Displaying items by tag: gift

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.

The Lens Media Laboratory (LML), a new research facility that will apply scientific principles to the characterization and conservation of photographs and other lens-based media, has been created as part of the Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPCH), a center dedicated to improving the science and practice of conservation globally. Paul Messier, a renowned photography conservator, will join Yale as the inaugural head of the LML. Funding for the endowed directorship and laboratory start-up has been provided by an anonymous donor.

“This extraordinary gift will catalyze the development of new methods for scholars to classify, preserve, and interpret photographs and other lens media, both physical and digital,” said Stefan Simon, director of the IPCH. “In Paul Messier, we have successfully attracted one of the foremost experts in the world, whose track record of working across a diverse range of constituencies and disciplines — from museums to individual collectors and humanities to the sciences — will be a tremendous asset to this endeavor.”

Billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin has given $10 million to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through his charity.

The gift by the Kenneth C. Griffin Charitable Fund will be used to create the Griffin Galleries of Contemporary Art, the museum said in a statement Friday. The gift is part of the museum’s Vision Campaign to raise $64 million for programming, which has reached $60 million in private donations toward the goal.

“The Vision Campaign is about great art and ideas -- that connect with the community and propel the MCA as a leader in the cultural economy,” Madeleine Grynsztejn, the museum’s Pritzker director, said in the statement.

Princeton University has announced the largest gift in its history: a trove of rare books valued at nearly $300 million, including a Gutenberg Bible, an original printing of the Declaration of Independence, all four of Shakespeare’s Folios and significant musical manuscripts written by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Wagner.

The Scheide Library, named for the family of the philanthropist and scholar William H. Scheide, has been housed in a special room in Princeton’s Firestone Library since 1959, when Mr. Scheide, who died last November at age 100, moved it there from his family home in Titusville, Pa. The bequest makes Princeton the permanent home of what the university’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, called “one of the greatest collections of rare books and manuscripts in the world today.”

Two New York philanthropists are donating a major collection of more than 300 ancient Greco-Roman and Near-Eastern glass vessels to The Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The gift from Robert and Renee Belfer was announced by the museum Wednesday. It comes as the institution celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. An exhibition titled “A Roman Villa — The Belfer Collection” showcasing approximately 100 of the objects will be on view at The Israel Museum from June 5 through Nov. 21.

The collection is “one of the most important private holdings of antiquities anywhere,” museum Director James Snyder said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem.

Despite the bitter cold temperatures heading into Valentine’s Day, a painting at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts is sure to warm some hearts.

“I guess having lived with this for 40 years I’d have to say it’s my favorite.”

The thing Bill Millis has been living with for 40 years is love…in fact, "Puppy Love." The instantly recognizable painting captures a young boy with his arm around a pigtailed girl’s waist sitting on a sagging wooden plank bench staring off into the moon.

Admission to the Milwaukee Art Museum will be free for one weekend — Feb. 21 and 22 — thanks to a gift from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.

The hope is to provide broad access to "Inspiring Beauty," an exhibition that celebrates the Ebony Fashion Fair, a fashion show that traveled the country for more than 50 years and served as a platform for black empowerment. It is the museum's first fashion-inspired exhibit.

Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, which specializes in modern and contemporary art and design, has received a major gift from the Swedish-born sculptor Claes Oldenburg and his late wife and long-time collaborator, Coosje van Bruggen. The couple met in 1976 while van Bruggen was working as a curator at the Stedelijk. Together, they created a swath of colorful, large-scale public sculptures, including "Flashlight" in Las Vegas, "Clothespin" in Philadelphia, "Spoonbridge and Cherry" in Minnesota, and "Shuttlecocks" in Kansas City.

Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s gift includes 175 works by 34 artists and spans a wide range of media -- from correspondence material and archival documents to installations, collages, sculptures, photographs, works on paper, books, and posters. van Bruggen served as a member of the curatorial staff at the Stedelijk from 1967 to 1971, a breakthrough period for conceptual and minimalist art.

The renovation and expansion of the Columbus Museum of Art received a $1 million boost yesterday — a donation from JPMorgan Chase & Co. The gift honors the memory of John G. McCoy, the late patriarch of Bank One Corp., whose family has supported the museum for decades.

In addition, JPMorgan Chase is donating to the museum a work from its corporate art collection. The sculpture — "John T. Ward Transporting Fugitives in Columbus, Ohio to Freedom, 1800s" — is a showcase piece by Columbus artist Aminah Robinson.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is kicking off its 50th anniversary with a major gift of contemporary art. Local collectors Jane and Marc Nathanson have promised the institution eight works created  over four decades, including seminal pieces by Damien Hirst, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol. The bequest marks the beginning of a campaign, chaired by LACMA trustees Jane Nathanson and Lynda Resnick, to encourage additional promised gifts of art in honor of the institution’s anniversary. The Nathansons’ donation is estimated to be worth around $50 million.

Well known for their philanthropic endeavors in the Los Angeles area, the Nathansons have made several contributions to LACMA’s collection, including supporting the acquisition of a set of Ed Ruscha prints in honor of the museum's 40th anniversary.