Daniel Libeskind has been a leading light in architecture for thirty years, yet he didn't build a thing until 1999. The Jewish Museum in Berlin was therefore both a professional challenge and a personal test: His parents had fled the Nazis. As his Imperial War Museum North opens in Manchester, he tells The Guardian's Suzie Mackenzie how buildings help us make sense of history.
The most talked-about show by a living artist in New York this spring was one that failed to open. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum caused a ruckus when it postponed a survey of Matthew Barney, an esteemed sculptor and filmmaker whose work extracts a surprising grandeur from subjects like satyrs, car wrecks, and homicidal dentists. But this time the uproar did not involve morally offended sensibilities. It was simply a matter of saving money. Kasimir Malevich and James Rosenquist, slated for major retrospectives later this year, were also bumped from the Guggenheim's calendar. The result is that
Propped up in a darkened room and illuminated at an oblique angle, the flat rectangle of pewter reluctantly reveals the scene it has faithfully held for 176 years. “You have to dance around it to get a good view,” Dusan Stulik, a senior scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute, said as he hovered nearby. You do, and the plate flashes gold before going dark. A step forward, one back, and somewhere in between an image emerges. A farm building. Pear and poplar trees. A dovecote. Together, the objects appear just as they did to Joseph Nicephore Niepce (pronounced Nee'-sah-for Nee'-yeps) in
When New York's Museum of Modern Art first opened its doors on the twelfth floor of a Fifth Avenue office building in 1929, it marked the beginning of a bold adventure. Modern art was fresh and vigorous, and the museum's brash founding director, Alfred Barr, had a mission: to bring Modernism to a still semiprovincial America. Seventy-three years later, modernism is the language of the cultural establishment, powerful as ever but no longer threatening. The new Museum of Modern Art in Queens, which opens to the public Saturday, is a momentary return to that earlier revolutionary spirit.
Moving to fill what will be one of the most scrutinized jobs in the rebuilding of downtown, the agency in charge of the effort is preparing to appoint a Merrill Lynch executive, Anita F. Contini, a longtime organizer of downtown cultural events, to oversee the creation of a memorial to the victims of the September 11 attack, according to officials involved in the effort.
Michael Maltzan's design for the temporary Queens location of the Museum of Modern Art provides an elemental introduction to the art of changing your point of view. This concept is doubly apt. The Modern stands at a historical moment of transition as well as physical transition. The shift is philosophical as well as physical. Maltzan has captured the moment. His design, created in collaboration with Scott Newman of the New York firm Cooper, Robertson & Partners, feeds into the future by recapitulating the history of modern vision.
A Picasso masterpiece not seen by the public for sixty years was sold at auction for more than £15 million yesterday. Nu au collier (Nude with necklace) fetched £15,956,650—almost double the estimate of up to £9 million. The painting was the main attraction of auctioneers Christie's annual sale of Impressionist art in central London and has become the most expensive painting to be sold in London this year.
The British Museum is so underfunded by government that it is barely able to perform its core functions and will have to cut even those if the grant is not increased, the outgoing director, Robert Anderson, told British legislators yesterday. Last week Dr. Anderson became the first director in 250 years to weather the closure of the Bloomsbury museum by a strike of its own staff, from security officers to curators.
A Black square on a white background by Malevich, given to the Russian government by a businessman who paid $1 million for it, has gone straight into the collection of the Hermitage.
Talk about excuses for a party. Forced out of its West 53rd Street Manhattan location by an earth-churning, ear-splitting reconstruction project, the Museum of Modern Art has now officially, if temporarily, moved to Queens. And that, apparently, is good enough reason to go wild.
A few years ago the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Malcolm Rogers, emerged victorious from an ugly confrontation with a handful of powerful donors and long-serving curators. Now he has set out to renovate and expand the institution. To pay for it all, the museum has embarked on a drive to raise a daunting $425 million. Officials here say this is the largest fund-raising effort ever undertaken by an art institution outside New York City. The new building is expected to cost $180 million and be completed in 2007.
A painting from the Claude Monet waterlily series which has not been seen in public for seventy-seven years has sold for more than £13 million ($20 million) at auction.