Category: visual

A piece by Huang Yong Ping was loaned to an exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and then abruptly pulled from the show following a dispute over restoration costs. Then it was quickly sold at auction. “We had already promised the piece to other museums on the exhibition tour so we had to find a work to substitute it. People who behave like this are not interested in art or artists. They are only interested in making money. Museums are powerless to prevent these abuses,”

Willard Holmes steps down as director of Connecticut’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. He’s been there since 2003 and is credited with bringing stability back to the institution. “When you are director, your job is to be the person with the overview. You live your life vicariously through the people working for you – the curators, the directors. I want to go back to being closer to the art.”

Boston College’s McMullen Museum plans to show controversial paintings attributed by some as Jackson Pollocks. “The risk comes with entering what one Pollock historian describes as a ‘swamp’ — the debate over the paintings New York filmmaker Alex Matter found five years ago in a locker rented by his late father, Herbert, labeled as works by Pollock.”

Where did Michelangelo stay while he was working at the Vatican, some 450 years ago? In St. Peter’s itself. “While going through the basilica archives for an exhibit on the 500th anniversary of the church last year, researchers came across an entry for a key to a chest ‘in the room in St. Peter’s where Master Michelangelo retires’.”

New York has seven art fairs opening next weekend: the Art Show at the Seventh Regiment Armory and the Armory Show at Pier 94, which are coinciding for the first time in several years, and five new or newish fairs, Scope, Pulse, the Red Dot Fair, LA Art, and DiVA.

“Is a university’s art an asset that should be traded to support college functions that have nothing to do with art? Should a donor’s wishes ever be second-guessed? If you’re the president of a college with severe financial struggles, is it sacrilegious or simply sensible to look at your museum’s prized O’Keeffe and see green?”

Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowry is one of the highest-paid directors in the US, with salary, bonus and benefits totaling $1.28 million in the year that ended June 30, 2005. But there’s more. “Between 1995 and 2003, that trust paid him a total of $5.35 million — in amounts ranging from $35,800 to $3.5 million a year — aside from the compensation supplied by the museum. Last year, those trust payments attracted questions from the New York State attorney general’s office.”

“Increasingly, many of the best works are in the hands of private collectors, who do not always make their treasures accessible to the public. The New Statesman has tracked down some of the most important artworks nestling in the private residences and offices of collectors, aristocrats and City businesses, where only the most privileged can see them. This trend is on the rise; with public galleries increasingly priced out of the art market, more and more work will disappear from public view.”

A painting by the French master Paul Cézanne, not seen in public for more than 60 years, has been rediscovered in Italy. Francesca Bardazzi, the co-curator of a forthcoming exhibition in Florence, came across the early work in a private collection.

“It is obvious that [this deal] is about petrodollars and military relations. It came from the [French] finance and foreign affairs ministries and [Louvre director] Mr Loyrette, a man of culture, has had to support it even if he doesn’t believe in it.”