Arts in Brief

Nazi-looted Klimt auctioned; It’s German season at Tmuna; Rehovot announces street art fest.

Gustav Klimt's Church in Cassone (photo credit: .)
Gustav Klimt's Church in Cassone
(photo credit: .)
Nazi-looted Klimt auctioned
A Nazi-looted painting by Gustav Klimt was auctioned in London for $45.5 million. The 1913 landscape Church in Cassone-Landscape with Cypresses, was sold at a Sotheby’s art auction Wednesday at a record price for the artist’s work. Montreal retiree Georges Jorisch, whose family in Vienna owned the painting until at least 1939, will share the proceeds of the sale with the current owner, the CBC reported. Jorisch had been in discussions with the current owners to reach a settlement, Sotheby’s told CBC.
It’s German season at Tmuna
Adam Geist by Dea Loher, February 17-20, is the first play of the ever forward-looking Tmuna Theater’s German Season. There’ll be three more full productions and, starting November, six staged readings. These plays represent contemporary and outside-the-envelope German theater, and tend to have have a socio/political bent. They are presented in collaboration with the Goethe Institute and are given in Hebrew.
Adam Geist is billed as a social manifest in which young Adam tries to find his feet in a world that has sanctified technology at the expense of people.  Loher, 46, is one of her country’s most performed playwrights.
The other three productions, in May, July and September, are Herr Kolpert, a dissection of a bored bourgeois, by David Gieselmann, a playmaker characterized as a “queer bird” who writes black comedies, a rare genre in Germany; Heaven by Fritz Kater, star of the Berlin theater, a play that relates to the “shrinking” cities of the former East Germany whose young abandon them; and Gesine Danwart’s Every Place in the Bathtub where There’s No Water, in which a sole actress, sitting in a bathtub, washes herself and her soul.
In addition to the readings there’ll be a symposium on German theater as well as two dance companies and a theater production, all from Germany.
Rehovot announces street art fest
Rehovot has announced the First International Art and Street Event Festival, which is set to take place July 4-6. Artistic director Jacky Bachar invites plastic and performing artists of all stripes and genres, singly or in groups, to submit ideas or existing works for participation in the festival. The basic theme is the living statue and it’s open to broad interpretation. If chosen, a piece will get funding and artistic support.
The deadline is February 25. Proposals can be sent to Sarit Ohayon, sarit@jackybachar.com.