Displaying items by tag: library

Six years after selling off his art collection in a record-breaking "sale of the century", the French businessman and philanthropist Pierre Berge is now putting his renowned library under the hammer.

The lover and business partner of the late designer Yves Saint Laurent told AFP he is putting almost his entire collection up for auction, one of the most priceless in private hands.

The Museum of Modern Art is planning its biggest masterpiece yet, not that you’ll get it.

The museum is moving ahead with plans for an estimated $93 million expansion at the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, according to an application filed with the New York City Department of Buildings Tuesday.

The plans for an adjacent lot, at 45 West 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, call for 32,842 square feet of new space, which will include theaters, a library/lounge, classrooms, exhibit space and gardens, the application indicates.

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.

The fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent once declared of his partner Pierre Bergé: “The world will talk about a Goût Bergé, just as it speaks of a Goût Noailles.”

As the $484 million auction of the couple’s art collection at Christie’s in 2009 can attest to, this “Bergé taste” is the epitome of a keen eye, and a penchant for objects with great history and pedigree. Over the next two years, more examples of Bergé’s fine collectibles are scheduled to go under the hammer in Paris, this time at Sotheby’s — in the form of 1,600 precious books, manuscripts and musical scores from his personal library that date from the 15th to the 20th century.

An employee at Russia's Hermitage Museum was arrested for stealing books and documents, some centuries-old, from the institution's celebrated collection and then trying to sell them to antique dealers, officials said Monday.

The man, who worked in the library of the Saint Petersburg museum, was taken into custody Friday in connection with a probe launched after items were found missing during an inspection last month, Russia's secret service FSB said in a statement.

It has been announced that five teams are the running to restore Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s celebrated school of art in Glasgow. UK based John McAslan + Partners (who restored Mackintosh’s last major commission), Scottish practice Page \ Park, and London and Hong-Kong based architects Purcell are all in the frame to lead the restoration of the Mackintosh Building amid a debate over how best to approach the rebuilding of the library and the areas of the building that were devastated by fire in May of last year. The selection of Avanti Architects and LDN Architects complete the roster.

Fourteen practices, from over one hundred initial expressions of interest, formally submitted documents in the first round of the tender.

On Sunday, December 7, a fire swept through the Galerie Canesso, on the rue Laffitte in central Paris, destroying part of its library, documents, and offices. The gallery specializes in Italian Old Master paintings from the Renaissance to the Baroque. The fire was caused by an electrical fault, said Véronique Damian, an art historian who works with the gallery’s founder Maurizio Canesso.

“This was a great loss for us but fortunately no paintings were damaged,” Damian said in a telephone interview.

An American academic is creating a searchable database of 12 million historical copyright-free images.

Kalev Leetaru has already uploaded 2.6 million pictures to Flickr, which are searchable thanks to tags that have been automatically added.

The photos and drawings are sourced from more than 600 million library book pages scanned in by the Internet Archive organization.

The images have been difficult to access until now.

Mr Leetaru said digitization projects had so far focused on words and ignored pictures.

The Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) announces the completion of a major digitization project that dramatically improves access to the library's online records. Part of a comprehensive $20 million library renovation and improvement initiative, more than 250,000 new catalog records, nearly 50,000 of which reference one-of-a-kind items unique to the Phillips Library, have been created. The records are available to countless researchers worldwide via the Phillips Library website and through OCLC/Worldcat. Boasting 400,000 volumes collected over two centuries, PEM's Phillips Library is one of the largest and oldest museum libraries in the country.

"This project marks a major leap into the modern age and is an invaluable boon to scholarly research," says Sidney Berger, The Ann C. Pingree Director of the Phillips Library.

The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City is the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to design. It was founded in 1897 by the Cooper/Hewitt family as part of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Science and Art and became a part of the Smithsonian in 1967. The institution has a collection of more than 200,000 items, houses an amazing design library, offers educational programs, and sponsors the National Design Awards. It is the foremost authority on design in the country but was long overdue for a makeover. Later this year, the museum will reopen with a new identity befitting the nation's preeminent repository of good design but their relaunch has already started online with a new website and a tailor-made typeface.