December will see the Edinburgh gallery’s final BP Portrait Award exhibition before it will end its sponsored partnership with the petroleum firm, citing its commitment to tackling climate change. This follows extensive protests and similar action by institutions such as the Tate and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
While the Carrousel du Louvre hosts the 2019 edition through November 17, the organisers of Fine Arts Paris and Salon du Dessin have announced plans to move the fine arts fair to the courtyard of the Dôme des Invalides for its fourth edition in November 2020. The space will accommodate around 20 more exhibitors.
Estimated at £1,000/2,000 at Duke’s Auctioneers on November 11, the rare pear-shaped teapot, celadon-glazed and adorned with the mark of the Qianlong Emperor, sold to a telephone bidder for £800,000. Buyer’s premium pushed the figure up to £1 million, setting the record for this season’s Asian Art week.
The museum will buy Orazio Gentileschi’s The Finding of Moses (1630-33), painted for Charles I on the occasion of his son’s birth, to keep it on display in Trafalgar Square due to its importance to national heritage. Having raised 90% of the £19.5m price, a public appeal is hoped to obtain the remainder by Christmas.
The Beijing museum will open an outpost in Shanghai’s Jing’an District in 2021, showing Chinese, international, and emerging contemporary art, following the trend of cultural institutions installing themselves in the city. The space, designed by New York’s SO-IL, will include a project space to showcase young artists.
A collector’s first edition of À toute épreuve by Paul Éluard, accompanied by wood engravings by Joan Miró – making it one of the most beautiful illustrated books of the 20th century – sold for €385,855 at the Pierre Bergé & Associés sale of the Kahn library at Drouot on November 7.
Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies named Connie Butler, chief curator at L.A.’s Hammer Museum, the honouree of their Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, which comes with $25,000. Dancer and choreographer Eisa Jocson received the Hugo Boss Asia Art award for emerging artists, accompanied by $42,800.
As the offshoot’s inaugural director Casely-Hayford, a Briton currently leading the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, will undertake management of the waterside museum in Stratford and the collection and the publicly accessible research centre, both set to open in 2023. He takes up his duties in the spring.
Ships at Sea in Stormy Weather (1873) was among a collection of around 1,500 works inherited from Cornelius Gurlitt, some of which proved to be Nazi-looted. The Manet painting, cleared of Nazi connections, is being sold to the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, to cover the cost of managing the Gurlitt trove.
Villepin’s tenure was characterised by an interest in culture, and now Villepin Gallery is set to open on March 13, adding to the mass of institutions appearing in China. The gallery, run in Hong Kong by son Arthur while he oversees strategy from Paris, will prioritise developing long-term relationships with artists.
The 25 signatories, calling on the art world’s potential “to advance society through new ideas”, demanded a taskforce dedicated to museum climate policy as part of a “Green New Deal”; it would advise institutions on sustainable exhibiting practices and issuesrelating to climatisation, such as construction and lighting.
The CAFA Art Museum will stage the Zhang Ga-curated CAFAM Techne triennial from 18 January – 29 March. The exhibition, the museum’s largest ever with over 130 artists and collectives from 28 countries, will be split in two parts addressing different aspects of technology and art: Topology of the Real and Art in Motion.
The Musée National Picasso-Paris and the Fondation Giacometti will open the new institution next June in the 798 Art Zone, where it will host temporary exhibitions on the artists using works drawn from both collections. The museum, funded by the district’s owner Sevenstar, is initially set to operate for five years.
Recently elected director Kaywin Feldman has hired Smithsonian Institution executives Elisa Glazer and Kate Haw to coincide with a major visitor survey through 2020. The appointment ties into the museum’s initiative to diversify its leadership; its senior officers now number seven, four of whom are women.
In Who Owns History? published on November 5, Geoffrey Robertson QC urges the museum to return works stolen under colonial rule, in particular the Elgin marbles. He claims that the institution tells "carefully-constructed lies" to escape blame, and that the majority of its stolen goods are hidden from public display.
While the antiques trade support group FACT’s bid to prevent the Ivory Act from going ahead failed, they have until November 12 to appeal the judgement, though this would require further fundraising from the trade. The defending group DEFRA meanwhile stated their intention to ensure the near total ban comes into force.
In what the Parisian institution is calling the “largest ever cultural exchange” between France and China, the new project was unveiled on November 5 at the West Bund Museum. Works will be taken from the French museum’s collection and it will curate the exhibitions to be shown in the Chinese outpost.
The £35.5M redevelopment, which includes a grand north-facing entrance, will result in inevitable job losses to the gallery’s 270 staff. During the closure period (29 June 2020 – Spring 2023), 300 portraits will be loaned per year to UK institutions such as York Art Gallery and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Ruf, whose tenure at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk was marred by controversy after the Dutch media wrongly accused her of mismanagement, will now work with director Anton Belov at Garage; undertaking duties previously assigned to ex-chief curator Kate Fowle, she will develop exhibitions and educational initiatives for 2020.
Timed with the American Friends of the Orsay’s annual gala in Paris on October 19, the sociologist Anne Monier published a work with PUF, available only in French, regarding the relationship between these sponsor groups and the museums. Monier outlines one possible drawback: the financial stronghold of the benefactors.
