Museum News

Couple Donates $70 Million Collection to Philadelphia Museum of Art

“Couple Donates $70 Million Collection to Philadelphia Museum of Art”

by Victor Fiorillo via PhillyMag

“On Thursday, Art Museum CEO Timothy Rub announced that the museum has acquired one of the country’s most important collections of contemporary art from Keith and Katherine Sachs. Keith Sachs, a museum trustee since 1988, is the former CEO of Horsham-based Saxco International, a distributor of wine and liquor bottles.

The collection of 97 works spans the last 60 years and includes pieces by American masters Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns, as well as dozens of other artists. The collection features paintings, both indoor and outdoor sculpture, large-format photography, and video art.

Here’s what Rub had to say:

The Sachs Collection reinforces and expands the scope of the Museum’s holdings of contemporary art and will enable us to present to our audiences a more comprehensive view of the art of the past half century.  . . . .”

 

“Flea Market Renoir Painting Sparks Legal Battle With Museum”

“Flea Market Renoir Painting Sparks Legal Battle With Museum”

via “ABC NEWS“

“A one-of-a-kind Renoir painting the size of a napkin is at the center of an intense legal battle between a museum that claims it was stolen and a Virginia woman who claims she bought it for $7.

The tiny work of art is an 1879 landscape by the Impressionist painter titled “Paysage Bords de Seine.”

In court papers filed this week, the Baltimore Museum of Art claims the painting was stolen in 1951. As evidence, the Museum provided a 60-year-old police report, old museum catalogues and a receipt showing that a patron bequeathed the painting to the museum. . . . .”

‘Degenerate Art’ Opens at Neue Galerie in the Spring

‘Degenerate Art’ Opens at Neue Galerie in the Spring

by Carol Vogel via “NY Times”

The Neue Galerie’s big spring show, “Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937,” has been nearly three years in the making, yet it seems particularly prescient after the discovery last month of what may well be the biggest trove of missing 20th-century European art — about 1,400 works suspected of being traded or looted during the Nazis’ reign, including paintings by Matisse, Chagall, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso and a host of other masters. Some disappeared in the late 1930s, around the time the Nazis raided German museums and public collections, confiscating works they called degenerate because Hitler deemed them un-German or Jewish in nature. . . .

This would be interesting to catch; I’m surprised so many works survived, since the Nazis destroyed so much of what they disapproved of (the loss in literary history was devastating).  It is a relief to know that so much survived, and I would be fascinated to attend this showing.  If anyone has a chance to go, a review would be greatly appreciated!

 

“Rediscovering China, India and Southeast Asia at the Cleveland Museum of Art: The new West Wing”

“Rediscovering China, India and Southeast Asia at the Cleveland Museum of Art: The new West Wing”

by Steven Litt via “Cleveland Art“

Exhibition: “Chinese, Indian and Southeast Asian Galleries”

Location: 

The Cleveland Museum of Art
11150 East Blvd., Cleveland

Opening Date: Jan. 2., 2014

Cost of Admission: Free

Further Information: www.clevelandart.org

“They were destinations of conquest and desire for millennia. Reaching them by caravan or by sea was dangerous, if not deadly. Yet traders and invaders from across Europe and Asia couldn’t resist the allure of China, India and Southeast Asia.

Thanks to the completion of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s new West Wing, Northeast Ohioans can now travel with ease – artistically speaking – to places that once fired the imaginations of Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Columbus and Magellan.

 On Thursday, the museum will launch a members-only preview of six new galleries containing nearly 500 works of art in jade, silk, bronze, gold, porcelain, ink on paper and dozens of types of stone, including the blue-gray schist of Afghanistan and the red sandstone of the Ganges Valley. . . . .”

 

“One of Van Gogh’s Last Paintings Unveiled”

“One of Van Gogh’s Last Paintings Unveiled”

by Mary Alice Parks via “ABC News“

“A spectacularly vibrant Vincent van Gogh painting was unveiled today at the National Gallery of Art in Washington after going private nearly 50 years ago.

The work, “Green Wheat Fields, Auvers,” is particularly exciting for art historians because the famous Dutch painter completed it just weeks before he died in France in 1890 at age . . . .”

I actually adore this painting; the blues and greens combined into an excellent group of harmonious colors.  And I’m amazed at the way the change in style from small raked lines in the grass to larger swirls in the sky is an excellent contrast. This is probably one of my favorites of Van Gogh’s works.