I can’t believe it’s already midterm! I’m off to NYC for a couple of nights – the (still relatively new) Islamic galleries at the Met are calling!
Midterm break!
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Category Archives: Museums
Hard times in Bosnia
The National Museum of Bosnia in Sarajevo, home to the Sarajevo Haggadah, is set to close.
The Sarajevo Haggadah is an important 14th Century manuscript of the Seder service produced in Spain (testimony to the Sefardic tradition), brought to Italy sometime in the Renaissance. It was sold to the National Museum in the 1890s – so though it is an important object documenting Jewish history, it doesn’t have much to do with Bosnia. I hadn’t read the provenance until just now – I, silly early medievalist, had always imagined it got to Bosnia (an example of the Spain-to-Islamic-Ottoman-Empire) in the wake of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain rather than an example of the Spain-to-just-as-Christian-Italy population movement. I’ve never read enough to know what the relative sizes of emigration to the Ottoman Empire versus other Christian territories.
Mis-catalogued Picasso recognized
That seems to be a better headline than most. They had it all along, but they don’t seem to have known what it was. I hope it brings in some money for them! Their insurance company wants too much for them to keep it.
Nazi Art Theft and Contemporary Museums
I’m looking forward to seeing “Portrait of Wally,” the saga of one Egon Schiele painting. Some major museums (including the MoMA in NYC) don’t sound as though they behaved very well.
And I thought it was only in the movies . . .
. . . that art thieves substitute a copy for the original! The FBI has just recovered a Matisse that was stolen that way.
Zollverein Essen – the herbarium
I’m still posting pictures from Germany! This was taken inside a display at the Zollverein XII museum in Essen. Sandwiched between glass plates were examples of all the flora found on the grounds as they were transforming the old factories into a culture-space.
This is about my favorite picture of me (me me!) this year.
Some of the best signage I saw this year
The signage at the Coal-washing plant at Zollverein XII in Essen was not only a great post-industrial museum, but was a just a great museum. If had fine signage – very clear and helpful.
Your Blogger at the Museum Folkwang, Essen
Finally! I’ve gotten the pictures uploaded and mainly sorted! Danyal and I went to several museums – the best art museum was certainly the Folkwang. They have a splendid collection of 19th and 20th Century German and French painting and some good sculpture. The building is brand new (built since I was in in Essen in 2009, which was one of my main reasons for going back!). It’s by David Chipperfield – here’s the story of the competition. It’s a very serene building – the colors are very subdued, and the galleries are strung around a series of courtyards. Every courtyard is different — some are partially paved, some have trees, some have sculptures. Here are my photos (or photos of me there). Here are everyone’s. We weren’t supposed to take interior photos, but I really don’t see why we can’t photograph for architecture.
The exterior surface is made of what I think is a cast glass – irregularly smooth, but very satisfying to touch and look at.
Beauty
If you want classical beauty, you won’t do much better than this bronze Dionysus in the Museo Palazzo Massimo. Click to go to my Flickr stream and you can see him full length.
I love these figures with the inlaid eyes — in his case, limestone. What we would give to see them the way the Romans saw them, polished, colored, and in a better setting than a cold museum! While I was on the road I re-read Steven Saylor’s Catilina’s Riddle (on Kindle). At the end of that book, Gordianus the Finder trades a farm he inherited from a rich friend for the friend’s house on the Palatine; in the peristyle of the house is a statue of Minerva which must have been along the same lines as this, which seeing this Dionysus brought home.
This particular Dionysus was discovered along the Tiber during the construction of the Ponte Garibaldi in the mid-1880s, just upstream from Tiber Island. He’s of the Hadrianic era (c. 125).
Placeholder for the Folkwang Museum
Sorry for the slowblogging, but I’vehave very limited wifi and am having trouble getting pictures off my camera And onto the iPad. But take it from me, the Folkwang Museum in Essen is a great collection — worth a detour, though not a trip on its own. Maybe a Rhineland Art Swing?
19th-21st C, very strong on expressionists and graphic arts (drawings and a major collection of German poster art). And the new building is splendid. More later — off to look at an Alvar Aalto symphony hall on the other side of the train station!
Free pictures! Free GOOD pictures!
The Walters Art Museum uploads 20,000 (that’s right, twenty thousand) images to the Wikimedia Commons – with a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. Yow. That’s sharing.
The Guggenheim fails to persuade the Finns
It proposed a museum be built on a city-owned site in Helsinki’s south harbor, and recommended the city move forward with an architectural competition.
The museum could have opened in 2018 after around three years of development, it said, adding that its 140 million euro estimate included the construction and design of the building. The museum would also have needed public, private and corporate funding to cover operating costs.
Finnish culture minister Paavo Arhinmaki took a skeptical view towards the project’s funding. He assumed Finnish taxpayers would end up paying close to 100 million euros of the construction costs.
“It is also worth considering whether Finnish taxpayers should finance a rich, multinational foundation in the first place,” he wrote on his blog after the initial proposal.
So the Guggenheim is out searching the world for major cities without a big enough contemporary art museum to compete with a Guggenheim franchise? Currently, the list of cities etched on the glass doors (I suppose they have those, just like a couture handbag shop), includes New York, Bilbao, Venice, Berlin and Abu Dhabi.
At least someone seems to be asking my question . . .
. . . who is the Napoleon of Crime pulling the threads of the spider web and directing the theft of Chinese objects from two separate university museums in England? The AP story hints only:
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the thefts were related.
I remind you, faithful reader, it was to me! Immediately!
Budget-cutting at the Getty
The Getty is cutting staff – especially in education. What’s going to hurt scholars is they are re-envisioning imaging. That’s to say, rather than concentrating on high quality images available over the web (for folks like me to look at), they are going to aim at images for visitors to access on cell phones. Not the same kind of photo-documentation at all. Oh, well, when you lose a billion dollars in the market, you make adjustments.
The director intends to spend money saved on acquisitions.
The most interesting line is the last, a bit of news I’d missed: “Earlier this month, the Getty announced the hiring of the first fund-raising executive in its 30-year history, in a bid to move beyond near-total reliance on how its investments perform.” With their endowment down that much, you think they would have reacted sooner.
Mona Lisa Overdrive
The Prado has made an amazing discovery underneath the upper layers on their copy of the Mona Lisa. Even the UNDERpainting and pentimenti (the revisions) match the original. They don’t think the hand is Leonardo’s, but they’re not sure WHAT they think.
Here’s the story, but in case you are close to using up your 10 page views/month at the New York Times, go directly here – the neatest interactive feature of all time.