MINNEAPOLIS RETURNS PAINTING, APPOINTS CURATOR; NEW ART PROTOCOLS FOR AUSTRALIA
After ten years of detective work, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts has concluded that a painting it has owned for decades was stolen by the Nazis. The museum has returned the 1911 painting, Fernand Léger’s Smoke over Rooftops, to the French heirs of a Jewish art collector who died in 1948, reports the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The institute’s saga began in 1997 when the museum received a letter claiming that the painting, now valued at $2.8 million, had been taken from Alphonse Kann, a legendary French collector who owned “tons of Picassos, Braques, and late-nineteenth-century Impressionist paintings,” according to Patrick Noon, the institute’s painting curator. Resolution of the painting’s fate required a French lawsuit and years of painstaking scrutiny of Nazi-era documents, as well as gallery and auction records in four countries. The research established that, after Kann fled to London, the Nazis confiscated the bulk of his collection and in 1940 moved it to the Jeu de Paume, a museum in central Paris, where it was inventoried and kept during most of the war. “Having researched this to the end of the road, we decided we had to return the painting; it was the right thing to do,” said institute director Kaywin Feldman.
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts also recently announced the appointment of David E. Little as curator of photographs and head of the Department of Photographs. Little comes to Minneapolis from New York, where he has served as associate director of the education department at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Prior to the Whitney, Little was director of adult and academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art. While Little’s career path led him into museum management, he is looking forward to devoting himself more fully to his original interest in scholarship, writing, and curatorial work. “I feel as if I am returning to my roots as an art historian and curator of the art of today, and I welcome the opportunity to work with the full breadth of the institute’s wonderful photography collection,” Little stated after accepting Kaywin Feldman’s offer to join the museum staff. Little will assume his full responsibilities in January, but in the interim he will work on shaping a strategic plan for developing the photography collections, exhibitions, and programs at the museum.
In other news, Corrie Perkin reports in The Australian_ that the outcry over artist Bill Henson’s photographs of naked underage children has prompted the Australian government to propose creating children-in-art protocols. Individuals and groups were invited to express their views. The responses are part of a draft document by the Australia Council, released yesterday, and will be on the council’s website in November for further comment. The council hopes to incorporate public views in its new protocols for artists who depict children in artworks, exhibitions, and publications that receive government funding. The protocols will apply from January 1. Participants are not named in the report but include academics, community and government bodies, and children’s rights activists. The draft report focuses on four main areas: “ensuring children are protected from the time the artwork is created to when it is shown; how to relate the nature and artistic content of the material to those who view it; protecting children from being exploited, including the use of images beyond their original context; and creating protocols while ensuring the council’s role as a supporter of artists and artistic expression remains intact.” Perkin writes that the report reveals genuine community concern for the rights of artists. “Upholding the freedom of practice and expression in the arts was a key consideration raised by many stakeholders,” it says. Participants acknowledge that “voluntary warnings on content that may cause offense are standard in television and other broadcast media, although the applicability of similar systems in art was questioned.”
