Vikan

Faced with a 27 percent drop in the value of its endowment funds and expected cuts in state and local government grants, the Walters Art Museum announced yesterday a restructuring plan that includes laying off seven of its 150 employees, imposing a salary and limited hiring freeze and staff furloughs, and canceling an exhibition that was to have had the museum collaborating with the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and the Getty in Los Angeles. Earlier this year, Hackerman House, where the Walters' Asian art collection is displayed, was closed weekdays in a cost-cutting move.

El Greco's mystery key is rare and curious and worth beaucoup bucks.He's convinced of this, even though he's not sure exactly what it is he paid $20 for last Christmas at a Fells Point antique store. And until El Greco is satisfied that every source of information has been unlocked, he's not going to part with his prize."Maybe the key to an old bank, maybe a castle," says 66-year-old Theodoros Roditis, an Eastern Avenue sewing machine repairman who composes music under the name El Greco.Eyes twinkling, the Greek emigre takes his speculation even beyond the castle door.

They understand us perfectly. They entertain us. They know when we're happy and when we're sad. They have a sense of humor, and they know what tickles us. They listen well. They obey (well, mostly). They are Very Good Dogs.And their Devoted People are the first to say so.Devoted People, even those with high-profile lives and frantic schedules, go to extraordinary efforts to make sure their dogs are happy. How far will they go? Think trans-Atlantic travel and cat companions. Think accessories from Paris and "cookies" on demand.

Hackerman House, the Walters Art Gallery's museum of Asian Art, has been closed temporarily to help meet demands of city budget cuts, Walters director Gary Vikan confirmed last night.The house, a separate building attached to the gallery and originally built as a 19th-century townhouse, will be closed beginning today for up to eight weeks. It will reopen no later than Sept. 21 and perhaps sooner if a Walters fund appeal succeeds."I anticipate this is eight weeks, max," said Vikan. "I hope it will be open in a couple of weeks depending on what happens.

People at the Walters Art Gallery first began to take notice of the face about 20 years ago. Carved on the corners of a marble sarcophagus dated at 210 A.D. and discovered north of Rome in 1885, it's called the Victory Sarcophagus. It is one of the finest pieces in the gallery's antiquities collection.Comments have been made about the face through the years, the kind of jocular remarks that images out of time or place often provoke. Some people find it eerie. But it's doubtful anybody has ever suggested it's anything more than an interesting coincidence.

An article in Tuesday's Sun about a 1998 Monet exhibit at the Walters Art Gallery misspelled the name of the curator overseeing the show. He is William R. Johnston.The Sun regrets the errors.The Walters Art Gallery will bring 22 rarely seen paintings of French Impressionist master Claude Monet to Baltimore in 1998, its director Gary Vikan announced yesterday at a ceremonial contract signing with the Musee Marmottan of Paris, which owns the world's largest collection of Monet's works.The exhibition, titled "Monet: Late Paintings of Giverny from the Musee Marmottan," is expected to draw as many as 200,000 visitors to the Walters during its nine-week stay, March 29 to May 31, 1998.

From Rembrandt to Rothko, Walters Art Gallery director Gary Vikan's cooking has mirrored the world of art as he moved from formal to abstract styles. "I've gone from being very bookish to being much more intuitive," he says.Vikan has traveled extensively throughout his life, and food memories are embedded in his recollections. There was the time, for instance, a decade or so ago, when he was traveling in Turkey. He had reached the town of Bursa, and settled in at a little restaurant in a tent.

Want to spend quality time with the movers and shakers of the Baltimore art world? Painter Raoul Middleman gives you the chance through an exhibit of his portraits of museum directors, artists, curators and other prominent figures on the local scene.Among the notable aspects of his show at the Steven Scott Gallery is that it's surely the only time you'll ever find these arts advocates rendered speechless.Mr. Middleman's expressive brushwork speaks for them. Wielding a brush as if he were an Old West gunslinger, Mr. Middleman executes fast and furious portraits in which the sitter's personality usually comes across with uncanny incisiveness.

"Gauguin and the School of Pont-Aven," the blockbuster exhibit that closed Sunday at the Walters Art Gallery, drew huge crowds that made it the second-biggest show in the museum's history.The exhibit brought 99,400 people to the museum during its two-month run, a figure second only to "Sisley," paintings by French impressionist Alfred Sisley, in the spring of 1993. That show, which ran for three months, drew 134,000 visitors.The Gauguin exhibit also set two attendance records for the Walters -- a daily average of 2,100 people and a final-week attendance of 17,400.

Peter John Prevas, a chemist and longtime teacher, died of lymphoma Friday at Good Samaritan Hospital. He was 77.He retired in 1983 as plant manager of Airco Inc., a manufacturer of electrodes in Sparrows Point. He also had taught Greek at Towson State University and science at several area high schools.Mr. Prevas had been a private tutor in science and mathematics and was considered an expert on iconography in the Greek Orthodox tradition."He truly loved his students," said his wife, Loretta Seader Prevas.

Faced with a 27 percent drop in the value of its endowment funds and expected cuts in state and local government grants, the Walters Art Museum announced yesterday a restructuring plan that includes laying off seven of its 150 employees, imposing a salary and limited hiring freeze and staff furloughs, and canceling an exhibition that was to have had the museum collaborating with the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and the Getty in Los Angeles. Earlier this year, Hackerman House, where the Walters' Asian art collection is displayed, was closed weekdays in a cost-cutting move.

As Walters Art Museum conservator Elissa O'Loughlin pulled back the lid to one of two wooden crates left in the museum's attic for decades, Gary Vikan broke the tension. "Oh, my God, not another Monet! We have much too many of those," the museum's director said. The audience burst into laughter. Vikan was standing too far away to see the crates' contents -- volumes of well-preserved black, leather-bound photo albums and one box. O'Loughlin opened the box and removed an 80-page red leather book.

A nationally renowned specialist in museum design, Polshek Partnership Architects of New York, has been selected to develop a master plan to guide growth and development of Baltimore's Walters Art Museum campus over the next decade. Museum director Gary Vikan said Polshek was selected over 10 candidates that sought the commission, the first comprehensive planning exercise at the Walters in 11 years. Open since the 1930s with an extensive collection assembled by William and Henry Walters, the city-owned museum began at 600 N. Charles St. and has grown into a campus that includes nine properties on three city blocks stretching along Centre Street.

GARY VIKAN, DIRECTOR of the Walters Art Museum, is a specialist in Byzantine art. He lectures on topics such as icons, early Christian pilgrimages and Elvis. But he has embraced the modern era, publishing his own blog on the museum's Web site. Every Wednesday he discusses art and cultural issues, and welcomes comments from readers. At the moment, he's preparing for a new exhibition at the museum: Deja Vu? Revealing Repetition in French Masterpieces, a show that opens next month exploring the significance of artistic repetition through the art of 11 celebrated 19th- and 20th-century French painters.

IT WAS BACK TO SCHOOL for several hundred grown-ups at the Baltimore School for the Arts. More commonly known as "Expressions," the school's annual fundraising party gives its guests a chance to take a class with some of the BSA's students as their teachers. Party chairs Teri Alexander, Nathalie Beatty, Elizabeth Linehan, Mary-Ann Pinkard and Krissie Verbic welcomed the new "students" as they filed into the school. Many bolstered their confidence and energy with a stop at the bar and at the hors d'oeuvres tables - and then decided which subject they wanted to give a whirl.

Five years ago, when someone suggested to Gary Vikan, the director of the Walters Art Museum, that he start a blog, he didn't know what a blog was. Not many people did. Now, inspired by the millions of people who are sounding off on the Internet, Vikan has added his voice to the mix. He thinks he's the first major museum director to do so. In his third posting on thewalters.org/blog late last month, Vikan pulled no punches. He took on his colleagues at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana, Calif.

Sweet sounds in any language On a visit last summer to Dresden, Germany, we stopped to listen to a quartet under an archway leading toward the Schloss. A small child seemed captivated by the music of Mozart and even danced a little jig. Gary Vikan Baltimore

In response to cuts in public funding and shifting viewer habits, the Walters Art Museum will no longer be open on Tuesdays, a move that shortens its regular week from six to five days, museum administrators said. It will also change its evening hours. Beginning next week, the museum will be open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Its evening hours will be 5:30 to 10 on the second Friday of each month. (The museum will no longer remain open in the evenings on the first Thursday of each month.

Museum officials and others alarmed over the fate of thousands of irreplaceable artworks looted from Iraq's national museum in Baghdad say the only hope for recovering the country's cultural patrimony may be by appealing to Iraqi national pride and by offering amnesty and small cash rewards to looters who return stolen objects. The idea of a no-questions-asked return policy, similar to city gun buy-back programs, was raised earlier this week by the New York-based American Council for Cultural Policy, said Walters Art Museum director Gary Vikan, a member of the group.

The thing that bothers national cultural leaders Martin Sullivan and Gary Vikan most about the looting in Iraq is how little art seems to matter, at least to U.S. military commanders. "That's probably the worst thing," said Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum. The pair - along with Richard S. Lanier, director of a New York foundation, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, that deals with relations between the United States and Eastern Europe - resigned Monday from the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property in protest.