For more than 50 years, painter Alice Neel created provocative, painfully revealing – and often nude and famously unflattering – portraits of art-world insiders. On the eve of the Whitney Museum’s Neel retrospective, eleven of her former subjects reflect on what it was like to sit for “a genius at detecting her subjects’ inner lives and notorious for exposing – and exaggerating – her subjects’ flaws. – New York Magazine
Category: visual
GETTY DIRECTOR RESIGNS
John Walsh announced he will step down this fall after heading the J. Paul Getty Museum for 17 years, during which he broadened the Getty’s collections and oversaw the museum’s transition to its lavish new Brentwood home two years ago. Getty chief curator Deborah Gribbon will step into Walsh’s position in September. – New Jersey Online (AP)
FRENCH WAR MUSEUM OPENS
On Sunday, French President Jacques Chirac inaugurated France’s first museum dedicated to France’s role in World War II. The inauguration was held on the 60th anniversary of de Gaulle’s famous call to resist the occupying Nazis. – CNN (AP)
TAKING BACK THE WALL
The land where the Berlin Wall once stood has held out both a promise and caution for the future. Now an important new building opens. “Here, on a chunk of land where just 10 years ago there was nothing but empty space and buildings pockmarked with shrapnel, a city is being reborn -one that is a real place, not just a tourist quarter.” – Chicago Tribune
THE MORALITY OF PAINTINGS
You’re an art dealer or curator and you’re invited to someone’s house and discover an art treasure that the owner doesn’t know he has. Do you tell? The answer is a lot more complicated than simple yes or no, concludes author Michael Frayn. – The Telegraph (UK)
FOSTER’S WOBBLE
Norman Foster is Britain’s most famous working architect, with a string of successes. But when his Millennium Bridge across the Thames opened last Saturday, it swayed and wobbled and terrified the crowds pounding across it. “What an embarrassment,” he tells Hugh Pearlman. – The Sunday Times (UK)
NO MORE PLOP ART
In the past seven years, Britain has erected some 7,000 pieces of public art sculptures. The kinds of art being put up is changing though: “Younger artists, in particular, prefer to make works that involve people and real life. They are not interested in parachuting in a big bit of sculpture.” – The Telegraph (UK)
BETTER LEFT UNDONE?
Art historians have always puzzled over the large number of paintings left “unfinished” by Paul Cezanne. Now a major exhibit of his “unfinished” works are on exhibit at Zurich’s Kunsthaus museum. As Cezanne wrote home to his mother in 1874: “I have to work constantly, (but) not in order to arrive at the finish, which attracts the admiration of imbeciles. I must strive to complete only for the satisfaction of becoming truer and wiser.” – MSNBC
THE ART LISTS
It’s been two months since American museums put up lists of artwork with questionable provenance during the Nazi era. “So far, no claimants have come forward to identify and seek restitution for objects on the Web sites put up by the Museum of Fine Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, or the Art Institute of Chicago. Nor have the sites yielded significant evidence that could lead to the recovery of stolen objects.” – Boston Globe
PRINTS OF WALES
Thirty of the Prince of Wales’s watercolor paintings – signed only “C”- went on display today in London, along with 26 oils by Saudi prince Khalid Al-Faisal, in the exhibition “Painting and Patronage.” – Times of India (AP)