Displaying items by tag: Art

The first major museum survey dedicated to scenes of night in American art from 1860 to 1960—from the introduction of electricity to the dawn of the Space Age— opened at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art this June. Night Vision: Nocturnes in American Art explores the critical importance of nocturnal imagery in the development of modern art by bringing together 90 works in a range of media—including paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, and sculptures—created by such leading American artists as Ansel Adams, Charles Burchfield, Winslow Homer, Lee Krasner, Georgia O’Keeffe, Albert Ryder, John Sloan, Edward Steichen, and Andrew Wyeth, among others. Featuring works from the BCMA’s robust collection of American art, as well as loans from 30 prestigious public and private collections across the United States—such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Phillips Collection; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—the exhibition provides visitors with an opportunity to consider transformations in American art across generations and traditional stylistic confines. Organized by BCMA Curator Joachim Homann, and on view at Bowdoin from June 27 through October 18, 2015, Night Vision demonstrates the popularity of the theme with American artists of diverse aesthetic convictions and investigates how they responded to the unique challenges of picturing the night.

The two houses will do almost anything to outmaneuver each other, and the friction between them will likely only increase under new CEOs.

This May, after billionaires had outbid billionaires in New York’s contemporary art auctions, something became immediately clear: Christie’s had just clobbered Sotheby’s with a gavel.

Over four days, Christie’s sales totaled $1.7 billion, its biggest week ever. On one of those evenings, frantic bidding inside its Rockefeller Center salesroom enabled the auction house to sell $706 million of art spanning the 20th century in less than two hours. An anonymous bidder even plunked down $179.4 million for Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger, smashing the record for the most expensive work ever sold at auction. “We’re in a fantasyland,” proclaimed collector Michael Ovitz, the former president of Walt Disney Co., as he left the room...

Once upon a time, our big museums were the “quiet cars” of a fast-track American culture industry. Like libraries, they were places where the volume was low, the energy slow, the technology unobtrusive. You came to them to look, to think and, in the days before museums became the prime social spaces they are now, to be alone in a small, like-minded crowd. You could take a little art home by hitting the postcard rack in the gift shop. But the only way you would retain most of what you saw was by spending time in the galleries and imprinting things on your brain.

That model is pretty much a generational memory now. Today, millions of people stream through major museums, filling the air with a restless rustle and buzz. They move through galleries fast and with a new purpose — cellphones in hand, they’re on Instagram treks and selfie hunts — and with a new viewing rhythm: Stop, point, pose, snap. If you want, you can even take the tour remotely, virtually, as more and more institutions make their collections accessible on the Internet...

The hundreds of gallery owners who apply each year to secure a coveted booth at Art Basel, the Swiss art fair, spend weeks on their admission applications. They describe the evolution of their galleries, track the history of their exhibitions and list the biographies of their artists. Then there is the matter of the “mock booths,” intricate sketches, miniature models, even virtual tours, of their planned exhibition spaces, complete with tiny reproductions of the exact works they hope to exhibit.

All to impress the fair’s selection jury, six fellow dealers who have become among the most powerful gatekeepers — and tastemakers — in the art world...

A Rotterdam court has ruled in favor of Dutch collector Bert Kreuk in the lawsuit launched against Danh Vō last September.

The polarizing collector sued the Danish-Vietnamese artist and Hugo Boss Prize winner for €898,000 (approximately $1.2 million), claiming Vō had failed to deliver an artwork for "Transforming the Known," an exhibition of Kreuk's collection at the Hague's Gemeentemuseum (Municipal Museum)—an assertion that Vō's representatives deny...

Museums are increasingly displaying jewelry as a form of wearable art in its own right, sometimes with the conversation centering around the innovative use of materials in alternative ways.

“Jewelry is more than just you wear to complement your clothes. If you pick good jewelry, it’s like wearing a piece of art,” says Ulysses Dietz, curator of the exhibition, titled "From Pearls to Platinum to Plastic," opening at the Newark Museum in June.

There is a widespread assumption that plastic is among the hardiest of materials, but that is far from true, as conservators in museums and galleries know only too well.

The Victoria & Albert Museum is now collaborating with Imperial College and University College London to find ways of saving 20th-century works of art and design featuring plastics, including polyester and polyurethane.

This spring the Corning Museum of Glass opened its light-filled, 26,000-square-foot art and design gallery building—comprising five interior galleries—designed by the New York City-based architects Thomas Phifer and Partners (Fig. 1). In addition, a new, 500-seat glassblowing amphitheater opened in the original blowing room of Corning’s historic Steuben Glass factory. Together they form...

To continue reading about the Corning Museum of Glass' new art and design gallery building, visit InCollect.com.

It’s the beginning of a long-term relationship Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Hyundai. The Southern California institution and the Korean automaker announced a 10-year partnership today which is part of the larger Hyundai Project. The move marks LACMA’s longest commitment to a corporate sponsor and will enable myriad projects in the areas of art and technology and Korean art scholarship, specifically through acquisitions, exhibitions and publications until 2024.

“Art is a creative expression of human values that transcends age, gender, race and culture,” said Hyundai Motor Company Vice Chairman Euisun Chung in a release.

The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation has announced plans to build a major museum honoring the Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany. Founded by the modernist architect Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus stands as one of most influential design schools in modern history.

Gropius established the Bauhaus School in the city of Weimar, Germany, with a singular mission -- to “reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts.” In Gropius’ manifesto, Proclamation of the Bauhaus, he explains his vision for reversing the split between art and production by returning to the crafts as the foundation of all artistic activity and design. Gropius established the Bauhaus School and developed a craft-based curriculum to educate and train artisans and designers, giving them the tools needed to create functional and beautiful objects for the rapidly-modernizing world.