Displaying items by tag: purchases

The Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, announced today it has acquired 200 new works through donation and purchase over the past year. The acquisitions include pieces by artists such as Trisha Brown, Beauford Delaney, Chuck Close, Joseph Kosuth, Liz Larner, Allen Ruppersberg, Barry Le Va, Danh Vo, and Akram Zaatari.

Deschenes’s piece Gallery 7 (2015) is a site-specific installation commissioned by the Walker, and an homage to the museum. A year-long production, it utilized the natural light from the gallery’s windows to expose a series of free-standing panels coated with photosensitive paper.

Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde fish and Piero Manzoni’s white canvas were among the top purchases during Frieze Week in London as the auction houses sold 231.2 million pounds ($373 million) of art.

As the biggest week-long concentration of art events in Europe ended yesterday, dealers at Frieze Art Fair individually reported brisk sales and the tallies at the auction houses almost doubled from last year’s October sales.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has launched MetCollects, a new web series that grants visitors first glimpses of the Met’s recent acquisitions. MetCollects will highlight one work each month, selected from the hundreds of pieces that the museum acquires through gifts and purchases each year. Each MetCollects feature will include photography, curatorial commentary, and occasionally, informative videos.

Three MetCollects features are currently available on the museum’s website. The features explore the following recent acquisitions: a multimedia meditation on time and space by the modern artist William Kentridge, an early 19th century portrait by the French painter François Gérard, and the Mishneh Torah by the Master of the Barbo Missal. The Italian manuscript from around 1457 is jointly owned by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Met.

Since 2000, the Met has launched a number of web-based initiatives including its Connections series, which offers personal perspectives on works of art in the museum’s collection by 100 members of the museum’s staff, and 82nd and Fifth, which features 100 curators from across the Met who talk about the one work of art from the collection that changed the way they see the world.

To view the MetCollects series click here.

First Look: Collecting for Philadelphia, which opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on July 13, 2013, will present a selection of works from the 8,000 individual acquisitions the institution has made since July 1, 2008. The generosity of various donors is hugely responsible for the collection that is presented to museum visitors each day. Whether it is artworks or funds to make purchases, donations have helped sustain the institution since its founding in 1876.

First Look presents a cross-section of the many works acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the past five years, most of which will be on view for the first time. The new acquisitions span centuries, continents and media. Highlights include paintings by Claude Monet (1840-1926), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Charles Wilson Peale (1741-1827).

 First Look: Collecting for Philadelphia will be on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through September 8, 2013.

After acquiring a considerable number of important drawings, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City has mounted an exhibition to showcase their recently added works. Spanning from the Renaissance through the 19^th century, the drawings were acquired through gifts, purchases, and bequests. Over 100 of these works will be featured in Old Masters, Newly Acquired.

The Morgan has greatly improved its Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Symbolist holdings by acquiring a number of works by such artists as Édouard Manet (1832-1883), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940), and Odilon Redon (1840-1916). The museum also acquired over forty Danish drawings including sheets by several Golden Age masters including C.W. Eckersberg (1783-1853) and Johan Lundbye (181-1848). The Morgan added to their British watercolor collection with works by John Martin (1789-1854) and Samuel Palmer (1805-1881). William M. Griswold, director of the museum, said, “The Morgan’s collection of drawings is among the finest in the world, and the institution has been very fortunate to have long-standing relationships with some of America’s most important collectors. This exhibition celebrates their connoisseurship and their commitment to the Morgan.”

Old Masters, New Acquired will be on view at the Morgan Library & Museum through August 11, 2013.

After receiving some criticism for its meager collection of 20^th century art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas made a number of major acquisitions. The works will debut at the museum later this month as part of the 20^th Century Art Gallery’s rotating exhibition schedule. Along with the newly acquired works, Mark Rothko’s (1903-1970) No. 210/No. 211 (Orange), which was purchased by Crystal Bridges in 2012, will be reinstalled.

Highlights from the museum’s recent purchases include Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) Hammer and Sickle (1977). The 6 x 7 foot acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas work is a part of Warhol’s Hammer and Sickle series. Crystal Bridges also acquired a major copper and Plexiglas sculptural work by the minimalist artist Donald Judd (1928-1994). Untitled 1989 (Bernstein 89-24) (1989) stands nearly 19 feet tall and is comprised of ten box-like elements made of copper and red Plexiglas. The sculpture is a prime example of Judd’s pioneering work.

In addition to the works by Warhol and Judd, Crystal Bridges acquired Max Weber’s (1864-1920) early modernist painting, Burlesque #1 (1909); Agnes Pelton’s (1881-1961) desert inspired oil on canvas work, Sand Storm (1932); and Marvin Dorwart Cone’s (1891-1965) Stone City Landscape (1936), which is executed in the Regionalist tradition.