Category: visual

Though 21st century art history majors might not realize it, the entire second half of the 20th century was covered by the shadow of WWII. “The war, Nazi crimes, and their legacy inevitably prejudiced Americans against German art and prompted curators and museum directors to reject proposals for exhibitions. In 1950, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago suggested that were his museum to show an exhibition of contemporary German work, it ‘would run against great objections.'”

It’s real, but it’s also stringently limited. “‘Holy smokes. I’ve never seen anything like this,’ said Robert Wall, 89, a Detroit native who has attended every Motor City auto show since 1937. ‘I had no idea this existed. I couldn’t have imagined this in my wildest dreams. I could stay forever.'” (He got 90 minutes.)

And sold, of course. Mike Mitchell “took shots of the band as they arrived for their first US concert at the Washington Coliseum two days later, using natural light because he could not afford a flash. He was there again when they played the Baltimore Civic Center on 13 September, even getting on to the stage to secure a better view.”

Henry Moore was a canny and vicious manipulator of the Tate, a former director’s diary reveals: “In 1945, the Tate’s board was considering whether to purchase a wooden sculpture by Barbara Hepworth. Moore, then a gallery trustee, interjected with the damning words: ‘If sculpture [was] nothing more than that, it would be a poor affair.’ The ploy worked. The Hepworth was rejected by the board, while every one of seven sculptures the Tate bought that year was by none other than Henry Moore.”

No, really: “Michael Ellis, the arts minister, has put a temporary export bar on the artwork, Lobster Telephone (White Aphrodisiac), by Dalí and Edward James, to give buyers a chance to keep it in the UK.” (By the way, if you have £850,000, you can save it for the UK.)

Basically, we have a cultural disconnect, or a potential one: “What happens when art shaped by utopian principles and intended as a civic gift to a temporary city is uprooted from its native white sands and replanted within white walls across the street from the White House, suddenly subject to the scrutiny of critics, curators and busy tourists?”

“The result of BA courses in curating will be a bunch of 21 year olds who will be theoretically savvy, but have little idea why particular works of art have a particular resonance at a particular time. They will be around £30,000 poorer after paying tuition fees – probably more, given their living costs – and they will realistically have few immediate employment prospects in the field of curating. Still, they can probably always go on to teach on a curating course.”

“He rightly identifies one of the reasons behind the decline as being economic liberalism, which has led to the opening up of the Italian cultural sphere to private enterprise. He sees that it has encouraged a naive selling-out to the profit motive —as with the huge advertisements that for years defiled Venice—but he could, perhaps, have added that this has happened because the reasons for the symbiosis between the public and private sectors that exists in the UK and USA have not been understood by successive Italian governments.”

The civil rights leader and educator Mary McLeod Bethune will be the first African American figure to be honored with a monument in the National Statuary Hall in the US Capitol. Fittingly, Bethune will replace a Confederate general.

“Asian travellers are flocking to museums in the West to admire his artistic creations. Multi-million dollar paintings by the prolific artist have become the most sought after objects of desire among affluent Asian collectors in recent years. The reputations of other Western artists are no match to that of Picasso’s in this part of the world. Picasso is simply a synonym for Western art.” Vivienne Chow explores the reasons – which are much more than just the stratospheric prices his work commands.