Category: visual

Conctruction costs for an expansion of the Portland Museum of Art have ballooned from $33 million to $45 million. “The troubled project has prompted a lawsuit against the project architect, tensions among museum trustees and a dose of uncertainty for the institution just as it is getting serious about hiring a successor to John Buchanan, the museum’s departed executive director.”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art says the Duccio painting it bought last year for $50 million is authentic and denies claims by an art historian that it is a fake. The museum says the painting has been “carefully examined… as a matter of course” and that it had “no reason to doubt” the authenticity of Madonna and Child, attributed to medieval artist Duccio.

The University of Chicago and the government of Iran are fighting a U.S. court ruling that aims to compensate victims of a 1997 Jerusalem bombing by auctioning off a rare collection of Persian tablets.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has acquired a series of nine studies by Andrew Wyeth. The studies are a gift from Wyeth’s family, who were impressed enough by a private tour of the museum’s Wyeth retrospective to offer up the additional works, which show “how Wyeth’s thinking evolved before he arrived at the final eerie image of a place setting absent a diner” in his painting, Groundhog Day, which is part of the museum’s permanent collection.

“The Van Gogh Museum said it bought 55 letters written by Vincent van Gogh that give important information about the 19th Century painter’s worldview and development of his artistic thought. The letters were written by van Gogh to fellow artist Anthon van Rappard from 1881 to 1885, when van Gogh was undergoing major transformations in his conception of art and his skill as an artist. Officials from the Amsterdam museum did not say how much the museum paid for the letters, but… a manuscript expert at Sotheby’s auction house put their value in the millions.”

“Thanks to podcasting, it’s becoming as easy to download a museum visit onto a portable digital audio player as it is a pop tune. And museums, realizing this is a way to reach a younger generation of potential patrons, are racing to get involved. They are making their in-house audio tours of special exhibits, as well as original programming, available on their websites for free use on iPods and other MP3 players. And art lovers can listen through their home computers as well. There’s even a newly coined term for the phenomenon – ‘artcasting’.”

“Every art institution here seems so dazzlingly meticulous and thought out, with their clean, uncluttered galleries, thorough exhibitions and, often, interesting yet unobtrusive architecture. Museum shops featuring mostly (gasp) catalogs and postcards, and the sense of physical hospitality alone can amaze, as with the leather armchairs in which you can read, doze or watch people in the upstairs lobby of the Basel Kunstmuseum. It’s easy to feel that museums back home have a lot to learn.”

When the Metropolitan Museum bought Duccio’s Madonna and Child last year for a reported $50 million, the painting was hailed as a masterpiece. Now James Beck, a leading art historian and Professor of Art History at Columbia University in New York, believes that the painting, which the Met dates to 1300, is not by Duccio at all. “It is a fake based upon indications found in works by or associated with Duccio. It is not even a good forgery.”

Christie’s has been hyping the sale of an expensive Picasso owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber. But maybe it’s not a very good Picasso. “Lloyd Webber recently suggested to Bloomberg that his sale announcement would be ‘the biggest news in the art market in 30 years.’ Why does it matter if someone actually falls for such hype? After all, the proceeds will reportedly go to a good cause—the education of young performers. The problem is that feverish prices pose a threat to the longterm health of the art market. The acquisition of lesser works for exorbitant amounts is the art trade’s version of ‘irrational exuberance.’ It can only set the stage for the next correction.”

While Americans celebrated the reopening of Washington’s National Portrait Gallery, plans for a Canadian portrait gallery have been languishing. “If the U.S. National Portrait Gallery’s reopening in Washington is ‘symbolic of the American spirit,’ what does it say about the Canadian spirit that Canada Day, 2006, has passed with completion funding for the Portrait Gallery of Canada still in limbo?”