Displaying items by tag: Renovation

The problematic Musée Picasso in Paris, which has been going through political upheaval has received some good news. Pablo Picasso’s eldest daughter, Maya Widmaier-Picasso, has donated two works by her father to the institution. Last June, Anne Baldassari, president since 2005 was fired, replaced by Centre Pompidou-Metz director Laurent Le Bon. This has created a split in the Picasso family. The changes have occured because of the delayed five-year renovation project, which has caused a massive spending deficit.

A 1908 drawing of a woman’s face in the Cubist style, containing a portrait of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire on the reverse of the page has been gifted by the artist's daughter.

Emily Rafferty, who has been the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than a decade, announced Thursday that she will be retiring in the spring of 2015.

"With the ebb and flow of projects, this feels like the right time. Nobody takes a decision like this without serious thought," Ms. Rafferty, 65, said.

Her retirement comes as the museum prepares to embark on a series of new initiatives and a related long-term capital campaign. She also cited a number of projects she shepherded that are well underway or nearing completion, such as the Costume Institute, which opened in May, and the plaza renovation project, which is scheduled to be completed in the fall of 2014.

Tucked into concert halls and hidden in plain sight across the Lincoln Center campus is a modern-art collection worthy of a museum.

But many visitors walk right past these gems. The collection includes 41 paintings and sculptures by modern masters such as Jasper Johns and Alexander Calder.

Eleven underwent conservation during the recently completed $1.2 billion renovation of the performing-arts institution's 16-acre campus.

Massachusetts’s Worcester Art Museum (WAM) is unveiling two newly restored William Hogarth (1697–1764) pendant portraits, the first paintings by the artist owned by an American museum, in the latest exhibition in the Jeppson Idea Lab series, which goes behind the scenes in the institution’s conservation lab.

The companion paintings, titled William James and Elizabeth James, were painted in 1744. Purchased by the museum way back in 1910 from a London art dealer, the pair was on display for nearly 100 years before they were taken down to make way for gallery renovations in 2008. When curators realized the paintings, thought to be in good condition, had never been examined by conservation experts, they seized the chance to take a closer look at the beloved canvases.

As an architect, Gene Kaufman doesn’t typically save buildings; he designs them.

But when he heard of plans to change Paul Rudolph’s celebrated but shuttered government building in Goshen, N.Y., as part of a renovation plan, he decided to step in.

“To lose a building like this would be a tragedy,” said Mr. Kaufman, a partner at Gwathmey Siegel Kaufman Architects in New York City.

He has offered to buy and restore the 1967 building, which architecture experts hail as a prime example of raw Brutalist style and others consider an eyesore in a town known for its historic harness-racing track and Greek Revival, Federal and Victorian houses.

Louisville's Speed Art Museum has hired a veteran curator from New Orleans to manage its contemporary art collection when it re-opens in spring 2016. Miranda Lash, who currently works as the curator of contemporary works at the New Orleans Museum of Art, will start her new job next month, according to the Speed Art Museum.

The Speed is currently undergoing a $60 million renovation and expansion project, which has closed the main museum building for construction until 2016.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art and architect Frank Gehry have unveiled a comprehensive renovation and expansion plan for the institution’s landmark building. Thanks to the exhibition “Classic Modern: Frank Gehry’s Master Plan for the Philadelphia Museum of Art,” visitors can catch a glimpse of the design, which involves adding 78,000-square-feet of gallery space to the museum without altering its celebrated facade. Through large-scale models, site plans, and renderings, the exhibition will help patrons visualize and understand the plan that Gehry has been developing with his creative team since 2006.

While Gehry is best known for his expressive, sculptural buildings, such as the curvilinear Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, his approach to the Philadelphia Museum of Art is considerably less dramatic. The project involves transforming the museum’s interior by renewing beloved spaces, such as the Great Stair Hall, and improving how visitors enter and move through the institution.

A world-class art museum tucked among the hills of Western Massachusetts: That’s the ambitious goal of the new Clark Institute.

To give it its full proper name, it’s the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. The Clark has been around since 1955, but you’d have to say it’s being truly reborn in 2014.

The new Clark has been so radically revamped and enlarged that it feels like an entirely new place. It has grown by almost 100,000 square feet of space, and most of its old space has been or is being renovated. Once isolated and inward-looking, the Clark now reaches out like a new guest at the party to become an integral part of the great landscape of the Berkshires. After 14 years of planning, designing, and building, it’s set for its grand reopening on July 4.

The reopening of Paris's Picasso museum after an extensive five-year renovation has been pushed back by a month to October 25, France's Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti said Monday.

The museum, which houses one of the world's most extensive collections of the Spanish master's work, had initially closed for a two-year renovation and its reopening has been deferred several times.

Filippetti said the delay was to ensure "good security conditions" to display the works. The reopening will coincide with the 133rd anniversary of Picasso's birth.

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor has rejiggered his masterplan for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art‘s (LACMA) campus to avoid the neighboring La Brea Tar Pits. When the original designs for the massive, $650-million overhaul of LACMA’s disjointed group of buildings was announced last year, the administration of the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits raised objections and claimed that the Zumthor plan would block rainfall and sunlight on the geological tourist destination and still-active paleontological research site rich with Ice Age fossils.

The new plan, as Jori Finkel writes for the New York Times, calls for a building that keeps its distance from the tar pits, instead stretching across Wilshire Boulevard to land on a lot currently used for parking.