NEW YORK, NY - Access to LIFE's Photo Archive -- over 10 million images in total -- will soon be available on a new hosted image service from Google, Time Inc. has announced. Ninety-seven percent of the photographs have never been seen by the public. The collection contains some of the most iconic images of the 20th century, including works from great photojournalists Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks, and W. Eugene Smith.

LONDON - Sotheby’s second major sale of Old Master Paintings in London this year will be staged on the evening of Wednesday, December 3, 2008 and will follow in the wake of the company’s impressive series of Old Master sales in London in the summer. The December sale will be led by the prominent names of Frans van Mieris the Elder (1635-1681), Pieter Brueghel the Younger (circa 1564-1638), Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625) and Hendrick Ter Brugghen (1588-1629).

STANFORD, CA.- Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University presents “Dürer to Picasso,” the first in a year long series of exhibitions spotlighting the museum's collection. With 100 works from the Renaissance to WWII, “Dürer to Picasso” represents the top tier of art acquired through gift, purchase, and bequest since the museum's reopening in 1999, after a closure forced by the 1989 Lomia Prieta earthquake. On view through 15 February, 2009.

BERLIN.- "Gropius praises efficiency here" runs the headline in the New York Times on May 27, 1928. The article relates that the architect Walter Gropius had been in America for several weeks to study the more efficient and timesaving methods of mass production. In the spring of 1928, Walter Gropius had resigned his post as director of the Bauhaus Dessau and, together with his wife Ise, embarked on a much longed-for study trip through the USA. There he would deal primarily with modern building techniques, particularly the steel-frame construction of New York skyscrapers. The trip is financed by Adolf Sommerfeld, the building contractor and longtime patron of the Bauhaus, with whom Gropius plans to carry out large building projects in Berlin that will make use of the state-of-the-art technology.

NEW YORK, NY - Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962), best known for her lush multimedia installations that playfully and provocatively merge fantasy and reality, has created a site-specific monumental video, sound, and sculptural installation that will immerse MoMA's atrium in moving images for the first time. Multiple high definition projections comprise a panorama measuring 25 feet high and 200 feet in almost surround, turning the atrium into a gigantic pool of images filled with liquid volume of light and color.

NEW YORK, NY - The Evening Sale of Latin American Art at Sotheby’s tonight brought $16,797,875. The highlight of the sale was Rufino Tamayo’s impressive mural, entitled America, which sold to applause to a Private Collector on the phone for $6,802,500. Artist records at auction were set for Remedios Varo, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Cildo Meireles, Thomas Jacques Somerscales, and Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo). The pre-sale estimate for 78 lots in the sale was $ 21,770,000 / 29,235,000 USD.

GENEVA - The United Nations unveiled a ceiling painting featuring hundreds of hanging icicles that cost $23 million. The new hall was inaugurated in the presence of Spanish King Juan Carlos, Queen Sophie, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Swiss Federal President Pascal Couchepin, along with the artist. Spanish abstract artist Miquel Barcelo used more than 100 tons of paint on the 16,000-square-foot elliptical dome. "Nothing better than art as a universal message to express the values and beliefs that inspired the United Nations," said King Juan Carlos.

Munich, Germany - Passionately provocative major works of contemporary art were collected by the Stoffels from the 1970's onwards. ‘Passionately Provocative’: the Modern Art Collection at the Pinakothek der Moderne is now showing a large part of this splendid collection for the very first time with some 120 works exhibited over more than 1,200 m. On exhibition 20 November through 1 March, 2009.

London - Wyer Gallery  presents an exhibition of new paintings by Annabel Emson. An Other Space opens with a private view on Thursday 20th November 2008. Teetering on the edge of abstraction and representation, Emson’s paintings reflect the patterns that arise naturally in the structure of the world around us. However, despite drawing inspiration from both the natural and manmade environment, she does not depict recognizable landscapes in existence somewhere but, working intuitively and spontaneously from memory, alludes to some less tangible or fleeting place or space, rooted in memory perhaps but which has become something other, independent, self-determining and lawless. On view through 10 January, 2009.

NEW YORK, NY -The Agora Gallery  is proud to present Shifra in Altered States of Reality: an Exhibition of Analog and Digital Fine Art Photography. Scheduled to run from November 19^th through December 9^th, the collection will feature a captivating selection of Shifra's dynamic photographs.  Shifra's photographic explorations of the city highlight dynamic attributes of steel, stone, and glass that are easily overlooked in daily life. Dissembling space and skewing the conventions of perspective, her large format photography allows audiences to encounter the world from unusual points of view.