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A portrait of Queen Elizabeth II was defaced with spray paint Thursday at London’s Westminster Abbey, and police arrested a man at the church on suspicion of vandalism.

Fathers 4 Justice, a protest group that campaigns on behalf of fathers denied contact with their children, said the arrested man was a member. It said he had written “Help” with paint on the picture in the abbey’s Chapter House.

“It was basically a dad that was desperate to see his kids in the run-up to Father’s Day,” Fathers 4 Justice campaign director Jolly Stanesby said. “He’s decided to ask for help.”

Stanesby said the action wasn’t an official protest organized by the group.

Police said a 41-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and taken to a London police station.

The abbey said the painting by Australia-born artist Ralph Heimans has been removed from public view until it can be restored.

The portrait was commissioned to mark last year’s anniversary of the queen’s 60 years on the throne. It was on display until March in Australia’s National Portrait Gallery in Canberra and was recently bought by Westminster Abbey for its collection.

The 9-foot by 11-foot (2.5-meter by 3.4-meter) painting shows the monarch standing on the spot in the abbey where she was crowned.

Last week, the queen and her family attended a ceremony in the abbey to mark the 60th anniversary of her coronation there in June 1953.

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In honor of Gustave Courbet’s birthday, we are revisiting a post originally published last year honoring the artist’s life and work.

We can think of few artists who embody the spirit of unbridled liberty and personal conviction better than Gustave Courbet. The rugged, bohemian painter would turn 194 if he were miraculously still with us today.

Courbet was born in 1819 in Ornans, France, a region that remained close to his heart throughout his artistic career. After a brief stint in law school, Courbet began painting, focusing on landscapes and the daily lives of peasants and neighbors. The reigning academic art schools were Romanticism and Neo-Classicism, which focused on mythological, religious or historical themes. The subject of capturing quotidian contemporary life was unheard of and unacceptable at the time. Yet Courbet deemed the lives of his relatives and fellow inhabitants of Ornans worthy of immortalizing, and on an epic, massive scale at that.

His works rebelled against the academy not only in subject and size but style as well. Prior to Courbet, most painting attempted to mask its materiality to more closely resemble what it represented. Yet the French artist revelled in the rough and fleshy textures oil paints provided, exploring the ways their irregularities mimicked those in nature. He did not strive for perfection, but sought to depict reality in all its beautiful messiness.

When “A Burial at Ornans” debuted in 1850, Courbet received great attention for the vast 10 by 22 feet canvas depicting the true-to-life funeral of his grand uncle. A work of this magnitude was normally reserved for religious or royal subjects, making the depiction of real-life townspeople nothing less than blasphemous. The piece was accused of being purposefully ugly, and Courbet was accused of being a savage, an anarchist and a genius (all of which we suspect he would have agreed with at the time). Of course, he became an instant celebrity, both from his revealing personal works and outspoken — even narcissistic — attitude regarding it. He turned his artwork into a sort of reality show.

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Willi Sitte, one of East Germany’s most eminent artists and a key representative of Communism’s preferred socialist realism painting style, has died at 92.

The head of the Willi Sitte Foundation, Hans-Hubert Werner, told German news agency dpa that Sitte died on Saturday morning after a long illness.

Sitte’s paintings depicted factory workers or farmers as glamorized ideals of Communist heroes. Among his famous works are voluptuous, often nude women.

He was the president of East Germany’s association of visual artists from 1974 to 1988 and also a member of the ruling party’s central committee. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Germany’s unification, Sitte was seen in a more controversial light because of his closeness to the Communist regime.

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The city of Lodz in Poland is promoting the work of street artists from around the world as a way of creating a cultural re-invigoration of this city whose population is three quarters of a million. Begun in 2009, the Urban Forms Gallery has installed more than 20 large square paintings on elevations in the city center.

The public/private partnership and the addition of the artwork has attracted business and investment, and of course urban exploring tourists who can follow a map to see the works within a couple of hours. As a model for employing the talents of street artists to create public art in service of the re-invigoration of a city, this one appears to be very successful at respecting the work while adding value to a neighborhood, district, city, and community.

The roster of nearly two dozen works features international street artists like Os Gemeos from Brazil, Aryz from Spain, and Remed from France, along with one of Poland’s proud street art sons named M-City from Gdynia, a city three hours north of here, and two hometown local talents Bezt and Sainer from the ETAM Crew.

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In the early 1940s, a young man named John Biggers enrolled at Hampton Institute, a black college near Norfolk, at the same time that Viktor Lowenfeld, a painter and art scholar who had fled Nazi persecution in Austria, arrived to establish the school’s art department.

The artistic aspirations that nourished them both — after the teacher dissuaded the student from majoring in plumbing so that he might dedicate himself to the brush and easel — form the thematic core of “The Hampton Years,” a world-premiere dose of history-laced edu-tainment from D.C. playwright Jacqueline E. Lawton and Theater J.

The drama, based on real people and directed with care by Shirley Serotsky, shows off the impressive research Lawton has done in constructing her account of a time of awakening for African American artists. An audience emerges after two hours in the Goldman Theater at the DC Jewish Community Center agreeably enlightened about efforts at Hampton — today known as Hampton University — to fortify young black men and women for a world resistant to their artistic goals.

What isn’t revealed powerfully enough at this stage of the play’s development is the tale’s specialness. Lawton’s genteel treatment is certainly edifying, and if imparting information is the play’s ultimate aim, then the mission has been accomplished. But if pursuing dramatic tension is also part of the plan, “The Hampton Years” has not quite reached the finish line.

The nebulous obstacle challenging both Viktor (Sasha Olinick) and John (Julian Elijah Martinez) is an establishment in wartime America that’s not yet willing to accept black painters and sculptors into the mainstream — or even, in many cases, into the buildings. “The Hampton Years” has characters recount the indignities that racism and segregation impose on black intellectuals, as in the story of how a group of black students had to find a surreptitious way to traverse a segregated park to enter an art museum.

The report of this incident and others — such as the account by one of John’s classmates (Crashonda Edwards) of the sculpture of hers purchased by a Virginia museum ending up on a shelf in the basement — are more interesting than what the play shows us of life in Viktor’s department. Viktor’s struggles with the college administration over the magnitude of his vision, for example, seem ordinary. What department chair worth his or her salt hasn’t contended with budget constraints and meddling administrations?

This might be an accurate reflection of how things were at Hampton; it’s just not gut-grabbing. And, as portrayed with a thick German accent and distracted air by Olinick, Viktor remains a rather one-dimensional touchstone. (Ze scenes in da haus mit Olinick und Sarah Douglas, az his vife, Margaret, reminded me of the moment in “Casablanca” when the German refugee husband asks his wife for the time by saying, “What watch?” and she responds with, “Ten watch.”)

The magnetic Martinez has more success as eager young John, who would go on, after following Lowenfeld to his next job at Penn State, to a career as a muralist. And Edwards, a key player in Theater J’s recent staging of David Mamet’s “Race,” gives another highly watchable performance here, as a gifted student in her own right, unhappily vying for attention with the teacher’s pet.

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A story right out of reality television has unfolded for a young couple from western Massachusetts.  Last year the couple acquired the contents of an abandoned storage locker at a Boston auction.  Little did they realize at the time that the locker contained a selection of works by Allan Rohan Crite, dubbed in 2002 as  “the granddaddy of the Boston art scene” by the Boston Globe.   The works were the content of Crite’s studio that was put into storage in the 1990s when he became ill.  The works will again be put up for auction, this time at Grogan and Company, Fine Art Auctioneers and Appraisers in Dedham on June 16th.

The collection features a selection of autobiographical pencil sketches Crite began in 1975 documenting the African American experience. The first of the series is a self portrait of the artist bearing an inscription that begins with “Such big chunks of this city has become a memory. Such big chunks of my life is a memory…”  The series of eight narrative drawings bears a $7,000-10,000 estimate.

“As a visual artist,” Mr. Crite said in a 1998 interview with the Harvard Extension School Alumni Bulletin, “I am . . . a storyteller of the drama of man. This is my small contribution – to tell the African-American experience – in a local sense, of the neighborhood, and, in a larger sense, of its part in the total human experience.”  The collection of works includes mostly prints and drawings, as well as the artist’s personal documents and studio materials, including a mannequin and his mimeograph machines.

Another highlight of the collection is a double ink and marker drawing titled “A Few Words” and “More Words”.  The view of Crite’s Boston neighbors is signed and dated November of 1999, and is estimated to bring $4,000-6,000.  Many of Crite’s lithographs will also be available.

In addition to the works by Crite, Grogan and Company will be holding their Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Auction on June 16th, 2013, featuring a fine selection of Fine Art, Furniture and Decorative Works of Art, Silver, Jewelry and Oriental Rugs. “It is exciting to be celebrating our twenty-fifth anniversary with such a diverse and quality filled auction,” stated Michael B. Grogan, “With almost 800 lots, there will be a little something for every interest.”

The auction will be begin at 10:00 a.m. Sunday, June 16th, with a three-day exhibition opening on Thursday, June 13th.  For a fully illustrated catalogue or more information about Grogan and Company’s auction and appraisal services, visit www.groganco.com or call 781.461.9500.

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“In Conversation: Modern African American Art” comes to the Peabody Essex Museum just as interest in art by black Americans is — belatedly — bubbling to the surface in New England’s art museums.

Prompted by the opening of its Art of the Americas Wing, the Museum of Fine Arts, in particular, has spent several years beefing up its holdings of African-American art. To that end, it established a special committee and courted collectors, in particular John Axelrod, whose large collection of African-American art was acquired in 2011.

The MFA put considerably more of these works on display in the new wing, and, earlier this year, it quietly mounted its first ever retrospective of an African-American artist. It was a small show, just 30 paintings and drawings by the fascinating Lois Mailou Jones, but a solid one.

The Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham has meanwhile put on impressive solo displays by John Wilson and Meta Warrwick Fuller, both pioneering African-American artists.

Institutions such as the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln have tapped into more contemporary African-American visions with shows by Sanford Biggers and Laylah Ali, respectively.

That’s not all, nor is it enough. But, as the first New England-area museum to present a survey of modern African-American art (from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Era and beyond), the Peabody Essex exhibition helps to congeal these disparate efforts.

The danger of reducing singular, enigmatic works of art to dull, dutiful illustrations of identity politics always lurks behind such efforts. After so many years of neglect, though, visibility matters.

So does social history, and this show, which comes to Salem from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., does a good job of placing compelling, individual visions by leading African-American artists in the context of the upheavals of (mostly) the middle half of the 20th century.

It does this in part by including a great deal of photography. It’s not all documentary photography by any stretch, but there are enough images that are tethered to the times to evoke a whole landscape of social change.

Roy DeCarava’s “Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, DC,” for instance, is a closely cropped portrait of a girl, devastating in its immediacy. Only the image’s title and the glimpsed fragments of bodies behind and in front suggest a political solidarity to match the sobriety and purpose that radiate from her face.

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Today we would like to celebrate the birthday of famed portrait artist and friend of Spanish royalty Diego Velazquez. The painter, who The Metropolitan Museum of Artonce described as “the most admired — perhaps the greatest — European painter who ever lived,” would turn 414 years old today if he were miraculously still alive.

Velazquez was born in Seville, Spain in 1599, and completed an early apprenticeship with the then famous painter Francisco Pacheco. He began painting portraits, the style of work he became famous for, when he ventured to Madrid in 1622, and was asked to paint a portrait for the king of Spain. Velazquez’s skills were to the king’s liking, and from then on, he became a standing fixture in the court.

Under the patronage of the crown, Velazquez lived a luxurious life, essentially participating in an artist residency that included health insurance and housing. Under the king’s wing, he not-so-shockingly won a competition to distinguish the best painter in Spain, the theme of which was the expulsion of the Moors. He was also able to travel outside of Spain as part of his position, a perk similarly enjoyed by his contemporary, Peter Paul Rubens, during a time when artists took part in diplomatic missions.

Beyond the dozens of portraits of King Philip IV, Velazquez also painted other members of the royal family and court. His most famous painting, “Las Meninas,” depicts Philip’s young daughter, Margarita, with her entourage of maids, pets and bodyguards. The number of figures and use of perspective is a feast for art historians, as Velazquez not only inserted himself into the painting but also used a mirror reflection in the background to portray the king and queen. Another work, “The Rokeby Venus,” represents the more sensual side of the artist’s oeuvre, and remains the only surviving example of a nude by Velazquez.

Velaquez worked up until his final days as a member of the royal court before he passed away on August 6, 1660. He is remembered as an artist’s artist, revered by greats like Picasso, Dali and Francis Bacon who all recreated variations of the famed portrait painter’s works. And if you’re wondering what Velazquez’ descendants are doing today, one of them — His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf — is presently ruling over Sweden. Not a bad job, we suppose.

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June 15th 2013

10:00pm - 2:00am at

7165 Lounge 7165 – Germantown Ave. Philadelphia, PA

Price: 15.00

DJ Gary O, Captain Boogie & Friends

Hosted by WDAS-FM PATTY JACKSON PLUS PARRY P

Cover is $15 All Night

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More Info Gary O: (267) 249-0528, Al Grey Jr (215) 849-9909