Category: visual

Austin, Texas’ Blanton Museum opens a new $83 million gallery. “For a museum that claims one of the country’s oldest and largest Latin American collections and a vast selection of prints, the upgrade could not be more welcome. Previously the Blanton’s displays were crammed into a bland, boxlike area in the university’s art building. At least that was its own space: until 2001, the collection occupied two floors of the humanities research center.”

Charles Saatchi has launched a new section on his website where artists can post samples of their work. “Saatchi’s website has a healthy readership with a daily online magazine, London gallery listing, reader-contributed essays and discussion forums devoted to debates over issues such ‘what is bad taste in art’?”

“It is unsettling that the first large-scale U.S. exhibition of the work of Donald Judd in almost 20 years has been organized by Christie’s auction house. Not because this isn’t a museum, although this fact gives pause. What’s unsettling is this isn’t a show at all. It’s a sale—some would say an unnecessary one.”

The British government is to compensate relatives of a man whose drawings were stolen by the Nazis. The drawings are in the British Museum. “Relatives of Dr Arthur Feldmann are to receive £175,000 after a special panel decided they had ‘firm evidence’ that the works had been seized in 1939. The family says the Old Master drawings can stay in the British Museum. The panel has asked the government to introduce laws permitting the return of objects plundered during the Nazi era.”

Glasgow’s much loved Kelvingrove gets a radical makeover. And does it work? “It’s as full-on educational as I have ever seen in a museum. A Victorian painting is shown in various stages of cleaning. There are panels explaining pentimenti and underpainting, why paintings look the way they do, all using actual objects from the collection. My initial reaction is that this is quite a lot to take in, but it is a good way to start people off on art appreciation, and most importantly it captures the imagination and makes you want to see the works in the following rooms, probably now in a new light.”

“Contemporary art in China has matured from the days when it was mainly imitative of the Western avant garde. The number of artists has spiked. Yet the crackdown on political art shows that official lines continue to be drawn firmly when it comes to the sacred goods of the nation, and that no political images or themes that are unapproved may be shown – even in relatively secluded places like Dashanzi, visited mainly by foreigners and a self-selecting group of educated Chinese.”

Turkey has made a claim on a stele in the British Museum. “The basalt stele, dating from the first century BC, depicts a relief of Herakles greeting the sun-god, with a Greek inscription on the reverse.”

“Italian prosecutors on Wednesday named a New York art gallery as a key link in what they say was a vast conspiracy to market stolen artifacts that allegedly involved a former J. Paul Getty museum curator on trial here.”

West London was shut down Wednesday as police checked out five suspected nail bombs. Then a woman stepped forward to eay they were part of her art. “Some of the packages were cardboard boxes containing soft toys and training shoes with nails sticking out of them. A 36-year-old local woman was held on suspicion of causing a public nuisance.”

“Some of the greatest hits in art history are coming to Sotheby’s and Christie’s in Manhattan this weekend: a van Gogh portrait of Madame Ginoux; a 1941 Picasso painting of his mistress Dora Maar with a black cat perched on her shoulder; and a haunting 1902 Blue Period Picasso of Germaine, one of his earliest muses…”