Displaying items by tag: william kentridge

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.

A sharp upswing in the value of South Africa’s best-known art has led to the country’s biggest art heist. Posing as paying visitors at the Pretoria Art Museum, three men proceeded to hold the museum staff at gunpoint and walk away with works by local masters Irma Stern, Gerard Sekoto, JH Pierneef, Maggie Laubser, and Hugo Naude.

Images of the criminals were not recorded because the museum’s camera surveillance system broke down on November 8, three days before the heist. Officials did alert Interpol. The three criminals left behind the most expensive piece in the museum’s collection, Two Malay Musicians by Irma Stern, due to lack of space in their getaway car. Works by other well-known South African artists such as William Kentridge, Walter Battiss, and Robert Hodgins were left untouched.

The five stolen artworks were owned by the City of Tshwane and were insured.