Category: visual

“During Sir Mark Jones’s directorship, the museum underwent a £120 million refurbishment that saw it open a new wing of Medieval and Renaissance galleries. Visitor numbers, the gallery said, are now at the highest level in its 150-year history.”

“At least since architect Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, back in 1997, it seems we’re always being told that the museum itself, not its contents, is the real work of art. Not at the MFA. This is a building where the art is thoughtfully displayed in an architectural setting that doesn’t call attention to itself.”

“Aside from illustrating some of the glaring differences between jurisdictions when approaching copyright protection and infringement, the trial illustrates, perhaps more significantly, the problem of balancing an artist’s rights of authorship (as inherited by their estate) against the freedom of expression of museum curators and other creators; in this case, photographers.”

“MFAB’s new American wing helpfully exposes the cracks in traditional thinking about American art. Maybe those fractures will give the museum some good ideas on how to represent art’s 20th century.”

“The Philadelphia Museum of Art has acquired more than 3,000 photographic images by the pioneering modernist Paul Strand, catapulting the museum into the front ranks of worldwide photography meccas, and creating the greatest single repository of Strand’s work anywhere.”

Led by a pair of Dutch artists, residents of the favela of Santa Marta have covered the exteriors of 34 buildings with swathes of vibrant color. The project has brought local and international attention to the area as well as providing some jobs and improving morale.

“Unbeknownst to most residents of 64 Aleja Solidarnosci (Solidarity Boulevard) – a drab gray Communist block near Old Town in Warsaw – an apartment on the top floor is one of the most important places in Poland’s avant-garde art history.”

“The muscular figures in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment fresco in the Sistine Chapel were based on male prostitutes he encountered in homosexual bathhouses and brothels, an Italian art historian has claimed.”

“After a saga that spanned two continents, featured characters ranging from a Pittsfield thief to a British sleuth of stolen art, and culminated in the 2008 conviction of a Watertown lawyer-turned-artist, the last two of the missing paintings were returned.”

“Now that the late Frances Brody’s other heirs have received their shares of her fortune, the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens has a much clearer idea of its own windfall from the L.A. art patron’s estate: a gift expected to easily exceed $100 million.”