Friday’s Art Notes

January 8, 2010, would have been Elvis Presley’s 75th birthday. The National Portrait Gallery celebrates with an exhibition, ‘Echoes of Elvis’, opening today. ‘Elvis, the Artist, and Pink Cadillac’ was painted by Donald Paterson, a developmentally disabled visionary artist who incorporates images of Elvis into much of his work.

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There were two unrelated but high-profile resignations this week. The director of the Getty Museum, Michael Brand, announced he will be stepping down at the end of the month, a year before the end of his contract.

And Daniela Dessi, a star of the Italian opera, quit a production of “La Traviata” after director Franco Zeffirelli told her he thought she was too old and too plump for her role.

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How did the music industry fare in 2009? Nielsen published the numbers yesterday. Overall, sales went up 2 percent from the year before, and vinyl sales were up 33 percent. But the purchase of whole albums (versus singles, individual songs and music videos) continued to drop. (For more, check out the Takeaway’s conversation this morning.)

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After learning the true provenance of an 18th century snuff box, the Metroplitan Museum of Art returned it to the heirs of a Munich gallerist who had sold it to pay a Nazi tax in the 1930s.

And the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation settled a three-year dispute over a Picasso painting with a German professor whose relative had been effectively forced into selling his valuable art collection during the Nazi regime.