WEBBER FOUNDATION MAY SELL PICASSO; BEIJING OLYMPICS BRINGS IN STAR ARCHITECTS
The Andrew Lloyd Webber Art Foundation, owner of a Pablo Picasso painting, can’t be sued by a German collector who claimed the Nazis forced his relative to sell the work, a New York court said. Bloomberg‘s Linda Sandler reported that the theater impresario’s foundation, and auction house Christie’s International, withdrew Picasso’s sixty-million-dollar portrait from sale a year ago after Julius Schoeps said it was forcibly sold by his great uncle, Berlin banker Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. The foundation said in court that Schoeps couldn’t sue for restitution because he wasn’t appointed to represent his relative’s estate, and the judge agreed. “It is well established in New York that a person who has not obtained letters as personal representative lacks standing or the legal capacity to commence an action on behalf of an estate,” said Supreme Court justice Rolando T. Acosta, according to the copy of the ruling posted online yesterday. Christie’s, the world’s largest auction house, had valued the painting, Portrait de Angel Fernandez de Soto, 1903, at forty to sixty million dollars, promising the foundation a minimum price whether it sold or not.
In developed countries, the Olympics can be just another sporting event, albeit a major one. But in China, the Olympics have become a symbol for its reemergence on the international stage and for its strong development in recent years, writes Clifford Coonan in The Independent. The world’s best-known avant-garde architects, including Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, and Paul Andreu, are transforming Beijing ahead of next year’s games. Zaha Hadid and Albert Speer Jr. have also been involved in projects, either taking part in competitions or helping with planning issues. The $675 million CCTV building, designed by Koolhaas’s Office of Metropolitan Architecture and built by the British engineering firm Arup, will radically alter the skyline of the capital. The first Olympic building that visitors to Beijing next August will see will be Lord Foster’s $2.8 billion Terminal 3 building at Beijing Capital International Airport. Of course, the centerpiece of the games will be the $560 million Olympic stadium built to resemble a bird’s nest of interwoven twigs and designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Other highlights include the Water Cube, designed by PTW architects, based on the shape of soap bubbles, and the French architect Paul Andreu’s National Grand Theater, a futuristic, dome-shaped bubble near Tiananmen Square. Coonan writes that this building phase is unlike anything Beijing has experienced since it was built on cosmological lines in the fourteenth century by Chinese master builders.
