BLOCH-BAUER HEIRS DONATE SCULPTURES; MACY’S PARADE GETS KOONS’S BIGGEST BALLOON

Two sculptures by the Belgian artist George Minne have been given to the Neue Galerie by the heirs of Adele Bloch-Bauer, whose portrait by Gustave Klimt was bought last year for the museum by Ronald S. Lauder for $135 million, reports Carol Vogel in the New York Times. The portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, was sold to him after the Austrian government returned to the family five Klimt paintings looted by the Nazis. The sculptures had also been seized during World War II and were returned to the Bloch-Bauer heirs only a week ago after being exhibited at the Belvedere Museum, on and off, for the last fifty years.

In other news, sculptor Jeff Koons will soon see his work take on a giant role in the next Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Koons’s Rabbit, 1986, a reflective stainless-steel cast of an inflatable bunny, is the inspiration for Macy’s latest acquisition in the “Blue Sky Gallery” series, which invites artists to create balloons for the parade. The parade balloon was created using a startling new reflective material fabricated to replicate the mirrorlike finish on the original sculpture. Measuring 53.5 feet tall, 26.5 feet wide, and filled with 4,650 cubic feet of helium, the parade balloon is Koons’s largest inflatable sculpture to date. “I’m a huge admirer of Jeff’s work,” said Robin Hall, executive producer of the parade. “Works like his giant topiary puppy at Rockefeller Center and the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, combine monumental style and whimsy—two elements that are inherent in every Macy’s parade balloon.”