Category: visual

“Thanks to an anonymous street artist who specializes in explicit images, large sections of Central Brussels have essentially become NSFW. Since mid-September, unauthorized murals depicting various parts of the human anatomy started cropping upon the walls of the Belgian capital, causing both giggles and disapproval.”

“[Audrey] Azoulay announced a 5% increase in funding to museums, and, notably, an increase of 12% for acquisitions budgets for regional and national museums. She said that museums security would be partly supported by an intra-ministerial fund.”

“Robert Gentile, 80, had been scheduled to stand trial last month for selling a loaded firearm to a convicted killer, charges his attorney contends were the product of a federal sting operation intended to pressure Gentile into leading agents to paintings stolen in 1990.”

The Centre Pompidou plans to loan works from its 120,000-strong collection, the largest of Modern and contemporary art in Europe.

“In 1935, Marcel Duchamp set up a booth at the Concours Lépine, a French fair for inventors promoting their latest gadgets that still occurs to this day. In between a stand of instant vegetable choppers and another of trash compactors, the Surrealist debuted a series of objects merging his interests in science and art: his Rotoreliefs, decorated discs made to spin on a turntable as optical entertainment.”

Jonathan Jones: “It is not simply that [Artemisia Gentileschi] became a highly successful artist in an age when guilds and academies closed their doors to women. She also did what none of the other – rare – Renaissance and baroque women who made it as artists could manage: she communicated a powerful personal vision. Her paintings are self-evidently autobiographical. Like Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois or Tracey Emin, she put her life into her art.”

“The I.M. Pei-designed wing of the National Gallery, a monumental presence on the Mall, opened in 1978 with its geometric peaks and knife-sharp edges … After nearly 40 years, the building needed upgrades to both improve infrastructure and accessibility and to make room for the museum’s expanding collection.”

“The departures kicked up a cloud of controversy just three months after the museum had announced a $25 million capital campaign to renovate and expand its building along the Grand Concourse and to establish an endowment for the first time.”

“The painting, a Madonna composition, had been obscured by discoloured varnish and was attributed to a minor hand. Its potential as a work of one of the giants of art history, as revered as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, was initially spotted by the historian Bendor Grosvenor.”

“Art Nouveau, 1920s Spanish and shabby chic were all looks that the cognoscenti embraced at one time or another, but never for this long. It’s as if the mechanism that refreshes cultural trends every few years has developed a glitch.”