Displaying items by tag: Modern Art

 After a two-stage competition, New York-based architecture firm Thomas Phifer and Partners has been selected to design Poland’s forthcoming Warsaw Museum of Modern Art. The company beat out eleven competitors, including Foster + Partners (New York), Henning Larsen (Copenhagen), and UNstudio (Amsterdam). The 161,000-square-foot museum will be located in Warsaw’s Parade Square, one of the largest city squares in the world. The museum, which will feature a large performance space for the TZ Warszawa theater, is expected to significantly boost Poland’s presence in the contemporary art world. 

Phifer and Partners’ proposal included plans for a glass-walled museum that will promote transparency to the public and connectivity to the overall city. In his design, Phifer followed the idea that the institution is “a building that reveals all it has.”

Rome’s modern art museum, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Roma Capitale, is planning an extension that will display contemporary works on loan from its commercial neighbour Gagosian, La Repubblica reports.

Rome’s urban planning commissioner Giovanni Caudo is working on the development of a new wing in an area that lies between the two buildings on Via Francesco Crispi and was formerly used by AMA, the capital’s waste collection agency. The projected 2265 sq. m expansion will allow the museum to exhibit more of its collection.

Not much surprises people outside King's Cross station in London, where the new square is usually a seething mob of anxious commuters, loungers dozing off hangovers on the hard stone benches and lost foreign students.

But when what looked like the white filmy curtains of a giant shower cubicle fell and revealed a huge bronze sculpture by Henry Moore, people stopped in their tracks to stare.

"It's … yeah … different," said Raymond Van Aubel and Michell Chew, holidaymakers from Holland and Indonesia, struggling for the courteous response. "Big. We were stunned, actually."

On October 20, 2014, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the most important exhibition of the essential Cubists -- Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso -- in over 30 years. “Cubism” will feature iconic works from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection, which is unmatched in its holdings of Cubist art. Lauder, a philanthropist and cosmetics mogul, promised his collection to the Met in April 2013. “Cubism” will mark the first time that the collection will be shown in public.

The exhibition will explore the invention and development of Cubism, a movement that transformed the landscape of modern art. Cubism departed from the traditional interpretations of art, challenged conventional perceptions of space, time, and perspective, and paved the way for abstraction -- a concept that dominated the art world for much of the 20th century.

Samuel Hunter, professor of art and archaeology, emeritus, at Princeton University and a renowned modern and contemporary art scholar, died of natural causes on July 27 in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 91.

"Sam came to Princeton in 1969 as a well-established historian of modern and contemporary art who had by that time played a prominent role in his field for more than 20 years as a professor, curator, museum director, editor and critic," said Michael Koortbojian, the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Art and Archaeology and chair of the Department of Art and Archaeology.

When Aimé Maeght, a French art dealer, lost his young son to leukemia in the 1950s, a trio of formidable modern painters—Georges Braque, Joan Miró and Fernand Léger—persuaded him to turn the family’s summer retreat above the hills of Nice into an artists’ haven. The Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation is 50 years old this month, and still bears abundant traces of the artists who made it happen: a magical Miró labyrinth, mosaics and stained glass by Braque. Its collection of 12,000 works includes 35 sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, as well as masterpieces by Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, Miró, Léger and Alexander Calder, among others. On average, 200,000 visitors tour its colourful galleries and garden every year.

Behind the idyllic exterior, though, the institution is vulnerable. The foundation is finding it hard to raise its €3m ($4m) annual budget.

Tucked into concert halls and hidden in plain sight across the Lincoln Center campus is a modern-art collection worthy of a museum.

But many visitors walk right past these gems. The collection includes 41 paintings and sculptures by modern masters such as Jasper Johns and Alexander Calder.

Eleven underwent conservation during the recently completed $1.2 billion renovation of the performing-arts institution's 16-acre campus.

A painting by Henri Matisse stolen more than a decade ago in Caracas and later recovered in an FBI sting is on display again in the Venezuelan capital.

The "Odalisque in Red Pants," worth around $3 million, was exhibited Tuesday for the first time in more than a decade at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

It had been replaced with a fake sometime between 1999 and 2002 and it was only in 2003 that Venezuelan authorities realized the original had been stolen.

Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced the two appointees who will inaugurate new curatorships within the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. Both positions were established this spring through a generous gift from Daniel Brodsky, the Museum’s Chairman, and his wife Estrellita B. Brodsky, an art historian and specialist in Latin American art.

Iria Candela will become the Estrellita B. Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art in the fall, focusing on the art of 20th- and 21st-century Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. And Beatrice Galilee, the new Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design, began working at the Museum in late April. Both will work closely with the modern and contemporary curatorial team, under the leadership of Sheena Wagstaff, the Museum’s Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art, on researching and developing the collection and devising the program for both the main building and the Marcel Breuer-designed building that the Met will occupy once the Whitney Museum moves downtown in 2015.

Art Basel Asia Director Magnus Renfrew will join Bonhams as deputy chairman Asia and director of Fine Arts in September, he said by telephone today.

“This is a very exciting time to be involved in the Asian art market and building up an Asian collector base,” said Renfrew, 38, who will be responsible for boosting Bonhams’ classical, modern and contemporary Asian art offerings.

Renfrew oversaw Art Basel’s Hong Kong fairs in 2013 and 2014. The company, which runs international art fairs in Basel, Miami and Hong Kong, said it has not appointed his successor in an e-mail response.