Displaying items by tag: Museum

Just two months after overseeing the completion of a six-year, $350 million renovation, Tom Lentz, the director of the Harvard Art Museums, has announced his intention to step down.

The news comes as a surprise to some in the museum world who thought Lentz might stick around to enjoy the fruits of his many years of labor. But to others in the know, the announcement is no surprise at all.

Lentz, 63, took up the position in 2003, and in the intervening dozen years has been put to the test so many times and in so many ways that many people marvel he lasted so long. He is set to depart on July 1; a search for his replacement begins immediately.

The Smithsonian plans to open its first international exhibition space at a new cultural complex being developed at the former Olympic park in London, officials announced Tuesday.

The deal would mark the first time in the institution’s 168-year history that it would have a public presence outside the United States. It also would make the Smithsonian part of an elite group of museums — including the Guggenheim in New York and the Louvre in Paris — that have opened venues in other parts of the world.

A museum commemorating the artistic community in the Paris neighborhood of Montparnasse has been permanently shuttered by the City of Paris, French art newspaper "Le quotidien de l’art" reported. The Musée du Montparnasse, established in 1996 in an historic building that originally served as the atelier of Russian artist Marie Vassilieff in the early 20th century, first closed its doors following a September 2013 audit ordered by the City of Paris, which owns the museum’s 4,600-square-foot building at 21 avenue du Maine in the 15th arrondissement. The audit deemed the museum not in compliance with the city’s rubric for an institution of its kind for lacking a permanent collection — this despite its founding designation by the city’s cultural affairs bureau as “a location emblematic of the artistic history of Paris.”

It has just been announced that Dallas Contemporary museum in Texas has named two new curators. Alison Gingeras will be its new adjunct curator and Justine Ludwig its new director of exhibitions and senior curator.

Ludwig has worked with many museums and art centers, including: the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Rose Art Museum, the Colby College Museum of Art, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.

George Washington University plans to sell the historic schoolhouse in Georgetown that it took control of this summer as part of a court approved breakup of the financially-troubled Corcoran Gallery of Art. The agreement sent the museum’s art collection to the National Gallery of Art and allowed the university to absorb its College of Art and Design.

The university said it has selected TTR Sotheby’s International Realty to list the historic brick building, known as the Fillmore, and its one acre of property. The initial sale price is $14 million.

The six Guggenheim Helsinki finalists shortlisted early last month will begin Stage Two of the highly debated competition with a visit to the museum site in Helsinki from January 14-16 as they start further development on their current proposals for final submission this April.

The names of the finalists have been revealed, but will not be matched to their proposals until the winner is announced in June 2015. The winning team will receive a prize of €100,000 (approx. US$136,000), while each runner-up will receive €55,000 (approx. US$75,000).

An Austin museum specializing in contemporary Latin American art has roughly 12 new pieces to display courtesy of a former Tyler couple.

The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin campus was gifted 12 modern and contemporary art pieces, including paintings, drawings and sculptures from college alumni Judy and Charles Tate, who now live in the Houston area.

The Courtauld Gallery is presenting the first major museum exhibition in over 20 years of one of the 20th Century’s most exceptional artists, Egon Schiele (18901918). A central figure of Viennese art in the turbulent years around the First World War, Schiele rose to prominence alongside his avant-garde contemporaries, such as Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka. He produced some of the most radical depictions of the human figure created in modern times, reinventing the subject for the 20th Century. The exhibition charts Schiele’s short but transformative career through one of his most important subjects – his extraordinary drawings and watercolors of male and female nudes.

"Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude" concentrates on the artist’s drawings and watercolors. It brings together an outstanding selection of works that highlight Schiele’s technical virtuosity, highly original vision and uncompromising depiction of the naked figure.

A long-standing restitution dispute between Germany's Kunstsammlung NRW and the heirs of the Jewish art dealer Alfred Flechtheim, regarding the provenance of Juan Gris work, "Die Welt" reports. The museum has called on the panel of experts from the so-called Limbach Commission to adjudicate the ongoing issue. The commission's rulings will be officially non-binding, but can hold significant sway in deciding restitution cases. The museum has asked the help of the panel of experts from the Limbach Commission to adjudicate the case.

The Kunstsammlung NRW claims that after years of provenance research it has not any found evidence to support beyond a reasonable doubt that Juan Gris's work "Guitar and Ink Bottle on a Table" (1913) belonged to the Jewish art dealer.

Plans for a long-awaited Modern and contemporary art museum in the Belgian capital have stalled because the federal government of Belgium and the regional government of Brussels have very different visions for the project. Leading Belgian cultural figures have expressed concerns that Brussels’s equivalent of London’s Tate Modern or New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will ever be created.

Earlier this year, the president of the Brussels region (Brussels-Capital), Rudi Vervoort, told Belgian media that the regional government of Brussels planned to convert a 16,000 sq. m Art Deco building north-west of the city center, formerly owned by the French car manufacturer Citroën, into a Modern and contemporary art center.