Displaying items by tag: archives

The decadelong quest included archive detectives, location mix-ups, vintage postcards and a coveted art collection torn apart by war. When it was done, the Museum of Modern Art decided to return an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner landscape to the heirs of its original, Jewish owner.

The museum announced Monday that the German expressionist painter’s 1917-18 canvas “Sand Hills (By Grünau)” rightly belongs to the heirs of a Berlin writer, Max Fischer, who had to leave his art behind when he fled Germany for the U.S. in late 1935.

The Vancouver Art Gallery on Tuesday unveiled Herzog & de Meuron’s conceptual design for its new museum building in downtown Vancouver. The 310,000-square-foot building features more than 85,000 square feet of exhibition space—more than double the museum’s current size — and a new education center with a 350-seat auditorium, workshops and a resource center for research, library services and artist archives.

Opening this summer at the New Orleans Museum of Art, A Louisiana Parlor: Antebellum Taste & Context is an exhibition featuring the Butler-Greenwood Plantation parlor furnishings acquired by the museum from descendants of the family in St. Francisville, Louisiana. The 1850s/60s parlor suite has survived with original textiles and rich documentation, making it one of the South’s best preserved examples of a pre-Civil War Louisiana interior.

The exhibition explores the relationship between this refined interior and its layered historical context through family portraits on loan from The Historic New Orleans Collection and through documents housed in the Mathews family archives of letters, receipts, and bills of sale held at LSU Library Special Collections.

How did Pablo Picasso celebrate his 80th birthday? Thanks to recent efforts by the Associated Press and British Movietone to make their newsreel archives more accessible to the public, we can now witness snippets of the occasion. The two companies announced a project to upload over one million minutes of digitized film footage to YouTube, comprising over 550,000 videos dating as far back as 1895. There are plenty of art-related clips to explore — watch New Yorkers in 1995 react to Christian Boltanski’s “LOST: New York Projects” in the subway or see Christo and Jeanne-Claude unwrap the Reichstag — but one of the greatest gems is the documentation of Picasso’s birthday.

The Getty Research Institute announced Tuesday that it has acquired the complete archives of the Margo Leavin Gallery, the influential Los Angeles gallery that represented such artists as John Baldessari, Alexis Smith and William Leavitt, among others, over the years from its opening in 1970 until it closed in 2013.

The Leavin gallery was known as the go-to place to see cutting-edge contemporary art from notable or up-and-coming artists from New York and Los Angeles.

The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, which offers a nine-week summer residency for artists in Skowhegan, Maine, opened a permanent New York space on 18 November. The new Chelsea-neighborhood location features two floors and 5,000 sq ft. of space, half of which will be devoted to archives and event space.

The artists Daniel Bozhkov and Mary Mattingly, both alumni, were due to finish a site-specific fresco and an “edible forest garden,” according to the school.

If you thought everything about the future of the Corcoran Art Gallery was parsed and settled, much to the dismay of its students, faculty, curators and various formers in all three categories, think again. There’s another outrage.

The Corcoran’s archives, which relate its entire 145-year history, are slated to be broken up.

Any archivist will tell you that, more important than the possibly wonderful individual items, it’s the whole of an archive that matters most to the historical record.

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art announces that it has cataloged, digitized and published online more than 35,000 artworks of eight prominent American photographers of the 20th century—Carlotta Corpron (1901–1988), Nell Dorr (1893–1988), Laura Gilpin (1891–1979), Eliot Porter (1901–1990), Helen Post (1907–1979), Clara Sipprell (1885–1975), Erwin E. Smith (1886–1947) and Karl Struss (1886–1981). This project was made possible by a $75,000 digitization grant the museum received from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 2012.

The Amon Carter owns the archives of these photographers, and the newly digitized works include all of the prints in these collections. Also digitized are 12,000 very fragile glass negatives, nitrate negatives and autochromes. Most are never-before-seen negatives that the museum is unable to display in the galleries due to format and fragility.

The Wedgwood Collection, described as one of the most important industrial archives in the world, could be broken up and sold unless £2.7m is raised in just three months.

The Art Fund has launched a public appeal to save the vast collection of treasures held in Staffordshire including ceramics, manuscripts and paintings, which has been described by Unesco as “unparalleled in its diversity and breadth”.

The price of the collection was set at £15.7m, and the majority has been raised from the Art Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund and charitable trusts.

In a great work of art, the artist's hand is invisible. Not so in the traveling exhibition "Revealed," which shows famous artists at work in their studios. The series of nearly 40 photographs has been culled from the archives of the French weekly magazine Paris Match by Pablo Picasso's grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso.

The pictures are showing in lobbies and other public spaces at Sofitel hotels in five cities, beginning in New York and ending in Beverly Hills next April. In between, the exhibit will be in Washington, D.C., Chicago and Montreal.