10 September 2008 | Museums
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis chose the wrong time to announce their new chief curator, the Baltimore Museum of Art contemporary art head, Darsie Alexander. Everyone is now too busy reporting another story, “Ending months of fervid speculation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art reached into its own ranks on Tuesday and chose Thomas P. [...]
The Art Newspaper writes up three new books on Harald Szeeman: “It is now widely accepted that the art history of the second half of the 20th century is no longer a history of artworks, but a history of exhibitions,” states—rather provocatively—the introduction to Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology. A concomitant phenomenon is the emergence of [...]
12 May 2008 | Architecture, Museums
The March 2008 issue of JSAH contains a review by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers of the recent Rizzoli website. (JSAH‘s website indicates that Ballon’s and Alofsin’s editorships are now held by David Brownlee and David DeLong respectively.) Rogers seems inclined to pass judgment on the exhibition’s arguments, but hesitant to follow through. (Its main argument, in [...]
10 April 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
“Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions” is now on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; Bloomberg News has an entertaining short interview with “the Met’s Keith Christiansen, who curated the exhibition with Pierre Rosenberg, the retired director of the Louvre”: Hoelterhoff: In pulling this show together, did you make any discoveries? Christiansen: I think [...]
9 April 2008 | Museums
From Carol Diehl, “Impenetrable prose from the Whitney Biennial“: …It is the problematizing of expectations and formalisms through destruction and transformations that is the heart of the continuing project…. (Todd Alden on Mika Tajima/New Humans) ——————– …invents puzzles out of non sequiturs to seek congruence in seemingly incongruous situations, whether visual or spatial…inhabits those interstitial [...]
2 April 2008 | Museums, Renaissance
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reviews the “Baccio Bandinelli 1493-1560, Dessins et sculptures du Louvre” exhibition now on view at the Louvre. It notes that this is a rare opportunity to reassess the artist, who’s been in disrepute since the Renaissance. His contemporaries starting things off by leaving to posterity “ein Negativbild” of the artist, which [...]
28 March 2008 | Museums
An anonymous correspondent has provided us with an oh-so-slightly satirized version of a week-long diary recently published by MoMA director Glenn Lowry: Monday To Williams College, which has a strong art history programme (I went there), to deliver a lecture about MoMA’s approach to collecting modern art. I love seeing the energy of students who [...]
17 March 2008 | Museums, Renaissance
Fancy a grand tour? This is also a good time to see Renaissance art, with Sebastiano del Piombo in Rome, late Titian in Venice (read more here), Arcimboldo in Paris, our oh-so scandalous man Cranach now arrived in London (read more here, here, here, here, and here), Nethlandish painting on view in Rotterdam, and Ghiberti’s [...]
14 March 2008 | Modern, Museums
If you’re interested in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European painting, you’re in luck. Current exhibitions tackle Courbet, Vlaminck, Vallotton (read here and here), women Impressionists (here and here), and the Barbizon School. Also read here about a lost Cézanne (rough English translation here).
22 February 2008 | Museums
According to The Art Newspaper: the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) has decided to quietly sell its Rockefeller Rooms to make way for a modernisation of its building on upper Fifth Avenue. The two period rooms from the Manhattan townhouse of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller have been the museum’s signature attractions [...]
21 February 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
From the Telegraph: During his lifetime, the Roman painter Pompeo Batoni was among the most celebrated artists in Europe, counting several popes among his patrons as well as Frederick the Great and Catherine of Russia. But only two years after his death in 1787, Sir Joshua Reynolds predicted that Batoni’s name would quickly fall into [...]
18 February 2008 | Crime, Museums
From the Boston Globe: … as one museum after another negotiates deals [to repatriate art], and prosecutors all over the world target the commercial trade in ancient objects, some prominent scholars are drawing a line in the sand, saying that objects belong where they are – that the movement is based on a false reading [...]
15 February 2008 | Museums
In caa.reviews, David A. Levine considers the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings: … Timed to coincide with Rembrandt’s four-hundredth birthday (2006) and the publication of [curator Walter] Liedtke’s masterful two-volume catalogue, Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this impressive exhibition puts on display every one of the [...]
11 February 2008 | Contemporary, Museums
What percentage of art museum collections are on display at any time? If the percentage is too small, should the art travel more so that it can be seen? What about the risk to the works? According to the New York Times, Eli Broad recently made the surprising decision not to give his contemporary-art collection [...]
1 February 2008 | Museums
From Le Monde: The Musée d’Orsay, which is devoted to nineteenth-century art and is one of France’s most important institutions, will have a new chief as of March 7: Guy Cogeval, 52. Formerly the director of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal – he spent nine years there – he was the favorite to replace [...]
22 January 2008 | Museums
The Washington Post and CultureGrrl report that Philip Conisbee has died. According to CultureGrrl, “the British-born French paintings expert may be best remembered for two glorious exhibitions: Georges de La Tour and His World, 1996, the first American exhibition devoted to that artist; and the recent blockbuster Cézanne in Provence, 2006.” According to the Post, [...]
10 January 2008 | Museums
Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello is stepping down. More here: “Director (and Voice) of Metropolitan Museum to Retire” “The Legacy of a Pragmatic Custodian of Human Civilization,” by Michael Kimmelman “Let the Horse Race Begin: The Search for a Successor” CultureGrrl The New York Sun
2 January 2008 | Conservation, Museums
In a recent issue of Studies in Conservation (52:3), Clare Richardson and David Saunders write on “Acceptable Light Damage”: A panel of observers was presented with pairs of reproductions of figurative and abstract oil and watercolour paintings, regions of which had been altered digitally prior to printing to give a known colour difference from the [...]
29 November 2007 | Museums
We read in The Independent: The city of Brussels is to host the largest showcase of European art that the continent has seen, an exhibition that aims to prove how “joined up” its artistic heritage really is. The Grand Atelier: Pathways of Art in Europe from the 5th to the 18th Centuries brings together 350 [...]
8 October 2007 | Africa, Contemporary, Museums
An extended review by Elizabeth Harney in the Summer 2007 Art Journal offers an opportunity to help fill in the gap left by CAA’s recent abortive attempt at a discussion of the ethical issues involved in the collecting and exhibition of contemporary African art. We apologize for quoting at this length from Harney’s review, but [...]
