Category: visual

“Thomas Jefferson University said yesterday that efforts by the city to stall removal of Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece The Gross Clinic, which the university has agreed to sell, are an inappropriate, misguided attempt to ‘restrict the University’s control over its own property.’ … On Friday, Mayor Street nominated The Gross Clinic, owned by Jefferson since 1878, for protection as a ‘historic object’ under the city’s historic-preservation ordinance.”

UK artists have voted Lucien Freud as their favorite in a survey. Freud “beat the likes of Rembrandt and Van Gogh – who also made the top ten – to become the artists’ favourite artist.”

What’s next for the Museum of Modern Art? How about another major expansion? “Several developers are in preliminary discussions with MoMA, [says director Glenn Lowry], “about the possibility of constructing a mixed-use building that would combine private commercial functions with more space for MoMA, probably to be used as galleries.”

“Germany’s culture minister and top museums called Monday for more transparency in the return of paintings stolen by the Nazis, responding to concerns that the nation’s galleries risk losing scores of valuable and popular works.”

Law enforcement officers say the thieves who stole Goya’s now-recovered “Children With a Cart” from a Howard Johnson motel parking lot likely weren’t looking for it. ” ‘This time of year, close to Christmas, they probably thought they’d found a truck filled with PlayStations and broke in and started looking for the biggest-looking box,’ said Steve Siegel, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the spokesman for the bureau’s Newark office.”

“Several years ago the artist Nina Katchadourian found herself staring up at the sky full of office windows in Times Square and thinking about the faceless occupants behind them. ‘You think, “My God, all those anonymous people up there, living and working,” ‘ she said. ‘There’s this sense of so much detachment between interior and exterior.’ With the cooperation of one of those anonymous people and the help of the Public Art Fund, Ms. Katchadourian is now trying to build a bridge — or at least, as she says, stretch a tenuous thread — between those two worlds.”

Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman is reinventing the museum. But “Lehman crossed a line in his relations with the art world this summer when he reorganized the Brooklyn Museum’s curatorial staff –– dividing it into two teams, one for collections and the other for exhibitions. Some saw this as an effort to centralize power and thus pursue his vision for the museum more efficiently. By October, two senior curators and two board members had resigned out of frustration with the museum’s direction. It seems a good time to ask: Setting aside the question of Mr. Lehman’s popularity (or lack of it) in the arts community, will his approach work?”

Buffalo has restored a Frank Lloyd Wright building, and is working on resurrecting (and completing) others. “Around the country, 15 Wright projects have been erected posthumously, but the Martin House structures are thought to be the first Wright designs rebuilt at their original locations after demolition, said archivist Margo Stipe of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.”

“Whatever’s happened, Robert Rauschenberg’s famous ‘gap between art and life’ has turned into a new vividly dissonant gap between inner and outer life. Despite what’s happening in the outside world, in our studios or in front of artworks we experience moments of genuine stillness, intensity, and meaningfulness—places on the edge of language that the world can’t strip away.”

The painting had been stolen from a truck en route from Toledo to New York City. “The FBI said extensive media coverage of the theft led to tips that enabled the agency to recover the painting. But the agency did not reveal when, where or how the painting was recovered, citing an ongoing investigation.”