ISRAEL MUSEUM RECEIVES PHOTO COLLECTION; MET LENDS WORKS TO TEXAS
A trove of photographs spanning 160 years has been donated to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem by the New York collectors Noel and Harriette Levine, reports Carol Vogel in the New York Times_. For more than three decades, the Levines have amassed a collection of 125 works, from nineteenth-century images by the British photographers William Henry Fox Talbot, David Octavius Hill, and Robert Adamson to modern masters like Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston and contemporary figures like Cindy Sherman and William Wegman. The Levines have supported the Israel Museum since 1994, when they presented a gift of eighty signed works by André Kertész. Three years ago, they donated twelve million dollars for the museum’s photography department; their current gift includes one million dollars to endow the department. (Mrs. Levine’s sister, Patricia Gerber, added one million dollars to that pot.) Since its founding in 1965, the Israel Museum has put together an encyclopedic photography collection, which now includes more than fifty-five thousand works. “This gift, along with the endowment, positions us to be a major force in the field,” said James S. Snyder, the museum’s director.
Vogel also reports that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is lending the University of Texas, Austin, twenty-eight pieces by artists like Beverly Pepper, Tony Smith, and Louise Bourgeois. They will remain there on long-term loan, where the public will have a chance to see them, and they will also be used by students for educational purposes. “It was a happy coincidence,” said Gary Tinterow, the Met’s curator of nineteenth-century, modern, and contemporary art. The University of Texas has opened a three-part public-art initiative. “We realized that the campus could benefit from a public-art program,” said Andrée Bober, the founding director of that program. Apart from the Met’s loan, the university has created an acquisitions fund for buying and commissioning works for public spaces throughout the campus. As the university undergoes considerable construction and renovation, it has adopted a policy whereby a small percent of the budgets for those building projects go toward acquisitions of art.
