According to ARTCYCLOPEDIA, Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss" is the most often sold art poster, followed by van Gogh's "The Starry Night" and Chagall's "La Mariée".
Click here to see the whole list. As an Austrian citizen, I'm quite familiar with Klimt's work. Here are some of my favourite paintings:

• Water Serpents II
• The Maiden
• Danae
• Water Serpents IV
• Lady with Hat and Feather Boa
• Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I
• Stoclet Frieze: Expectation
• NSFW: Nude

related items:
Kolmogorov scaling in impassioned van Gogh paintings, Mahalanobis

Nature: Fractal analysis has been used to assess the authenticity of paintings purporting to be the work of Jackson Pollock. Click here to read the whole story.

related items:
On the consistency of backward-looking expectations, Mahalanobis

Guess how much items went for at auction. To take part in the Name Your Price Quiz, you will be required to answer questions about prices of various antiques and collectibles. Every time you answer a question correctly you will be awarded 1 point. Each time you answer a question incorrectly you will lose a life.

Welcome to the alternative universe.

via zeitgenossen

Netherlandish Proverbs, or the Blue Cloak as it is sometimes called, includes visual representations of perhaps more than 90 individual proverbs. Proverbs were well-known to the people of 16th-century Flanders. For example, a contemporary of Bruegel, Frans Hogenberg, produced an engraving around 1558 illustrating some 40 proverbs.In this program, a selection of proverbs is identified to provide you with a starting point to a better understanding of Bruegel’s painting.

ad Public Choice: "He does not care whose house is burning as long as be can warm himself with the coals." ad Capitalism: Read ever-interesting Don Boudreaux on The large fish eat the little fish.

Example: One woman holds a distaff while the other woman spins. He carries a basket of light into the daylight. A young woman hangs a blue cloak on her elderly husband (a deceived or cuckolded man).

[wissen.de: Bis ins ausgehende Mittelalter galt Blau als die Farbe der Verstellung, der Lüge und Täuschung. Man kann dies gut auf dem Bild "Die niederländischen Sprichwörter" von 1559 ablesen, das in der Berliner Gemäldegalerie hängt. Dort zeigt Pieter Breugel d. Ä. eine junge Frau, die ihrem ältlichen Mann nach einer holländischen Redensart "den blauen Mantel umhängt" (mit weiter Kapuze, so dass er kaum etwas sehen kann), die ihn also mit einem Liebhaber betrügt. Diese Bedeutung findet sich noch in jüngeren Redensarten wie "Er lügt uns das Blaue vom Himmel herunter" oder "Er will mir einen blauen Dunst vormachen".]

Click here to continue reading. Click here (Nature) or here (New Scientist) or here (Wired) for an executive summary.

Armed men stormed into a lightly guarded Oslo museum Sunday , threatened staff at gunpoint and stole Edvard Munch's famous paintings "The Scream" and "Madonna" before stunned museum-goers. "Art experts speculated the thieves might want a ransom as the works are too well known to be sold except to a reclusive collector." (reuters). The Munch Museum had two of the "Scream" pictures; a private collector owns a third version; and the fourth is on display at Oslo's National Gallery. That version was stolen in February 1994 but recovered three months later. Police recovered the fragile work undamaged in a hotel in Asgardstrand, about 40 miles south of Oslo. Three Norwegians were arrested. At the time, investigators said the trio tried to ransom the painting, demanding $1 million from the government. It was never paid. Click here to read more.

Wikipedia: Some theorists liken the look of the screamer to that of a grey alien, claiming Munch was painting a close encounter he had experienced, while others use this theory to state simply that Munch was mentally unstable and therefore others who report encounters with similar beings were as well. A possibly more likely explanation for the image is that Munch was reproducing the face of a Peruvian mummy he had recently seen at an exhibition in Paris. The mummy had its hands alongside its face, similar to the position of the screamer in the painting.

related links:
The economics of Mexican kidnapping, Tyler Cowen

Are you talking to me?

This evening I was dragged to a little art gallery* near the place in Ottawa where I'm staying at the moment. Drinking wine in the midst of stylishly dressed women and looking at wonderful paintings... Elysian! Here is the painting ("Santa Puta", Francois Baril Pelletier) one of my companions, "the nice Greek lady from the embassy", has bought... Now we are talking! ;-D.

*Pukka Gallery (site under construction)

For centuries, artists, historians and tourists have been fascinated by Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile. Now it seems that the power of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece comes in part from an unlikely source: random noise in our visual systems.

Click here to read the story.

via artnudes