Displaying items by tag: corcoran gallery of art

The National Gallery of Art added another 1,541 works from the Corcoran Gallery of Art to its permanent collection earlier this month, bringing the total works it acquired from the dismantled Corcoran to almost 8,000.

The majority of works in this second round of acquisitions, voted on Oct. 1 and announced Thursday, are lithographs by the prolific 19th century Frenchman Honoré Daumier. The museum accepted 1,230 works by Daumier, including a large work from 1834 titled “Le Ventre Legislatif.”

Whether it achieved its goal of preserving the legacy of the Corcoran Gallery is debatable, but the landmark agreement that broke apart Washington’s oldest private museum has been an absolute bonanza for the National Gallery of Art.

After its board of trustees approves the next round of acquisitions on Oct. 1, the National Gallery of Art will have accessioned about 40 percent of the Corcoran’s collection, including priceless pieces by Edgar Degas, Frederic Edwin Church, John Singer Sargent and Carrie Mae Weems.

George Washington University plans to sell the historic schoolhouse in Georgetown that it took control of this summer as part of a court approved breakup of the financially-troubled Corcoran Gallery of Art. The agreement sent the museum’s art collection to the National Gallery of Art and allowed the university to absorb its College of Art and Design.

The university said it has selected TTR Sotheby’s International Realty to list the historic brick building, known as the Fillmore, and its one acre of property. The initial sale price is $14 million.

Its death sentence came down in a public courtroom, but the priceless estate of the Corcoran Gallery of Art is being divvied up under a cloak of secrecy.

Museum-goers who grew up with Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of George Washington and George Inness’s landscapes don’t know if these and other treasures from the city’s oldest private museum will hang on the walls of the National Gallery of Art or at one of the Smithsonian museums — or if they will be consigned to a storage facility.

George Washington University (GW) in Washington, DC, is beefing up its arts infrastructure. Less than two months after the university finalised its merger with the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the GW Museum and the Textile Museum announced they will open a joint facility on the university’s Foggy Bottom campus on 21 March 2015.

The museum is set to occupy both the Maxwell Woodhull House, a historic former home of a US Navy commander, and a 35,000 sq. ft addition designed by the local firm Hartman-Cox Architects. Since the university finalized its merger with the Corcoran in August, it has also assumed operations of the gallery’s Beaux-Arts building near the White House.

The hearse carried only a wreath, because technically, the dearly departed was still alive — albeit barely, considering the vegetative, life-supported state the Corcoran Gallery of Art has been in since August. When the institution’s takeover by the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University was approved last month, the spirit had already left the body. So on Saturday, the day before the museum was scheduled to close for renovations, from which it will later emerge as part of the National Gallery of Art, former staff members gathered there to mourn.

Visitors to the Corcoran Gallery of Art have quadrupled since admission became free to the public late last month.

With the gallery scheduled to close soon for renovation, art lovers are coming to the gallery in its last month for all kinds of reasons.

After court approval of a controversial plan that ended the Corcoran's independence, the art gallery and its school have merged with the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University.

Now that the deal between the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University is signed and sealed, the first change in operations became apparent Friday: Admission to the Corcoran now is free.

The controversial merger between the Corcoran Gallery of Art, George Washington University and the National Gallery of Art, all in Washington, DC, has received the green light from the district’s Superior Court. In a ruling on Monday 18 August, Judge Robert Okun called the decision “painful,” but concluded that it would be “even more painful to deny the relief requested and allow the Corcoran to face its likely demise.”

Under the terms of the agreement, first announced in February 2014, the beleaguered Corcoran will transfer its historic Beaux-Arts building and its College of Art + Design to George Washington University. The National Gallery of Art will take over a substantial portion of the Corcoran’s 17,000-work collection, which includes paintings by John Singer Sargent and Frederic Edwin Church as well as celebrated photography holdings.

The court calls them “The Intervenors,” which sounds as if it could be the name of a performance art collective. If that were true, the past few weeks would have been quite a show for the group Save the Corcoran.

The scrappy group of students, staff, faculty and concerned observers dedicated to preserving the nearly 150-year-old museum as an independent institution in the face of a merger with the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University see themselves as David fighting Goliath — which makes their recent legal intervention the proverbial sling to the forehead. They won’t find out whether they’ve slain their giant until Aug. 20 at the latest, which makes this week an anxious wait.