All The Art News That's Fit to Print

Lots of art law in today's New York Times:

• Its story on the Picasso withdrawn from last night's auction at Christie's.
• Carol Vogel's report on that auction (the biggest in history, totaling $491 million). In addition to what she calls "the stars of the evening" -- the four Klimts which were recently returned after arbitration to the Bloch-Bauer heirs (along with the Portrait of Adele that sold for $135 million earlier this year to the Neue Galerie) -- the sale also included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Street Scene, Berlin,” which "found its way to Christie’s only three months after the German government returned it to the heirs of Alfred and Thekla Hess, Jewish collectors in Erfurt, Germany" and which sold for $38 million, also to the Neue Galerie.
• The latest on the underpayment of capital gains taxes on the Childe Hassam painting that was at the center of the recently settled Brooke Astor guardianship case.
• A story on retired truck driver Teri Horton, the subject of the upcoming documentary "Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?," mentioned earlier here. There's a good image of the painting she bought for $5 in a thrift shop in the early 1990s with the Times story.
• The latest on Italy and the Getty.
• A report on "an on-and-off restitution battle lasting six decades" which ended with Austria agreeing yesterday to return Munch's “Summer Night on the Beach” to Marina Mahler, the granddaughter of the composer Gustav Mahler and his wife, who originally owned it.