| | Germany's Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation Refuses to Return Nefertiti Bust to Egypt
| | | | 
This Oct. 15, 2009 file photo shows the famous 3,300-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti seen at the "Neues Museum", New Museum, on the so-called Museum Island during a media preview in Berlin, Germany. Egypt has officially requested the return of the bust, which has been in Berlin decades. Dating back to the 14th century B.C. monarch, it tops Egypt's wish list of artifacts the country hopes to bring back as part of a campaign to retrieve thousands of antiquities spirited out during the colonial period and afterward. AP Photo/Markus Schreiber.
BERLIN (REUTERS).- A German foundation rejected Monday an Egyptian request to return the 3,400-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti, a sculpture which draws over one million viewers annually to a Berlin museum. Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) sent the request to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which runs the Neues Museum in the German capital where the bust is kept. "The foundation's position on the return of Nefertiti remains unchanged," foundation president Professor Hermann Parzinger said in a statement. "She is and remains the ambassador of Egypt in Berlin." Egypt's antiquities chief, Zahi Hawass, appealed to the foundation seeking the return of the bust, famed for its almond-shaped eyes and swan-like neck. However, the foundation said it did not consider the letter an official state request as it had not been signed by Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif. German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt discovered the bust about 275 km south of Cairo in 1912, and ... More |
 |
First Show, Since 2005, of Recent Work by Ellen Gallagher at Gagosian in New York
Ellen Gallagher, Greasy, 2011. Ink, oil, graphite and printed paper on canvas, 79 1/2 x 74 in. © Ellen Gallagher. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Tom Powel.
NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian Gallery presents recent work by Ellen Gallagher. “Greasy” is her first exhibition in New York since “DeLuxe” at the Whitney Museum in 2005. From the outset of her career, Gallagher has brought together non-representational formal concerns (seriality, process) and charged figuration in paintings, drawings, collages, and films that reveal themselves slowly, first as intricate abstractions, then later as unnerving stories. The tension sustained between minimalist abstraction and image-based narratives deriving from her use of found materials gives rise to a dynamic that posits the historical constructions of the “New Negro” -- a central development of the Harlem Renaissance -- with concurrent developments in modernist abstraction. In doing so, she points to the artificiality of the perceived schism between figuration and abstraction in art. Selecting from a wealth of popular ... More | | New iPad Application Tells John F. Kennedy's Story Fifty Years After Inauguration
Photo at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston showing the top hat and gloves Kennedy had made for his inauguration. AP Photo/Stephan Savoia.
By: Kristina Cooke
NEW YORK (REUTERS).- Fifty years after John F. Kennedy's inauguration, a new iPad application dedicated to the late president's life aims to be a multimedia museum for history buffs. The app, by New York City-based historian and publisher Marc Schulman, includes a new biography titled "JFK History Maker - A Fifty Year Retrospective" as well as photographs, video and audio clips, the text of major addresses, letters, and his calendar. "The paper book is limited, in that you can't see all the supporting documents, videos and photographs," said Schulman, who simultaneously created the app as he was writing the biography. Schulman gives the example of someone wanting to learn about Kennedy and civil rights. The user could look into his meetings on the issue and how much time he dedicated to it, watch video clips and read the full text of Kennedy's ... More | | Comfortably Above Low Estimate, Sotheby's Americana Week Brings $14.4 Million
The Ptarmigan Vase: A Monumental Copper, Silver and Gold Mokume Vase, circa 1900-05, which sold for $662,500. Photo: Sotheby's.
NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s Americana Week concluded with a 3-day auction total of $14.4 million, comfortably above the cumulative low estimate of $11.5 million. The sales brought significant prices for American furniture, silver and folk art, led by An Important Searls Family Chippendale Highly Inlaid Cherrywood and Mahogany Chest of Drawers that achieved $872,500 in the Saturday afternoon session of Important Americana. The dedicated auction of Property from the Hascoe Family Collection performed strongly on Sunday, bringing $5,446,466 and selling 92% by lot. Additional Hascoe property will appear in sales throughout the spring auction season, culminating in a second dedicated auction in London devoted to the Hascoes’ impressive collection of Czech art. The first day of the Important Americana sale saw major prices for silver pieces with exceptional histories. The session was led by The Ptarmigan Vase: A Monumental ... More |
 | Flash, Superman, Green Lantern from $1 Million+ Collection Headline Huge Comics Event at Heritage Auctions
A CGC-certified 8.0 Showcase #22 Green Lantern, estimated at $17,000+.
DALLAS, TX.- The Savannah Collection, a newly discovered grouping of more than 40,000 comic books, spanning from 1958 to the present, and acquired directly from the distributor, valued in total at more than $1 million – roughly $350,000 of which is in this auction – makes its debut in Heritage Auctions’ Feb. 24-26 Signature® Vintage Comics & Comic Art Auction. “This collection has already been recognized as a pedigree collection by certification service CGC,” said Ed Jaster, Senior Vice President at Heritage, “one of few collections from this era to receive that designation.” The collection is particularly notable for coming replete with significant comic books of the silver age, with a particular emphasis on key DC issues, such as a CGC-certified 8.0 Showcase #22 Green Lantern, estimated at $17,000+. An Archie Comics #1, CGC 8.5 – the highest-graded copy of the issue, and the only known cop ... More | | Van Gogh, Other Artistic Masterpieces on Display at Radford University Art Museum
Vincent Van Gogh, “The Wheat Field behind St. Paul's Hospital,” St. Rémy, 1889 (detail). Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Photo by Katherine Wetzel.
RADFORD, VA.- Community leaders and officials from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) and Radford University gathered on Thursday evening, Jan. 20, for a preview event celebrating the opening of “Van Gogh, Lichtenstein, Whistler: Masterpieces of World Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,” an exhibition commemorating the museum’s 75th anniversary. Supported by Altria Group, the special exhibition is open to the public and is featured in the Radford University Art Museum, located in the Covington Center for Visual and Performing Arts, from Jan. 21 - March 4, 2011. Admission is free. The exhibition features the work of about 30 artistic masters from around the world. Featured pieces include those from masters such as Post-Impressionistic icon Vincent Van Gogh, American ... More | | Two California Groups Want Historic Decommissioned Navy Ship as a Tourist Attraction
File photo of the battleship USS Iowa fires its 16-inch guns during duty in the Persian Gulf. AP Photo/Eric Risberg.
By: Sudhin Thanawala, Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO, CA (AP).- The USS Iowa supported U.S. forces fighting the Japanese during World War II and helped tankers safely navigate the Persian Gulf in the Iran-Iraq War. Though the ship has long since been out of service, its final battle is still being waged. Two California nonprofits — one in the San Francisco Bay area, the other in Los Angeles — are vying to host the decommissioned ship as a tourist attraction. The Navy is expected to make a decision within a few months. Fights over such ships, although not unprecedented, are generally confined to the most coveted of vessels. A group that wanted the USS Missouri — site of Japan's surrender in Tokyo Bay during World War II — to remain moored in Bremerton, Wash. sued the Navy in 1998 when the ship was ... More |
 |
Sotheby's Announces the Dedicated Auction of What Modern Is: The Collection of Mark McDonald
Timo Sarpaneva, “Lancet”, Circa 1955. Glass. Estimate: $20,000-30,000. Photo: Sotheby's.
NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s announces the dedicated auction of What Modern Is: The Collection of Mark McDonald, to be held on 10 March 2011 in New York. The sale offers works assembled over the full span of Mr. McDonald’s impressive career as an influential gallery owner, during which time he helped to create and build the market for midcentury furniture and design in America. His successful galleries, from Fifty/50 and Gansevoort Gallery in New York City to 330 and the current Mark McDonald, Ltd in Hudson, NY, became art-world landmarks where the new style of ‘Midcentury Modern’ moved to the forefront of the design and decorating worlds. Sotheby’s previously offered works from Mr. McDonald’s collection in 1993, during his transition from Fifty/50 to Gansevoort Gallery. What Modern Is will be on exhibition in Sotheby’s York Avenue gall ... More | | A Gathering Quiet: Metalpoint Paintings and Drawings by Susan Schwalb at Galerie Mourlot
Susan Schwalb, Madrigal #10 2010 12”x12” copperpoint, bronze on white Plike paper.
NEW YORK, NY.- Galerie Mourlot presents its second solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Susan Schwalb. Susan Schwalb’s new series of carefully constructed silverpoint paintings uses delicate horizontal lines and bands, drawn across layered fields of color, to create serene and meditative works. Layering, line and light are Schwalb’s signatures. Each individual silverpoint line which she attentively places over a field of acrylic color adds a layer of movement to her painting. The result is a quiet and compelling vibration of color and line. The paintings in this new series are composed of subtle hues of pale peach, subdued pink, pastel blue and muted gold, evoking natural forces. These panels are carefully beveled so that the imagery seems to float off the wall. While her works are essentially abstract, the carefully chosen titles do provoke certain readings. Aspects of her art suggest movement, ... More | | Kunsthalle Basel Presents First Major Solo Exhibition in Switzerland of Works by Artist Bettina Pousttchi
Entitled "World Time Clock", the show is also the first comprehensive institutional presentation of the artist's multifaceted oeuvre.
BASEL.- Kunsthalle Basel presents the first major solo exhibition in Switzerland of works by Berlin-based German-Iranian artist Bettina Pousttchi. The exhibition is on display until March 13 2011. Entitled "World Time Clock", the show is also the first comprehensive institutional presentation of the artist's multifaceted oeuvre. Pousttchi, who was born 1971 in Mainz, Germany, has recently received due attention for her large-scale, site-specific photographic work "Echo" (2009/10). The recent project involved covering all four elevations of the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin (Temporary Kunsthalle Berlin), built in 2008 by Adolf Krischanitz and situated in the historical centre of Berlin, with a digitally manipulated collage of archival images of the glass skin and concrete pilasters of the nearby Palast der Republik (Palace of the ... More |
 |
Exhibition of Sol LeWitt's Exchanges of Artwork with Various Artists Opens at MASS MoCA
The works of art that LeWitt received throughout his life, as well as records of what he offered in return, are maintained by the Sol LeWitt Private Collection.
NORTH ADAMS, MA.- Although celebrated for the revolutionary role he played in the development of both Conceptualism and Minimalism, Sol LeWitt was also renowned for his exchanges of artwork with various artists throughout his lifetime. For LeWitt, the act of exchange seemed to be not only a personal gesture, but also an integral part of his conceptual practice. In addition to encouraging the circulation of artworks through a gift economy that challenged the art world’s dominant economic model, LeWitt’s exchanges with friends and strangers had the same qualities of generosity and risk that characterized his work in general. In the spirit of continuing the artist’s lifelong philosophy of open exchange, and in conjunction with the LeWitt Wall Drawing Retrospective on view at MASS MoCA through 2033, MASS MoCA and Cabinet present An Exchange with Sol LeWitt—a curatorial project initiated by independent curator ... More | | After 222 Years, First Draft of a Poem by Robert Burns, is Found in Castle in Scotland
File photo of the statue of Robert Burns (1759 -1796, Scotland's national bard). EPA/BARBARA WALTON.
By Ian MacKenzie
EDINBURGH (REUTERS).- Staff at a castle in Scotland have discovered a rare letter including the first draft of a poem by Robert Burns 222 years after he posted it. The letter -- which includes a draft of "On Seeing a Wounded Hare" -- surfaced at Floors Castle in the Scottish borders on the eve of celebrations marking the birth of Scotland's national bard on January 25, 1759. The letter, dated May 13, 1789, was addressed to James Gregory, then head of Edinburgh University's medical school. It was spotted by a member of the castle staff in an album that had come into the possession of the then 6th Duke of Roxburghe. The poet sent the letter from Ellisdale, his farm near Dumfries in southwest Scotland, and enclosed an early version of his poem on the wounded hare. Burns expressed his gratitude to Gregory for his support and invited his comments and criticism, asking him to "mark faulty lines with your pencil." The published poem, On Seeing a Wounded Hare, first printed in 1793, cur ... More | | Rare Andy Warhol Self Portrait to Go Under Hammer a Christie's in New York
A large-scale Andy Warhol self-portrait, previously unknown to the wider public. AP Photo/Christie's Images.
By: Basil Katz
NEW YORK (REUTERS).- A rare Andy Warhol self portrait in stark white and red, which had been in private hands for over 30 years, will go on sale at Christie's in London next month, anchoring the auctioneer's post-war and contemporary art offering. The unusually large canvas, 6 feet by 6 feet (1.8 m by 1.8m) features the pensive artist staring straight at the viewer but with half his face swallowed in a shadow of blood red paint. One of 11 self-portraits in this 1967 series, it is the only one restricted to two colors. Christie's estimates a gavel price of three to 5 million pounds ($8 million) for the painting. "This is one of the missing pieces of the Holy Grail," said Amy Cappellazzo, Christie's co-head of contemporary and post-war art. It was put up for sale by the estate of the painting's purchaser, who is now deceased, she added. Warhol was at the height of celebrity when he first exhibited the painting along with the 1 ... More |
| More News |
Santa Monica Museum of Art Presents Daniel Cummings: Recent Paintings
SANTA MONICA, CA.- The Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Daniel Cummings: Recent Paintings (on view through April 16, 2011), the first museum exhibition for this young, up-and-coming artist. SMMoA consistently premieres the work of artists who have gone on to make important contributions in contemporary art, including Brody Condon, Urs Fischer, Rebecca Morris, Joel Morrison, and Henry Taylor. The exhibition runs in Project Room 2 concurrently with Al Taylor: Wire Instruments and Pet Stains, the first American museum survey of work by this important and prolific artist, and in Project Room 1, The Donkey Show. Cummings (b. 1980) is a graduate of the MFA program in sculpture at UCLA, where he transferred his interest in 3-dimensional objects to painting. His abstract work plays with space and color in a variety of scales. Deceptively simple at first glance, his paintings are in fact, meticulously structured and complex formal com ... More
Newly Acquired Grayson Perry Works to Be Shown in Manchester
MANCHESTER.- Two striking works by Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry will go on display in a new show at Manchester Art Gallery next week. A vase entitled Jane Austen in E17 (2009) and an etching, Print for a Politician (2005), were recently bought for Manchester. The two works will be on show in a new display co-curated by a group of 20 young people from Manchester. They will be shown together with a number of unusual objects, text, film and some rarely seen examples of historic costumes, prints and ceramics selected from the gallery’s stores. The young people involved in curating the show are all between 15 and 18 years old and are known as the gallery’s Creative Consultants. Their project culminates with a workshop with Grayson Perry on 31 January. The new display is part of Visual Dialogues, a partnership programme managed by Tate Britain working with regional museums and galleries. Art Fund director Step ... More
KUB Arena Presents Living Archives in Cooperation with the Van Abbemuseum
BREGENZ.- What is an archive? What is a collection? What are the relationships between the documents stored in archives and objects stored in collections concerned with memory, identity, history, and politics? What narrations are implied in them and towards which possible other ways of reading could they be expanded? The collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven is a joint consideration of the significance of archives and collections, which play a major role in the current reconsiderations of artistic practices and conservations in the realm of the museum. The project proposes a series of artistic and curatorial approaches, which formulate individual and fragmented art histories, archives and collections, undermining more canonized modes of operation and opening up alternative interpretation. Alongside the exhibit Living Archive – Mixed Messages of the Van Abbemuseum, which includes works by Francis Bacon, R ... More
Major Commissions Awarded to Ground-Breaking Program for Disabled Artists
LONDON.- The London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, the UK Arts Councils and the British Council have awarded £820,000 funding to a new round of major commissions for Unlimited, the ground-breaking programme that celebrates arts and culture by disabled and deaf artists on an unprecedented scale for the Cultural Olympiad. The 13 new commissions range widely in artform including choreography, live arts, visual arts and theatre. Projects include a circus show exploring the ups and downs of Bipolar Disorder and thousands of ceramic flowers planted at historic sites across the country. The works will take place across the UK and with support from the British Council many of the commissions will see collaboration between the artists in the UK and other countries including Brazil, China, Germany and South Africa. Unli ... More
Illustrious Designers, New Collectors and Philanthropists Gather at Young Collectors Night at the Winter Antiques Show
NEW YORK, NY.- On Thursday, January 27th, East Side House Settlement (ESH) will host the annual Young Collectors Night at the Winter Antiques Show at the Park Avenue Armory. This high-energy night attracts over 600 new collectors, young philanthropists, art and antique enthusiasts, and interior designers. Sponsored by New York magazine and Elie Tahari, the dazzling evening offers guests a private viewing of one of the world’s most prestigious antiques shows, renowned for its sensational showcase of American, English, European, and Asian fine and decorative arts dating from antiquity through the 1960s. Proceeds from the event will benefit East Side House Settlement, a leading social services agency that serves young people and families in the South Bronx. The evening is co-chaired by Emily Israel an ... More
|
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment