reveal some crucial aspect of his or her identity.

But in the case of L.A. photographer Jeff Sheng's latest project, capturing his subjects' faces would almost certainly put their careers in jeopardy. That's because Sheng has set about to photograph U.S. military service personnel who are gay but closeted in their work lives. Titled "Dont' Ask, Don't Tell," the ongoing project consists of a series of stark, sometimes sad, portraits of U.S. soldiers who are forced to hide a part of who they are.

"I want to give an invisible community some visibility, but at the same time, to keep them invisible," said Sheng on the phone from Vancouver, where he is working on another project.

"There's already a lot of journalistic work on gay people in the military who have been discharged. My project is more about people who are still serving."

To conceal the identities of current military personnel, the photographer has used lighting and shadow effects to mask part or all of their faces. Sometimes, the subject will conceal his or her face with a hand, as in the photo above, titled "Jess, Bend, Oregon, 2009." (The names and towns of the titles are fictional for the protection of identity.) In certain cases, the entire subject is hidden in the shadows. The photographer sometimes meets them in a hotel near the base where they are serving.

Monster Mash: LACMA's red ink; Charlie Chaplin museum in Switzerland; Galileo's fingers

-- Financial trouble: LACMA loses 23% of its investments in the last fiscal year. One victim is Jeff Koons' dangling train project, which was scheduled to arrive at LACMA in 2011-12, and is now delayed for three more years. (Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg)

-- Little tramp: A long-planned museum dedicated to Charlie Chaplin, pictured, will be constructed at the site of the actor's former home in Switzerland. (Radio Suisse Romande)

-- Discovery: Two severed fingers and a tooth belonging to Galileo have been identified by a museum in Florence, Italy. (CNN)

-- Landing on their feet: Two actors from the recently closed Broadway revival of "Brighton Beach Memoirs" have landed roles in the upcoming revival of "A View from the Bridge." (New York Times)

-- Major project: A $208-million concert hall in Helsinki, Finland, is intended to improve on the existing Finlandia Hall, but it's already 50% over projected costs. (Bloomberg)

-- Winner: Jez Butterworth's "Jerusalem" was named best play at the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards. (Playbill)

-- Operatic great: Swedish soprano Elisabeth Soderstrom has passed away at age 82. (Telegraph)

-- Moving up: "Enter Laughing," which has had two runs off-Broadway, is aiming for a Broadway engagement in the fall of 2010. (Variety)

-- And in the L.A. Times: The L.A. Philharmonic's "West Coast, Left Coast" festival begins; a look at the Broadway production of "Fela!"

-- David Ng

Photo:  Charlie Chaplin with Virginia Cherrill in a scene from "City Lights." Credit: Los Angeles Times