Category: visual

“Italy’s highest court has once more delayed a ruling on whether it will affirm a lower court’s decision ordering the Getty Museum to return one of its most prized antiquities, the so-called Getty Bronze, to Italy after 36 years as one of the foremost works on display at the Getty Villa in Malibu.”

Inside a makeshift fabric booth at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, as tourists pass by and look in, conservators use laser tools that look something like blow-dryers to remove the crusty grime that built up over decades on the graceful female statues that formed porch columns at the ancient temple. (slide show)

“They charge that the foundation ignored Peggy Guggenheim’s last wish for the collection, which consists mainly of Cubist, Surrealist and abstract postwar art: that it be displayed in the palazzo in its entirety and without additions.” More generally, they’re furious over the expansionist, corporate character of the foundation’s current activities.

Adrian Searle surveys “a Turner shortlist that’s intent on being more serious – or at least more difficult and demanding than usual. Apart from the work of Phillips, there are few concessions here to visual pleasure or the easy headlines the prize often attracts.”

The Bern Art Museum’s director says he’s thrilled but mystified by the gift, since Gurlitt, a reclusive Munich resident, had no connection at all to the museum or city. The collection, estimated to be worth roughly $1 billion, includes many works thought to have been looted from Jewish owners during World War II, so sorting out ownership issues will be long and messy.

A piece commissioned from Miami-based R & R Studios, meant for the front of the main branch of the city’s public library, consists entirely of the word Y E S ! in bright red capital letters. “But this week, facing an onslaught of criticism, City Manager Jane Brautigam said the wheels of Boulder’s bureaucracy had spun a little too quickly.”

There’s a strong Scottish connection. Three out of four of the finalists studied in Glasgow.

“[The auction house] sold the statue, a 10th-century sandstone depiction of a mythological figure known as Pandava, to an anonymous collector in 2009, but bought it back earlier this year after officials determined that the sculpture had been looted” from an ancient Khmer temple during Cambodia’s 1970s civil war.

Jonathan Lopez looks at the newly-authenticated Portrait of Dirck van Os, now restored and back on view at Omaha’s Joslyn Art Museum.

“Five years after it closed for a two-year renovation, Paris’s [Musée Picasso] – which houses one of the world’s most extensive collections of the Spanish master’s work – will finally reopen its doors in September, the culture ministry announced Sunday.”