The last Shah assembled a major collection – Cassatt and Degas and Magritte, Pollock and Lichtenstein and Warhol, even Picasso – and it all got stuck in a basement in the early days of the Islamic Republic. Three decades on, asks Jonathan Jones, why shouldn’t this mother lode be gracing the walls of Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art?
Category: visual
The Deteriorated Art Of Patent Drawings
“Whereas patent drawings from the 1800s and even early- to mid-1900s featured artistic techniques like shading, multiple perspectives and texture, today’s patent drawings are often embarrassing doodles at best.”
Rome’s Colosseum, Now Beginning To List, Will Finally Get Renovation
“Long-delayed repairs to the 2,000-year-old Colosseum will begin in December in a project funded by Italian billionaire Diego Della Valle to save the crumbling monument”
Unknown Goya Canvas Identified
“An early religious painting by Goya, which hung for more than 80 years unrecognised in a private collection, has been discovered and will be sold by Koller Auctions in Zurich in September. Paintings by Goya are rare, with fewer than 10 on the auction market in the past 20 years.”
In Dubai, A Museum Of Women
“The Women’s Museum of the United Arab Emirates is the creation of Rafia Obaid Ghubash, an academic, psychiatrist and former president of the Arabian Gulf University, who campaigns for women’s education. Her aim is to educate visitors – locals, expats and tourists – that Emirati women have enjoyed more power and influence than is recognised.”
Janet Cardiff, George Bures Miller And the Power of Sound
A look at the couple who are perhaps today’s most prominent sound artists, with visits to their most recent work (described as “18 shoebox-size speakers and 4 subwoofers arranged discreetly in the underbrush [of a forest], with tree stumps to sit on”) and their most famous (Forty-Part Motet, based on Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium).
China’s Private Museum Mogul
“Private museums built by wealthy individuals have been cropping up all over China. But the museums founded by 55-year-old Sichuanese developer Fan Jianchuan stand out for their sheer scale.”
The Drama Of The 8×10 Film Camera
“Alec Soth says: ‘One of the qualities of this camera is that because you are under a dark cloth, [the subjects] don’t see you and they don’t see you looking right into their eyes. … They become less self-concious, in a strange way, than if I’m holding a camera to my face.'”
Do U.S. Museums Have Looted Asian Artifacts? Feds Want To Know
“Federal authorities are asking American museums to scrutinize their collections for items that they have obtained from a veteran Manhattan art dealer now accused of possessing antiquities stolen from India and other countries.”
Documenta 13 Setting Attendance Records
The Kassel, Germany-based art festival may bust through the records set at the last exhibition. That’s useful, because “documenta 13 needs to break records. With the additional facilities, such as the numerous wood cabins in the Karsaue Park, and record number of staff, its five-year budget was estimated at €24.6 million ($30.3 million). Leifeld hoped that much of this budget increase would be offset by increases in ticket sales.”