Category: visual

Curator Judith Mann: “She is a phenomenon in terms of the history of art, because we really understood her life far earlier than we cared, really, about her painting. And the understanding of Artemisia as a painter, as an artist, followed the fanfare of her celebrated rape, and it made a rather skewed understanding of this artist. And now we try to go back and fill in and properly understand.”

“As time has passed, the government has tried out different, more innovative strategies to find the art. But the results have been slow to come in, and the Marcos family is once again gaining political power. … Earlier this year, it started an interactive website to crowdsource information. Like any respectable social media campaign, the website features a clever Twitter hash tag: #ShowMeTheMonet.”

In 2011, the Louvre’s director of conservation, Ségolène Bergeon Langle, resigned in the midst of a scandal that followed the restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne” (c. 1503). Begun in 2009, the restoration was supposed to be a celebratory event to kick off a series of restorations of Leonardo paintings in the Louvre’s collection (of 15 known to exist, the museum owns six). However, Langle, along with other experts, felt the conservators had gone too far in removing the various layers of yellowed varnish, eliminating or modifying original aspects of the painting.

The legislation could end a years-long cultural cold war with Russia, which has refused to loan works since 2010 due to lawsuits filed in the US over objects seized during the Bolshevik Revolution.

“[The paper’s art editor] said that cramming a bunch of art-market nuggets into a single day had become inconvenient, especially as websites publishing market scoops (this one included) became able to put up those kinds of stories untethered to a publication schedule.”

“That, more or less, is what happened to Thaddée Prate, director of old master pictures at the Tajan auction house [in Paris] … In March, Mr. Prate recalled being ‘in a bit of a rush’ when a retired doctor visited Tajan with 14 unframed drawings that had been collected by his bibliophile father.”

The out-going director of the Tate museums will receive the $25,000 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, given by Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies based on a poll of art professionals.

“The risk — as with all of the projects emerging from BIG’s huge and increasingly busy office — is that the project, in final form, won’t quite make the leap from clever and opportunistic to something more architecturally powerful or profound.”

Her mushroom drawings hang in the Science Museum in London. “These drawings, most of them from the 1890s, are so accurate that even today, they are still consulted by scientists.”