Displaying items by tag: French

Abu Dhabi has finally awarded a $653 million contract to build a branch of the Louvre Museum to Arabtec Holding Co., a Dubai-based construction company, which is partly owned by Abu Dhabi. The Louvre has been planning the outpost since March 2007, but was sidetracked by a number of delays prompted by a public spending review of Abu Dhabi’s government.

The Louvre’s new 688,890-square-foot location, which will be designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel, is expected to open in 2015. The museum’s inauguration will be followed by the opening of the Zayed National Museum, which is being built in association with the British Museum in 2016 as well as a franchise of New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2017. All three of the museums will be part of a development located off the coast of Abu Dhabi City on Saadiyat Island.

The Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi is part of the country’s effort to establish itself as a cultural hub as well as a noteworthy tourist destination. Arabtec, which won the project after a competitive bidding process, is expected to begin construction on the museum immediately.

A painting worth $1 million by the French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was recovered in Essex, England. Stolen from the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm in 1987, the location of Le Jardin (1920) has remained a mystery for more than twenty years.

The discovery occurred when British art dealer Charles Roberts of Charles Fine Art was offered the Matisse painting by a Polish collector. Roberts ran a search on the Art Loss Register (ALR) database, a hub for information regarding stolen artworks, and found Le Jardin listed. Christopher A. Marinello, executive director and general counsel of the ALR, facilitated the painting’s recovery and it is currently being held in the organization’s office before being returned to Sweden in the coming weeks.

Le Jardin was the only artwork stolen during the 1987 burglary when thieves broke through the museum’s front entrance with a sledgehammer and unscrewed it from the wall. The burglars escaped just minutes before private guards arrived to investigate the scene. Following the robbery, the thieves made several attempts to sell the painting back to the museum for an exorbitant sum. Museum officials resisted, knowing that the Matisse painting was too well known to sell on the open market and that it would resurface eventually.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris sent a number of French masterpieces to Shanghai’s Power Station of Art for the exhibition Electric Fields: Surrealism and Beyond – La Collection du Centre Pompidou, which opened on December 16. The show marks the first collaboration between the Pompidou, a leading museum of modern and contemporary art, and a Chinese institution.

The exhibition, which is part of the Shanghai Biennale, features approximately 100 works from the Pompidou’s collection including works by Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Andreas Gursky (b. 1955), Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), and Ed Ruscha (b. 1937). The show is divided into six categories that explore various Surrealist themes and includes paintings, sculpture, video and manuscripts.

The show’s title is a combination of two influences – the name of the venue, a former electric power station, and Andre Breton (1896-1966) and Philippe Soupault’s (1897-1990) seminal piece of Surrealist literature, The Magnetic Fields (1919). The exhibition runs through March 15, 2013 in Shanghai.

Mary Griggs Burke, who built the most comprehensive collection of Japanese art outside of Japan, passed away on December 8, 2012 at her home in Manhattan. She was 96.

Burke’s collection, which she amassed over fifty years, featured thousands of artifacts including paintings, prints, sculpture, textiles, lacquerware, ceramics, and calligraphy. Worth tens of millions of dollars, her meticulously assembled collection spans five millenniums and includes early pieces from around 3000 B.C. to works of the 19^th century A.D.

Burke was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1916, where she grew up in a Victorian mansion adorned with 18^th century French objets d’art as well as a few important Japanese artifacts. After earning a bachelor’s degree in 1938 from Sarah Lawrence College and a master’s in clinical psychology from Columbia, Burke traveled to Japan in 1954. Japanese-influenced Bauhaus architect, Walter Gropius, who was designing a house for Burke, suggested the visit. Burke immediately fell in love with Japan and its art and returned to the country dozens of times throughout her life.

Burke began avidly collecting Japanese art in 1963. Her holdings eventually grew so vast that they required their own residence. Burke purchased the apartment adjacent to her own on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to house her collection; she also employed a curatorial staff and encouraged students and scholars to visit. In 2006, Burke announced that after her death her collection would be divided between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Burke served on the boards of many institutions, including the Met. At the time of her death she was an emeritus trustee of the museum.       

Now in its 58^th year, the Brussels Antiques and Fine Art Fair (BRAFA) will take place January 19-27, 2013 at the exhibition space, Tour & Taxis. Featuring 128 dealers from 11 countries, the fair will present works from the Middle Ages to the 20^th century including antiquities, jewelry, furniture, ceramics, drawings, engravings, Old Master as well as modern paintings, sculpture, textiles, contemporary art, photography, and much more.

After drawing in 46,000 visitors last year, BRAFA organizers have made a number of adjustments in hopes of surpassing 2012’s numbers. There will be 26 new exhibitors present and an increased emphasis has been placed on pre-Columbian art; archaeology; primitive arts; 17^th to 19^th century furniture; 19^th to 20^th century paintings, sculptures, and drawings; Asiatic arts; 20^th century decorative arts; and modern and contemporary art. BRAFA has also added a new section to this year’s fair devoted to manuscripts. Exhibitors in this section include Signatures (Paris), Librairie Thomas-Scheler (Paris), and Sanderus Antiquariaat (Ghent, Belgium).

In honor of the fair’s tenth year at Tour & Taxis, BRAFA’s architects, Volume Architecture, have designed an extraordinary entrance inspired by Byzantine architecture, particularly that of the mosques in Istanbul.

VIP guests will be given a sneak peek of the impressive fair at BRAFA’s exclusive charity event on January 18. A silent auction will be held during the evening and proceeds will benefit the Merode Foundation to support its work on educational and social projects in Brussels’ working class neighborhoods.

Exhibitor highlights include Whitford Fine Art (London), which specializes in French and British 20^th century painting and sculpture, Leysen Jewelers (Belgium), jewelers to the Belgian royal family, and Guy Pieters Gallery (Paris/Belgium), a leading force in the contemporary art world for the past 30 years.

In response to critic’s who say French art is elitist, the Louvre has embarked on the “Louvre-Lens” project and have built an extension of the museum in the poor mining city located in northern France. The project, which opens this week, is housed in a glass and aluminum structure and stands in stark contrast to the rest of the impoverished area.

While the Louvre is well intentioned, locals are wary. French President, Francois Hollande, visited the museum on December 4 but failed to venture outside the institution’s walls. While art is welcome, locals feel they are in greater need of expanded job opportunities and a more stable economy. Still, the Louvre hopes that they can help transform Lens similarly to how the Guggenheim Museum turned the burned-out, industrial city of Bilbao, Spain into a travel destination.

Lens was leveled as a result of World War I and II. After that, the city spent decades as mining area and endured many related tragedies. After the last mine closed in 1986, the city fell into poverty. Now one of the country’s poorest cities, Lens has an unemployment rate of 24 percent; the national average is 9 percent.

Designed by a Japanese firm, the museum boast two large exhibition spaces and features a diverse body of work including Cycladic sculptures, Egyptian statues, 11^th century Italian mosaics, and Leonardo da Vinci’s restored masterpiece, The Virgin and Saint Anne.

One of the most significant artists of the 20^th century, Henri Matisse (1869–1954) is best known for his use of color and fluid, innovative forms. A leading figure in modern art, the French artist defined the Fauvist movement, but defied classification. The works of Nicolas Poussin, Édouard Manet, Auguste Rodin, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin inspired Matisse and he communed with groundbreaking artists such as Camille Pissarro, André Derain, and Gertrude Stein.

 The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Matisse: In Search of Painting opens on December 4 and explores the evolution of Matisse as a painter. Matisse worked rigorously, often painting the same scene and subject over and over again to gauge his own progress and compare various techniques, a process he developed during his academic training.

In Search of Painting features just 49 vibrant canvases but spans Matisse’s entire career. Organized by Rebecca Rabinow, a curator of modern and contemporary art, the exhibition places the works in pairs and groups by subject to illustrate Matisse’s methodical process. In the 1930s, Matisse began having photographs taken at various stages of each painting to document their evolution. Three of the finished canvases along with their accompanying photographs will also be on view. The juxtaposition illustrates Matisse’s own self-awareness and the arduous process that led to each finished canvas.

Matisse: In Search of Painting will be on view through March 17, 2013.

Paris’ Musee du Louvre and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the Legion of Honor and the de Young Museum, announced that they have reached a mutual agreement and will collaborate on a series of exhibitions and exchanges. The institutions will share works from their incendiary collections over the course of the next five years including antiquities, paintings, decorative arts, prints, drawings, textiles, and sculptures.

The Louvre and Fine Arts Museums have been working on the arrangement for the past two years and will celebrate its commencement with the exhibition, Royal Treasures from the Louvre: Louis XIV to Marie-Antoinette. The show, which opened on November 17 and features a collection of decorative arts from the French monarchy, will be on view through March 17, 2013.

The agreement will allow each world-renowned institution to broaden their international reach and inhabitants of each city will have a new selection of masterpieces to view. Loans between the museums may include entire exhibitions or single objects.

Next fall doors will open to Paris’ Parsons the New School for Design for the second time. Frank Alvah Parsons, who founded the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (now Parsons), initially opened a French branch in 1921. The Paris location closed temporarily during World War II and when Parson merged with the New School for Social Research in 1970, the Paris branch was included. The New York and Paris campuses continued to grow apart until their association was no more than a technical one. In 2010 the Paris institution changed its name to the Paris College of Art and the New School could return to Paris using the Parsons moniker.

The new campus will be announced on November 29 at the Palais de Tokyo. Located on the Rue Saint-Roch, the Paris School of Art and Design will accommodate 300 to 500 students, who will be able to begin their studies there or in New York. Parson also has associated campuses in Shanghai and Mumbai. The school will offer bachelor’s and master’s programs in multiple art disciplines, fashion, design, and business.

The publisher and art critic, Christian Zervos, founded the French art review, Cahiers d’Art, in 1926. The magazine ran without interruption from 1941 to 1943, until 1960 and featured artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Leger, Ernst, Calder, and Giacometti. Known for its striking layout and abundant photography, Cahiers d’Art also featured reviews written by the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett. After being out of production for more than fifty years, Cahiers d’Art has been reborn.

Swedish collector and entrepreneur, Staffan Ahrenberg, bought the dormant publication after he walked by the still-operating Cahier d’Art gallery along the rue du Dragon in Paris. Ahrenberg re-launched Cahiers d’Art with former Art Basel director Sam Keller and the renowned curator Hans Ulrich Obrist as editors. The first issue features Ellsworth Kelly, Cyprien Gaillard, and Sarah Morris. As in the past, Cahiers d’Art will not contain advertisements nor will it follow a regular production schedule.

Major art world players including Larry Gagosian, Guggenheim boss Richard Armstrong, and Alfred Pacquement of the Pompidou Centre gathered in a tiny Left Bank gallery in Paris to celebrate the review’s return.