Category: visual

“A single stone arch is all that remains of Palmyra’s most important site and the Middle East’s most significant ancient temple, alongside Baalbek in Lebanon. Isis blew up the temple building in August 2015, destroying two inner sanctums dedicated to the Palmyrians’ supreme deity, Bel, the sun god Yarhibol and the moon god Aglibol.”

Christine Coulson, chief adviser to the director: “It is a Met that exists just beyond the walls of the galleries, where the staff move through tunnels and hallways like the below-stairs cast of Downton Abbey. It is also where we keep the ghosts.”

“Goya’s Saturn devours his son on a park bench, flinging chunks of arm to a flock of pigeons; the lady in pink of Edward Hopper’s Morning Sun snaps out of her reverie when a bird crashes into her bedroom window; the raining men of René Magritte’s Golconda jump out of a plane and splatter bloodily on the ground, alarming local newscasters.”

The “painstaking job began the morning just after the della Robbia’s fall, when conservators gathered in its closed-off gallery to begin making sense of the pieces, some of them as tiny as fingernails. “It was a lot like an archaeological dig — all the pieces were collected and bagged and numbered.”

“Pop-up art exhibitions will begin to appear throughout the region Wednesday, when high-quality reproductions of artworks from the Philadelphia Museum of Art will be installed in public places from Coatesville to Doylestown.”

“Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena … is releasing a number of his residential designs as an open-source resource to help tackle the global affordable housing crisis. … The aim is to provide the material to government agencies and developers who might think it’s ‘too expensive’ to invest in well-designed social housing.”

A Paris art dealer’s estate wants the art-collecting Nahmad family to return Amadeo Modigliani’s Seated Man With A Cane, which it claims the Nazis seized in World War Two. Panama Papers documents show the family had hidden true ownership of the work.

“The files may finally lay to rest rumours about how Christie’s snatched the Ganz commission from under the noses of rival auction houses. It is also a masterclass in the art of hedging by one of the world’s most successful financial speculators.”

“To suggest that a building of such architectural merit is not worthy of being preserved and reused in a new capacity is shortsighted at best and downright flippant at worst. Suffering from neglect and a rather unflattering interior renovation in the last decade or so, the building would require a commitment by the city to restore and maintain the facility.”

“Unlike many campus outcries of the past year, this one has nothing to do with sexism or racism. [Henry] Moore’s Reclining Figure (1969-70), many students have said, is just ugly and doesn’t fit in with Columbia’s neo-Classical aesthetic.”