Category: visual

“About 40 Wikipedia contributors in the London area spent Friday with a ‘backstage pass’ to the museum, meeting with curators and taking photographs of the collection. And in a curious reversal in status, curators were invited to review Wikipedia’s treatment of the museum’s collection and make a case that important pieces were missing or given short shrift.”

The Armenian Apostolic Church of the Americas “has filed a civil lawsuit against the Getty Museum, claiming the institution illegally bought seven pages from a sacred Bible. [The church] claims that the seven pages, which date back to 1256, were ripped from the … Zeyt’un Gospels [manuscript] during the Armenian Genocide.”

“My career in art crime had begun the first month I reported for duty in Philadelphia, when the sculpture that inspired the Impressionist movement was stolen from the Rodin Museum on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.” Then came “a spot in a coveted year-long art history class at the Barnes Foundation in Merion. Some 42 art-crime investigations would follow….”

Historians have differed on where precisely the artist was when he painted Charing Cross and Waterloo bridges in the smog. “Now scientists claim to have solved the puzzle of Monet’s vantage point, using computerised records of the sun’s movement, ordnance survey maps of London and historical weather records.”

“On Wednesday the museum announced a major new exhibition, ‘Abstract Expressionist New York,’ which will include 300 works by 30 artists in the fields of painting, sculpture and photography. Most important, virtually all of the art, created from the 1940s to the ’60s, will come from the museum’s own collection.”

“According to a 14-page legal notice from the public prosecutor’s office in Rome, J. Michael Padgett, 56, antiquities curator at the Princeton University Museum of Art, is a focus of a criminal investigation of ‘the illegal export and laundering’ of Italian archaeological objects.”

“The thing I really loved about Louise Bourgeois was that she wasn’t afraid of her emotions; she wasn’t afraid of being totally female and releasing those kind of emotions into the world through her art as a lot of men have done through history…. [Women] are actually much better at this kind of thing than men, and Bourgeois wasn’t the Queen of this, she was the King.”

Haunch of Venison’s Harry Blain and Graham Southern “founded the original London gallery,” which is now owned by Christie’s and “has locations in New York, London and Berlin. Their departures–in a market where dealers can have as much cachet as artists–raise questions about the direction of the gallery amid a possible expansion.”

“The Rue Louise Weiss, an unprepossessing street in southeastern Paris that was the poster child for the city’s 21st-century contemporary art scene, is drawing its last breath.”