Displaying items by tag: collections

The Barnes Foundation — which is still feeling out its new identity in downtown Philadelphia after relocating in 2012 from its original home in the suburb of Merion, Pa. — announced Thursday that it had chosen Sylvie Patry, a longtime curator at the Musée D’Orsay in Paris, to be its new chief curator and deputy director for collections and exhibitions.

Ms. Patry, 46, is a specialist in Impressionist and Post-Impressionism, which is the strength of the Barnes’s collection, built by Albert C. Barnes, a willful and eccentric pharmaceutical tycoon, and opened in 1922.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today that Barbara Drake Boehm will be the Paul and Jill Ruddock Senior Curator at the museum’s medieval-art annex, the Cloisters, where she is currently a curator. In this newly created position, Boehm will oversee plans for budgeting, museum strategy, and the collections, while still serving as a curator for shows at the Cloisters.

In the past, Boehm has worked on shows about enamels made in Limoges between the 12th and 14th centuries, Jeanne d’Évreux’s prayer book, and art made in Prague during the 14th and 15th centuries.

Coming up on June 22, Bonhams Los Angeles is holding a European Furniture and Decorative Arts auction featuring highlights from a myriad of noteworthy collections, including that of Casablanca director Michael Curtiz, and Rupert Murdoch – formerly from the collection of Dr. Jules C. Stein.

Leading the 539-lot sale is a pair of François Linke French gilt bronze mounted Vernis Martin decorated mahogany vitrines, circa 1900 (est. $60,000-80,000). It highlights a strong selection of Parisian furniture and decorative arts from the late 19th century including works by such makers as Linke, Beurdeley, Zwiener, Sormani, Durand, Barbedienne, Escalier de Cristal, Boudet and Christofle.

The Shaker Museum│Mount Lebanon has launched a newly digitized online catalog of historic photography as a part of its ongoing effort to make available online a full catalog of its collections. The project has been supported by a $25,000 grant from the Leon Levy Foundation.

The museum’s catalog records and presents the richest historical information, including scenes of Shaker villages from the mid-late 19th Century, as well as a collection of stereograph images from this early period by James Irving, a Troy, NY-based photographer. Viewers are able to see a larger version of each image with accompanying historic information and details and from links in the online catalog can share the records with friends or contact the museum with comments or questions.

Someone apparently unfamiliar with the term “Romantic art” asked a Yale curator if Yale’s big, new exhibition would be ready for Valentine’s Day.

That’s curator humor, delivered politely of course, during the Wednesday preview of this beefy show, the first joint exhibition by the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art called, “The Critique of Reason: Romantic Art 1760-1860.”

Amy Meyers, director of the Yale Center for British Art, said artwork often has been lent from one side of Chapel Street to the other in past cooperation between the gallery and the Brit center, but never with the opportunity to bring the two collections together in this way, to examine this important period’s art in such context.

Manhattan’s federal court has dismissed a lawsuit brought by Elizabeth Bilinski and 19 other collectors against the Keith Haring Foundation over its refusal to authenticate 111 works.

According to the court papers, Bilinski submitted works she owned by Haring, which she and the other plaintiffs had acquired from Angelo Moreno, a friend of the artist, to the foundation in 2007. But the foundation, without giving a reason, rejected the pieces as “not authentic.” When Bilinski submitted what she considered more evidence of authenticity, including a statement from Moreno, the foundation refused to reconsider its decision. The collectors said that a forensic report indicated that the art could have been created during Haring’s lifetime, and that experts at Sotheby’s believed the works to be authentic, but the auction house refused to sell them without the foundation’s approval.

Thomas Kren, the associate director for collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum, will retire after more than 35 years, the museum announced Thursday.

When Kren leaves the Getty in October, Richard Rand, senior curator of paintings and sculpture at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., will replace him. Rand began his career at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1989.

Kren arrived at the Getty in 1980 as the associate curator of paintings. In 1984 he became the first senior curator of manuscripts, a position he held until 2010, when he took on his current role.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has published a new handbook—the first in more than 20 years—of its encyclopedic collections. Featuring some 550 masterpieces from the Museum’s world renowned holdings of Asian, European, American, and modern and contemporary art, this volume includes a broad range of media from each of the Museum’s curatorial departments, including paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures, the decorative arts, costumes and textiles, arms and armor, and architectural settings. Expanded entries provide in depth information on some of the most significant works, among them Thomas Eakins’s masterpiece "The Gross Clinic" (1875) and a superb man and horse armor acquired in 2009.

The introduction to the handbook, written by Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, recounts the Museum’s institutional history and the formation and distinctive characteristics of its collection.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum announced today the creation of The American Art Collaborative (AAC), a consortium of 14 American museums committed to building the next generation of digital searches and scholarly advancement. Members of the Collaborative are meeting in Washington, D.C., this week to move from planning to implementation of their Linked Open Data Initiative, which seeks to expand the possibilities inherent in linking museum collections through Linked Open Data (LOD).

The Collaborative plans to create a diverse critical mass of LOD on the Web on the subject of American art by putting the collections of the participating museums in the cloud and tagging this data as LOD.

The Smithsonian Institution’s federal appropriation will increase $14.5 million to $819.5 million for the fiscal year that started Oct. 1, officials said.

Most of the money — more than $675 million — will cover salaries and expenses at the institution, including a federal pay raise of 1 percent and increases in employee benefits and other costs.

The appropriation — a small piece of the omnibus package Congress passed earlier this month — includes $6.5 million for staffing, programming and collections care for the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the final $24 million of the federal government’s commitment for its construction.