The Three Graces by Lucas Cranach Join the Collections of the Louvre Museum

PARIS.- A month after the launch of the campaign to acquire Lucas Cranach’s Three Graces, the Louvre has raised 1 million euros from over 5000 donors. This enabled Lucas Cranach’s Three Graces to enter into the Louvre’s collections. The Louvre would like to thank all those who have taken part in this extraordinary successful campaign! On November 13, the Louvre museum launched a fundraising campaign to acquire The Three Graces by Lucas Cranach. This small oil on wood painting shows [...]

MoMA Presents Andy Warhol’s Influential Early Film-Based Works on a Large Scale

NEW YORK, NY.- Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures, on view at MoMA from December 19, 2010, to March 21, 2011, focuses on the artist’s cinematic portraits and nonnarrative, silent, and black-and-white films from the mid-1960s. Warhol’s Screen Tests reveal his lifelong fascination with the cult of celebrity, comprising a visual almanac of the 1960s downtown avant-garde scene. Included in the exhibition are such Warhol ―Superstars as Edie Sedgwick, Nico, and Baby Jane Holzer; poet Allen Ginsberg; musician Lou Reed; actor Dennis [...]

Moscow Museum of Modern Art Presents Cultural Exchange Project: VoTH

MOSCOW.- VoTH is a project of cultural exchange between Russia and the Netherlands, initiated by Dutch curators Marjan Teeuwen and Ine Lamers (Marjan Teeuwen / KW_14 is responsible for the organization of the exhibitions and the catalogue). The core of this exhibition is an endeavour of 8 Russian and 8 Dutch contemporary artists to analyze and reflect upon some aspects of today’s Russian society, culture, and history. All artists have created new work for this project. Dutch participants: Daya Cahen, [...]

Galerie Lelong Presents An Exhibition of Paintings by Five Emerging and Mid-Career Artists

NEW YORK, NY.- Galerie Lelong presents Five from L.A., an exhibition of paintings by five emerging and mid-career artists—Whitney Bedford, Kirsten Everberg, Alexandra Grant, Iva Gueorguieva, and Annie Lapin—who each uniquely employ bold and saturated colors, an elusive sense of space, and fluid movement between abstraction and representation. Currently working in Los Angeles, the artists hail from diverse backgrounds and explore a variety of themes, including language, turmoil, and the fragility of memory and perception. Five from L.A. opened to [...]

Pierre Huyghe is the 2010 Winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Contemporary Artist Award

WASHINGTON, DC.- The Smithsonian American Art Museum announced that Pierre Huyghe is the 2010 winner of the museum’s contemporary artist award. Huyghe was selected by an independent panel of jurors for his “pioneering vision and tireless ambition to make art that defies expectations and extends conventional practices into new territory.” Huyghe is the ninth winner of the $25,000 award, which recognizes an artist younger than 50 who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity. It [...]

Ground-Breaking Exhibition of Contemporary 21st Century International Art at GoMA

QUEENSLAND.- An ambitious and ground-breaking exhibition of contemporary international art from the first decade of the twenty-first century is present at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) from December 18, 2010 to April 25, 2011. Queensland Art Gallery Director Tony Ellwood said ‘21st Century: Art in the First Decade’ would showcase over 180 works by more than 110 senior and emerging artists from over 40 countries, with most of the work from the Gallery’s own expanding collection.’ ‘The Queensland Art [...]

SFMOMA Announces 2010 SECA Award Winners

SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announced that Mauricio Ancalmo, Colter Jacobsen, Ruth Laskey, and Kamau Amu Patton are the 2010 artists selected for its biennial SECA Art Award. Administered by SECA (Society for the Encouragement o f Contemporary Art), one of the museum’s auxiliaries, the signature award honors Bay Area artists who are working independently at a high level of artistic maturity but who have not yet received substantial recognition. The four award winners [...]

Exhibition of Rarely-Seen Drawings Explore Noted Sculptor, Tony Smith’s Early Work at the Menil Collection

HOUSTON, TX.- On view at the Menil Collection from December 17, 2010 through April 3, 2011, Tony Smith: Drawings brings together a group of rarely-exhibited works on paper by the American artist best known for monumental geometric sculptures in steel and bronze. Created between 1950 and 1955, the 30 drawings on display encapsulate a dramatic turning point in Smith’s artistic career, as he shifted from his professional architectural work towards painting and sculpture. Throughout this brief yet remarkably productive period, [...]

Esther Mañas and Arash Moori Present Invoking a Demon Landscape at Espai 13 by Fundació Joan Miró

BARCELONA.- Esther Mañas (Madrid, 1974) and Arash Moori (Birmingham, United Kingdom, 1977) joined artistic forces in 2004. They currently live and work in Madrid. Their work explores sound within the extended field of sculpture and installation. Sound is used as a sculptural medium to change the perception of architectural spaces taken over by EM&AM. They work on a site-specific basis, making the most of a site’s symbolic properties or the given or found contexts. These architectural borrowings include materials and [...]

World Museums Unite for Dulwich Picture Gallery’s 200th Anniversary

LONDON (REUTERS).- London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery turns 200 in January, and the museum is in for a birthday treat of 12 masterpieces from around the world, one for every month of its anniversary year. The paintings to be loaned to the gallery in the south of the capital including major works by Velazquez, Vermeer, El Greco, Veronese, Rembrandt, Ingres, Van Gogh, Gainsborough, Constable and Hockney. “Dulwich is recognized internationally as a really important museum in the history of museums,” said [...]

Sotheby’s Doha Auction ‘Hurouf: The Art of the Word’ Realises Above High Estimate, Total of $5.6 Million

DOHA, QATAR Sotheby’s ‘Hurouf: The Art of the Word’ Sale, the first-ever international auction entirely devoted to calligraphy, realised the outstanding total of $5,630,125 (QAR 20,500,765), in excess of the pre-sale high estimate of $5.5 million. The sale established sell-through rates of 72.5% by lot and 87.6% by value, and set 9 new records for artists at auction and benchmarks for 21 artists whose works have never before been offered in an international sale. 32% of the buyers were new [...]

Frank Gehry’s Design for University of Technology, Sydney Envisions a New Kind of Business School

SYDNEY.- Sydney’s Frank Gehry designed Dr Chau Chak Wing building will open a new page in business education in Australia. The world-renowned architect’s plans for the $150 million building, his only in Australia, were unveiled at a media conference at the University of Technology, Sydney. UTS has been working with Gehry Partners to design a world-class business school based on the idea of a tree-house structure. As Frank Gehry has put it, “a trunk and core of activity and… branches [...]

Renovation and Extension of Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp to Last from 2011 to 2017

ANTWERP.- The renovation of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) will start in September 2011 and last until the autumn of 2017 rather than 2014 as previously announced. The main reasons for the longer duration are the scope and complexity of the work, combined with some complications revealed during the preparatory phase. The renovation and extension of the 19th-century museum in Antwerp ’s Zuid (South) district is a complex undertaking. It encompasses not only the replacement of all [...]

Foam in Amsterdam Presents a Retrospective Containing Work by W. Eugene Smith

AMSTERDAM.- This winter, Foam presents a retrospective containing work by W. Eugene Smith (US, 1918-1978). Smith has been hailed as the founder of the photographic essay. His extensive pictorial narratives, accompanied by captions and comments, appeared in magazines such as the world-famous American periodical Life in the 1950s, the heyday of photographic journalism. Smith’s black-and-white reportages exhibit a powerful sense of involvement, dealing with subject matter that reflects his social commitment. Foam features six of his finest series, including The [...]

Two Evocative Paintings of Welsh Landscapes to be Auctioned at Bonhams

LONDON.- Two beautiful oil paintings of the Welsh countryside by Alfred de Breanski are to feature in Bonhams auction of 19th Century Paintings on 27th January 2011. Fishermen and cattle, Betts-y-Coed is expected to fetch £10,000-15,000 while The Llugwy from Pont-y-Cyfyng, Capel Curig is estimated to sell for £5,000-7,000. Alfred de Breanski (1852-1928) was a British landscape artist admired for his spectacular and resplendent views of Wales and the highlands of Scotland. These rural scenes are noted for their beautiful [...]