Displaying items by tag: political

Opening on October 2, 2013 at Tate Britain in London, Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm will be the first exhibition to explore the history of physical attacks on art in Britain from the 16^th century to the present day. The show will present famously marred works while exploring the religious, political and aesthetic motives that have provoked these violent acts.

The exhibition will include Statue of the Dead Christ (1500-20), which is being loaned to the Tate by London’s Worship Company of Mercers where the work was discovered beneath the chapel floor in 1954. The work was attacked by Protestants during the Reformation and is missing a crown of thorns, arms and lower legs. It is the first time that the Mercer has loaned the work since it was discovered nearly 60 years ago. John Singer Sargent’s (1856-1925) portrait of Henry James, which was attacked by a suffragette at the Royal Academy in 1914 with a knife, will also be on view. A less violently disgraced work is a portrait of Oliver Cromwell that was hung upside down by a devote monarchist. The work is on loan from the Inverness Museum in Scotland.

Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm will be on view at Tate Britain through January 5, 2014.

The exhibition Photography and the Civil War, which is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, brings together over 200 photographs of the American Civil War. Spread across 11 galleries, the landmark exhibition also includes photographic artifacts and objects from the time period. The portraits of young soldiers, promotional images of political candidates, and landscapes of the blood-soaked battlefields come together to tell the story of a violent four-year war that transformed America forever.

From 1861 until 1865, the American Civil War claimed 750,000 lives and Photography and the Civil War aims to examine the role of photography during this devastating conflict. Organized by the Met’s senior curator, Jeff L. Rosenheim, the exhibition includes loans from renowned private and public collections.

Photography and the Civil War will be on view at the Met through September 2, 2013.

The Brooklyn Museum, which holds a celebrated decorative arts collection, is currently presenting a selection of rarely seen American and European quilts. In fact, only one of the 30-plus quilts on display has been on public view in the past 30 years.

The exhibition titled Workt by Hand: Hidden Labor and Historical Quilts aims to explore the impact of feminist scholarship on the ways in which historical quilts have been and are currently viewed, contextualized, and interpreted. The exhibition goes beyond the connection of quilting to feminism and explores the medium of quilting as an art form and as an aspect of material culture with meaningful social and political undertones.

The quilts on view at the Brooklyn Museum span two centuries and feature iconic designs and techniques including the log cabin style, the Amish sunshine and shadow style, and crazy quilts, which were fashionable during the late 19^th century. A quilt by Mary A. Stinson that is considered one of finest examples of a crazy quilt is included in Workt by Hand.

Workt by Hand aims to shed light on the skill, craftsmanship, thought, and energy that went into quilting; something that was frequently overlooked in a male-dominated society. The exhibition, which is on view through September 15, 2013, includes photographs, newspaper clippings, sample pieces of quilts, and other ephemera relating to the history of quilts.

This past March, the highest court in Germany for civil affairs ordered that 4,300 pre-World War II posters looted by Nazis were to be returned to Peter Sachs, a retired airline pilot. Sachs is the son of Hans Sachs, a Jewish dentist who fled Germany in 1938 after being arrested by Nazis and sentenced to the Saschsenhausen concentration camp.

The poster collection, worth more than $5.8 million, was previously kept at The Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. Sachs started his collection in the late 19^th century at a young age and went on to publish a poster magazine called Das Plakat, found a society, and give lectures on the subject. Unique works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Ludwig Hohlwein, Lucian Bernhard, and Jules Cheret are included in the collection.

At the time of its confiscation, Sachs’ collection was the largest of its kind. When the Gestapo seized the posters in 1938, Sachs was told that Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wanted the works for a new museum wing dedicated to “business” art. Sachs’ collection included advertisements for travel destinations and various products as well as propaganda and political posters.

When Sachs arrived in the U.S. with his wife and young son, he assumed that he would never see his collection again. In 1961 he accepted about $50,000 from the West German government, figuring the works had not survived the war. In 1966 when Sachs learned that some of his collection was still intact in East Berlin, he made contact with communist authorities in an attempt to get the posters loaned for exhibitions. He never succeeded.

After Sachs’ death, his son Peter fought a five-year legal battle for the return of his father’s posters after a government panel denied his claim in 2007. The court ultimately ruled that Sachs had never lost legal ownership of the post collection and that Peter, Sachs’ heir, had the right to possession.

Guernsey’s auction house will handle the collections’ sale in three intervals. The first auction is scheduled for January 18, 2013 and the second and third series will take place at six-month intervals. Guernsey’s hopes to find a single buyer for the collection and has been in talks with museums in Germany, Israel, and the U.S.