Displaying items by tag: negatives

During the inauguration of the Centre Pompidou’s new Photo Gallery, the museum’s president, Alain Seban, announced plans for an exhibition space dedicated to architecture and design. The new gallery will be located within the Centre Pompidou’s existing building in Paris’ lively Beaubourg neighborhood. According to “The Art Newspaper,” Seban said that he plans “to create, as soon as possible, a gallery of architecture and design by reclaiming spaces closed to the public.”

The new Photo Gallery, which is housed in former technical facilities at the Centre Pompidou, opened to the public on Wednesday, November 5. Stretching over 200 square meters, the gallery allows the museum to display a larger portion of its vast photography collection, which includes 40,000 prints and over 60,000 negatives.

The New York Times has a thorough rundown of a very messy battle over the estate of the late reclusive photographer Vivian Maier, whose talent only came to light after her death in 2009, aged 83, and “nearly penniless and with no family.” Maier spent most of her life working as a nanny for wealthy Chicago families, quietly pursuing her passion for photography out of the public eye and producing poignant, documentary scenes of everyday life in Chicago, New York, and other American cities.

Since 2007, John Maloof, a former Chicago real estate agent who purchased tens of thousands of negatives for under $400, has been actively promoting and overseeing her work through commercial galleries (most notably with the prestigious Howard Greenberg Gallery), exhibitions, books, and a recent documentary that he helped direct, Finding Vivian Maier.

A collection of 548 photographs taken by Edward Weston and printed posthumously by his son Cole Weston — the only person Weston authorized to print from his negatives — will be auctioned by Sotheby’s in New York on Sept. 30. The house is estimating that the prints, which are being sold in a single lot, may bring as much as $3 million.

Weston began his career as a photographer in the first decade of the 20th century and produced about 1,400 images over the next four decades. His best-known and most striking work includes stark black-and-white images, desert landscapes, nudes, and inanimate objects like trees, rocks and shells, which in his photographs often look like sculpture.

The Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University announced that it has received three significant gifts from separate donors. The bequests greatly increase the museum’s holdings of works by the postwar artist Richard Diebenkorn, Pop art pioneer Andy Warhol, and the African-American painter Jacob Lawrence. The Cantor Center, which opened in 1894, houses one of the largest collections of Auguste Rodin sculptures in the world. The institution also has a sizeable collection of postwar American art.

Phyllis Diebenkorn, a Stanford alumna, donated 26 of her late husband’s sketchbooks, which contain well over 1,000 drawings, to the museum. The sketches, which span Diebenkorn’s long and varied career, will be converted into digital scans, making them readily accessible to students and scholars.

How do you archive a performance? Can you put human speech and action under glass and frame it? Stow art that unfolds in three dimensions within acid-free archival boxes, to be filed away in a cool, dark vault?

The conundrum of how best to preserve the history of midcentury American performance art — art created before phones had video cameras — lies at the center of the Getty Research Institute's recently announced acquisition of Robert McElroy's archive. In more than 700 prints and 10,000 negatives, the photographer documented the performative works of Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg and other artists whose "Happenings" grew from niche New York art events into a full-fledged pop culture phenomenon.