Fernand Leger

Artistic movements nearly always spring from a desire to throw out the old and bring in the new. That's certainly true of Purism, a post-World War I, Paris-based movement that promoted an aesthetic of refinement and clarification. The founders of Purism, artists Amedee Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (better known by his pseudonym, Le Corbusier), titled their manifesto "Apres le cubism" ('After Cubism") and dismissed their Cubist predecessors' work as outdated decoration.

A Fernand Léger painting owned by pop star Madonna sold for $7.2 million at a New York auction Tuesday. Madonna had put the painting up for sale to benefit her charitable group, the Ray of Light Foundation. The sale, which was part of a larger Sotheby's auction of Impressionist and Modern art, exceeded expectations. The auction house had originally estimated that the work would go for between $5 million and $7 million. "Trois Femmes à la Table Rouge" was created around 1921 and is a quasi-cubist depiction of three women sitting around a red table.

A Fernand Léger painting owned by pop star Madonna sold for $7.2 million at a New York auction Tuesday. Madonna had put the painting up for sale to benefit her charitable group, the Ray of Light Foundation. The sale, which was part of a larger Sotheby's auction of Impressionist and Modern art, exceeded expectations. The auction house had originally estimated that the work would go for between $5 million and $7 million. "Trois Femmes à la Table Rouge" was created around 1921 and is a quasi-cubist depiction of three women sitting around a red table.

Artistic movements nearly always spring from a desire to throw out the old and bring in the new. That's certainly true of Purism, a post-World War I, Paris-based movement that promoted an aesthetic of refinement and clarification. The founders of Purism, artists Amedee Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (better known by his pseudonym, Le Corbusier), titled their manifesto "Apres le cubism" ('After Cubism") and dismissed their Cubist predecessors' work as outdated decoration.

A man suspected of hiding precious artwork stolen from the Paris Museum of Modern Art last year claims that in a panic, he threw the paintings into the garbage. Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, Matisse and Leger paintings stolen in May 2010, and worth about $134 million, may have been dumped in a garbage bin on a Paris street and destroyed with the rest of that day's trash, according to testimony by one of three suspects connected to the theft. The suspect, a 34-year-old watch repairman, was identified only as Jonathan B. by the French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche.

Three paintings by Russian-French artist Marc Chagall were sold for record amounts to U.S. and Japanese bidders at a Paris art auction Monday. One Chagall work, featuring a blue-costumed circus musician on a pink background, sold for $706,812 (the auction's top price), while another Chagall, "The Red Tree," went for $674,000 and a third canvas, a watercolor, fetched $105,116.

Modern artworks by Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and others, estimated as worth more than $500,000, have been stolen from an Athens museum, police said Saturday. The 38 lithographs and prints by some of the world's most distinguished painters and sculptors belonged to a private collection on display at the Goulandris-Horn Foundation since Feb. 7. Prints by Spanish painter Joan Miro, French painter Fernand Leger and Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti were among works missing from the foundation.

Paintings done in France before World War II and American works done after it dominate a show of 20th-Century art at Washington's National Gallery that opened Tuesday and will remain a major feature of the museum for the next two years. The upper level of the gallery's East Building is dominated by Picassos, while canvases painted in France by Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque, Fernand Leger and others, capture the upper reaches of the main building.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has sent a painting by cubist Fernand Leger back to the heirs of a Jewish art collector in France, after concluding it had been stolen by the Nazis during World War II. The museum had owned the 1911 Leger painting "Smoke Over Rooftops" since 1961. But after a decade of detective work, the institute decided to return it to the heirs of noted Parisian collector Alphonse Kann, who died in 1948. "Having researched this to the end of the road, we decided we had to return the painting; it was the right thing to do," Kaywin Feldman, director of the institute, told the Star Tribune for a story published Thursday.

KNOWING well the power of assembled bits of colored glass "to illumine men's minds so they may travel through it to an apprehension of God's light," French Abbot Suger filled the church of Saint-Denis with biblical iconography in stained glass in the 12th century, launching a revolution in Gothic architecture that spread across Europe.