Category: visual

“On walls, canvas, wood, or parchment, the música of reds was always more pregnant, more cadenced, and more resonant than others. Moreover, painting treatises and manuals are not mistaken; it is always with regard to red that they are most long-winded and offer the greatest number of recipes. For a long time, it was also the chapter on reds that began the exposition on pigments useful to painters.”

“Brooklyn taketh, but sometimes Brooklyn giveth back.” Last spring, Nancy Spector left the Guggenheim’s Manhattan flagship to become chief curator at the Brooklyn Museum. Now the Guggenheim’s director has created a new position just for her.

Gurlitt, who died in 2014, was the son of one of the dealers Goebbels chose to sell confiscated “degenerate” artworks abroad. He left his entire collection – about 1,500 works inherited from his father (including Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Monet, Kokoschka, Courbet, Dürer, Canaletto, and others) worth an estimated billion dollars – to the Bern Art Museum, which is about to exhibit it in partnership with Bonn’s Bundeskunsthalle.

Anselm Kiefer: Coagulation was organized by the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, where it ran at the end of last year as part of a four-city China tour. Kiefer himself says that the exhibition is happening without his consent, and the galleries that represent him are objecting as well; the show’s (German) chief curator calls this an attack on her curatorial freedom and says that commerical interests are trying to interfere.

Thinking about the potential gap between design that’s good and design that succeeds raises the obvious question: What is “design,” anyway? This is a question that has been picked over for decades. Advocates of the profession—critics, curators, designers themselves—insist that the work is underestimated, if not flat-out marginalized. Design (they are forever pointing out) is not merely an exercise in superficial aesthetics or styling, as the public may assume. It is, rather, a far more serious matter of problem-solving and experience-shaping, driven by a uniquely rigorous approach to the human-made world in all its dimensions.

“Experts made comparisons, including microscopic analyses, with other Rembrandt originals in Amsterdam, Paris and Vienna to confirm that the chalk drawing indeed came from the world-renowned Dutch master’s hand. The museum noted how unusual the discovery was as worldwide only few drawings of animals by Rembrandt exist.”

“It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen: 100 rock climbers abseiling down the façade of the Reichstag, slowly unfurling this huge silvery curtain.” While Jeanne-Claude is no longer with us to give her testimony, Christo and project manager Wolfgang Volz give their accounts of Christo’s most successful project before The Gates.

“Tom Hill, the American hedge fund manager who paid over £30m for a Pontormo portrait, is refusing to accept a matching offer from London’s National Gallery.”