The Art Team is part of the Barnes’ continuing effort to deepen its ties with its audience. Initiated by Shelley Bernstein, chief experience officer and deputy director of audience engagement, probably best known for her work with digital technology, the Art Team is notable for its relative lack of tech, at least for now.
Category: visual
Lost Monet Discovered In Storage Space At Louvre
Water Lilies: Reflection of Willows was one of a set of 25 Monet paintings in a huge collection of Western art acquired by the Japanese collector Kōjirō Matsukata. In the leadup to World War II, he had the works stored for safekeeping in France and England. When they were finally returned to Japan in 1959 (after Matsukata’s death), this work wasn’t among them. Now it has turned up, though it’s badly damaged.
The Mona Lisa May Be Making A Tour Of France
“Da Vinci’s masterpiece, which has spent nearly all of the past 500 years in Paris, could soon be smiling at audiences across France as part of a rare tour, the country’s culture minister said Thursday. Françoise Nyssen told Europe 1 radio she was ‘seriously considering’ the move as part of travelling exhibition of the country’s most prestigious artworks.”
Visitor Admissions Have Plunged For Two Big London Museums
The National Gallery had 6.3 million visitors in 2016, but this fell to 5.2 million last year, a drop of 17%. The NPG did much worse, with numbers decreasing from 1.9 million to 1.3 million—a fall of 35%. The data for May to December 2017, as reported in the Times newspaper, presented an even more dismal picture, with a decline for the NPG of 42%.
Record-Setting Picasso Leads $189 Million Auction At Sotheby’s
Picasso’s Femme au béret et à la robe quadrille (1937) sold for $69.2 million, the second-highest price ever paid at auction for a single artwork in Europe. Two other Picassos, Le Matador and Tête de femme, sold together for $31.7 million. Other artist whose work sold for seven figures or more included Derain, Boccioni, Dalí, Magritte, and Lynn Chadwick.
In Two Days, A Single Firm Spends $156 Million On 13 Picassos
“Gurr Johns, which buys and sells on behalf of clients, won four pieces by the Spanish artist, totaling £73.8 million ($102.4 million) at Sotheby’s on Wednesday, according to the auction house. One day earlier, the company won at least nine other Picasso works at Christie’s, … to the tune of £38.9 million” ($53.5 million).
How Nigeria’s Famous Floating School Won Architecture Awards And Then Literally Fell To Pieces
One week after architect Kunlé Adeyemi collected the Silver Lion at the 2016 Venice Biennale, “the Makoko Floating School collapsed. All that remained of the structure heralded as a bellwether of change for a slum and its inhabitants was a flattened pile of planks adrift in the waters of a polluted lagoon. What follows is an account of the school’s stunning rise and fall.”
An Important Iconic NY Skyscraper Is About To Be Torn Down
“If the bank has its way—and who’s to stop it?—workers will soon take acetylene torches to the 700-foot, 57-year-old building at 270 Park Avenue, razing and then replacing it with a 1,200-foot-high hyper-headquarters ample enough for 15,000 people. Union Carbide will become the tallest structure ever demolished by peaceful means, grabbing that mournful title from the 1908 Singer Building, which came down in 1968.”
What Could Be The Next Great Source Of Pigments? Genetically Engineered Bacteria
“The model organisms used for [a new] study were colonies of flavobacterium, a rod-shaped bacteria found in soil and freshwater; the colonies were naturally a rich, metallic green hue. By altering the genetic makeup of the flavobacterium, the scientists found they could also change the color of the bacteria. Not only could they produce any color of the rainbow, they could control the intensity of each shade” – and the resulting pigments are brilliant and iridescent, like peacock feathers.
Picasso At His Most Revolutionary And Most Repugnant: ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’
Sure, most of us who know about the painting know why it’s revolutionary: it’s arguably the birth of Cubism. On the other hand, says Picasso scholar Miles J. Unger, “You can’t look at Les Demoiselles d’Avignon without suspecting that this is a man who had some issues with women.”