Displaying items by tag: Modern Art

Iran is starting to use its soft power, agreeing last month to lend works from the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art’s (TMoCA) collection of international and Iranian art for an exhibition in Berlin next year. The show, a symbol of Iran’s rapprochement with the West, could travel beyond Berlin, a spokeswoman for the Tehran museum tells us. The exhibition will include works by international and Iranian artists.

Other leading museums have expressed an interest in borrowing from the Tehran collection, which includes works by Picasso, Rothko, Pollock and Bacon among others.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (or Mia, as it is styled now) announced today that Robert Cozzolino will be the museum’s new Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator of Paintings. He is expected to begin his position at the Minnesota museum on March 1, 2016.

Cozzolino comes from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In his eleven-year tenure at the Philadelphia museum, where he is currently a senior curator and the Evelyn and Will Kaplan Curator of Modern Art, Cozzolino established himself as an expert in American painting.

Where the newness of art comes from (when it comes) is something of a conundrum. The New Presentation of the Modern Collection at the Centre Pompidou Musée National d’Art Moderne (the second largest collection of modern and contemporary art in the world, after the Museum of Modern Art in New York) attempts to remedy this conundrum by pointing out and celebrating certain shrewd and ardent theorists, art critics, art historians, publishers, editors, poets, and thinkers who helped shape Modern art’s prevailing theories and tastes. As selected by Pompidou director Bernard Blistène, these influential figures of theoretical inquiry are shown putting forth key concepts that inspired and framed the artworks made between 1905 and 1965.

In a visit with his daughters this past summer, President Obama spent nearly an hour at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the nation’s largest repository of paintings and sketches by Edward Hopper.

He also could have seen a few Hoppers at home.

A. Alfred Taubman, the late billionaire developer and former owner of Sotheby’s auction house, was a boundless art collector whose taste spanned every period, genre and medium, from works of antiquity to contemporary art.

In advance of a series of sales of his 500-piece collection — believed to be worth more than $500 million — Sotheby’s has transformed its building inside and out to give a real sense of its depth and scope.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced Wednesday that it will reopen May 14, 2016, after being closed for three years of expansion. When it does, it will have seven floors of exhibition space, and one of those floors, the fourth, is larger than all five floors from the original building designed by Mario Bottathat opened 20 years ago.

“This is a game changer for San Francisco,” said SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra. “It lifts us to the top ranks for museums of modern and contemporary art in the world.”

A rare still life cubist collage by Pablo Picasso that features newspaper cuttings of ads for Quaker oats and Cherry Rocher cherry brandy has been acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Of the 30 collages Picasso made, only a handful remain in private hands. It shows a stylized glass and bottle standing on a table, in a medium seen as revolutionary in the early 20th century. It was made using charcoal, ink and pencil and stencilled lettering, but the bottle was cut from samples of a French newspaper, Le Journal, dated 12 December 1912.

Christie’s presents the sale of three works by Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Dan Flavin from the collection of Paul Maenz to be sold in the evening sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art on November 10th. Through his gallery and the artists he represented, Paul Maenz had a profound impact on Cologne’s importance as a cultural and artistic center. Specialized in works by conceptual artists early on, the Galerie Paul Maenz Köln was instrumental in introducing avant-garde art of the 1970s and 1980s to Europe. New York and Cologne have had a decisive influence on the art world, both cities afford the kind of climate that artists value and possess intuitions that both challenge and support the art scene.

A masterpiece of the American pop art movement hits the auction block in New York next month, expected to set a new record for artist Roy Lichtenstein and continue a record-setting year in art sales.

Christie’s has set the low estimate for Lichtenstein’s iconic “Nurse” at $80 million, but believes it could fetch in excess of $100 million at a specially curated evening sale in New York on November 9.

A Lucian Freud drawing not seen in public for nearly 70 years has emerged having been largely unknown to experts, thought to be the only self-portrait to also feature his first wife Kitty Garman.

Freud drew the startlingly intense work, Flyda and Arvid, in 1947 and gave it shortly afterwards to his friend Sonia Brownell, best known for marrying George Orwell on his deathbed in 1949 and who was almost certainly the model for Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four.