Category: visual

To avoid letting important artwork be bought and shipped out of Britain, Britons have bought many artworks over the past century. The Saved! show at the Hayward Gallery in London features some 400 artworks “saved” in this manner. The show features work by Michelangelo, Velasquez, Boticelli, Picasso, Mondrian, Rodin and Titian. “It is dedicated to sculptures, paintings and treasures saved by the National Art Collections Fund over the past 100 years.”

California’s historic missions are falling down. So the US House of Representatives has passed a bill to spend $10 million on repairs. “The missions have been ravaged by the passage of time and the invasion of natural pests, such as the beetles that are gnawing their way through the redwood beams and statuary in San Francisco’s Mission Dolores. Two centuries of California earthquakes have left many of the buildings with seismic troubles. Irreplaceable artwork desperately needs preservation work.”

Herbert Muschamp writes that LA’s new Disney Hall is more than a building. “It’s a home for everyone who’s ever felt like a French curve in a T square world. Disney Hall is a riotous rebirth. Not just for downtown Los Angeles, where the building is situated, and not just for the whole sprawling mixed-up La-La. What is being reborn is the idea of the urban center as a democratic institution: a place where voices can be heard.”

Disney Hall’s opulent opening may herald a redefined downtown for Los Angeles. But nearby homeless and advocates for the poor see Disney as a symbol of catering to the rich. “It’s fine to have a music centre, but this has cost $276m and, if you add the $200m that the cathedral cost, that’s almost half a billion dollars to provide services for the rich. Where’s the half billion for the poor?”

The Ontario College of Art & Design has a new building rising in downtown Toronto, and Lisa Rochon is already impressed with the “flying box” design and “hallucinatory” architecture. “In this scenario, technology has been twisted into art to produce an exhilarating building. A public square has been rammed directly into the architecture, sending sparks flying from the impact… Fully executed and carefully resolved, the building and civic square at OCAD could become Canada’s version of the Centre Pompidou.”

MC Escher, who always said that he was as much mathematician as artist, has a new museum dedicated to his work. The Escher Museum, based in the Netherlands, “arranges Escher’s prints and drawings chronologically, with early realistic sketches, linoleum cuts, and some commercial designs on the first floor and most of the masterpieces of perspective and optical illusion that made him famous in the 1950s and 1960s grouped thematically on the second, main floor. The museum also adds a modern touch with a ‘virtual reality’ display on the third floor that turns some of Escher’s best-known works into moving holograms.”

The Victoria & Albert Museum launches a new glossy magazine for museum members. “It’s an ambitious and risky project. As a general-interest art magazine, containing a lavish 82 pages of editorial complemented by only 30 pages of up-market advertising, it appears far superior to anything on the commercial market. The dummy issue I saw looked pacey, imaginative and stylish, with plenty of strong words as well as beautiful pictures.”

The Hermitage Museum plans to open a branch in Amsterdam next year. “Located in a 17th-century canal-side building, the Hermitage Amsterdam will be much more than a boutique satellite operation; once finished, it will be larger than the city’s Stedelijk Museum.”

Thieves have stolen nine works from Sergei Bugayev’s house outside St. Petersburg. “The missing works, valued at $250,000 by experts at the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, include works by Bugayev himself, who is also known as ‘Africa’, and by other leading local artists, such as Timur Novikov. The thieves destroyed about 140 other works of art, as well as rare antique furniture and books, the charred remains of which were found in the house’s back yard. ‘The mastermind behind this crime knows contemporary art, Bugayev told The Art Newspaper, “They took the best works’.”

The new Art Sales Index reveals a downturn in art sales in the past year. “This massive annual worldwide survey shows that the international art auction market shrank by 10 per cent from £1.63 billion to £1.45 billion in the 12-month period that ended in August. In the US auction turnover was down by 11.7 per cent, while in Britain the decrease was 18 per cent.”