Displaying items by tag: medals

Kimbell Art Museum curator and former National Gallery intern C.D. Dickerson has been named curator and head of sculpture and decorative arts at the National Gallery of Art, the museum announced Thursday.

Beginning July 27, Dickerson will oversee a collection of more than 3,500 works of European and American sculpture, decorative arts and medals. He succeeds Mary Levkoff, who left in July to become the director of Hearst Castle in California.

Think Victorian sculpture, and our minds immediately jump to Frederic Leighton’s athlete wrestling a python, one of the highlights of the Tate collection. It features in this exhibition and is a good benchmark for what Victorian sculpture was like — visually striking and with all the subtlety of a jewel encrusted pastoral staff, which happens to be another item on display in this show.

The show starts off slowly with medals, coins and busts of Queen Victoria made from different materials, but from then on in there is a selection of some breathtaking artifacts and sculpture.

A Napoleonic medal cabinet has been saved from export from the UK after a successful fundraising campaign to buy it for the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London.

In January, on the recommendation of a reviewing committee administered by Arts Council England, the British government decided to defer granting an export license for the cabinet until July, allowing the V&A time to raise the required sum of £534,000.

The Dallas-based auction company, Heritage, will host a number of sales featuring objects from Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s (1841-1919) personal archive starting on September 19, 2013 in New York. Items include the artist’s eyeglasses, funeral receipts, clothing, paperwork, photos, medals, statues and books signed by fellow artists. The sale will also include letters and writings by Renoir that detail his travels, inspirations for paintings and relationships with models and dealers.

During the 1970s, Renoir’s heirs moved from France to Canada and then to Texas, taking the artist’s belongings with them. The trove, which will be broken into 150 lots, has been stored in various spots across North America until now. Scholars are hoping that an institutional buyer will step up and make a bulk purchase as the collection holds significant historic value.

The collection was put up for auction once before in 2005 but it failed to sell. Following the sale, anonymous buyers from Arizona purchased the lot. They are now consigning the works to Heritage.

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.