“Switzerland’s largest city Zurich acknowledged Monday it had lost trace of 5,176 works of art, including an original painting by Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. The city had carried out its first full inventory of its vast collection of 35,000 pieces in nearly a century, only to discover that nearly 15 percent were missing, including nearly 1,400 original works.”
Category: visual
A Skyscraper In Venice? By Pierre Cardin?
“His proposed Palais Lumière – a dizzying 60-story pirouette of glass and steel – represents either economic salvation for a faded corner of Venice or a grandiose fetish worthy of Dubai, depending on whom you ask.”
Into The Vortex Via A Century-Old Quilt
“You might not expect a mind-bending vortex to emerge from an old quilt. But about 100 years ago, a housewife armed with a needle and some red and white scraps of cloth crafted a unique pattern that doubles as a brain trick.”
Woman Who Botched Spanish Fresco, Now Famous, Sells Her Own Art
“Fame has come late to Cecilia Gímenez, an 80-year-old Spanish painter whose disastrous attempt at restoring a 19th-century Ecce Homo on the walls of her local church spread her name around the globe over the summer. … Now [she] has appeared as an artist in her own right, with one of her pictures currently for sale on eBay. (The bidding has now passed €610.)
Yale Art Gallery To Reopen After Three-Year, $135M Makeover
Architect Richard Olcott “called the project ‘beyond a renovation. It was a series of interventions,’ in which floors that were sometimes half a floor off were joined, steel beams were sunk over the length of four stories to hold added roof space for dramatic ceilings.”
The Man Who Transformed Yale’s Art Gallery
“Jock Reynolds, the director of the Yale University Art Gallery, likes to say that when he took over in 1998, the collection … had grown so large that its landmark Louis Kahn building resembled an ‘old sock drawer.’ The museum could show only a small fraction of its holdings, and some works had been in storage so long that even the curators had never seen them.”
Using 3D Printers To Recreate Ancient Artifacts
“Using a process called photomodeling, the Harvard team photographed sculpture fragments in the museum’s collection from hundreds of angles to create 3-D renderings of each piece, then meshed them together to form a semi-complete 3-D model of the original artifact.”
In Recession, Europe Cuts Back On Public Art
“It is curious, therefore, that people don’t consider public sculpture an important part of the civic landscape.”
Art Of The Subway Map
“Subway riders could navigate from dot to dot, in much the same way that hikers traverse a forest by following trail blazes.”
What Happened To The British Empire Museum’s Lost Artifacts?
The former chairman of the board of the now-closed museum says “it was fair to say that ‘dozens’ of items were unaccounted for but also admitted that it may never be known exactly how many objects went missing. ‘It’s hard to be mathematically precise,’ he said.”