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Tuesday, 16 September 2014 11:28

After amassing a private collection of African-American Art over four decades, Bill Cosby and his wife Camille plan to showcase their holdings for the first time in an exhibition planned at the Smithsonian Institution.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art announced Monday that the entire Cosby collection will go on view in November in a unique exhibit juxtaposing African-American art with African art.

The collection, which will be loaned to the museum, includes works by such leading African-American artists as Beauford Delaney, Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence, Augusta Savage and Henry Ossawa Tanner. The Cosby collection of more than 300 African-American paintings, prints, sculptures and drawings has never been loaned or seen publicly, except for one work of art.

Tuesday, 16 September 2014 11:13

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh made a guest appearance on the "Antiques Roadshow" as it was revealed that she is a big fan of the show.

The show was filmed in the summer at Hillsborough Castle, The Queen's official residence in Northern Ireland.

She had a private meeting with the experts, who at her request did not value the objects but discussed their history.

Tuesday, 16 September 2014 11:07

Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the curator who shepherded an art world set piece in Madison Square Park on Friday, called what was being installed “the great levitating sculpture.”

The sculpture was “Points of View” and consisted of three extremely tall, extremely heavy pieces, but none of them rose from the ground and floated magically through the air. There were no David Blaine maneuvers, no seemingly impossible sleight of hand.

Tuesday, 16 September 2014 10:58

Anselm Kiefer is a bewildering artist to get to grips with. The word that comes up most often when his work is discussed is the heart-sinking and slippery "references". His vast pictures, thick with paint and embedded with objects from sunflowers and diamonds to lumps of lead, nod to the Nazis and Norse myth, to Kabbalah and the Egyptian gods, to philosophy and poetry, and to alchemy and the spirit of materials. How is one to unpick such a complex personal cosmology? Kiefer himself refuses to help: "Art really is something very difficult," he says. "It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult for the viewer to understand … A part of it should always include having to scratch your head."

Now 69, Kiefer is the subject of a retrospective at the Royal Academy, where he is an honorary academician and which, through its summer exhibitions, has done much to bring him to the attention of the British public.

Tuesday, 16 September 2014 10:51

First there was singing and dancing. And then the complaining began.

A storefront art installation in Anacostia that is part of 5x5, the city-wide public art festival, will be removed after community members complained that it looked like junk.

The D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities said it will take down “The New Migration” by Abigail DeVille, a found-art project installed in a down-at-the-heels section of Good Hope Road SE.

Tuesday, 16 September 2014 10:42

An exhibition of Henri Matisse's cut-out art has become the most successful exhibition held to date at the Tate with more than 560,000 visitors.

The Tate Modern show was the first in its history to attract more than half a million people.

"Matisse: The Cut-Outs" drew attention to the final part of the French artist's career from 1937-54.

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, said he was "delighted" at the show's success.

Monday, 15 September 2014 17:09

On Saturday, September 13, the twelfth annual London Design Festival opened to the public. The nine-day celebration of contemporary design promotes London’s creativity, drawing in the city's greatest thinkers, practitioners, retailers, and educators. The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) serves as the central hub location for the event, which spans the entire city, including various cultural institutions, galleries, luxury boutiques, art schools, public spaces, and more.

Conceived by designers Sir John Sorrell and Ben Evans in 2003, the London Design Festival is comprised of over 300 events and exhibitions staged by hundreds of partner organizations across the design spectrum and from around the world.

Monday, 15 September 2014 13:41

Critics think they have the last word, but sometimes art keeps talking. In 2008, while organizing the Jewish Museum’s boisterous survey of Abstract Expressionism, “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning and American Art, 1940-1976,” the curator, Norman L. Kleeblatt, noticed that two paintings — Lee Krasner’s “Untitled” (1948) and Norman Lewis’s “Twilight Sounds” (1947) — seemed to be speaking to each other. He had the good sense to listen and, later, to orchestrate a deeper conversation. The result is “From the Margins: Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis, 1945-1952,” a nuanced, sensitive and profound exhibition.

The show isn’t really a dialogue, in the conventional sense. But it bravely elides differences of gender, race and religion, finding that Krasner and Lewis — a Jewish woman and an African-American man — shared a visual language that was a subtler, more intimate dialect of Abstract Expressionism.

Monday, 15 September 2014 13:32

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is going east — far east, for The Costume Institute’s spring 2015 exhibition, to be titled “Chinese Whispers: Tales of the East in Art, Film, and Fashion.”

Incorporating the realms of fine and filmic art from the Department of Asian Art, the summer show will explore how China has fueled the creative imagination of designers all over the world for centuries, resulting in layers of cultural translations, re-translations, and, of course, mistranslations.

Monday, 15 September 2014 13:17

Documenting ancient rock art for a living isn’t for everyone. The hours are long. The office is a dusty, rust red landscape that is regularly baked in 40C heat. The work material is often surreal, seemingly indecipherable.

But for the traditional owners of land near the remote town of Laura, a four-hour drive north-west of Cairns, the job is essential – and urgent.

The Quinkan galleries are among the largest collection of rock art in the world, stretching over 230,000 hectares of sandstone. Dating back at least 30,000 years, the galleries take their name from the Quinkan spirits – comprising helpful protectors and mischief makers – of local lore.

Monday, 15 September 2014 12:53

Tate and the Terra Foundation for American Art announced the appointment of Alex J. Taylor as Tate's new Terra Foundation Research Fellow in American Art.

"Research plays a fundamental role in Tate’s mission to increase the public’s knowledge, enjoyment, and understanding of the art it collects," explained Tate’s Head of Collection Research. "This new initiative promises to forge new perspectives on post-war American art and deepen the rich interpretative information that Tate makes available to the public on works in the collection."

Monday, 15 September 2014 12:07

Diane Keaton is paying Nashville a visit next year.

The Academy Award winner will be the keynote speaker at the 2015 Antiques & Garden Show of Nashville, taking place Jan. 30 through Feb. 1 at Music City Center.

Monday, 15 September 2014 11:57

The Flemish Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens and the beautiful Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, the sovereign of the Spanish Netherlands, shared an artistic vision in service of the Catholic faith. In the 1620s, Eugenia commissioned Rubens to create 20 massive tapestries celebrating the Catholic Church through vivid allegorical scenes.

Those tapestries usually are at the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales (Convent of the Barefoot Royals) in Madrid, where they are rarely seen by the public. But that will change Oct. 14, when they go on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum as part of the exhibition "Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist."

Monday, 15 September 2014 11:52

The Peabody Essex Museum announced a $5 million pledge Thursday from the Lynch Foundation, adding to the museum’s already impressive endowment.

The money will be used to establish continuity for the museum’s changing exhibition program, featuring exhibits like the recently opened Alexander Calder display, “Calder and Abstraction: From Avant Garde to Icon.”

The Lynch Foundation, formed by Marblehead’s Carolyn and Peter Lynch in 1988, focuses on health care, education, museums and Roman Catholic religious institutions. Carolyn Lynch has sat on the PEM board for nearly two decades; she is president and chairwoman of the Lynch Foundation.

Monday, 15 September 2014 11:44

The inscription of several Le Corbusier buildings on the Unesco’s World Heritage List is once again under discussion. According to Le Figaro, the president of the Association of Le Corbusier Sites, Marc Petit—who is also the mayor of Firmini, a small town in France’s Loire region featuring several of the architect’s buildings—is undeterred by the two previously unsuccessful attempts.

“We’ve redone our application taking into account the experts’ recommendations, particularly regarding the reduction of the number of sites,” he said, “although the proposal includes a new country, India.”

Friday, 12 September 2014 17:02

Bloomberg Philanthropies, the nonprofit founded by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, announced that it is expanding its funding for cultural institutions’ digital projects. The foundation is committing $17 million to six museums to help increase visitor engagement and education through innovative technology tools. The recipients of the expanded grant program are the American Museum of Natural History (New York), the Brooklyn Museum (New York), the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (New York), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gardens by the Bay (Singapore), and the Science Museum (London).   

The latest round of funding will support a spate of new technologies.

Friday, 12 September 2014 12:21

Few people have ever visited Oak Spring Farms, the grand home here of Rachel Lambert Mellon, better known as Bunny. If they had, they would have seen a Pissarro, unframed like a flea market find, above the living room fireplace. Upstairs, a still life by van Gogh hung above her bathtub. Antique porcelains — cabbages, asparagus, artichokes — were artfully arranged on practically every surface.

Mrs. Mellon was the matriarch of an American dynasty whose fortune and art holdings rivaled that of the Fricks, Carnegies and Morgans. But perhaps most notably, she was a passionate collector of a bygone era. She didn’t pay attention to what was in fashion; she didn’t think about future financial returns.

Friday, 12 September 2014 12:15

Art Basel sent around a press release this morning to announce their new partnership with Kickstarter, the culture crowdfunding site:

The Art Basel Crowdfunding Initiative will aim to catalyze international support for non-profit visual arts organizations worldwide by promoting outstanding projects to Art Basel’s extensive global audience.

With this new initiative, Art Basel will support the non-profit sector of the artworld, at a time when public funding for the arts has been dwindling. Designed specifically for non-profit arts organizations, the Art Basel Crowdfunding Initiative will offer visibility and support for a wide variety of artistic projects, including non-profit exhibitions, public installations, films, artist books, education programs, artist residencies, talks, conservation and archiving, and other innovative art projects.

Friday, 12 September 2014 11:58

A portrait by Gustav Klimt could be put up for sale, potentially fetching over $30 million, to resolve a dispute between a Viennese art foundation and the granddaughter of the woman in the painting, a lawyer for the granddaughter said on Thursday.

Klimt, an Austrian symbolist, painted the portrait of Gertrud Loew in 1902 and it belonged to her at least until 1938, a year before she fled Austria to escape the Nazis.

Her U.S.-based granddaughter, Andrea Felsovanyi, has been contesting ownership with the private Klimt Foundation, which currently holds the work.

Friday, 12 September 2014 11:52

Vincent van Gogh’s (1853-1890) cheerful painting Bridge across the Seine at Asnières (1887), is now on view in the European Gallery of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH. In the Modern Gallery, two stunning 20th century sculptures, Alberto Giacometti’s Annette IV (1962) and Henri Laurens’ Petite Cariatide(1930) will be on view starting September 24. These works of art are on loan to the Currier through December 2014.

“We are delighted to share these three important works of art by major artists of the late nineteenth and twentieth century with people throughout New England and beyond.” said Susan Strickler, director and CEO of the Currier. “In particular, this van Gogh has not been exhibited in America since 1970, so this is a rare opportunity to see this lively painting.”

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