Displaying items by tag: scholar

The Guggenheim has named architect and scholar Troy Conrad Therrien as Curator, Architecture and Digital Initiatives. As the first person to hold this position, Therrien will contribute to the development of the museum’s engagement with architecture, design, technology, and urban studies, in addition to providing leadership on select new projects under the direction of the Chief Curator and the Director’s Office.

The Guggenheim's role in architecture has always been one of patronage, commissioning Frank Lloyd Wright to design its landmark building in New York City and Frank Gehry to design the celebrated Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which extended the institution's global constellation of museums.

Christie’s announced it has been entrusted with the sale of the Collection of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, the distinguished American scholar, dealer and collector of Asian Art who passed away in August 2014. Widely recognized throughout Asia and the Americas for his ground-breaking role in the study and appreciation of Asian Art, Mr. Ellsworth was a distinguished connoisseur who opened new arenas of collecting to Western audiences and built a successful business purveying the very finest works of art to his generation’s foremost collectors. His personal collection of over 2,000 items was assembled over a lifetime and widely recognized as the most important grouping of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian sculpture, paintings, furniture and works of art. To celebrate this exceptional collection and the generous and benevolent man behind it, Christie's is organizing free public exhibitions and a special five-day series of auctions and online-only sales to be held during Asian Art Week at Christie's New York in March 2015. A global tour of highlights from the collection kicks off November 21 in Hong Kong, and will continue to stops throughout Asia and Europe prior to the New York sales.

Eight notebooks used by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat that have never before been shown in public are due to go on view at the Brooklyn Museum in April. “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” (3 April-23 August 2015) includes 160 unbound pages from journals the artist filled with sketches and notes between 1980 and 1987. The notebooks come from the collection of Larry Warsh, and another 30 drawings and paintings from other collections will be shown as well.

Tricia Laughlin Bloom, who co-organised the show with the scholar Dieter Buchhart, says the exhibition reveals a side of the artist that tends to be glossed over by the traditional narrative.

The long-lost Caravaggio painting that the baroque master had with him when he died in 1610 has finally been identified, according to the world’s foremost authority on the artist.

Several copies of "Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy" are thought to exist. But now the Caravaggio scholar Mina Gregori has said she is confident of having made a “definitive” verification of the version that she has studied in a private European collection.

At its recent meeting, the Stanford University Board of Trustees took an early evening stroll among the modern and contemporary American paintings and sculptures in the new Anderson Collection at Stanford University.

Their visit followed an in-depth presentation by Alexander Nemerov, a Stanford scholar of American art, on Jackson Pollock's "Lucifer," one of its most important works, and a talk by Jason Linetzky, the inaugural director of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, on the history of the collection, which includes more than 100 works of art.

Filling vacancies in two of the Getty Museum's most important jobs, museum director Timothy Potts has picked Jeffrey Spier, an American scholar with whom he's had a long professional connection, as its new senior curator of antiquities — the top post at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades — and an Italian museum director, Davide Gasparotto, as senior curator of paintings based at the Getty Center in Brentwood.

Gasparotto has been director of the Galleria Estense museum in Modena, Italy, for the last two years, and spent 12 years as a curator and art historian at the National Gallery of Parma.

Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced today that preeminent American art scholar Morrison H. Heckscher will retire on June 30, following 13 years as Lawrence A. Fleischman Chairman of The American Wing and a distinguished curatorial career at the Museum that spanned nearly five decades. He will become Curator Emeritus of The American Wing on July 1.

Mr. Campbell announced further that Sylvia L. Yount—currently Chief Curator as well as the Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art and Department Head at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA)—will become the Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of The American Wing this fall. She was elected to her new position at the June 10 meeting of the Executive Committee of the Museum’s Board of Trustees.

Christie’s auction house says science has confirmed that a disputed painting is the work of Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. The painting could fetch 8 million pounds ($13 million) when it is sold next month.

“Saint Praxedis” is believed to be the earliest surviving work by the 17th-century artist, but there has long been a question mark over its authenticity.

The work was tentatively attributed to Vermeer after it appeared in an exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 1969, and the authorship was reinforced in 1986, when leading Vermeer scholar Arthur Wheelock argued it was authentic.

The Museum of Contemporary Art took the next step in rebuilding its staff and programming, appointing Helen Molesworth of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston as its new chief curator.

A scholar, art writer and curator, Molesworth has been at ICA/Boston since 2010. Before that she headed the department of modern and contemporary art at the Harvard Art Museum and served as the museum's Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art.

She will start Sept. 1.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have received a donation of over 200 Native American artifacts from the Thomas W. Weisel Family Art Foundation. The gift, which includes important textiles and ceramics, will significantly enhance the museums’ Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas collection. The donation also includes an unspecified endowment for the collection’s conservation and research.

Weisel, a pioneer of Silicon Valley’s tech industry, began collecting Native American artifacts over 30 years ago. His acquisitions have been guided by the California-based artist and Native American art scholar, Tony Berlant. His collection spans more than 1,000 years of artistic creativity and includes artifacts from the American Southwest, the Northwest Coast, and the Great Plains. Weisel is also an avid collector of postwar American art.

A portion of the gift will be displayed in the exhibition “Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art from the Weisel Family Collection,” which will open on May 3 at the de Young Museum.