Displaying items by tag: Research

Kim Conaty has been appointed curator for the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. Conaty comes to the Rose from The Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she was the Sue and Eugene Mercy, Jr., Assistant Curator of Drawings and Prints. In her new position, Conaty will play a key role in planning exhibitions and interpreting the Rose’s exceptional collection of post-war art, undertake significant research, and evaluate potential acquisitions. Conaty will join the Rose staff in December 2015. 

“I am delighted to welcome Kim as a creative partner during an historic period of ambitious growth for the Rose," said Christopher Bedford, Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose.

Featuring a hundred drawings from the Uffizi, the Ashmolean, and Christ Church, Oxford, Titian to Canaletto is a groundbreaking exhibition based on new research. Venetian art has long been associated with brilliant colors and free brushwork, but drawing has been written out of its history. This exhibition highlights the significance of drawing as a concept and as a practice in the artistic life of Venice. It reveals the variety of purposes and techniques in drawing from Bellini, Titian and Tintoretto to Tiepolo and Canaletto.

The Judd Foundation is working to digitize Donald Judd’s archive, which is in the process of being moved fr om New York to Marfa, Texas, wh ere the artist founded the Chinati Foundation in 1986.

The archive has so far been the main resource for a catalogue raisonné being compiled by the Judd Foundation. With the appointment in September of former studio assistant Ellie Meyer as the catalogue raisonné research manager, the project is moving into a more public phase, focusing on collectors, galleries and institutions.

The Vancouver Art Gallery on Tuesday unveiled Herzog & de Meuron’s conceptual design for its new museum building in downtown Vancouver. The 310,000-square-foot building features more than 85,000 square feet of exhibition space—more than double the museum’s current size — and a new education center with a 350-seat auditorium, workshops and a resource center for research, library services and artist archives.

The world’s oldest wood carving just got older. Until last week, the Shigir Idol, a totemic sculpture that stands 2.8 meters (~9.2 feet) tall, was thought to be roughly 9,500 years old. New testing by German researchers now reveals it to have been made 11,000 years ago, making it twice as old as the ancient Egyptian pyramids at Giza, the Siberian Times reports.

The scientists in Germany used accelerated mass spectrometry to analyze seven small samples drawn from the wooden sculpture. The results date the idol to the very beginning of the Holocene epoch, or the geologic period that marks the development of human civilization.

With a record-breaking 6.4 million visits during 2014, the National Gallery remains committed to researching its collection and offering visitors a unique insight into the history and many stories that still lay undiscovered in its paintings. The exhibition 'Visions of Paradise: Botticini’s Palmieri Altarpiece' (on view from November 4th to February 16th 2016) is the culmination of three years of research on Francesco Botticini’s monumental altarpiece (228.6 x 377.2 cm) of the Assumption of the Virgin, completed in about 1477 for the funerary chapel of Matteo Palmieri (1406 – 1475) in the church of San Pier Maggiore in Florence.

What is luxury? A watch, a couture dress, a crown? Or is it having control over space, time, privacy? Is the notion of luxury changing over time?

A new exhibition, organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London together with the Crafts Council, asks these very questions. (In fact, it’s called What Is Luxury?) The works showcased help illuminate the way we use and perceive luxury today, and how that might change in the future.

“We realized when we started researching the project that on the one hand, everyone has a relationship to luxury and its own definition of it,” says Leanne Wierzba, V&A/Winchester School of Art research fellow and co-curator of the show.

All known drawings from Francisco Goya’s private “Witches and Old Women” album are being presented in their original sequence, thanks to extensive technical research undertaken by conservators, curators and art historians. An exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London (until May 25) marks the first time that all 22 ink drawings, which include depictions of elderly women fighting, witches carrying babies on their backs and pensioners dancing, have been shown together since their sale and dispersal in Paris in 1877.  

In what the noted Goya scholar Juliet Wilson-Bareau calls a “feat in forensics”, conservators and curators spent months examining the sheets to determine the pictures’ correct order. Although Goya (1746-1828) meticulously numbered each sketch, eight lost their numbers over the years.

One of the most beloved paintings in the Gallery’s permanent collection, "Young Girl Reading" (c. 1770) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, shows a young woman in profile, reading the book in her hand. It is now clear that a completely different face was painted underneath, that of an older woman looking out towards the viewer. Using groundbreaking imaging techniques and new art historical investigation, Yuriko Jackall, assistant curator of French paintings, John Delaney, senior imaging scientist, and Michael Swicklik, senior paintings conservator, all at the National Gallery of Art, recovered and reconstructed this first composition, a fully-realized, “lost” painting newly referred to as "Portrait of a Woman with a Book."

It's hard to believe that this gorgeous bit of painting by Francisco de Goya, held at the Carnegie Museum of Art since 1965, has only been on view now and then. But that's because it hasn't always been acknowledged as the Spaniard's work. This is about to change, as new research just about proves that the Pittsburgh painting is by him.

The prestigious "Burlington Magazine" is getting ready to publish an article, by the late art historian John Williams, that shows that Goya used the Carnegie piece to help him paint his great fresco around the base of the dome at the chapel of San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid, where he finished working in 1798.