Category: visual

Forty-five major impressionist paintings from Paris’ Musee d’Orsay have been loaned to the National Gallery in Melbourne, Australia for the summer. It’s rare for the d’Orsay to loan the stars of its collection during the busy summer tourist season. “The Musee d’Orsay has put a warning on its internet site, telling people that if they want to see certain pictures they have to travel to Australia for the next three months.”

The Whitney Museum in New York has chosen Italian architect Renzo Piano to design its upcoming expansion, replacing Rem Koolhaas, whose $200 million design was rejected by the Whitney board last year as too extravagant. Board members say they aren’t looking to create a “destination building,” merely a functional museum, and they applauded Piano’s willingness to work within their parameters.

As the Barnes Collection continues the long, slow legal process required to allow it to move to Center City Philadelphia from the suburban plot it has called home for decades, the case being brought by three Barnes art students in an attempt to block the move seems increasingly quixotic. But the students don’t necessarily lack legal standing, merely the financial wherewithal to pursue their agenda as aggressively as the pro-move forces have done. “To keep up their fight, the students want to raise at least $100,000 to hire expert witnesses for the second weeklong hearing in the case, slated for September in Montgomery County Orphans’ Court.”

“The thief who ‘kidnapped’ a fibreglass sculpture by the graffiti artist Banksy has struck again. AK47, as he calls himself, has removed a Tracy Emin pink neon sign called Just Love Me from outside the Hackney Empire theatre in east London… He also claimed that AK47 was a rapidly growing international ‘arto-political movement’, but was vague about the membership, saying only that it had ‘a lot’.” He plans to return the work by week’s end.

“Some compare it to a globe severed at the Equator. To others it resembles a phosphorescent egg floating in a crystal sea. One prominent Beijing architect said that when the desert dust kicks up around Beijing, lathering the expansive glass dome in a pall of gray grime, it resembles nothing so much as dried dung. But the most apt analogy for the $300 million National Theater of China, now nearing completion in the political heart of Beijing, near Tiananmen Square, may be a hot potato.”

“Pledging to increase its commitment to modern and contemporary art, the Metropolitan Museum is planning a major reorganization of its departments of European painting and modern art, it announced yesterday. Gary Tinterow, 50, the museum’s longtime curator of 19th-century European paintings, will run a new, expanded modern art department, which will include European paintings from 1800 to the present as well as international 20th-century sculpture, drawings, prints, decorative arts and design.”

A new gallery has opened in Brooklyn, showcasing the artwork of one Tillamook Cheddar. Tillie’s works, which consist mainly of semi-random scratch marks and are always executed in blue, yellow, black, or red, “have drawn comparisons to such abstract artists as Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly.” Prices at the gallery range from $40 for a lamp to $1000 for a full-size painting, which sounds quite reasonable, except for one caveat: Tillie is a 5-year-old Jack Russell terrier.

“Three masterpieces painted by El Greco for the same chapel but separated for nearly 400 years went on display together for the first time in Spain yesterday, at Madrid’s Prado museum. The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, a towering altarpiece considered to be one of El Greco’s greatest works, was reunited with two paintings of saints, lit up by her radiance, which the artist designed to flank her.”

The pop art movement is hitting the Pacific Rim in a big way, with the legacy of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein dramatically in evidence among young Asian artists. A combination of encroaching capitalism and the global influence of American popular culture is fueling the movement, but the Asian version of pop art isn’t a perfect mirror of the Western version. “What’s different is the way the Asian artists approach it in their portrayal of identity issues, alternative lifestyles and fashion consciousness of the people.”

Italy is moving ahead with plans to turn over management of many state-owned museums to private companies (an idea strongly opposed by prominent leaders in the world’s museum community). “The proposal to sell State-owned buildings has been contentious, largely because the State does not know in detail what it owns, and the architectural protection lobbies are afraid that masterpieces may be sold to unsuitable owners.”