In the catalogue to the current Carnegie Museum of Art exhibition Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750-1900, “the first serious, full-scale examination of the subject of animals in art [and] the first to incorporate scientific materials and concepts,” featuring “not only paintings, sculptures, and photographs, but also natural history displays, zoos, taxidermy, and book illustration,” [...]
27 April 2006 | Modern, Museums
In the Guardian (via Arts Journal), we read that “Stockholm’s Moderna Museet recently asked the government for 50m kronor (£3.7m) to buy new works, exclusively by female artists, to redress the gender imbalance in its collection. ‘When it comes to masterpieces,’ Lars Nittve, the museum’s director, argued in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter last week, [...]
24 April 2006 | Modern, Museums
“The most feline artist in in the history of art,” Toulouse-Lautrec’s lesser-known Montmartre contemporary Théophile Steinlen gets a 120-work show in Madrid which argues for the importance of his immersion in the voyeuristic and proletarian currents of modernity. The catalog includes a translation of Werner Hofmann’s classic article “Caricature from Leonardo to Picasso” (see College [...]
19 April 2006 | Modern, Museums
From Artinfo.com: “It’s the newest acquisition of the Clark Art Institute, an oil painting by Eugene Delacroix dating to the late 1820s that until now has never been publicly displayed … Since the artist’s death in 1863, it has been in the private collection of a single family that bought it at auction … Museum [...]
18 April 2006 | Americas, Museums
From the Washington Post: “David Sellin, 75, an art historian who lectured widely and was curator in the Office of the Architect of the Capitol from 1976 to 1980, died April 11 at Washington Hospital Center. He had lymphatic cancer. Dr. Sellin settled in the Washington area in 1971 after teaching jobs at Colgate and [...]
11 April 2006 | Museums
“Leading up to its highly anticipated October opening, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University has named Catharina Manchanda curator. She replaces Sabine Eckmann, who became the museum’s director in 2005 … German-born, she holds bachelor’s degrees in art history, English and German from the University of Stuttgart and a master’s degree in [...]
10 April 2006 | Modern, Museums
As ArtsJournal notes, the Observer has an interesting article on the V&A’s new modernism show: “Modernism absorbs a lot of body blows these days, and one UK critic recently claimed that the art movement was responsible for ‘more human misery than anything else in history.’ Hyperbole aside, though, was modernism really a bad thing? ‘The [...]
30 March 2006 | Museums
“For the first time, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen … has opened up his private art collection. Twenty-eight works, some not seen in public for more than 50 years, will be on display under the same metallic, multihued Frank Gehry-designed roof that holds some of the other cool stuff that Allen has collected. Down the hall [...]
24 March 2006 | Museums, Renaissance
A new Antonello da Messina exhibition is “offering experts a unique opportunity to view most of his oeuvre together. Of the 45 surviving masterpieces attributed to Antonello da Messina, 37 of them are on show in the Scuderie del Quirinale … Curated by art historian Martin Lucco, it is the first exhibition devoted entirely to [...]
22 March 2006 | Modern, Museums
Artnet reports that the Whitney Museum “has announced plans for ‘Picasso and American Art,’ Sept. 28, 2006-Jan. 28, 2007. Organized by Michael FitzGerald, a professor at Trinity College in Connecticut and coordinated by Whitney associate curator Dana Miller, the show includes nearly 40 works by Picasso and another 130 works by American artists, largely focusing [...]
20 March 2006 | Islamic, Museums
Art historian Rebecca Smith comments on the recent New York Times article, “Southeast Asia, Too, Is on Map of Islamic Art“: “I’ve realized what really gets me about [Met curator Stefano] Carboni’s statement [that the Met's exhibit of Southeast Asian Islamic art was probably more a cultural experience than an artistic one]. Western Islamic art [...]
17 March 2006 | Books, Contemporary, Museums
Independent curator Harald Szeemann was no mere administrator / catalogue-foreword-writer, but rather an art-world Macher, a creative author of exhibitions, and he practically invented the role. So writes Hans-Joachim Müller in his new book-length overview of Szeemann’s career. In the view of the Frankfurter Rundschau‘s Mirja Rosenau, one could go so far as to say [...]
17 March 2006 | Museums
Why did the Nazis allow the museum to continue its operations and even undertake an historic expansion? According to the Prague Daily Monitor, “There are several theories attempting to explain it, but none of them is supported by historical evidence. According to the most frequently used explanation in the post-war era, Nazis planned to establish [...]
16 March 2006 | Asia, Islamic, Museums
From the New York Times: “What is Islamic art? Can it embrace art and artifacts from Southeast Asia, where Islam has been a dominant religion since the 15th century but whose lush tropical lands were largely cut off from the inspirations of the Ottoman, Persian and Mughal empires? … Absolutely, say the curators of a [...]
13 March 2006 | Americas, Museums
From the Washington Post: “a museum official and art historian who was a leading authority on 19th-century American painting, died Feb. 22 … Mr. Hoopes had a particular interest in watercolor painting and coined the term ‘the American medium’ to describe the attraction of U.S. artists to watercolors, particularly in the 19th century. He wrote [...]
Thomas Hoving, who was director of the Met when it purchased the Euphronios Krater, talks to Time Out: “the Getty Museum in Los Angeles has 40,000 antiquities. Of that, I’d say 35,000 are suspect [provenance-wise] … Museums have too much shit anyway! All these pompous museum directors say, ‘We’re the showplace for civilization.’ Bullshit! They [...]
In the February Art History, art historian Peter Vergo laments the disappearance of the traditional exhibition catalogue: “Twenty or thirty years ago, large international exhibitions were usually marked by catalogues, in which items on display were not only reproduced but also discussed at length and in detail. That was partly because, in that more leisurely [...]
8 March 2006 | Ancient, Museums
From the Chicago Tribune: “The increasingly fractious dispute between [Yale] and Peru, involving at least 250 artifacts, is one among many in a recent upsurge of ownership controversies between U.S. museums and foreign governments.” As a result, museums are “devoting more staff and money to researching the objects in their collections with uncertain provenance, or [...]
8 March 2006 | Contemporary, Museums
In this week’s New Yorker, Calvin Tomkins writes: “Having devoted itself for 75 years to nurturing and celebrating American art, [the Whitney Museum] is now willing — or almost willing to concede that there is no such thing. Belief in a native American aesthetic has steadily eroded over the past three decades, as art has [...]
7 March 2006 | Contemporary, Museums
Should Britain regulate the export of contemporary art? Peter Aspden writes that currently “works have to be at least 50 years old for Waverley [rules] to apply. Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, the Chapman brothers: their work sidles silently across the border, and there is nothing we can do about it. Good riddance, I hear many [...]
