Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

The hurdles of running a contemporary-art museum in the West African country of Benin might seem light years away from the concerns of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the world’s largest and wealthiest.

But some issues span continents, affecting institutions big and small—how to connect with audiences, for example, in an increasingly digital world.

The Met in April is hosting a meeting of museum leaders from 15 countries to talk shop, compare notes on management and forge new ties with peers from other parts of the world.

Christie's London staged a really solid sale this evening that realized £117 million ($178 million) against a presale estimate of £93–132 million and achieved all but five of 62 lots selling. These figures hide what was actually a fairly see-saw event, as 25 lots went for hammer prices above their estimate, three of them for record prices. Twenty lots struggled, selling for hammer prices on or below the low estimates, including five of the top 10 lots. (Estimates do not include buyer's premium, whereas sale prices given here do.) So, while the sale was the third highest for Christie's contemporary in London (the previous high was £133 million in June 2012), it wasn't entirely smooth sailing.

The work of 30 prominent contemporary artists is going on display at Hudson Valley sites linked to two of the most influential figures in American art.

The Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill and the Olana State Historic Site across the river in Hudson have announced that they'll co-host an exhibit of contemporary art to highlight the role the two properties played in shaping American art in the 19th century.

The Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami (ICA) has lost its interim director less than five months after announcing the appointment of Suzanne Weaver to the post.

The ICA, an institution set up by the former trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, informed the press in September that it had hired Weaver, a veteran of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky and the Dallas Museum of Art, to help lead the institution as it prepared to open a temporary space in the Design District.

A Gerhard Richter abstract painting sold Tuesday night at Sotheby’s contemporary art auction in London for £30.4 million, or about $46.3 million, including fees.

The monumental, 10-foot high canvas, “Abstraktes Bild,” numbered 599 and painted with veils of red, blue and green pigment, was bought by a telephone bidder, represented by Cheyenne Westphal, Sotheby’s worldwide co-head of contemporary art, after lengthy competition from another telephone bidder.

The Shaker Museum│Mount Lebanon will be featured in a new book, "Shaker: Function, Purity, Perfection," to accompany an all-Shaker exhibit at the prestigious European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht, The Netherlands in March. The exhibit is being organized by art dealer Philippe Ségalot and Paris furniture dealer François Laffanour. The accompanying book will be published this month by Assouline Publishing.

Mr. Ségalot spearheaded the project. Celebrated for his work in contemporary art, he first became interested in Shaker design and began collecting Shaker objects eight years ago. He approached the Museum earlier this year about borrowing collection items to add to the privately-owned objects to be exhibited at the Maastricht Fair, which runs from March 13 to 22, 2015, and enlisted the Museum’s help in producing the new companion book on Shaker furniture.

Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, which specializes in modern and contemporary art and design, has received a major gift from the Swedish-born sculptor Claes Oldenburg and his late wife and long-time collaborator, Coosje van Bruggen. The couple met in 1976 while van Bruggen was working as a curator at the Stedelijk. Together, they created a swath of colorful, large-scale public sculptures, including "Flashlight" in Las Vegas, "Clothespin" in Philadelphia, "Spoonbridge and Cherry" in Minnesota, and "Shuttlecocks" in Kansas City.

Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s gift includes 175 works by 34 artists and spans a wide range of media -- from correspondence material and archival documents to installations, collages, sculptures, photographs, works on paper, books, and posters. van Bruggen served as a member of the curatorial staff at the Stedelijk from 1967 to 1971, a breakthrough period for conceptual and minimalist art.

Thirty-three-year-old Malaysian financier Jho Low, one of the art collectors who own property in the Time Warner Center—he owns a penthouse on the 76th floor, once owned by Jay Z and Beyonce, that he bought for $30.55— has been identified in an article in the "New York Times" as the buyer of Jean-Michel Basquiat's 1982 painting "Dustheads." The painting fetched $48.8 million in May 2013 at Christie's New York.

That purchase was part of a $495 million sale of postwar and contemporary art, which was, at the time, the highest total in auction history. Christie's has gone on to break that record three times with subsequent contemporary art auctions.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has published a new handbook—the first in more than 20 years—of its encyclopedic collections. Featuring some 550 masterpieces from the Museum’s world renowned holdings of Asian, European, American, and modern and contemporary art, this volume includes a broad range of media from each of the Museum’s curatorial departments, including paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures, the decorative arts, costumes and textiles, arms and armor, and architectural settings. Expanded entries provide in depth information on some of the most significant works, among them Thomas Eakins’s masterpiece "The Gross Clinic" (1875) and a superb man and horse armor acquired in 2009.

The introduction to the handbook, written by Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, recounts the Museum’s institutional history and the formation and distinctive characteristics of its collection.

The National Gallery of Art has added 6,430 works from the Corcoran Gallery of Art to its collection in a historic effort that improves its standing as Washington’s flagship art institution while attempting to preserve the legacy of what was the city’s oldest private art museum.

The acquisitions — described by curators as dazzling, stunning and transformative — will dramatically alter the National Gallery’s holdings of contemporary art, sculpture, American paintings and works on paper. And because they are rich with works by women and African Americans, the pieces diversify the National Gallery’s collection.