B-SIDE-ART

  The Draken Harald Hårfagre has done something no movie prop ever needs to do: it has actually crossed the Atlantic Ocean, under its own sail, with a real crew rowing real oars through real North Atlantic swells. Built in Norway using traditional Viking shipbuilding techniques, it is the largest longship constructed in modern times. This summer, it sailed toward Oslo for the July 17 premiere of a film in which it plays a ship that, historically speaking, could not have existed for another two thousand years. In Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," the Draken stands in for an ancient Greek warship from the Late Bronze Age — the world of Homer, roughly 1600 to 1100 BCE. The Draken is a Viking vessel, a design that would not exist until the ninth century CE. Nolan built his film around practical effects rather than digital fabrication, and reportedly told the Los Angeles Times he needed something wooden-hulled, built with ancient technology, that could survive open ocean in g...

  For years, anyone could walk into the Kunsthaus Zurich and stand in front of paintings by Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse, and Max Beckmann without paying a private collector a cent to see them. The works belonged to Werner Merzbacher, a Swiss businessman who built his fortune in fur trading and currency exchange, and who had quietly placed much of his collection on long-term loan to the museum since 2018 — an arrangement that asked nothing of the public and depended entirely on his own continued goodwill. Merzbacher died in 2024. The goodwill, according to Swiss reporting, may not have survived him. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain — Vincent van Gogh, "Wheatfield with Crows" (1890). Reference image only. Much of what Merzbacher owned had come to him through his wife's family — inherited by way of his grandfather-in-law, Bernhard Mayer, a name that appears nowhere on museum wall labels but sits quietly behind an Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Fauvist, and German Expressi...