Displaying items by tag: museum of fine arts boston

In the mid-1500s, European merchant ships, loaded with treasures from Asia, began arriving in the port city of Acapulco. The cargo of Japanese lacquerware, Chinese porcelains and ivory carvings from India and the Philippines was bound for Europe. But along the way, many of the objects found their way to markets in Mexico City. Similar stories played out in port cities from Rio de Janeiro to Boston, transforming the Americas into a nexus of global trade and leaving an indelible impact on local art.

To explore the influence of Asian craftsmanship on the art of the early Americas, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is hosting “Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia.”

In one of his final acts as director of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, Malcolm Rogers will visit Portland to talk about 21st-century museums.

Rogers, who retires from the MFA at the end of July after 21 years, will talk about how museums must adapt to the times in a discussion at 6 p.m. July 21 at Hannaford Hall on the Portland campus of the University of Southern Maine. His talk is part of the Bernard Osher Lecture Series of the Portland Museum of Art.

‘Hokusai,” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is an absolute dream. Almost immediately—in this phenomenal retrospective of more than 230 works by Japan’s most famous artist—it is easy to see why Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) continues to be universally revered. Hokusai was, in turns, a romanticist, a classicist and an expressionist; a reverent traditionalist and a pioneering, crowd-pleasing populist.

In the spring of 1925, the famed painter John Singer Sargent was preparing to travel from London to Boston. His plan? To oversee the final installation of murals he’d created for the Museum of Fine Arts — mythic works that would join similar paintings at the Boston Public Library and Harvard’s Widener Library, cementing the artist’s relationship with the city he loved.

But Sargent never made the trip: He died in his sleep before embarking on the voyage.

The organization behind the prestigious Fulbright fellowship is launching a new program to rescue artists from conflict zones. The Artist Protection Fund, a three-year pilot project led by the Institute of International Education and funded with $2.79m from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, offers grants to threatened artists and places them at host universities or art centers in friendlier foreign countries.

“Threats against just one individual artist can have an immediate chilling effect on entire artistic communities,” Allan Goodman, the president of the Institute of International Education, said at a launch event at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Opening today, on what would have been Leonardo da Vinci's 563rd birthday, the exhibition "Leonardo da Vinci and the Idea of Beauty" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The show will feature a recently rediscovered self-portrait of the artist and a suite of masterpieces by Leonardo including the long-admired "Head of a Young Woman (Study for the Angel in the 'Virgin of the Rocks')," a metalpoint drawing from the 1480s, widely renowned for its naturalism, and which art historian Kenneth Clark called the “most beautiful . . . in the world."

The exhibition marks a rare opportunity to see "Head of a Young Woman," in the US. The work, which Bernard Berenson believed was “one of the finest achievements of all draughtsmanship," belongs to the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, Italy.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, today announced that Matthew Teitelbaum has been appointed its Ann and Graham Gund Director. Teitelbaum, who is currently the Michael and Sonja Koerner Director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, succeeds Malcolm Rogers, who will retire when Teitelbaum assumes his role at the MFA on August 3, 2015.

Formally elected at a special meeting of the MFA’s Board of Trustees earlier today, Teitelbaum becomes the 11th director in the MFA’s 145-year history. He was selected after an international search overseen by a committee appointed by the Board.

A self-portrait by Van Dyck that was dismissed a decade ago as a copy is now hanging in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota, as an original work. The painting, which has been authenticated by experts, was quietly put on display in February, having been lent by a US collector based on the West Coast.

An unpublished paper on the self-portrait, prepared for the owner, dates the work to around 1629 and states that the attribution is accepted by four key experts: Susan Barnes, a co-author of the 2004 Van Dyck catalogue raisonné, Christopher Brown, the former director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, David Jaffé, a former senior curator at the National Gallery in London, and Malcolm Rogers, the outgoing director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has announced loans of important paintings by Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt van Rijn for its upcoming landmark exhibition "Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer" (October 11, 2015–January 18, 2016). Vermeer’s "The Astronomer" (1668) will be on loan from the Musée du Louvre in Paris, while the artist’s "A Lady Writing" (about 1665) will be on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Works by Rembrandt in the exhibition will include "The Shipbuilder and his Wife" (1633) on loan from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the full-length, life-size "Portrait of Andries de Graeff" (1639) from Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel in Germany. They will join the two seated full-length portraits by Rembrandt from the MFA’s collection, "Reverend Johannes Elison" and "Maria Bockenolle" (both 1634).

"A Lady Writing" portrays a privileged woman engaged in the art of letter writing, associated in 17th-century Holland with a certain level of education and wealth. Belonging to the same elite world, "The Astronomer" represents a “gentleman amateur” engaged in scientific inquiry that had relevance to the maritime navigation crucial to the mercantile interests of the young country.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is receiving a major gift of 186 works seized by Nazi forces in 1938.

It’s taken decades for the donor’s family to recover the famed collection that includes fine jewelry, rare books and paintings. The objects have taken a fascinating journey between Vienna and Boston.

One of the confiscated works is a Dutch painting of a man on a horse titled, “A Dordrecht nobleman on horseback with retainers and grooms.” But instead of focusing on the front of the canvas, MFA curator of provenance Victoria Reed points to numbers and letters on the back. They’ve been drawn, etched and stamped onto the painting’s wooden stretcher.