Category: visual

“A row over Modernist masterpieces continues to simmer between the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and St Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum … The dispute involves dozens of works from the collections of Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, including paintings by Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, once housed in the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow.”

“While the Senate is fast-tracking a bill that would protect the Detroit Institute of Arts’ collection from sale in a bankruptcy proceeding, the state House of Representatives has no plans to take up the bill before members leave for a two-month summer break later this month.”

“Imagine a single work of art that captured a sense that, after all these decades of trying, modern art hasn’t managed to change the world, or even much affect it.”

The rarely-displayed Clark Sickle-Leaf Carpet, one of 25 auctioned off at Sotheby’s by Washington’s beleaguered Corcoran Gallery of Art, sold for $33.765 million – a new high for art from the Islamic world and well over triple the previous record for a carpet.

“The Seasonal Inflatable Structure project, informally known as ‘the Bubble,’ is dead, the Smithsonian Institution and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden announced Wednesday. The decision … caps years of high-level debate and division about what the Bubble would mean for the Hirshhorn and the Mall.”

The gift, from California ranchers Libby and Bill Clark, “is among the largest in the MIA’s history, consisting of nearly 1,700 objects – paintings, sculpture, ceramics, woodblock prints, bamboo baskets – spanning more than 1,000 years.”

Police seized artwork that showed children’s bodies with sexual objects.

“Generally speaking, minimal structures offer a lot of space for interpretation. They require something from the viewer — an active eye, an active mind.”

“The DIA’s origins date back to 1885, when it was opened privately. By 1919, however, the founders had realized that they couldn’t run it on operating revenue alone. So they turned the collection over to the city, at a time when civic leaders were optimistic about government stewardship of institutions such as libraries and zoos.”