Displaying items by tag: scholar

Andrew Butterfield, an art dealer and Renaissance scholar, had seen the two-and-a-half-foot tall wooden sculpture several years before, in a photograph, and thought it was “really fantastic.”

“It felt so much like the embodiment of the early Renaissance,” he said recently. He passed on making an offer then. But the gilded figure of a plump, graceful cherub, or putto, nagged at him, and when he finally did buy it, in 2012, it set him off down an art-historical detective trail that made him glad he followed his instincts. Mr. Butterfield and several other experts he has enlisted now believe the statue is a lost work by Donatello, one of the defining artists of the Renaissance, and a rare example of the artist’s work in wood, making the discovery not only a major addition to Donatello’s surviving corpus but also to the history of Western sculpture.

The Detroit Institute of Arts board of directors today named Salvador Salort-Pons, an internationally respected curator, scholar and the museum’s executive director of collection strategies and information, as its director, president and CEO, effective October 15, 2015.

Salort-Pons has served as director of the museum’s European Art Department since 2011, adding the role of director of collection strategies and information in 2013. He also serves as the Elizabeth and Allan Shelden Curator of European Paintings at the DIA and has played a key role in the museum’s strategic planning process, approaching his work with the visitor-centered approach that is a key tenet of the DIA’s vision. He succeeds Graham W. J. Beal, who retired as director of the DIA on June 30.

The Morgan Library & Museum, which has been without a leader since late last summer, looked West to bring back a longtime New Yorker as its new director, choosing Colin B. Bailey, who has served since 2013 as director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco but was for many years before that the chief curator at the Frick Collection.

Mr. Bailey, a well-regarded Renoir scholar, succeeds William M. Griswold, who left last year to take over the Cleveland Museum of Art. Mr. Bailey comes to the Morgan almost a decade after an expansion, designed by Renzo Piano, enlarged not only the museum’s floor plan but also its ambitions, moving it more actively into contemporary art, collaborations with other institutions and high-end acquisitions.

New research by an Italian scholar has shown that a painting in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum known as the "Meidum Geese" may be a fake. Writing for our sister newspaper, "Il Giornale dell’Arte," the Egyptologist Francesco Tiradritti called the five-foot-long fragment of wall decoration “what the Mona Lisa is to Western art.” A facsimile is on view in the Egyptian galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

According to the historical records of Egypt’s Antiquities Service, the work was discovered in 1871 at the tomb of prince Nefermaat and his wife Itet (also Atet) at Meidum, and dates to around 2575-2551 BC in the early fourth dynasty.

The collector, scholar and legendary gossip Horace Walpole woke one morning in June 1764 in the extraordinary fantasy home he had created near the Thames, west of London.

Strawberry Hill had – and now has again after years of careful restoration – roof, battlement and mantelpieces bristling with spires and gargoyles, stairs and bookcases copied from the tombs of medieval kings. Its passageways and library ceilings were embellished with imagined ancestors, and windows glitter with stained glass collected by the crate load from across Europe.

Princeton University has announced the largest gift in its history: a trove of rare books valued at nearly $300 million, including a Gutenberg Bible, an original printing of the Declaration of Independence, all four of Shakespeare’s Folios and significant musical manuscripts written by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Wagner.

The Scheide Library, named for the family of the philanthropist and scholar William H. Scheide, has been housed in a special room in Princeton’s Firestone Library since 1959, when Mr. Scheide, who died last November at age 100, moved it there from his family home in Titusville, Pa. The bequest makes Princeton the permanent home of what the university’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, called “one of the greatest collections of rare books and manuscripts in the world today.”

The Royal Academy is to present the first blockbuster of the year, and expectations are high for this exhibition of Flemish baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens – an artist who painted everything from family portraits to ceilings including at Banqueting House in Whitehall. But the artist is known for his feast of color, violence, eroticism and history that entranced the rulers who paid him to decorate palaces across early 17th-century Europe, and not least his sensuously fleshy female nudes and the term they spawned: "Rubenesque."

The artist was also a scholar, a self-made gentleman and noted diplomat who used his connections with royal patrons to broker deals on behalf of European powers. From the French Romantic painter Delacroix, whose works owe Rubens everything, to Picasso, who claimed to dislike Rubens but was obviously influenced by him, this exhibition promises to be a truly stupendous celebration of a the artist's onfluence; the exhibition will look at how Rubens has inspired of great artists during his lifetime and over the proceeding centuries.

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive has acquired the Steven Leiber collection of Conceptual art and ephemera as well as Leiber’s library of Conceptual art reference and artists’ books. Steven Leiber, who was a world-renowned dealer, scholar, and collector with a special interest in Conceptual art, died in 2012.

In recognition of Leiber’s impact on the history of art and on the museum’s own collection, BAM/PFA will name the area of its new building that will house these works “The Steven Leiber Conceptual Art Study Center.” BAM/PFA’s new building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is currently under construction in downtown Berkeley and is slated to open in early 2016. With this new acquisition, BAM/PFA is poised to become one of the world’s leading centers for the study of Conceptual art.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Monday that it had received a major gift of 20th-century works by African-American artists from the South, including 10 pieces by Thornton Dial and 20 important quilts made by the Gee’s Bend quilters of Alabama.

The works, 57 in all, are being donated by the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which was begun in 2010 by the scholar and collector William S. Arnett to raise the profile of art by self-taught African-Americans. Thomas P. Campbell, the Met’s director, described the gift, which also includes work by Lonnie Holley, Nellie Mae Rowe and Joe Minter, as a significant enlargement of the museum’s holdings of work by black American artists.