Category: visual

Josh Niland tells the story of curator Henry Geldzahler and the 1971 deaccessioning of Max Beckmann’s Self-Portrait with Cigarette.

“Through May 14, visitors will have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see masterful watercolors by Edwin Abbey, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, John La Farge, Thomas Moran, William Trost Richards, Maxfield Parrish, Jessie Willcox Smith, Violet Oakley, Georgia O’Keeffe, and a host of others.” The Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition, which opens today, was a bear to put together. Stephan Salisbury tells why.

Record-breaking attendance and popular new branches or not, a certain critical mass of news coverage – chronicling deficits and layoffs and cancellation of high-profile expansions, and asking if your museum is ‘a great institution in decline‘ – will probably lead to news like this.

“Lawrence Des Cars’s appointment comes after a lengthy process, which saw three other candidates reaching the final selection stages: Dominique de Font-Réaulx, director of Paris’ Delacroix Museum; Michel Draguet, director of the Royal Museums of Belgium; and Sylvain Amic, director of the Musée de Rouen. Le Monde reports that des Cars’s appointment is also significant in that she’s only the second woman curator to head a major Paris museum, alongside Sophie Makariou at the Musée Guimet.”

“Founded in 1984 by the foursome of Curiger, Jacqueline Burckhardt, Walter Keller, and Peter Blum, the magazine was known for both multiple essays on each of the artists it focused on and, later, innovative multiples by the same artists who were the subjects of the quarterly issues. As a measure of the respect the magazine garnered, consider that the editioned works were the subject of a show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2001.”

“Full-year adjusted net income at Sotheby’s for 2016 was $99.6 million, compared with $143.1 million in 2015, reflecting a softening in the market that Sotheby’s has been trying to counter by diversifying its business.”

It took less than a week from the show’s opening at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum for this to happen – and the value of the unfortunate spotted yellow pumpkin is roughly $800,000.

Cara Ober, who graduated from the high school in question and subsequently taught in that school district: “In banning such works of art, based on one person’s reported complaint in a highly charged and ugly political climate, this administration, surrounded by ultra-conservative voters, has opened up a can of worms that confirms the worst biases among students, exactly the opposite of what they need to learn.”

Three people, at least one of whom who appeared to have a white nationalist symbol on his jacket, argued with a group that had been protesting the president’s executive orders on immigrants – and the fight went all the way to the third floor of the museum, where, amid the 18th century European art, guards had to subdue the fighters.