Category: visual

“Paris’ Pompidou Center plans to fill a colorful circus big top with Picassos, Matisses and Calders instead, creating a roving museum to take its masterpieces of modern art to France’s culturally deprived rural regions and rough suburbs.”

In 2003, the contemporary art hothouse opened a big new space in a converted Nabisco factory up the Hudson in Beacon, NY; not long afterwards, Dia closed its exhibition space in New York City. But now, “Dia [has] announced that it will be building a new home in Chelsea, which is now the downtown hotbed of Manhattan art galleries.”

North America is, of course, famous for the brilliant reds, oranges and yellows its trees display in the fall, and East Asia offers its own arboreal spectacular (think of all those Japanese maples). Why do the leaves of Europe offer mostly yellow and brown? The answer, it turns out, has to do with ice ages and mountain ranges.

“Through scanning, the [Scottish] experts can conjure up what objects looked like ages ago, in effect turning the clock back on ancient sites. They can simulate the effects of climate change, urban encroachment or other natural or man-made disasters on those same sites, peering into the future.”

“The Fleisher Art Memorial, home of free and low-cost art classes for its South Philadelphia community for more than a century, has been buffeted by criticism in recent months as it modifies both programs and focus.” Students fear the school will be “refashioned from something unique into ‘a traditional art school.'”

Peter Zumthor “is known to be uncompromising when it comes to his designs, and he exhibits his work rarely. He also tries to maintain an ethical orientation to design and practice, working mainly on public and institutional projects, and repeatedly turning down lucrative offers from developers and private clients.”

“The Museo Guggenheim Bilbao is completing feasibility studies for a satellite near the historic town of Guernica, just 40km east of Bilbao. Local and provincial authorities in the Basque Country anticipate that the new museum would extend the so-called ‘Bilbao effect,'” but the government is wary of spending in this economy.

“With 1,119 pages of drawings and notes, almost all of them in Leonardo’s own hand, the Atlantic Codex is by far the largest set of works by the archetype of universal genius.” Milan’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana is putting all of it on view over the next six years, bit by bit.

“Alfred C. Glassell Jr., founder of Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Co., intended to leave about half of his $500 million estate to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and his will should be honored, a lawyer for the museum said.” Lawyers for Glassell’s daughter say the museum took advantage of an old man.