Category: visual

“In a case of life imitating art, the renovated museum, with a clear glass floor-to-ceiling wall looking out onto West 54th Street, gives its 10,000 daily visitors a bird’s eye look into the upmarket apartments across the road. Even in a city where gazing into other people’s apartments is an acceptable pastime, the residents of West 54th, who include the former Beatle Paul McCartney, have had enough.”

Two big French museums are opening satellite branches. “The Louvre is to open a $100 million satellite in the northern French city of Lens, near Lille, in 2009 and will occupy a new annex at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta for three years from 2006. Still, the Louvre’s director, Henri Loyrette, has said he considers Britain’s Tate to be a closer role model than the Guggenheim. The Tate, founded a century ago on London’s Millbank, now runs three other museums in Britain, but it has no permanent presence abroad. In contrast, while the Pompidou will inaugurate a new $68 million branch in the northeastern French city of Metz in 2007 it is also looking beyond France.”

A number of 17th Century paintings worth 10 million euros were stolen from a Dutch museum Sunday. “Up to 20 Dutch paintings and numerous silver items were taken during the Sunday night break-in at Westfries Museum in Hoorn. ‘The heart of our collection is gone, including top artworks of national importance’.”

Painting became the unloved orphan child of the art world in the 20th century, derided by critics as passe and insufficiently adaptable in an age when everything in art had to be new and exciting. But these days, painting is hot again, to the extent that it seems absurd for anyone ever to have suggested its impending demise.

Art thief Stephane Breitweiser was sentenced to 26 months in prison this weekend, one day after attempting suicide in his jail cell. Breitweiser will have to pay significant damages for works ruined by his ax-wielding mother, who was also sentenced to prison.

“If Fallingwater in Pennsylvania is Frank Lloyd Wright’s greatest work, then a house he designed in this Cleveland suburb is one of his most livable. Owner Paul Penfield has opened up the Louis Penfield House to guests after spending four years restoring it to the architect’s original vision. It is one of three Wright houses in the United States — and the only one outside of Wisconsin — that allows visitors to spend the night.”

Baltimore’s much anticipated new museum of African American art and culture finally has an official opening date, after months of delays and setbacks. The Reginald F. Lewis Museum will open to the public on June 25 as the second-largest museum of its kind in the U.S.. The state of Maryland will pick up the tab for 75% of all operating costs for the museum’s first year of operation.

Finally, at 75, Frank Gehry is building himself a house. “It is the work of a man who has achieved a measure of inner peace – someone who no longer feels a need to rage against established institutions. Yet it is anything but complacent. Its lightness of spirit is a testament to Mr. Gehry’s creative stamina at a point in life when many architects of his stature are content to recycle well-tested formulas. If only as an example of his willingness to venture into unexplored territory, it will undoubtedly rank as one of his most important works.”

In 1972, Louis Kahn designed a memorial to FDR on New York’s Roosevelt Island. It never got built, and now the city is considering another plan for the site. But “devotees of Roosevelt and of Kahn are hoping that it is not too late to reconsider Kahn’s 2.8-acre memorial as part of the 14-acre site. With renewed interest in the art of memorial-making (because of plans for ground zero) and in the work of Kahn (because of a film made last year by his son, Nathaniel), the time is finally ripe, they say, to realize Kahn’s plan.”

The new MoMA is so much larger, it has reinvented itself. But this very ambitious museum has a problem. “If it continues adventurously to acquire new works, it will soon run out of space —as, in fact, it already has. Yet no other American museum is so generously committed and dedicated to continuing to present international developments in contemporary art. It is clear that selling off valuable parts of the basic collection to make room for novelties, however promising or prestigious, is a form of vandalism. As it now stands, the greater part of the collection should, by moral right, be accorded public landmark status.”