Just as the city’s Stedelijk Museum reopens, the Van Gogh is shutting down for a seven-month refurbishment. Meanwhile, 75 paintings, the cream of the collection, are headed to St. Petersburg, where they will be displayed at the Hermitage until their return to the Dutch capital next spring.
Category: visual
Bond Guru Offers Huge Reward For Return Of Stolen Art
“Jeffrey Gundlach, one of the world’s top bond gurus, has offered a $1.7-million bounty for the safe return of a cherished collection stolen from his Santa Monica home last week. The $10-million haul included some of the biggest names in contemporary art: Piet Mondrian, Jasper Johns and Richard Diebenkorn.”
What Will Become Of London’s Olympic Art?
“The fate of two enormous works created by Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn for the recent London Olympics and Paralympics Games is uncertain, with key trade figures questioning whether the large-scale pieces will ever find a home.”
What The Warhol Foundation’s Sale Tells Us About Foundations
“Always the most visible member in this small but fast-growing community, the Warhol Foundation has just demonstrated that artist-endowed foundations are not all alike and that it is, as always, among the most distinctive.”
Poor Columbus – A Monumental Problem
“As power changes and the memorialized fall out of favor, the forces of history have destroyed monuments almost as fast as they go up.”
Three JMW Turner Paintings Authenticated In Cardiff
“Three oil paintings deemed fakes and locked away for half a century have been found to be genuine works by landscape artist JMW Turner. The oils were left to the National Museum Wales in 1951 by Gwendoline and Margaret Davies of Llandinam, Powys, but discounted in 1956.”
The Industrial Revolution In Color
“Up until the mid-19th century, bright colors were the preserve of the wealthy, the only people who could afford them. Yet the dyes used in even the most expensive items were so unstable that they often faded or discolored. The development of chemical dyes” – starting with mauve in 1858 – changed all that.
The Temporary Light Sculpture That Kosovo Doesn’t Want To Give Up
It’s some seven-meter-tall scaffolding with “A PLACE BEYOND BELIEF”, and it sits in Pristina, “between the new government education offices, the Kosovo Art Gallery, and the half-built, half-ruined Orthodox church raised by Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s.” Nathan Coley’s piece has surprising resonance with Kosovars.
Modernizing A History Museum, And Making A City Take Notice
“The Atwater Kent Museum … is now the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, a modernized showcase for everything from George Washington’s desk to Joe Frazier’s boxing gloves.”
Photographer Displays How The (Theatrical) Sausage Gets Made
Martha Swope began documenting dance and theatre rehearsals in the 1950s. “For Ms. Swope, now 84, rehearsals were ‘where you see the creativity and the interchange, how it grows to what it comes to be onstage,’ she said.”