The Blonde Ambition: pop art

A Roy Lichtenstein painting missing since 1970 has surfaced at a New York City warehouse – and a judge has ordered that it stay put until rightful ownership can be determined, according to court documents.

Lichtenstein's Electric Cord was created in 1961. It depicts a coiled cord in black and white on a 28 by 18 inch (71 by 46 cm) canvas. It was bought for $750 in the 1960s by art collector Leo Castelli, but disappeared in 1970 after the Castelli gallery sent it out for cleaning.

In 2007, Barbara Castelli, who inherited the art gallery when her husband Leo died in 1999, listed Electric Cord with a registry of missing and stolen artwork.

Castelli learned last week that an art dealer named James Goodman had contacted the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation seeking assistance authenticating the artwork, which was sitting at a storage facility on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

The painting had been shipped from a gallery in Bogota, Colombia, court records show.

Lawyers for Castelli claim the painting is worth $4m (£2.6m). New York State judge Peter Sherwood issued a temporary restraining order on Tuesday barring the painting from being removed from the warehouse.

Lichtenstein was a pioneer in pop art who died at age 73 in 1997. In May, one of Lichtenstein's works, Sleeping Girl, sold at the auction house Sotheby's for $44.8m.

Roy Lichtenstein's Electric Cord resurfaces after 42 years

By MavyDesign

A Roy Lichtenstein painting missing since 1970 has surfaced at a New York City warehouse – and a judge has ordered that it stay put unt...

Louis Vuitton’s new collection with Yayoi Kusama, includes an extensive range of shoes, bags, dresses, and scarves, all reflecting Kusama’s distinctive aesthetic.

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of mediums, including painting, collage, sculpture, performance art and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and an important voice of the avant-garde.

Both the collaboration Vuitton’s most extensive with an artist ever – and the fashion house’s sponsorship of Kusama’s retrospective art show at the Whitney (which has also been seen in Madrid, in Paris, and at the Tate Modern in London) came out of that meeting of the obsessive minds back in 2006.

“Marc Jacobs’s sincere attitude towards art is the same as my own,” Kusama told the Cut from her studio in Tokyo recently. “I respect him as a wonderful designer. Louis Vuitton understands and appreciates the nature of my art. Therefore there isn’t much difference from my process of making fashion.”

The starting points for the collection were obsession and seriality. The iconic Louis Vuitton leather goods, ready-to-wear, shoes, accessories, watches and jewellery became the supports for Kusama’s organic repetitive patterns. Treated in vigorous and hybrid colours, the polka dots cover the products infinitely. All over, express the unlimited possibilities of playing with scales, colours and densities. When the “kusamesque” figure comes to life, the patterns ripple and lead the eye into a stroboscopic game. No middle, no beginning and no end: this hallucinatory proliferation will also be relayed in the Louis Vuitton windows worldwide decorated with emblematic motifs: biomorphic shaped “nerves” sculptures for windows named “BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE”; flowers entitled “ETERNAL BLOOMING FLOWERS IN MY MIND” and especially red polka dots on white background among which Kusama figures named “SELF-OBLITERATION” can be spotted. For the artist, who sees her life as “a dot lost among millions of other dots”, this collaboration will allow her to spread her polka dots infinitely across the world and convey her message: “Love Forever”. “It enables her to increase her audience and that of contemporary art in general, concludes Marc Jacobs. The task Louis Vuitton has always set itself.”

The first global window installation in the flagship in New York City, will be followed by similar installations in all 453 Louis Vuitton stores worldwide.