Displaying items by tag: visitor

An Oscar Murillo canvas was taken from the exhibition “Forever Now: Painting in an Atemporal World" at MoMA last week by a visitor, a MoMA representative has officially confirmed.

"Last week, one was removed by a visitor," press director Margaret Doyle told artnet News in an email.

Doyle further claimed that MoMA security identified the visitor and it was "quickly returned without incident or damage to the work" and that all eight of the canvases by Murillo in the show "are on view in the galleries."

The Van Gogh Museum has is received its millionth visitor for 2014. The lucky visitor, Mrs. van Waveren from Zwaag, received a bouquet of sunflowers an a voucher for ten gallons of decorative paint after entering the museum. 

As compared with recent years, more attendees are stopping by the Amsterdam museum, which is expecting the rate of visitors to keep rising. Last year saw a total of 1.4 million people pass through the museum’s doors.

The recently re-opened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam welcomed its two millionth visitor on December 3. The two guests, who were visiting from Israel, were greeted by the museum’s General Director and Sales Manager and given flowers and gifts from the museum shop.

Since opening to the public in April following a ten-year renovation, the Rijksmuseum has been welcoming between 7,000 and 10,000 visitors per day. Most satisfying to museum officials is that for the first time in years, the institution’s Dutch visitors outnumber their foreign counterparts.

Founded in 1885, the Rijksmuseum is dedicated to Dutch art and history. Its illustrious collection includes paintings by Dutch masters such as Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Jan Steen and Frans Hals.  

A commissioned study showed that the annual economic impact of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, which recently underwent an extensive renovation, has increased to €235 million since reopening. 80% of the reported increase is a result of the spike in visitor expenditure. In addition to boosting the city’s economy, the Rijksmuseum has created approximately 1,000 jobs since the renovation.

Wim Pijbes, Director of the Rijksmuseum, said, “It is clear that the investment in the new Rijksmuseum has had major consequences that stretch far beyond the walls of the building itself. These results prove that the age-old wisdom of John Paul Getty still rings true: fine art is the finest investment.”

The Rijksmuseum, which was founded in 1798, is the national museum of the Netherlands. It reopened to the public after a 10 year, €375 million renovation on April 13,2013. The Rijksmuseum welcomed its millionth visitor on August 23, 2013.

It was recently revealed that a Joan Miró (1893-1983) painting, which was damaged while on view at the Tate Modern in London, cost British taxpayers $326,000 to repair. Part of the museum’s retrospective of the Spanish modern artist, Painting on White Background for the Cell of a Recluse I (1968), was damaged when a visitor placed both hands against the work to steady himself after tripping and falling in the museum.

A white canvas sliced by a delicately wavering gray line, Cell of a Recluse I is one of five rare triptychs by Miró, which were exhibited together for the first time during the Tate retrospective in 2011. The work was immediately repaired after the incident, which left the acrylic on canvas painting with dents and markings. Cell of a Recluse I was on loan to the Tate from Barcelona’s Joan Miró Foundation and the British government paid the Foundation over $300,000 to cover the repair costs for the painting and to account for any loss in the work’s value due to the incident.

The Tate has recently been responsible for a string of damaged artworks including Mark Rothko’s (1903-1970) Black on Maroon (1958), which was defaced by a visitor, an early work by Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1977) titled Whaam! (1963), which was also marred by a museum patron, and a portrait of Margaret Thatcher by Helmut Newton (1920-2004), which was damaged when a staff member slipped and cracked the photograph’s glass frame.