Displaying items by tag: acquisition

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei co-designed the Beijing National Stadium or "Bird's Nest" for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.

The dissident and human rights' activist also has been imprisoned repeatedly by the Chinese government.

ArtReview in Oct. 2011 declared him "the most powerful artist in the world," placing him in the No. 1 slot on its annual Power 100 list of the world's most influential figures in contemporary art.

Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park has acquired a work by Weiwei, one of the world's most venerated and vilified artists working today.

Shopping today so often involves hardly lifting a finger, except to click a mouse to order a product — any product — online and have it shipped to your home.

But acquisition used to be an art, according to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, where people went out, surveyed things, discovered trends, and compared goods before taking them home.

Before industrial mass production, purchasing took much more skill and effort, and was often the result of complex negotiations between maker and shopper,” noted Dr Mary Laven, from the History Faculty of the University of Cambridge. “The most significant things in life were not bought and sold off the shelf, but were handcrafted in homes and workshops, customized for their owners.”

The Walker Art Center, which is 75 years old this year, has acquired around 4,000 objects amassed by the late Chinese-American artist Martin Wong. The artist Danh Vo turned the hoard into an installation, "I M U U R 2," for a solo show at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2013 after winning its Hugo Boss Prize.

When the Walker bought the piece last September, it fulfilled Vo’s hope that the trove would enter a museum. The Danish-­Vietnamese artist made the work from the bric-a-brac that Wong had collected over four decades: Chinese teaware, calligraphy, Disney figurines, and assorted Americana alongside Wong’s own paintings.

Museum-goers are anticipating this fall’s debut of the Louvre Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, part of a long-term cultural agreement with the French government. One recent acquisition may surprise visitors: Museum officials in Abu Dhabi say they have paid Los Angeles’s Armand Hammer Foundation an undisclosed sum for a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington.

The 1822 painting shows the first American president sitting at a desk, one hand resting on a document, the other cradling a sword hilt. Other Washington portraits by Stuart have sold for around $8 million, according to dealers and auction records.

On Friday, February 6, 2015, the Blanton Museum of Art announced that it will acquire and construct Ellsworth Kelly’s only building. Kelly, an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with Color Field painting, hard-edge painting, and Minimalism, conceived the stand-alone structure in 1986 for a private collector. At the age of 91, he is finally seeing the project come to fruition.

Austin, a 73-by-60-foot stone building, will be constructed on the museum’s grounds at the University of Texas at Austin. The structure will feature luminous colored glass windows, a totemic wood sculpture, and fourteen black-and-white stone panels in marble -- all designed by the artist.  Kelly has gifted the Blanton the design concept for the work, including the building, the totem sculpture, the interior panels, and the glass windows. Once it is complete, Austin will become part of the museum’s permanent collection. The Blanton has launched a campaign to raise $15 million to realize the project and has received commitments totaling $7 million.

The splendidly sturdy "Miss Bentham," a painting by the American George Bellows which was once owned by Andy Warhol, has become the first nude acquired by the renowned collection of the Barber Institute in Birmingham, where she joins works by Botticelli, Rubens, Van Dyck, Van Gogh, and Picasso.

It is only the second work by the painter, regarded as one of the greatest of early 20th-century American artists and much better known for his gritty urban and brutally realistic boxing scenes than for naked ladies, to enter a British collection.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has announced the acquisition of five major French paintings as a bequest from a longtime supporter.

The works are a late Cezanne painting of Mont Sainte-Victorie, a Manet still life of fruit, a landscape and cityscape by Pissarro and a Morisot portrait. All were a bequest from Helen Tyson Madeira, who died last year.

The museum also announced that it had received two early portraits by Marcel Duchamp.

The Spanish newspaper "El Confidential" has reported that the Museo del Prado has purchased a Renaissance triptych, depicting the birth and adoration of Jesus, for €4 million.

The artist behind the piece remains unidentified, but experts have deduced it was painted in around 1450 in Castilla, Spain. It previously belonged to the Álvarez Fisa Collection.

A 200-year-old chandelier made for the summer palace of Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother and King of Westphalia from 1807 to 1813, has a new home. The chandelier, created by the German firm Werner & Mieth in 1810-1811, has been purchased by the Toledo Museum of Art for its collection.

The Spiral Chandelier is made of cast, chased and fire-gilded bronze armature hung with cut and polished glass pendants.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced Tuesday its intention to lend more than 130 pieces of its Islamic art collection to a museum under construction in Saudi Arabia.

The King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture,  scheduled to open in 2016, will show the LACMA pieces along with a new acquisition, a never-before shown 18th century room from a home in Damascus, Syria.