VIENNA’S DUTCH, FLEMISH MASTERS TO SAN DIEGO

Forty major works by 17th- and 18th-Century Dutch and Flemish artists from the collection of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts go on display Saturday at the San Diego Museum of Art.

The exhibition, “Dutch and Flemish Masters: Paintings from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts,” contains landscapes, genre scenes, still lifes of food and flowers, as well as portraits by Van Dyck, Van Goyen, De Hooch, Fabritius, Asselyn, Van Huysum, Codde, Pynacker and Van Ruisdael. A series of sketches in oil paint by Peter Paul Rubens also has been included.

The Vienna Academy was founded in 1692 under the tutelage of Hapsburg emperor Leopold I; it gained international fame in 1822, when Count Anton Lamberg-Sprinzenstein, an Austrian nobleman, bequeathed 740 of his Old Master paintings to the institution. This cache includes some of the finest examples from the Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish art of the 17th Century.

The show, which runs through Oct. 13, was organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts with financial support from the National Endowment for the Arts and an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities.

“Angels Flight” is a collaborative series of theater, poetry, performance art, dance and puppet shows to be presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art and Pipeline, a downtown theatrical company.

The series will play weekends Sept. 6 to Oct. 27, Saturday and Sunday at 8 p.m., at the Wallenboyd, Pipeline’s 80-seat theater located at the corner of Wall and Boyd streets in downtown Los Angeles.

Featured in this interdisciplinary series are painter/performer Hirokazu Kosaka, actor/writer/mime/choreographer Jan Munroe, poet/performance artist Lewis Mac Adams, actress Tina Preston, performer Tim Robbins, dancer/writer/actor Kedric Robin Wolfe, dancer/choreographer Gilberte Meunier and puppeteer Bruce D. Schwartz in collaboration with performer Donald Krieger.

Christo is at it again. The artist will wrap Paris’ venerable bridge, Pont Neuf, on Sept. 20, 21 and 22, and leave it thus trussed for two weeks.

According to Christo: “The decision to wrap Pont Neuf was inspired by the particular position of the bridge, joining the left and the right banks and the Ile de la Cite--the heart of Paris for over 2,000 years. Begun under Henri III, in 1578, Pont Neuf was completed in 1606, during the reign of Henri IV.

In a news release Christo said: “No other bridge in Paris offers such topographical and visual variety. Wrapping Pont Neuf will continue the tradition of its successive metamorphoses by presenting a new sculptural dimension and in becoming, for a few days, a work of art itself. Ropes will hold down the shiny sandstone-colored cloth to the bridge’s surface and maintain the principal shapes, accentuating reliefs while generalizing proportions and details. During the different stages of the project, car, boat and pedestrian traffic will neither be slowed down nor hindered in any way. All expenses related to the ‘Wrapped Pont Neuf Project’ will be borne by me, as in all my other projects, through the sale of my original preparation drawings and collages, as well as my earlier works.”

A panel of judges from the local visual arts community will meet Saturday to select three finalists in a competition to design a sculpture for the IDM Development Corp.’s “100 Broadway Office Building” project in Long Beach. The panelists are Mary L. Beebe, director of the Stuart Collection, UC San Diego; Stephen Garrett, executive director, Long Beach Museum of Art Foundation and former director of the J. Paul Getty Museum; Thomas Hartman, director of design, Frederick S. Wight Gallery, UCLA, and partner in L.A.X. Studios, and David Ball, president of development, IDM Corp.

Finalists will receive a $500 stipend to submit a final design proposal. As much as $60,000 will be awarded to the sculptor selected for the execution of the commission.

The competition is co-sponsored by IDM and the Public Corporation for the Arts. For information, call Mary Sullivan at (213) 432-8708.

Black-and-white, sepia-tone and painted photographs by Zarko Kalmic are on view in the Otis/Parsons North Gallery through Aug. 30, in an exhibition organized by Joan Agajanian Quinn. Among Kalmic’s segmented photo-portraits are those of artists Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, actors Jon Voight and Divine, actresses Bette Davis and Grace Jones, and singer Nina Simone.