French Unions Threaten to Shut Paris Museums over Job Cuts

11.27.09

Unions representing French museum workers are threatening to extend and widen a strike that has kept Paris’s Pompidou Center closed all week, reports Gregory Viscusi for Bloomberg. Seven unions sent a joint letter to the culture ministry yesterday warning that they will start a strike on December 2 at tourist attractions including the Louvre and Versailles if the government proceeds with planned job cuts, said Kamal Hesni, a representative at the CFDT union, in a telephone interview. Unions say the government’s plans to replace only one out of every two retiring civil servants will cripple French museums, as will its plan to cut some subsidies.

The move could hurt hundreds of businesses, stores, and restaurants that depend on tourists in French cities. The nonreplacement of one out of every two retirees, designed to shrink the state and cut the budget deficit, was a campaign pledge of President Nicolas Sarkozy in his 2007 election. “The Pompidou Center, like numerous other public establishments, is on the edge of financial paralysis,” a release by the unions said November 24. Workers voted today to continue their strike for at least another twenty-four hours, Hesni said. A spokeswoman for culture minister Frederic Mitterrand said the ministry had no immediate comment.

Former Chauffeur Charged with Stealing Warhols

11.27.09

The New York Daily News reports that a former chauffeur named James Biear ripped off Kenward Elmslie, the eighty-year-old grandson of newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer, and stole a Warhol painting worth $220,000, a $64,000 sketch, and family heirlooms from Elmslie's Greenwich Village home. Biear allegedly also stole a book autographed by Alfred Lord Tennyson to Elmslie's mother, Constance Pulitzer, in 1904.

Sources said he pocketed items while he drove for the elderly poet between March 2005 and August 2007 and gained his trust. Elmslie realized something was amiss in early 2007, when he noticed that a crate Warhol had painted to look like a case of Heinz 57 ketchup was missing. Warhol gave Elmslie the work in 1964. Searches of the poet's Manhattan apartment and Vermont home turned up nothing.

Biear apparently sat on the hot art before getting a dealer in Yardley, Pennsylvania, to sell it in May of last year. Biear told the dealer the Warhol was a gift from an uncle. The scam came to light when Biear's ex-wife told insurance investigators much of his stuff was stolen, a police source said. That's when FBI agents and cops knocked on Biear's door in Ossining, New York. He is charged with fraud.

Venice Biennale Attendance Increased in 2009

11.27.09

Representatives from the fifty-third Venice Biennale have reported an 18 percent increase in attendance for this year’s edition and that a record number of visitors attended––375,702 (from 319,332). During its twenty-four weeks, the Biennale was constantly at the top of the rankings of the most visited exhibitions in Italy, with a daily average of 2,223 visitors and record numbers during the weekends of 9,761 people; 132,185 students visited, either individually or in groups. The Biennale was directed by Daniel Birnbaum and chaired by Paolo Baratta. It closed on November 22. It was inaugurated on June 6 by Giorgio Napolitano, the president of Italy.

Polanski’s House Arrest Will Begin After Ski-Chalet Adaptation

11.26.09

Roman Polanski, the film director facing extradition to the United States on a sex-crime charge, may begin house arrest as soon as his alpine chalet has been fitted to monitor the electronic tag he must wear, reports Joseph Heaven and Matthias Wabl for Bloomberg.

Switzerland’s justice ministry won’t appeal the November 24 court decision that granted Polanski bail, according to a statement on the government’s website today. The Oscar-winning director must also transfer $4.49 million and surrender his travel documents to Zurich police before he can end two months of detention.

Polanski was arrested at Zurich Airport on September 26 as he arrived to collect an award at the city’s film festival. The seventy-six-year-old fugitive faces up to two years in jail in the United States for sexual conduct with a thirteen-year-old girl in 1977.

Polanski, a French-Polish citizen, raised the cash bail by offering his apartment in Paris as a security. He also owns a chalet at the Gstaad ski resort where the court said he can stay until the United States Justice Department’s extradition request can be decided.

Polanski was initially charged on six felony counts alleging he drugged and raped the thirteen-year-old. He later pleaded guilty to one count of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor after the lawyer for the girl’s family asked prosecutors to avoid a jury trial.

Pompidou Center Workers Extend Strike

11.26.09

Staff members on strike at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris have to extend their protest as that modern art museum weighs job cuts, Dave Itzkoff reports for the New York Times via Agence France-Presse. On Monday, museum employees and security guards walked off the job, amid fears that more than four hundred jobs will be cut at the museum’s Beaubourg building over the next ten years. The French government could reduce the museum’s payroll by not replacing retiring staff members; more than 40 percent of the staff at the Pompidou Center is over the age of fifty, and the legal retirement age in France is seventy. On Tuesday, representatives of the museum staff met with aides to Frédéric Mitterrand, the French culture minister, but a union official told Agence France-Presse that the meeting “did not go well.”

After a meeting Wednesday with Alain Seban, president of the Pompidou Center, Franck Guillaumet, who heads the cultural section of France’s major union, the Confederation Générale du Travail, said, “The strike must go on.” He added that the job cuts will also affect other big cultural institutions, including the Louvre, Versailles, and the National Library.

Kiki Smith and Deborah Gans Commissioned to Design Window for Museum at Eldridge Street

11.25.09

The Museum at Eldridge Street has commissioned the artist Kiki Smith and the architect Deborah Gans to create a new east window for its 1887 synagogue, a National Historic Landmark on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, according to the New York Times.

“We were interested to make a piece that integrated into the building but would not mimic the structure,” Smith said in an interview.

The synagogue reopened in 2007 after a twenty-year restoration, but there were no available records of the original window. “We decided not to try to re-create something when we did not know what that something really looked like,” said Bonnie Dimun, executive director of the museum.

Instead, Smith and Gans will reimagine the window, due to be completed by late spring. While the design has yet to be released, Smith said it would feature the Star of David at the center “in a field of blue five-pointed stars.”

The Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the new design, which will replace a clear tablet-shaped glass-block window that was installed in the mid 1940s after the original was damaged. “This was the only place in the building where we could extend the story,” said Amy Stein Milford, the museum’s deputy director.

Koons’s Train Derailed; LACMA and Huntington Acquire Mackmurdo Chair

11.25.09

When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced plans in 2007 to build Jeff Koons’s massive, multimillion-dollar Train, the news quickly polarized the art community, reports the Los Angeles Times. Some said it would be a monumental and important work of art for LA. Others decried it as a potential eyesore and a money pit.

Nearly three years on, Train appears to be nowhere near completion—or even a start date for construction. LACMA told the Los Angeles Times that the project is still somewhere between the feasibility and design phases and that the public won’t see the finished artwork until 2014.

Train was initially scheduled to be completed in 2011 or 2012. Designs for the piece call for an approximately seventy-foot replica of a 1943 Baldwin 2900-series steam locomotive, suspended vertically from a 161-foot-tall construction crane.

Train has a rumored price tag of twenty-five million dollars, but the museum declined to disclose figures except to say that it is budgeted in the “many millions” of dollars. If the rumored cost is true, Train would be among the most expensive pieces of art ever commissioned by a museum.

John Bowsher, the museum’s director of special art installations, said the next phases for Train involve two mock-ups: one involving a full-scale steam component that will test the size of the steam plume, and another dealing with the nose of the train engine that will use real materials to determine how easy it will be to meet the artist’s standards.

Neither mock-up has begun yet, according to Bowsher. He also said that there is no start date for the construction of the project.

In other news, LACMA and the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens have jointly acquired an elaborately carved mahogany chair, unveiled in 1885 at the “Inventions Exhibition” in Liverpool and subsequently known as a precursor to the Art Nouveau movement, reports the Los Angeles Times. The chair was made by Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, an English architect, graphic artist, and craftsman.

The last of five known chairs in a set to come on the market, it will go on view in December at the Huntington in a suite of galleries devoted to the British Design Reform movement. Two years later, it will move to LACMA and join a new display of international Arts and Crafts furniture. Acquired in a fifty-fifty ownership arrangement, the chair is expected to continue traveling across town every two years.

Sharing a desirable object may be a sign of the times, when few museums can buy what they want without passing the hat. But it’s also a way of avoiding local competition.

A “sensible” move, said John Murdoch, director of the Huntington’s art collections, in a statement released by the San Marino institution. “It simply seems the smartest way to build strength in depth when neighboring institutions collect in the same area.”

Three other Mackmurdo chairs from the same set are in London, one at the Victoria and Albert Museum and two at the William Morris Collection. The fourth belongs to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

New Gallery for Los Angeles

11.25.09

A new gallery has opened on the Sunset Strip, reports Artnet. The twenty-three-year-old P. C. Valmorbida, curator of the recent Richard Hambleton show in Manhattan, and LA collector Jared Najjar have teamed up to open Prism at 8,746 West Sunset Boulevard. The first exhibition is “MindtheGap,” an exhibition of works by Barry McGee and Philip Frost, organized by P. M. Tenore, founder of RVCA and the publication ANP Quarterly.