Works Of Art

Trapped in a life-and-death struggle, a huge African elephant cast in bronze rises on its haunches as hunters perched on its back slash with swords and spears at two powerful tigers that are attacking their party. UNTAMED: THE ART OF ANTOINE-LOUIS BARYE / / Through May 6 / / The Walters Art Museum / / 410-547-9000 or thewalters.org

The war between the printed page and the electronic impulse will not soon be won. Computers are here to stay, but no amount of cybermaniacal enthusiasm will relegate books to the dingy corners of museums where armor collections collect quaintness.The electronic book's problem: Despite hardware improvement, reading on a screen is not appealing. The exception to that resistance is in books with a primary purpose of research or reference -- data, lists, tables, chronologies.Where is the line drawn?

The FBI and Interpol have taken an interest in art. In coming months, their Web sites will feature hundreds of pictures of the world's greatest masterpieces -- from Degas to Rembrandt to Van Gogh.And they are all stolen.Interpol calls the new program "Les Oevres D'art Les Plus Recherchees" -- the Most Wanted Works of Art. Its aim is to use the global reach of the Internet to track down missing paintings, sculptures, etchings, tapestries and any other priceless object that's disappeared into the shadowy world of international art thievery.

William M. Bigel, a longtime interior designer known for his unpretentious decor and keen sense of color, died Wednesday at his Lutherville home of complications from multiple sclerosis. He was 56.The native of Waukegan, Ill., earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in art history from the University of Illinois in 1966 and a master's degree from George Washington University two years later.After completing fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution and the Harvard School of Business, he worked at the National Gallery of Art before joining the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1969 as director of programming.

What's a work of art worth? The simple answer is: whatever the market will bear.I know that. You know that. So does art journalist Peter Watson, who somewhat belatedly fills in the details about what we already know in "Sotheby's: The Inside Story," an absorbing if slightly breathless account of shady goings-on inside one of the world's most prestigious auction houses.Smuggled art, stolen art, art with questionable provenance - Sotheby's sells it all, Watson charges. And not because it's good, or important, or even beautiful, one might add, but simply because what the market will bear these days is quite a lot.Part spy thriller, part true-crime story, Watson's book recounts his decade-long attempt to uncover a mystery art historians and curators have long been puzzled by but only reluctantly have examined: Given the strict export controls many countries imposed a generation ago to prevent speculators from plundering their national treasures, how was it that so many foreign artworks regularly turned up on the auction block in cities like New York and London?

Mission: Designated by Congress as America's "national museum, repository, and education center for the best in original, self-taught artistry," AVAM studies, collects, preserves and exhibits visionary art -- art produced by individuals, usually without any formal artistic training, who transform dreams, loss, hopes and ideals into powerful works of art. AVAM's seven galleries hold works created by farmers, housewives, mechanics, retired folk, the disabled...

A MURAL depicting a Bedouin tribesman telling stories to children graces the wall of the study of Concetta and Eugene Pierelli, Normandy Heights residents for more than 30 years. Their son, Louis Pierelli, created the artwork on one of his trips home from Florence, Italy.He used techniques he learned in 21 years in Florence restoring frescoes, sculpture and other art objects.A 1974 graduate of Mount Hebron High School, Louis studied art history at the Johns Hopkins University and won a fellowship from Syracuse University to study in Florence.

WHAT DO YOU call even less than a little bit? Recently I was reminded of the allure of the ultra-minimal by the work of Bethe Bronson, a master's degree candidate at the Maryland Institute, College of Art.I have written before about my own difficulty coming to terms with the obscure visual language of post-modern art and of my quarrel with the incomprehensible jargon in which so much contemporary art criticism is couched.It is one of the ironies of contemporary criticism that the movement known as minimalism -- a style characterized by extreme restraint in the use of color and form, and the employment of simple geometrical, often repetitive, motifs -- has inspired some of the most arcane, convoluted commentary ever commited to paper.

NEW YORK -- Fakes are a fact of life in the art world. They slip into even the finest museum collections and auction or gallery offerings, usually one at a time.But on Sunday, some prominent art dealers charge, a Florida auctioneer plans to put not one, not two, but dozens on the block, attributed to artists like Piet Mondrian, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jasper Johns and Helen Frankenthaler."It looks like virtually nothing in the catalog is authentic," said Robert C. Graham Jr., president of James Graham & Sons, a gallery on upper Madison Avenue.

A headline on an item in the Foreign Digest incorrectly said yesterday that artworks were damaged in a fire at the Tate Gallery in London. Paintings and other works of art were removed before any could be damaged.The Sun regrets the error.Pub Date: 6/16/97

The men and women featured in Harrod Blank's Automorphosi s, driving cars that look straight out of some avant-garde artist's imagination, must be the happiest, quirkiest, most approachable bunch of exhibitionists ever. Several of them will be at Artscape this weekend to prove it. Blank's documentary, which gets a free screening at the American Visionary Art Museum today, features scores of art cars, automobiles adorned, adapted and otherwise added-to by artists holding to no rules but their own (and maybe just a few having to do with traffic safety)

Baltimore's Contemporary Museum at 100 W. Centre St. will be transformed into an environmental think tank and laboratory when the Futurefarmers art collective from San Francisco opens The Reverse Ark: In the Wake, an exhibit exploring the social, historical and environmental history of the city's mills and textile industry, running March 26 to Aug. 22. Using the concept of an "ark" as a place of preservation and exploration, Futurefarmers will work with...

The state budget crunch hit the arts hard this year, especially in Baltimore, where four of the state's largest arts institutions are located. Officials at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum and Center Stage are struggling with a triple whammy of double-digit declines in endowment income, falling ticket sales and a 36 percent cut in funding for the state arts council, which supports arts groups across...

POP MUSIC Roll with Winwood When Steve Winwood reached his pop peak in the 1980s with such monster smashes as "Higher Love," featuring Chaka Khan, and "Roll with It," the British singer-musician had been making music for more than 20 years. His earlier fusions of rock, blues and soul gave way to a decidedly more streamlined pop approach. But his music over the years has managed to retain some grit, as heard on his latest album, the solid Nine Lives. Winwood performs at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St. Tickets are $36.50-$75.

If you want to see paintings by Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso, you don't have to visit the Baltimore Museum of Art. You can view works by those artists and many others at the new home of Renaissance Fine Arts in Pikesville. A "Masters" section is one of the many features of the gallery, which opened this fall at 1848 Reisterstown Road. There are also areas with contemporary art, sculpture, vintage posters and custom framing, and a separate boutique featuring jewel-encrusted frames and other art objects by Jay Strongwater.

T he Coming Storm is going away for awhile. So is The Goose Girl. And one of Alfred Sisley's Impressionist paintings. Maryland's temporary loss will be Tennessee's and Pennsylvania's gain, when 32 paintings from the 19th century leave the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore next month to go on the road for nearly a year as a traveling exhibit titled The Road to Impressionism: Barbizon Landscapes from the Walters Art Museum. Directors announced this month that the museum will close its 19th-century galleries from Aug. 18 to Oct. 10 so many of the paintings now on display there can be prepared for the tour.

Self-proclaimed "cartist" Conrad Bladey has been creating works of art from cars for the past 20 years in Linthicum. The extravagant vehicles have become staples at the annual Artscape, where two years ago they were sans gas engines. Bladey then sought to create a human-powered art car, what he says was the natural progression in the project. The Art Gurney, devised from a gurney bought at the Maryland State Surplus Warehouse, was decorated with buttons and paint from other car projects and serves as a memorial to a friend who passed away during its construction.

cakecentral.com This site is for those who want their cakes to be works of art. You can get ideas from the photos and discussion forums, and learn step-by-step decorating techniques.

A class of budding artists at Deerfield Elementary School painted watercolor renderings inspired by the works of artist Georgia O'Keeffe. They created close-up views of flowers that appeared to be under a magnifying glass. Another handful of youngsters created oil and pastel paintings based on the work of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. When all of the works were completed, Debbie Perry was given the task of selecting the 10 best pieces. "We have so many children here who create great art," Perry said.

They're knock-offs. But knock-offs of priceless works of art, and the fickle world of fine art can't seem to decide where they belong. Main hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Or leaky warehouse in Queens? Hundreds of plaster replicas of Greek statues and Renaissance sculptures - made in the 1800s so American art students could see the great works without schlepping to Europe - have lived in climate-controlled glory and U-Haul hell as they've fallen in and out of fashion. Six of the pieces moved yet again, this time to a Baltimore art studio, where they're getting the type of TLC lavished on the Sistine Chapel.