Category: visual

Winning the years-long court battles over its proposed move to central Philadelphia may have been the easy part for the Barnes Foundation. “In the months to come, the Barnes must expand its board, collect $100 million in capital pledges, raise at least $50 million more for an endowment and figure out how to cover its interim operating costs. And while stepping up its fund-raising, the foundation must select an architect and decide how to continue its educational mission.” And as if that weren’t enough, the opponents to the Barnes move haven’t conceded defeat just yet.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is 200 years old this year, and it has been a year of great change at the venerable Philadelphia institution. Bigger isn’t always better, of course, but thr Academy’s considerable expansion seems to have increased its artistic viability as well. “The museum benefits enormously from the addition of six large gallery spaces, with more to come in a few years. The new galleries not only enable the museum to display considerably more of its permanent collection; they have also produced an unexpected dividend. This is a more agreeable marriage between art and architecture, especially in the institution’s historic building.”

Leonardo DaVinci’s Florence workshop may have been discovered by researchers at an Italian military installation. “Italian museum officials are hoping that the discovery of the frescoes and five small rooms where Leonardo might have lived and worked, in a building just off the Piazza of the Santissima Annunziata in central Florence, will help flesh out the life of the artist, inventor and scientist.”

Something about the sight of a lone figure wandering along a remote road was an irresistable inspiration for countless German artists of the mid-1800s. “The early 19th century in Germany was tough on intellectuals; in the wake of the Napoleonic wars and the Congress of Vienna came a fierce persecution of democratic ideas and those who held them, so that to assert one’s ‘German-ness’ as an artist, one’s allegiance to folk culture and local history, was in some ways a radical act.” Inherent in the theme of the lonely exile was “an inwardness, whispering and pleading to be let out.”

Evan Maurer’s impending departure from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Twin Cities’ most visible mainstream museum finds itself at a crossroads. Maurer’s reaction to a city famous for its embrace of modern art was a “populism-with-panache approach to shows and collecting” for the formerly staid and decidedly unsexy MIA. “He led the nation in collecting American Indian artifacts as art, helped set up an important French-American museum collaboration, oversaw two expansions of the Minneapolis museum’s building and was, at his peak, a money-raising powerhouse.”

Chicago’s Millenium Park made a big splash when it debuted in the heart of the Second City last summer. But winter has brought a whole new character to Chicago’s downtown gathering place, and “on Sunday afternoon, park organizers will add to the park’s dazzling array of attractions by kicking off a series of free concerts on the stage of the Frank Gehry-designed Pritzker Pavilion.”

The Whitney Biennial will be curated for the first time by two Europeans in 2006, with British-born Whitney curator Chrissie Iles teamed with Frenchman Philippe Vergne, senior curator at the Minneapolis-based Walker Art Center. “Both curators say it is too early to give any specific details about the direction the biennial will take or what themes, if any, will be addressed. Nor do they know if works will be shown in Central Park, as in the last two biennials.”

“The European Central Bank, seeking a home worthy of its growing stature in the financial world, on Thursday awarded the design of its new headquarters here to a Viennese firm, Coop Himmelb(l)au, which proposed a bold pair of twisted towers linked by a soaring atrium… Design professionals were pleasantly surprised by the choice, saying that the bank’s headquarters would be a landmark on Frankfurt’s skyline – perhaps even a powerful symbol of Europe’s economic integration – provided it was not watered down too much during the building process.”

“Offering a major surprise, the City of Chicago on Friday will announce winners in its international design competition for pedestrian bridges along the lakefront, choosing a bold new look for the North Avenue Bridge instead of a plan that would have echoed the gently curving profile of the existing bridge.” Among the winners are a boomerang-shaped bridge with solar-powered lighting, two S-shaped specimens, and a curving suspension bridge. Each bridge will cost several million dollars to build, and construction is slated to begin in 2007.

It’s been ten years since San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art opened in a new building. “Beyond the flaws and virtues that were on display from the start, the building’s craftsmanship shines more clearly with age. And it is now self-evident that Swiss architect Mario Botta designed with an eye to the future, not just the opening-day crowd and critics.”