Category: visual

Logos may seem insignificant, but they have a major impact on the way people think about a company or an institution, or whether they think about it at all. So when Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art decided it needed a new logo, it was a major project.

Groups advocating the return of art looted by the Nazis in World War II have made great progress in recent years, but the battle is far from over. Just identifying looted art is a major undertaking: “One thorny issue is just how many looted items could have made their way to American museums. Under scrutiny are objects that were created before 1946 and obtained by a museum after 1932. Other criteria are whether the piece was in Europe at that time and whether ownership changed between 1932 and 1946.”

The city of Berlin plans to return a 1913 painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to the heirs of the Jewish family who lost it to the Nazis in World War II. The painting, which depicts a Berlin street scene, is valued at $12.5 million, and has hung in Berlin’s Brücke Museum since 1980.

“The summer group show wars are raging in [New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.] Over the last few years they have become something of an annual rite. Starting in late June and continuing through August, the solo shows drop off and the group shows — four or more artists — proliferate. The densely packed yet oddly discrete parallel universes in which galleries exist for most of the year lose some of their definition… It is open season for cool hunting and power gathering. Hipness prevails over blue-chipness.”

“The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has agreed to return to the Italian government artifacts long suspected of being looted, according to a tentative agreement announced today. In exchange, Italy will loan the MFA objects from the country’s vast holdings of antiquities, and work with the museum to make sure the MFA does not acquire stolen works in the future.”

Since going on public display at New York’s Neue Gallery, Gustav Klimt’s 1907 masterpiece “Adele Bloch-Bauer 1” has been drawing crowds and controversy in roughly equal measures, with the latter sparked by the Neue’s quickly abandoned plan to charge visitors $50 to view the Klimt. But despite the Neue’s course correction, the outrage over the steep admission price has spread, and a much-needed debate over what it costs to gain admission to New York’s various museums and galleries is now well underway.

Colorado’s Clyfford Still Museum has named five prominent architectural firms as finalists in the race to design the museum’s 30,000-square foot headquarters. When completed, the privately funded museum will house 2,100 of Still’s works, donated to the city of Denver by the artist’s widow. A final decision on the architecture is expected in early November.

“The first Europeans went [to Africa] to exploit the continent and were soon followed by artists excited by the ‘primitive’. But, as a new exhibition shows, the images they produced bear the stamp of colonialism with a paint brush… Our view of Africa has been an inheritance of 19th-century colonialism, dominated by biological determinism, by repressed and perverse sexuality, and by paintings and sculptures that ignored the realities of the place and time in favour of a romanticised and polemical vision.”

The Chicago Art Institute is protesting a caption and characterization of one of the museum’s artworks in the New York Times. The museum says that contrary to a Times caption, “a landscape painting by Gustave Courbet long owned by the Art Institute of Chicago was never found to have been confiscated by the Nazi regime in Germany during World War II.”