Displaying items by tag: Museum

The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is ramping up endowment efforts after a wave of financial and administrative troubles left the institution’s future murky. Museum officials announced on Tuesday, March 26, 2013 that the amount of promised donations would raise MOCA’s endowment to $60 million, the highest in the institution’s 34-year history.        

Jeffrey Soros, the president of MOCA’s board, and trustee Eugenio Lopez, a prominent art collector, are helming the new fundraising campaign known as MOCA Independence. The goal of the campaign is to raise $100 million, which will allow the museum to continue operating as an independent institution devoted to contemporary art.  

MOCA’s troubles began in 2008 when overspending and dwindling investments left the museum with an endowment of a few million dollars. Eli Broad, a billionaire art collector and one of MOCA’s founding board members, gave the museum a second chance when he donated $15 million to the institution; Broad also pledged $15 million to match outsider contributions. While Broad’s generosity helped keep the museum afloat, MOCA struggled to find donors that would match his pledge.

MOCA’s troubles prompted partnership offers from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The museum declined both offers in favor of maintaining its independence.

After receiving some criticism for its meager collection of 20^th century art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas made a number of major acquisitions. The works will debut at the museum later this month as part of the 20^th Century Art Gallery’s rotating exhibition schedule. Along with the newly acquired works, Mark Rothko’s (1903-1970) No. 210/No. 211 (Orange), which was purchased by Crystal Bridges in 2012, will be reinstalled.

Highlights from the museum’s recent purchases include Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) Hammer and Sickle (1977). The 6 x 7 foot acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas work is a part of Warhol’s Hammer and Sickle series. Crystal Bridges also acquired a major copper and Plexiglas sculptural work by the minimalist artist Donald Judd (1928-1994). Untitled 1989 (Bernstein 89-24) (1989) stands nearly 19 feet tall and is comprised of ten box-like elements made of copper and red Plexiglas. The sculpture is a prime example of Judd’s pioneering work.

In addition to the works by Warhol and Judd, Crystal Bridges acquired Max Weber’s (1864-1920) early modernist painting, Burlesque #1 (1909); Agnes Pelton’s (1881-1961) desert inspired oil on canvas work, Sand Storm (1932); and Marvin Dorwart Cone’s (1891-1965) Stone City Landscape (1936), which is executed in the Regionalist tradition.

Six 140-year-old Japanese silk paintings by Utagawa Kunitsuru have undergone major restoration thanks to Washington, D.C.-based conservator, Yoshi Nishio. The paintings, which measure about 6 feet tall and 21 ½ feet wide, were previously hung in the Decatur House, a historic home and functioning museum, which serves as the National Center for White House History. The Decatur House is located across Lafayette Square from the White House and was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1976.

The paintings are believed to have been created in 1873 during a time of rich cultural exchange between Japan and the United States. The leading theory suggests that President Ulysses S. Grant acquired the works when he visited Japan in 1879 as part of a world tour. Only one of the six paintings is signed and dated.

The works have hung in the Decatur House for over a century and years of smoke, sunlight, and moisture had left the paintings wrinkled and darkened. Nishio, who received the paintings last year, spent hours cleaning the works with water, solvents, cotton swabs, and bamboo brushes with sable bristles. He worked on particularly delicate portions of the paintings with a scalpel under magnification. The paintings also had to be immersed in water to separate them from the boards they had been glued to.      

The paintings, which feature a geisha, a robed samurai, white cranes, cherry blossoms, and a long-tailed rooster, are expected to return to the Decatur House in June 2013.

On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 Norwegian officials announced that the country’s government would help fund a new museum devoted to the influential painter and printmaker Edvard Munch (1863-1944). The new institution will replace the current Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, which was built after World War II in a notoriously rundown neighborhood. Many believe that the shoddily constructed museum does not do justice to Munch, his art or his legacy.

The city council has been discussing the creation of a new museum since 2008 but plans were stymied by disagreements over cost, location, and architecture. After years of disputes and little progress, the Norwegian state decided to step in by offering to help fund the $278 million project as well as assist with project management. State officials are asking Oslo’s city council to make a formal request for the support, which would hopefully lift the museum out of its dismal financial situation.

Upon his death in 1944, Munch bequeathed a large portion of his collection to the city of Oslo including two versions of his seminal painting The Scream. While many people hope that the government’s offer will help move the museum project along, others are not as optimistic. Carl Ivar Hagen, a member of the city council, doesn’t expect the matter to be resolved anytime soon. Hagen believes that even with the state’s assistance disputes over the new museum’s location will continue to halt progress.

Officials at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. announced that the museum’s East Building will undergo a $30 million renovation, adding over 12,260-square-feet of exhibition space and a rooftop sculpture garden to the structure. Designed by famed architect I.M. Pei (b. 1917) and opened in 1978, the East Building houses the museum’s collection of modern paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints as well as study and research centers and offices.

The East Building galleries will gradually close beginning in July and ending in December 2013; they will remain shuttered for approximately three years once renovations begin in January 2014. The project will create two sky-lit Tower Galleries within the East Building, which will be adjoined by an outdoor sculpture terrace. The East Building will continue to house the museum’s modern art collection and may see the addition of a room dedicated to the work of Mark Rothko (1903-1970). Museum officials hope that the additional exhibition space will inspire future donations to the National Gallery’s permanent collection.

The East Building project is part a Master Facilities Plan, which started in the museum’s West Building in 1999 and involved bolstering the building’s infrastructure and renovating its main floor and sculpture galleries. A number of established Washington-based philanthropists are donating $30 million for the East Building project; it is one of the largest gifts the museum has received from private donors in a decade.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has offered to acquire L.A.’s struggling Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). MOCA has been at the center of a number of controversies after the museum’s chief curator, Paul Schimmel, left the institution in June 2012 after 22 years on the job. Critics have bashed the museum for becoming too celebrity focused and all of the artists who once served on the museum’s board including John Baldessari (b. 1931), Barbara Kruger (b. 1945), and Ed Ruscha (b. 1937), have resigned after disagreeing with the institution’s new direction.

LACMA Director, Michael Govan, offered to raise $100 million for MOCA’s two locations in exchange for the acquisition. LACMA made a similar offer to MOCA, which is currently helmed by former New York gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch, back in 2008. LACMA officials believe that the merger would strengthen both institutions and provide MOCA with stability and strong leadership.

MOCA’s contributions, grants, and operating profits have all declined in recent years.

The London branches of Sotheby’s and Bonhams will join forces with the Cologne-based auction house, Lempertz, to sell off works from the late Gustav Rau’s (1922-2002) vast collection. Rau, a well-known art collector and philanthropist, passed away suddenly in 2002, leaving his remarkable collection to Unicef’s German branch. Rau’s holdings, which include many Old Master and Impressionist paintings and sculptures, were estimated to be worth around $600 million at the time of the bequest.

While Unicef has sold a number of Rau’s works to fund ongoing projects over the years, this is the first time a significant portion of the collection has come up for sale. The auction, which is planned to take place this summer, will feature works by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), El Greco (1541-1614), and Claude Monet (1840-1926) among many others. The works are all in pristine condition as Rau either left his collection in storage or offered them to museums for exhibition purposes rather than hanging them in his own home.

All proceeds from the sales will benefit children’s causes, specifically in emerging countries. Rau, who spent much of his life working as a doctor in Africa, was a champion of clean drinking water initiatives and better vaccination practices in developing areas. Unicef plans to use a large portion of the funds to finish a children’s hospital in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that Rau founded before his death.      

Germany’s Staatsgalerie Stuttgart museum returned a 15^th century Renaissance painting stolen by Nazis during World War II to the estate of a Jewish art dealer. The museum acquired Virgin and Child, which is attributed to the Master of Flémalle (1375-1444) who is identified by historians as Robert Campin, in 1948.

The painting once belonged to Max Stern (1904-1987) who lost over 400 paintings to the Nazi regime during a forced sale in 1937. After Jews were banned from selling art in Nazi-occupied Europe, Stern shuttered his Dusseldorf gallery and escaped to London in December of the same year. Before settling in Montreal, Stern sold even more paintings, including Virgin and Child, in order to buy a German exit visa for his mother. Stern went on to purchase the Dominion Gallery of Fine Arts and established himself as one of Canada’s most important art dealers and collectors.

Upon his death in 1987, Stern donated a portion of his estate to Concordia and McGill Universities in Montreal as well as the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. For the past ten years Concordia has been working to recover the hundreds of paintings Stern lost at the hands of the Nazis. The initiative, known as the Max Stern Art Restitution Project, has facilitated the return of 9 works originally belonging to Stern; Virgin and Child is the 10^th and the only work to be returned from a German museum thus far.

A ceremony was held on Tuesday, March 5, 2013 at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin to celebrate the painting’s return.  

On March 4, 2013 the Philadelphia Museum of Art announced a number of important acquisitions that will enhance the institution’s European, Latin, and American art collections. The gifts came from various donors including collectors Roberta and Richard Huber, global healthcare company GlaxoSmithKline, and several Museum Trustees.

Among the recent acquisitions is Amaryllis Josephine, a double-page watercolor on vellum by Belgian painter and botanist Pierre Joseph Redouté (1759-1840). A pencil drawing of the flower’s bulb accompanies the watercolor. Both of the works were created as part of a series of engravings made under the patronage of the empress Joséphine, Napoleon Bonaparte’s first wife.

The museum also received four 18^th century paintings that are currently on view as part of the exhibition Journeys to New Worlds: Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Art from the Roberta and Richard Huber Collection (on view through May 19, 2013). The works include King Luis I of Spain on Horseback (unknown artist, Peru); Saint Anthony of Padua Preaching Before Pope Gregory IX (unknown artist Peru); The House at Nazareth (unknown artist, Bolivia); and Our Lady of the Reedbed or Irún with Donor, Captain Joaquín Elorrieta by Ecuadorian artist José Cortés de Alcocer.    

Other acquisitions include 236 photographs by pioneering modern photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976); N.C. Wyeth’s (1890-1976) Trial of the Bow, the first painting to enter the museum’s collection by the artist; and an early 20^th century stained glass and bronze chandelier by Tiffany Studios under the artistic direction of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933).

The Philadelphia Museum of Art will hold an exhibition of its recent acquisitions this summer.

Following the lead of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and PBS, Google will launch a series of monthly digital “Art Talks.” The project aims to bring gallery and museum collections to life through virtual hangouts with curators, museums directors, historians, and educators from the world’s most distinguished cultural institutions. The talks will explore various arts-related topics including the curating process, popular themes throughout art history, art education, and the significance of specific masterpieces and artists.

The first Art Talks hangout will take place at 8PM on March 6, 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Deborah Howes, the museum’s Director of Digital Learning, will join a panel of artists and students to discuss the process of teaching art online.

Upcoming Art Talks include Caroline Campbell and Arnika Schmidt from London’s National Gallery discussing depictions of the female nude throughout art history (March 20, 2013) and a panel discussion of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s (1525-1569) Tower of Babel featuring Peter Parshall, curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (April 2013). Additional talks are planned for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico.

The talks will be posted on the Google Art Project‘s YouTube channel after they air.