LICHTENSTEIN FOUNDATION ACQUIRES ARCHIVE; FIFTY WORKS TO LAS VEGAS ART MUSEUM
Carol Vogel writes in the New York Times that the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has made its first acquisition: the photographer Harry Shunk’s archive. Shunk, who died in 2006 at eighty-one, was known for photographing art by the likes of Yves Klein, Arman, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Christo, creating extensive records of their work. He also photographed artists, among them Magritte, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, and Lichtenstein. Jack Cowart, director of the Lichtenstein Foundation, said that Dorothy Lichtenstein, the artist’s widow, who is president of the foundation, had been approached by an appraiser about buying the archive, which consists of more than one hundred thousand items, including more than sixty thousand of Shunk’s printed photographs. The foundation bought the archive in August at a public estate auction conducted by the public administrator of New York. “It was in extreme distress,” Cowart said of the Shunk archive. The foundation will soon begin to organize and study the archive and plans to make it available to scholars. “We won’t keep it forever,” Cowart said. “In time, it will become clear which institution or institutions we should give it to.”
According to the Las Vegas Sun, the Las Vegas Art Museum is officially announcing that it will receive fifty artworks from the Herbert and Dorothy Vogel collection as part of a national gift program called Fifty Works for Fifty States, initiated by the Vogels and the National Gallery of Art. The program distributes twenty-five hundred contemporary works throughout the country, giving fifty works to an institution in every state. The Las Vegas Art Museum will receive works by Werner, Edward Renouf, F. L. Schröder, and Larry Zox, among others. As reported last month, Libby Lumpkin, executive director of the Las Vegas Art Museum, said the museum is honored to have been selected: “I have been an admirer of the Vogels and their collection for many, many years. They are the quintessential example of how you can be a collector without having an enormous amount of money. They got to know the artists and the gallerists. They followed their instincts. And they had great instincts.” Ten museums were already selected earlier this year, as reported here on Artforum.com.
