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For more than half a century, Salvador Dalí's dark and dramatic rendering of Christ's crucifixion has been regarded as his finest religious painting, attracting millions of visitors to an apparently modest municipal art gallery in Glasgow.

But now, 57 years after being bought direct from the artist by Glasgow's city fathers, the painting is at the centre of a legal investigation which may yet snare a death metal band from Alsace in France, ashtray manufacturers, and poster-makers in the US, Britain, Italy and Spain.

The council believes it has been losing tens of thousands of pounds in unpaid licensing fees and royalties a year from unauthorised copies of Christ of St John of the Cross, which was bought for £8,200 and now valued at more than £60m.

Lawyers acting for Glasgow city council have drawn up a hit-list of 50 companies, manufacturers and artists selling hand-painted copies, who are suspected of illegally copying it. Warnings have been issued to 25 firms and individuals across the world - some wrongly claiming to have the council's permission to reuse the image - to "cease and desist" or face legal action.

After intellectual property experts at Burness, the Glasgow-based law firm hired by the council, have finished with the largest suppliers of unapproved copies, the French rock band Mercyless may be next in line. The band's 1992 album Abject Offering, which features such tracks as Unformed Tumours and Burned at the Stake, has a cropped version of the painting on its cover. A council spokesman said the band was refused permission to use the painting but claimed on the album cover it was authorised to do so.

Colin Hulme, the intellectual property lawyer handling the case for the council, said their initial investigations had found that a handful of printing firms were responsible for a large proportion of the illicit copies. They may be asked or forced to repay royalties going back some years, he said.

Some firms even claimed to have authority to reprint Christ of St John of the Cross from the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation in Figueres, Spain, which oversees copyright for most Dalí works. But that claim was firmly denied yesterday by a spokeswoman for the foundation. "It's a very rare case that Dalí sold the work and the rights," she said. "But I can confirm that the owner of the painting does also own the copyright."

From The Times

January 28, 2009

A colossal mistake? Art world baffled by 'Goya' masterpiece

(Museo Nacional del Prado/Reuters)Experts say that the the poor technique and difference between other Goya masterpieces cast doubt on The Colossus

For almost 80 years it has been regarded as one of Francisco de Goya’s towering glories. But yesterday it was revealed that The Colossus was not painted by the Spanish master at all, but by an understudy. After a seven-month investigation, experts at the Prado gallery in Madrid came to the reluctant conclusion that the masterpiece was probably the work of Asensio Juliá, one of Goya’s assistants. They said that the painting, which has hung in the Prado for 78 years, was “Goyaesque but not by Goya”.

Experts at the Prado started an investigation last year when José Luis DÍez, the gallery’s curator of 19th-century art, suggested that The Colossus was the work of Juliá after a detailed analysis of the picture. He based his claims on the discovery of the initials A. J. in one corner of the canvas. Yesterday The Colossus was still attributed to Goya, but this may change to “From the school of Goya”. It was uncertain whether Juliá would be acknowleged formally for his work.

Goya experts have been split for years over the authenticity of the painting. In 2001 Juliet Bareau-Wilson, a British art historian, claimed that The Colossus and another work, The Milkmaid of Bordeaux, had been created by others. Her theory was supported by Mrs Mena, who agreed that doubts had existed for some time about both the paintings. The Prado denied the claims at the time and many experts believe the quality of the work means that Goya must have been involved. Nigel Glendinning, a British art historian, doubted that anyone but Goya could have painted the work. He told the Spanish newspaper ABC: “I never said it would be impossible that [someone else] might have intervened in the work of Goya, but the painting is too audacious to be by Asensio Juliá, because of the centrifugal strength of the composition and its iconic power. I hope to be able to see the study and the proofs.” A pioneer of early 19th-century techiniques, Goya is considered to be one of the world’s first “modern” artists, with a penetrating and incisive view of humanity. The Colossus, which is dominated by the figure of a giant who bursts through the clouds to terrify villagers below, was painted during the Peninsular War against France by Britain, Spain and Portugal between 1808 and 1814.

An inventory of Goya’s possessions in 1812 refers to a work called The Giant. Experts claim the that giant represents the Spanish people emerging to expel the French invaders who occupied Spain at the time. Others say that the horrified figures of the people represent the madness of war.

By John Hiscock Last Updated: 5:21PM GMT 29 Jan 2009

House husbands: Are you man enough? More and more men are swapping PowerPoint for potty training and embracing the role of the stay-at-home father, says Casilda Grigg.

By Casilda Grigg Last Updated: 5:02PM GMT 13 Feb 2009

It's 7.30 on a cold winter's morning and three bleary-eyed children are getting ready for school. Alarm clocks are ringing, eggs are frying and the kitchen table is a sea of cereal packets, chewed pencils and exercise books. It's just another frantic weekday morning in a typical British family home, except for one small detail: there's no mother in sight. She left half an hour ago in a sharp suit and a cloud of Je Reviens. This morning, just like any other day of the week, her jeans-clad spouse – aka house husband – is trying to tie shoelaces, pack lunches, blow noses, and get the children out of the house and off to school, without tears, tantrums or mishaps.

Across the land, more and more men are giving up work to become full-time fathers, putting their children's welfare before their professional ambitions, and bucking the trend for selfish career-driven parenting recently criticised by The Good Childhood Inquiry. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics reveal that there are 192,000 house husbands in the UK, compared to 119,000 16 years ago.

Some are doing it through economic necessity, others as a positive lifestyle choice. And as the recession starts to really bite, numbers look set to rise further as thousands of redundant men find themselves marooned at home, reliant on their wives' earning power. So fashionable is this new phenomenon that a film is in development, starring Anna Chancellor and John Hannah, about five stay-at-home fathers.

For many fathers who step off the career ladder, the real challenge is not the childcare itself but the isolation. For others it's the small challenges, whether it's doing up the tiny buttons on a toddler's coat, or getting the neck of a jumper stuck on a child's nose. But such blips are of no consequence to the cherished child of the stay-at-home dad. ''What children need is love and boundaries, as well as structure and routine,'' says Dr Frances Goodhart, a consultant clinical psychologist. ''That can be provided on a day-to-day basis by either parent.''

British mother-of-three Laura Watts, who lives in Holland, believes that men excel at childcare but often flounder when it comes to the minutiae of domestic life. ''My hunch is that men are less good at the day-to-day running of the household. It's all those little extras like remembering to send birthday cards or buying the children new shoes."

True though this may be, for many fathers the struggles of multitasking are amply rewarded by the deep closeness they develop with their offspring. But that isn't to say the picture is entirely rosy. Divorce lawyer Vanessa Lloyd Platt has warned of the strain such role swapping can place on marriages. And even when such arrangements are happily consensual, the trade-off can dent a man's confidence, particularly if he feels a loss of kudos.

Perhaps the way forward for a happy, healthy society lies in parents sharing the childcare and the breadwinning, rather than exchanging roles. ''In Amsterdam there are lots of men and women who work part-time so they can spend time with their kids,'' says Laura Watts. ''At my children's school, half the parents picking up their kids are men and they do perfectly normal jobs. Part-time work is built into Dutch society. Now isn't that just wonderful?''

Great Works: Leviathan (1651), Abraham Bosse and Thomas Hobbes

British Museum, London

By Tom Lubbock

Friday, 20 February 2009

English illustration is a strong tradition. There are many books that can hardly be imagined without their images. Edward Lear's nonsense rhymes come with his nonsense drawings, and Beatrix Potter's tales are more than half-told by her watercolours. The world of Lewis Carroll's Alice books is partly the creation of John Tenniel's pictures – and ditto Dickens' Oliver Twist and George Cruikshank's.

William Blake is the supreme joiner of text and image. Meanwhile, there are many less graphic artists who have used their talents to visualise Paradise Lost, The Pilgrim's Progress and Gulliver's Travels. The tradition of English illustration has typically been devoted to the fantastic and visionary.

Yet one of the most fantastical and memorable examples of the tradition isn't connected to a work of imagination. It's found in a famous treatise of political philosophy – on the first page of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan: The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. This illustration is an Anglo-French work: drawn by a French artist, Abraham Bosse, but designed in collaboration with the philosopher. It shows a giant which represents Hobbes' idea of the absolute state.

The text along the top quotes the Latin Bible, from the Book of Job, and describes the monster Leviathan: "There is no power on earth that can compare with him." The giant wears a crown. He rises above a landscape, and wields a sword and a crozier, emblems of civil and church authority. But his most striking aspect is the way his torso and arms are made up of numerous densely crowded little figures. He is a swarm-man.

The Leviathan giant embodies the answer to Hobbes' great fear, civil war. (He was writing after the English civil war, in exile in France.) The populace agree to surrender all their individual powers. They are incorporated into an undivided, conflict-free body, the all-governing, all-embracing state.

The mass of people is gathered like a congregation. They face inwards, reverently, towards the head of the mortal god, who gazes out. The figures in the multitude are very similar, wearing the same respectable hats and cloaks. They are all male. In other words, they represent the 17th-century franchise – though within that, no class distinctions are registered. The people are equal in their submission.

But this great archetypal image can be seen in numerous ways. See it as a big body packed with little bodies: maybe it was an inspiration to pictures of the Wicker Man. The first one appeared, published by the eccentric English antiquarian Aylett Sammes, 25 years after Leviathan. Or see how the giant's body arises from behind the horizon, out of nowhere. It's the same way that The Colossus emerges beyond the landscape in the painting now de-attributed to Goya. One way or another, fantasy is this picture's destiny.

National Gallery and Tate end row over 1900

Britian's leading public art centres have reached an agreement after a row broke out over the National Gallery's plans for a Picasso exhibition, set to open next week.

Last Updated: 12:38PM GMT 20 Feb 2009

Defining any period of history is a tricky business, but when it comes to art history, fixing the dates of movements and styles can be especially contentious – with important financial ramifications for museums and galleries.

Next week, the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square opens an exhibition devoted to the work of the Spanish titan of 20th-century art, Picasso. The show is likely to be the hottest ticket in the art world this spring, bringing in substantial revenue for the museum's coffers.

And yet, according to the terms of an agreement thrashed out in 1996, the exhibition encroaches on the territory of the Tate. At that meeting, the heads of both institutions agreed upon a dividing line between the collections. The National Gallery bound itself to not show any art made after 1900, leaving Tate free to cover international art made from the start of the 20th century to the present day.

However, the agreement lapsed in 2007, leaving the NG free to mount shows of modern and contemporary art, hence its decision to bring the touring blockbuster exhibition, Picasso: Challenging the Past, to this country. Tate's director, Sir Nicholas Serota, might be forgiven for feeling piqued by his rival's decision to put on a big Picasso show – after all, in 2002, Tate Modern hosted an important exhibition devoted to those two giants of modern art, Matisse and Picasso.

Last year, however, the new director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, was unrepentant. "The idea is not to have an agreement," he reportedly said in September. "We are not happy with 1900 as a final, absolute point of the end of the National Gallery." You can understand his concern, of course: these days, modern art is big business. And, from a scholarly viewpoint, limiting what you can show to an arbitrary date is highly reductive. Art historians could argue for aeons about the exact year in which Modernism started – and for many of them, 1900 wouldn't be their first choice.

So where does that leave things today? Yesterday, it was announced that a new agreement lasting until 2019 has been reached, reportedly to the satisfaction of both parties. "Following recent discussions, the National Gallery and Tate have agreed that the principles governing the historical boundaries of their two collections, which were put in place in 1996, should continue to apply for another 10 years from 2009," a statement read.

The key point, though, is that the new agreement will have a greater degree of flexibility than the old one: the NG accepts that Tate will continue to acquire 19th-century paintings by artists associated with the 20th century (such as Bonnard and Matisse), and vice versa. "It's a harmonious working out of how we're going to do things from now on," says Thomas Almeroth-Williams of the National Gallery.