Displaying items by tag: garden

A new garden-themed art exhibition will tell the intriguing story about Claude Monet and the famous water lily pond that inspired his best-known works.

Monet's later years saw him obsessively paint the lilies in his garden at Giverny, in northern France.

But his artistic legacy could have looked very different had Monet's rural neighbors had their way.

The Frick Collection has yielded.

Facing a groundswell of opposition to a proposed renovation that would have eliminated a gated garden to make way for a six-story addition, the museum — long admired for its intimate scale — has decided to abandon those plans and start over from scratch.

“It just became clear to us that it wasn’t going to work,” said a museum official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the board had not yet made the decision final with a vote.

Guests at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens will encounter an enhanced experience Saturday with the grand opening of the Steven S. Koblik Education and Visitor Center.

Named for the Huntington's outgoing president, the new facilities include the library's first California garden, four multi-use classrooms for visiting students and teachers, a 400-seat auditorium with a state-of-the-art sound system, a colorful orientation room, meeting and event spaces and a large cafe with indoor and outdoor seating and a pizza oven.

"It's one of my favorite places in the world to show my work," glass artist Dale Chihuly said of the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden in Coral Gables, Florida, at the December 6 opening of his sprawling site-specific exhibition.

Throughout the garden's 83 acres, Chihuly and his team set 24 installations of his well-known glass sculptures at various sites—among them: sweeping meadows, palm forests, and a butterfly farm.

Officials at the Frick Collection knew their plan to build a six-story addition to a beloved, landmark, jewel-box museum would draw detractors. But leaders of that Fifth Avenue museum say they didn’t expect it to get so intense so fast.

Since the museum announced its expansion in June, more than 2,000 critics of the plan have signed a petition put together by a consortium of preservation groups that have created a website and given themselves a name: Unite to Save the Frick.

Now, the group says it has found evidence that the museum, whose plan needs city approval, is going back on a promise made in its original landmark review roughly 40 years ago to make permanent a garden by the noted landscape architect Russell Page that is to be destroyed in the expansion.

Diane Keaton is paying Nashville a visit next year.

The Academy Award winner will be the keynote speaker at the 2015 Antiques & Garden Show of Nashville, taking place Jan. 30 through Feb. 1 at Music City Center.

Life with Picasso was never easy, it seems, and neither was the €52 million renovation of Paris's Picasso Museum. After five years of delays and difficulties, culminating in a public quarrel and the firing of its president in May, the museum's reopening is finally set for the artist's birthday, Oct. 25. The public will get a preview of the new interiors, before the artworks are installed, on Sept 20-21. The renovation has doubled the public space, modernized outdated facilities and added a new entrance, a multimedia auditorium and a Cubist garden with geometric topiary trees.

The museum's 17th-century hôtel particulier was built in 1659 by Pierre Aubert, a financier and adviser to Louis XIV. He was also the salt tax collector, and his extravagant mansion was quickly nicknamed Hôtel Salé (salty). The majestic staircase, based on a plan by Michelangelo, is the centerpiece, with delicate ironwork banisters and a sumptuous array of sculpted garlands, cherubs and divinities.

When Aimé Maeght, a French art dealer, lost his young son to leukemia in the 1950s, a trio of formidable modern painters—Georges Braque, Joan Miró and Fernand Léger—persuaded him to turn the family’s summer retreat above the hills of Nice into an artists’ haven. The Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation is 50 years old this month, and still bears abundant traces of the artists who made it happen: a magical Miró labyrinth, mosaics and stained glass by Braque. Its collection of 12,000 works includes 35 sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, as well as masterpieces by Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, Miró, Léger and Alexander Calder, among others. On average, 200,000 visitors tour its colourful galleries and garden every year.

Behind the idyllic exterior, though, the institution is vulnerable. The foundation is finding it hard to raise its €3m ($4m) annual budget.

This summer, fourteen monumental sculptures by Alexander Calder (1898-1976) are taking over the Rijksmuseum’s 'outdoor gallery' for the largest freely accessible outdoor exhibition of his work to date.

Calder (1898-1976) is undoubtedly one of the most celebrated inventors of modern sculpture. His cut-out and colorful abstract objects that move in the air or rest firmly on the ground can be found throughout the world, whether in museums or in gardens and public plazas, ranking him among the first and most prolific sculptors of large-scale outdoor works. This show of his monumental sculptures in the gardens of the Rijksmuseum creates a fascinating landscape of stately abstract forms.

Guest curator Alfred Pacquement, former director of Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou in Paris, has selected mobiles, stabiles, and standing mobiles by Calder from major museums and private collections.

This exhibition is the second in a series of annual international sculpture displays, which will be presented in the Rijksmuseum’s gardens over the next four years, made possible with funding from the BankGiro Loterij and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

WLTX in Columbia, South Carolina reported that antique dealer Michael Whittemore’s van and trailer went missing during an overnight stay in Orangeburg. Whittemore was on his way from Florida to one of the largest industry events of the year, the New Hampshire Antiques Show, when the apparent highjack occurred. The show, which is organized by the New Hampshire Antiques Dealers Association, is scheduled to take place from August 8^th through the 10^th in Manchester.

Whittemore’s white Ford van and 16-foot covered trailer were stocked with early American furniture, folk art, paintings, vintage garden items, weathervanes and other one-of-a-kind objects. Whittemore told WLTX, “It is scary that it has come to this point. That someone has taken all of this I have worked so hard for away from me and it is almost impossible to replace or recoup what I have lost.”

The Orangeburg County Sheriff’s Department in South Carolina is currently investigating the incident.