Category: visual

If Monday morning had gone as planned, the Prairie Art Gallery would have been “filled with visitors, staff and a pre-school class filled with 20 children. But early in the morning, curator Robert Steven noticed one of the central roof beams had cracked and water was trickling into the south end of the building. … It was moments after city workers left the building after checking out what was going on that a third of the roof sagged and smashed to the floor.”

The late philanthropist Paul Mellon gave $218 million and 900 pictures to the National Gallery of Art. “‘We thought of bringing them all together, but we couldn’t,’ said director Earl A. ‘Rusty’ Powell III. ‘There’d have been nothing left in the galleries.'” The museum, which is mounting a Boudin show instead, is one of 19 institutions around the world marking Mellon’s centennial this year.

“Fourteen years after the J. Paul Getty Museum purchased a 4th century BC Greek funerary wreath for $1.15 million from a Swiss art dealer, 17 months after the Greek government formally demanded its return and eight months after the museum agreed to do so, the delicate gold headpiece is about to go home.” Packing the fragile treasure for the voyage has been an adventure in itself….

Two centuries after it abolished slavery, Britain is putting the spotlight on its “deep engagement in the slave trade in earlier centuries and the fundamental role this played in forging the nation’s wealth and power. With the support of the government and a $20 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, national museums and community groups across Britain have begun re-examining what a new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London calls these ‘Uncomfortable Truths.'”

“Three masked men stole a massive block of gold worth more than $2-million (U.S.) from a Japanese museum in a heist police said Monday could have been prevented — if only the curators hadn’t left its showcases wide open.”

The Art Newspaper’s annual list. “For the third year, exhibitions in Tokyo top the list. The show with the highest daily attendance last year was “The Price Collection: Jakuchu and the Age of Imagination” at the Tokyo National Museum in its enormous Heisei wing. It had 6,446 daily visitors: huge, although not as high as the 9,436 the museum averaged in 2005 for its “Hokusai” show. The second most visited show was also in Tokyo, “Leonard Foujita” at the National Museum of Modern Art (6,324 a day).”

The iconic gallery opened in 1942 in New York. “It was an immediate success. The opening night was thronged. There was plenty of publicity, and over the following five years it was in this bizarre fantasy of a gallery – and not in a purist white cube environment – that Guggenheim exhibited the work of younger American painters such as Pollock.”

Leonardo’s The Annunciation arrived safely in Tokyo from Italy’s Uffizi in Florence. “Some 15 specialists took more than an hour to remove the 15th-century painting from a triple-layer protective crate of wood and metal and hang it at the Tokyo National Museum. Plans to send the Renaissance painting to Japan sparked protests in Italian cultural circles, including from the director of the Uffizi, who said the work — which had not left Florence since 1945 — was too fragile to be transported.”

Have today’s leading architects learned the wrong lessons from modernism’s mistakes? “The swing away from the austere modernist credo — form follows function, all else is decadence — was inevitable. But that aesthetic development didn’t have to be combined with a flight from urban planning, although the two issues are intertwined in complex ways.”

“Michael Darling arrived at SAM last July from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where he was associate curator. He came just in time for a mad scramble to get the Olympic Sculpture Park open, quickly followed by his next mad scramble: the reopening of the museum downtown on May 5 and -6, with contemporary art gaining triple its former space and dominating the opening exhibit of gifts honoring SAM’s 75th birthday.”