Category: visual

“Somewhere a great collection of 20th-century Mexican art has been hidden. The works, by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and their contemporaries have been removed from a museum in Cuernavaca, about an hour south of [Mexico City], until further notice as a legal battle unfolds over the collection’s rightful ownership.”

“Christie’s International sold for 10 pounds ($15.40) an artwork earmarked to fetch 2,000 pounds at its auction of Russian art in London, summing up the mood at yesterday’s sale which missed the low forecast by almost half. Nikita Lobanov-Rostovsky’s hand shot up when [the] auctioneer … gestured toward the piece ‘Troika Leaving the Farmstead’ and asked, ‘Will anyone give me 10 pounds?'”

The U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security is now involved in a dispute over the Ka-Nefer-Nefer burial mask, a 3,200-year-old golden relic which was recorded in storage in Egypt in 1959 but somehow wound up being acquired – apparently legally – by the St. Louis Art Museum in 1998.

“From the tracks of the High Line – the derelict elevated railway on New York’s Lower West Side currently being transformed into a mile-and-a-half-long ‘park in the sky’ – this most bustling of cities seems suddenly quiet and still…”

“But unlike the ancient Colossus, which stood 34 metres high before an earthquake toppled it in 226BC, the groundbreaking work of art is slated to be much taller and bigger. […] [I]n the spirit of the 21st century the new Colossus has been conceived as a highly innovative light sculpture, a work of art that will allow visitors to physically inspect it by day as well as enjoy – through light shows – a variety of stories it will ‘tell’ by night.”

“A Museum of Conflict in Libya? Not before time you might say. The London-based Metropolitan Workshop … has won a closed competition to design this very building close to the Hall of the People in Tripoli’s west end.”

“Finally, justice for Henri Matisse’s ‘Le Mur Rose.’ The oil painting, which was stolen from a rich German Jewish family sometime after 1937 and kept by a Nazi officer responsible for delivering poison gas to Auschwitz, is to be given Thursday to a British charity that supports medical rescue in Israel.”

“The economic downturn has prompted the Newseum, the sprawling attraction on Pennsylvania Avenue NW that opened in April, to reduce its staff of 250 employees by 10 percent, the institution has announced. … The museum is a private operation financed largely by the Freedom Forum, a foundation with significant stock-market investments.”

“I have no idea whether, in this dismal economic climate, the University of California will find the money to build its new art museum here. But if it fails, it will be a blow to those of us who champion provocative architecture in the United States,” Nicolai Ouroussoff writes. “Its contoured galleries, whose honeycomb pattern seems to be straining to contain an untamed world, would make it a magical place to view art.”

“Despite any bad rap for being boring or undervalued, there are still 850 million people coming through the nation’s museums each year. Why? As Philippe de Montebello, former Metropolitan Museum of Art director, says simply, ‘A museum is the memory of mankind.'”