Category: visual

“On his watch, LACMA has planned and built one facility, the Resnick Exhibition Pavilion; opened another that was in progress when he arrived, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum; and purchased property along Wilshire Boulevard that could permit further growth.”

“The same anguished questions have tortured dozens of other victims — from celebrities to wealthy collectors to artists and those managing their estates — defrauded of some $120 million by a man some call the Bernard Madoff of the art world, owner of a lavish Upper East Side gallery one luxury magazine called the best in the world.”

“We thought it represented the common man. We were saying that this thing that’s so elitist out there, by coming into the city, had to connect with the common man – and we’re still pushing for that.”

“Matisse’s landmark 1905-06 painting The Joy of Life is … perhaps the pinnacle of the Barnes’ many critically important pictures. The plan is to display it in its own small gallery on the new structure’s second floor. The painting – Matisse’s largest to date when he painted it – has for decades hung in a stairwell, not in a room.” The LA Times critic explains just why this is a crucial detail.

The museum had “asked the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission for permission to construct a permanent food kiosk outside its entrance on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street. Its architects envisioned a sleek alternative to all those blue and yellow umbrellas, one that might possibly propel a few carts to seek alternative feeding grounds down the avenue.”

“Do they have anything to say to the rest of us? Do they deliver any new ideas, or is theirs just a collage of fake names scrawled out in fat letters, ego trips that mean nothing except to the writers and their crews?”

An untitled 1926 oil painting by Juan Gris, “stolen from a St. Louis County home more than six years ago – now valued at up to $1million – has been located in Florida and will be returned, the FBI said Tuesday.”

“Though the displayed projects are tiny forays into massive problems, they raise sticky questions. Do they bandage slums rather than eliminate them? Do such projects work in the long term, and are they replicable?”

Other Modernist pioneers “came from similar [humble] backgrounds, including Le Corbusier, whose father was a watch enameler, yet Rietveld was the only one to be defined by his roots, so much so that he is often dismissed as a carpenter who drifted into design by accident.”