Word: titian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...castle populated by Coney Island ghosts. Fluorescent skeletons jiggle their pasteboard bones in each recess; the cellars resound with prerecorded mutters, wails and injunctions to silence; entrepreneurs tap their way down the corridors, prodding each moulding in the hope that a panel will fly open, revealing a lost Titian, an undocumented Goya, or a Japanese gingko-nut tycoon with an open checkbook. Collectors do not want the taxman to know how much they paid for what, and neither do dealers. The availability of a painting may be the occasion for as much conspiratorial hoo-ha and discreetly vicious elbowing...
...results have been tragic. Italian museum and church security is so poor that from 1968 to the middle of 1971 more than 3,000 works of art vanished. In the first three months of this year, 1,598 pieces were stolen, ranging from candlesticks to paintings by Titian. An estimated $10 million worth of archaeological material, from Etruscan vases to Roman busts, is spirited out of Italy every year...
...George Killing the Dragon, 1940, can only be explained in terms of this problem. St. George, with its glutinous, worried paint, its muddily incoherent color and its torpid drawing, would hardly pass as a student academy piece; it is recognizable, though only just, as a mock Titian. But behind it one can sense manic obstinacy, as though De Chirico were trying to root himself in the past and abolish the present. Significantly, it bears a Latin inscription: "De Chirico, the best painter, painted this...
...Oilionaire J. Paul Getty shook up the British art establishment last June with his acquisition at auction of Titian's The Death of Actaeon for about $4,200,000. Just the year before, New York City's Metropolitan Museum had walked off with another British-owned masterpiece, Velasquez's portrait of Juan de Pareja, for a record $5,544,000. Officials of the National Gallery and others raised a din, acting as if those rich Americans would soon leave Britons nothing to look at but the telly. At last, with considerable reluctance, the government blocked the removal...
Recalls Penelope Gilliatt (hard g as in grin): "He sensed something perilous in the air even then." The hair and skin are the same hue that used to transport Titian, and she has never married a Hungarian of any kind. But as for the "something perilous"-well, Conner's trepidations were founded...