Category: visual

“The Phillips Collection is expected to announce today that it has received $23.5 million for its endowment in the last nine months, including two of the largest single gifts in the museum’s history… The Phillips has an annual budget of $12 million, with the endowment contributing 7 to 8 percent.”

“The Corcoran Gallery of Art announced yesterday that it will close for seven weeks, starting Jan. 26, for repairs to its old and leaky roof. The project includes the replacement of nearly 50,000 square feet of glass, a hallmark of the original 1897 Beaux-Arts building.”

“Previously unknown sketches have been discovered on the back of a Leonardo da Vinci painting in Paris that experts think may have been drawn by him. The sketches, which were discovered by accident, feature a horse head, part of a skull and baby Jesus with a lamb.”

“New York art dealer Christoph Van de Weghe had eight works by Damien Hirst in his booth at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair earlier this month. He sold only two… The unsold works included an $850,000 cabinet filled with cigarette butts and a blue canvas with 15 butterflies.”

“A curator at the Louvre Museum in Paris has stumbled upon some unknown drawings on the back of a painting by Leonardo da Vinci that look like they might be by the Italian master himself, the Louvre said on Thursday.”

Eli Broad, who has offered to bail out Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, is blasting an alternative plan put forward by LACMA to merge the two museums. “The question, he said, is which bailout carries a stronger guarantee of secure funding for MOCA’s endowment and exhibitions: his $30-million offer or LACMA’s merger proposal, to which no price tag has been publicly attached.”

“Clients in search of iconic statements often hire star architects from out of town to come up with big ideas, while asking local or regional firms to collaborate and carry out details… What happens when such relationships don’t gel? The Cleveland Institute of Art has been finding out with [its] proposed $55 million expansion.”

MOCA’s board of trustees will spend Thursday trying to decide between two options for its future: a merger with LACMA, or a bailout from billionaire Eli Broad. “The lack of a clear direction and uncertainty over who will end up running the museum have stymied additional outsiders from making a firm commitment to help the museum… [and] a change in leadership looks more and more probable.”

“A collection of EH Shepard’s original drawings for the Winnie the Pooh children’s books has fetched £1.26m ($1.92m )at auction, in London.” The auction broke the previous record for a Shepard drawing when one of the artist’s best-loved drawings went for £115,250 ($176,041).

The value of the Getty Trust has plunged by 25% since this summer. In a memo, chief executive James N. Wood has “asked our management team to freeze all hiring. Any requests to replace positions will be subject to my review. I have also asked that promotions and salary adjustments be halted…”