Category: visual

Six months ago, the New Orleans Museum of Art was on the verge of launching a $100 million capital campaign and planning a major expansion of its building. Hurricane Katrina and its devastating aftermath, of course, changed everything, although the museum and its collection escaped largely unscathed. Six weeks after the storm, the museum was forced to lay off all but a skeleton staff. Now, the museum’s director finds himself attempting to sketch out a future in a city that may not have one of its own.

As museums around the country struggle to make themselves relevant to a generation raised in front of computer screens and conversant with high-tech gadgetry, some institutions seem to be having more luck than others. In Pittsburgh, which like many mid-sized cities boasts one dominant museum and an array of smaller, more specifically targeted ones, it has been the less prominent museums which have made the most progress in integrating new technologies into their existing collections.

A years-long dispute between the UK and the European Union over art sales and those who benefit from them is coming to a head this month, with the EU set to try and force Britain to accept the “artists’ retail rights levy” already in force on the continent. “Supporters of the levy… say that artists and their descendants should benefit from rising prices, while opponents argue that it will drive business away to nations that do not impose it, such as the United States and Switzerland.” UK officials say that they would be disproportionately hurt by the levy, since the country accounts for better than 50% of the European art market.

Andre Derain painted 30 landscapes of London during two brief visits in 1906 and 1907. Inspired by Claude Monet’s paintings of the River Thames just below the Houses of Parliament, Derain’s works in fact changed the face of landscape painting, and caused a generation of artists to rethink their use of color. “By saturating his London views in colours so fierce it hurts to look at them, Derain was entering into unknown aesthetic territory – territory in which colour had become independent of the form it was used to construct, a pictorial element in the picture subject only to the painter’s expressive intentions.”

“When the BBC commissioned three landmark new buildings it was praised as a patron of cutting edge architecture. But now the architects of two of the projects have been dropped and the third may not even happen… The BBC has hardly been forthcoming about these expensive schemes – understandable, perhaps, considering the regular bashings it has had in recent years – but isn’t it fair to ask what, exactly, it has been doing with the vast sums of the public’s money earmarked for these buildings?”

“The antiquities market appears to be thriving in spite of adverse publicity from the trial in Rome of Marion True, the former curator for antiquities at the Getty Museum in California… At Christie’s £8.2 million antiquities auction this month, its second highest total ever, a 4,000-year-old, 14in statue of a family group made a record for any Egyptian antiquity, selling for £1.6 million to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas… Looking ahead, another local market worth watching could be Greek art of the 19th and 20th centuries. Proceeds from the Greek art sales at Bonhams and Sotheby’s in London have nearly doubled in the past four years, rising to more than £8 million this year.”

“It is not always easy to grasp what Britain’s National Portrait Gallery is for. Is it about fame or the art of portraiture? And, if the former, how to differentiate it from Madame Tussaud’s or a historical [celebrity magazine]? … It was on a different wave of self-confidence that Lords Stanhope, Ellesmere and the others floated the idea of a National Portrait Gallery 150 years ago. They wanted a gallery that would reflect the Whig view of history, a parade of personalities who could fairly be seen as the cultural and political ancestors of what had only recently become an administratively centralised world empire. What they got, and we have still got, is rather different: a gallery that shows art in the service of human individuality.”

Six indictments have been handed down by Norwegian prosecutors in the August 2004 theft of Edvard Munch’s masterpieces, The Scream and Madonna, from an Oslo museum. “Three of those indicted are already in police custody. Five of the suspects are charged with aggravated robbery tied to organized crime, which could result in prison terms of up to 17 years. The sixth is charged with fencing, because he allegedly helped store the stolen paintings. Neither has been recovered.”

Whether for better or for worse, religion is becoming an important global issue once again, and more often than not, matters of faith seem to be fodder for bloody conflict and bad feeling between nations. So a prominent architect who specializes in designing houses of worship can be counted not only as a progressive development, but a profoundly unusual one. But Mario Botta’s driving inspiration goes beyond simple religious faith, and crosses over into a complex and deeply felt belief in “ethical” design.

“Big changes are afoot at the Rodin Museum in Paris. There is a new and more spacious entrance on the Rue de Varenne, and a new and more generously stocked bookshop. Orientating oneself through the gardens and into the main body of the museum in the Hotel Biron feels less bemusing than in the past. What is more, a new director, Dominic Vieville, has just been appointed, and the museum’s 19th-century chapel, closed for restoration for almost a decade, has reopened as a space for twice-yearly temporary exhibitions.”