Displaying items by tag: Museum

Now’s the Time: Recent Acquisitions brings together highlights from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s ever-growing collection of contemporary art. Ending on January 2, 2013, the exhibition features works that have been acquired by the institution over the past five years and illustrates how painting, sculpture, and photography have evolved since the 1970s. While spotlighting the museum’s newest holdings, Now’s the Time also shows how the institution’s acquisitions have grown more inclusive in recent years and features works from a wide variety of artists and explores a range of ideas and perspectives.

The exhibition features works from both established and emerging artists including Ai Weiwei (b. 1957), William Cordova (b. 1971), Anish Kapoor (b. 1954), Barbara Kruger (b. 1945), and Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965).

The Art Institute of Chicago is sending almost 100 European modern art masterpieces to the Kimbell Art Museum in For Worth, Texas. Part of a four-month traveling exhibition, the show at the Kimbell is slated to open on October 6, 2013 and run through February 16, 2014.

Renowned for its collection of modern European art, the Art Institute of Chicago will loan its works to the Kimbell while their own galleries undergo renovations. The Kimbell is the only museum to host the Art Institute’s traveling exhibition.

The show will include sculptures and paintings by Juan Gris (1887-1927), Georges Braque (1882-1963), Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), Paul Klee (1879-1940), Joan Miró (1893-1983), and Marc Chagall (1887-1985). Two major highlights of the show are Henri Matisse’s (1869-1954) Bathers by a River (1909-10) and Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) Old Guitarist (1903).

The Kimbell hosted an exhibition of Impressionist works from the Art Institute of Chicago back in 2008. The show was one of the best regarded in the Kimbell’s history.

Thanks to a generous gift from longtime museum donors, Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art added 37 new pieces, including vessel forms and sculpture, to their permanent glass collection. The acquisition includes works by notable glass artists such as Michael Glancy (b. 1950), Klaus Moje (b. 1936), Ann Warff Wolff (b. 1937), and Richard Marquis (b. 1945).

LACMA’s glass art collection, which focuses on studio glass from the mid-1960s to the late 1990s, contains more than 100 objects, most of which came from Greenberg and Steinhauser who started donating to the institution in 1984. The museum’s relationship with the couple is so strong that earlier this year Greenberg and Steinhauser invited LACMA officials to handpick works from their personal collection for the museum. Besides their substantial glass gift, Greenberg and Steinhauser made a monetary donation to LACMA to go towards educational programs about glass.

Greenberg and Steinhauser’s collection boasts 400 to 500 works and is considered among the top five studio glass collections in the United States. The couple began avidly collecting in the mid-1970s and slowed down around the mid-1990s when sculpture and nontraditional forms became more prominent than the vessel art they adored. The duo has since taken to collecting contemporary photography.

In celebration of the studio glass movement’s 50^th anniversary, Greenberg and Steinhauser decided to disperse most of their collection to a number of institutions across the country. The couple will keep 15 to 20 sentimental pieces for themselves and the rest of their works will go to LACMA, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, and the Corning Museum of Glass. Greenberg also hopes to donate works to the Smithsonian, New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, the Mint Museum, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, and the Racine Art Museum, although arrangements with those institutions still need to be made.

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.

After twelve years at the helm of the world’s busiest museum, Henri Loyrette announced that he will leave his post at the Musée du Louvre in April of 2013. Before becoming the president and director of the Louvre, Loyrette served as the first curator and then the director of Paris’ Musée d’Orsay from 1994 to 2001 and has served as France’s chief curator of heritage since 1975. Loyrette has already informed the president of France, François Hollande, and the country’s minister of culture of his departure.

The Louvre attracts more visitors each year than any other institution in the world and Loyrette has managed to keep that number on the rise. In fact, the number of visitors has almost doubled under Loyrette’s leadership; 5.1 million patrons were reported in 2001 and by the end of 2012, almost 10 million people will have visited the Louvre this year.

However, Loyrette did much more than increase attendance during his time at the Louvre. He is responsible for implementing the museum’s contemporary art program and has organized exhibitions by Cy Twombly (1928-2011), Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945), and many other renowned modern artists. Loyrette employed a new policy that relied on crowd-sourced fundraising and launched a number of successful public campaigns that asked art enthusiasts to help the museum make important acquisitions. Loyrette also oversaw the opening of the Louvre’s outpost in the northern city of Lens as well as the expansion of the museum’s Islamic art galleries, which opened earlier this year.

Loyrette will no longer be in charge when the Louvre’s outpost in Abu Dhabi opens. The controversial project stirred debate in the French art world as Abu Dhabi has paid nearly $1.3 billion to use the Louvre name for thirty years and to gain access to the museum’s collection during that time. Designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the Abu Dhabi location is slated to open in 2015.

Considered one of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s (1632-1675) masterworks, Girl With a Pearl Earring has spent over a century at the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague. Sometimes referred to as the “Dutch Mona Lisa,” the painting, which is not dated, features a wide-eyed young girl whose gaze has been captivating audiences for hundreds of years.

Girl With a Pearl Earring is one of 15 paintings heading to the Frick Collection in New York from the Netherlands. Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting From the Mauritshuis opens on October 22, 2013 and runs through January 19, 2014. Because of the high level of interest in the enigmatic work, chief curator at the Frick, Colin Bailey, decided to give Girl With a Pearl Earring its own space in the museum’s Oval Room. The rest of the exhibition will be on display in the Frick’s East Gallery.

The Mauritshuis is currently undergoing renovations, which is why part of its collection has been sent out for exhibition. In addition to the Frick, the works will appear in Japan (through January 6, 2013), San Francisco’s de Young Museum (January 26, 2013-June 2, 2013), and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art (June 22, 2013-September 29, 2013). The rest of the Mauritshuis’ collection will remain in the Netherlands and will be exhibited at The Hague’s Gemeentemuseum until the renovations are completed.

On October 6, 2012, Vladimir Umanets, entered the Tate Modern in London and defaced the one of the museum’s most treasured paintings, a mural by Mark Rothko (1903-1970). Born Wlodzimierz Umaniec in Poland, 26-year-old Umanets currently lives in England.

Umanets vandalized Rothko’s Black on Maroon (1958) by writing his name in black paint along with “A Potential Piece of Yellowism” in the corner of the canvas. Umanets claimed that his defacement was an artistic act and compared himself to Marcel Duchamp, a pioneer of conceptual art known for his appropriation of objects.

Umanets appeared at Inner London crown court on December 13 and was given two years in jail by Judge Roger Chapple. Umanets had pleaded guilty at a previous hearing.

The Rothko mural was originally intended for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York and was given to the Tate as a gift from the artist in 1969. The Tate has made plans to restore the work, but the process will not be an easy one. Rothko often used unusual materials, such as eggs and glue, making restoration especially difficult. Officials estimate that the project will cost nearly $325,0000 and will take around 20 months to complete.

England’s British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, which closed in 2008, is in hot water after nearly 150 works that were lent to the museum while it was still open have been deemed missing. To make matters worse, a number of the pieces were sold at auction without their owners’ permission.

Most of the museum’s collection has been turned over to the Bristol city council, which is carrying out a full audit. In addition, trustees of the museum are in negotiations with the eight displeased owners to work out compensation agreements. While no arrests have been made, trustees of the museum have been involved in an ongoing dispute with the former director, Gareth Griffiths, over the missing works.

Among the 144 works that have disappeared is a nineteenth-century oil painting belonging to Lord Caldecote. Caldecote’s father, a well-known engineer and industrialist, lent the work by maritime master, Thomas Buttersworth, to the museum. After his father’s death, Caldecote asked for the painting to be returned. Sadly, the painting’s whereabouts are unknown as Christie’s sold it for almost $100,000 back in 2008.

There are no reports of personal profits from the sales and it is believed that the mix-up occurred because it was unclear whether objects had been given to the museum or were there on loan.

The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum opened in 2002 and aimed to tell the story of Britain’s colonial past through objects. While the institution was initially lauded, it was unable to attract enough visitors to keep it afloat. Plans to move the museum to London were scrapped after the country fell on tough economic times.

Yale University Art Gallery will celebrate the completion of a multi-year, multi-million dollar renovation and expansion on December 12. The project cost $135 million and increased exhibition space by about one-third. The museum, which is located in New Haven, CT, now boasts nearly 70,000 square feet and includes a gallery devoted to African, Asian, and Pre-Columbian art that was designed by Louis Kahn in 1953, the Old Yale Art Gallery, which features ancient, European, and contemporary art, and the 1866 Street Hall. The project joined all three buildings to create one cohesive institution.

Besides the physical expansion, the Yale University Art Gallery has significantly increased its collection’s holdings. The museum acquired 1,100 new works including African terra-cotta figures, Greco-Roman coins, medals from the American Revolution, and marble portraits of Marcus Aurelius and Plato over 1,700 years old.

The expansion and renovation were designed and led by Duncan Hazard and Richard Olcott, partners in New York’s Ennead Architects. The project took 14 years to complete and outfitted the museum with new areas for exhibitions and object study and increased access to the Gallery’s comprehensive collections.

Founded in 1998 by husband and wife team Judy Goffman Cutler and Laurence S. Cutler, the National Museum of American Illustration art (NMAI) is the first institution in the country to be devoted entirely to American illustration (Fig. 1). A private, nonprofit organization, the NMAI was originally built to house the Cutlers' personal art collection, an assemblage of works from the Golden Age of American illustration, a period lasting from 1895 until 1945. The Golden Age was a direct result of the vast improvements in printing technology at a time when newspapers, magazines, and illustrated books were the main source of media. No longer constrained by the limits of the medium, illustrators were able to freely experiment with color and new techniques. With assistance from the National Arts Club, a private club devoted to promoting public interest in the arts, the NMAI opened its doors to the public in 2000.