Displaying items by tag: satellite location

Add the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a growing list of museums, including the Guggenheim and the Louvre, that are launching new satellites from the mother ship. Late last month, during 250th-anniversary celebrations of the Hermitage’s founding by Catherine the Great, the New York architects Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture of Asymptote Architecture signed a contract to design the Hermitage Modern Contemporary, an outpost in Moscow that will draw on the Hermitage’s rich 20th-century art collections and also display new work.

Five architectural firms are on the shortlist to design the Louvre’s new storage facility, planned to open near the museum’s satellite in Lens, northern France. Corinne Vezzoni & Assoc and Zig Zag architecture, both from France, Neutelings Riedijk Architecten from the Netherlands, Roger Stirk Harbour + Partners from the UK and Estudio Arquitectura Baeza from Spain were chosen from 173 applicants.

In September 2013, then-minister of culture Aurélie Filippetti announced that the Louvre would move works held in a basement storage area on the banks of the River Seine due to the risk of flooding.

Eugène Delacroix’s (1798-1863) celebrated painting Liberty Leading the People was defaced while on view at the Louvre’s satellite location in Lens, which opened in the former mining town in northern France in December 2012. French police have a detained the woman accused of scrawling a graffiti tag along the bottom of the work.

Delacroix, a leader of the Romantic school in French painting, painted Liberty Leading the People to celebrate the July revolution of 1830, which brought down France’s Charles X. The work was featured on the country’s 100-franc banknote before the Euro was adopted and is rumored to have inspired New York’s Statue of Liberty.

Just before the museum closed for the day on Thursday, February 7, 2013, a 28-year-old woman scribbled in 12 inch writing what officials believe to be a reference to a 9/11 conspiracy theory. Officials believe that the work can be easily cleaned, but a restoration expert from the Louvre was being sent to Lens to perform a thorough examination. Museum officials have not yet decided if the painting will need to be removed.