Category: visual

He had 45 seconds in this particular iteration of his fame. – AdAge

“The museum that Sir David is proposing would aim to make generations of black children feel like they have a place in the nation’s future. He said: ‘It is really amazingly important for the representation of people in the sort of cultural tropes of the nation.'” – BBC

Picture the High Line, only a museum, in Los Angeles, and designed to “offset the effects of gentrification and revitalize the vibrant heart of black Los Angele.” – Los Angeles Times

That’s a new one: Art historian Christopher Wright says a painting attributed to the mid-15th century artist Rogier van der Weyden’s workshop “is a 20th-century fake, of an unknown man sporting a Beatles-style haircut and reading a paper containing nothing more than nonsense.” – The Observer (UK)

Still Life with Fruit and Chestnuts, in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco since 1960, has been de- and re-authenticated more than once; it had been labeled as possibly by Van Gogh and had not been consistently on display. Now the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has determined that the painting is genuine Vincent, dating from 1886. — The Art Newspaper

Last Christmas Day, two men unbolted and carried away a 330-pound bronze gnome from outside an Auckland art gallery. When the extensive media coverage made things a little too hot, they dropped off the statue at a Salvation Army post with a “please return to” note taped to its head. The gnome-nappers have now been apprehended. — Artsy

The sheet with the thumbprint is entitled The Cardiovascular System and Principal Organs of a Woman (around 1509-10). Although fingerprints have been found on other Leonardo drawings, the one on the medical sheet as “the most convincing candidate for an authentic Leonardo fingerprint” among the Queen’s 550 or so Leonardos. – The Art Newspaper

She was friends with Frida Kahlo and Isamu Noguchi, posed for Man Ray, and married Mexican surrealist Wolfgang Paalen, yet she made her own work for decades without promoting it. But she was a standout of last summer’s “Made in L.A.” at the Hammer; this year she has huge shows at Hauser & Wirth and the Serpentine Gallery; for her 100th birthday in 2020, she’ll get a retrospective in Mexico City that will later tour the U.S. Meet Luchita Hurtado. — T — The New York Times Style Magazine

“The museum hopes to represent all black civilizations, but the fact that it is based in Dakar is not mere coincidence. Art lives and breathes in Dakar. With its founding father and the brain-child behind this grand museum – Léopold Sédar Senghor – having been a poet, cultural theorist and leading pan-Africanist thinker, it makes sense that Dakar would be the home of this museum.” — Quartz