Category Archives: Museums

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

March 17, 2023: the extraordinary story behind what Canadian police have called “the biggest art fraud in history”. More than 1,000 fake works purporting to be by the First Nations artist Norval Morrisseau are seized and eight people have been charged.

The Art Newspaper’s Editor, Americas, Ben Sutton, tells the extraordinary story, involving a rock star, a television documentary and alleged forgery rings, and what it tells us about the market for First Nations art in Canada. A report into artists’ pay in the UK has exposed the inordinately low sums paid to artists for their labour by arts organisations.

We talk to the art collective Industria, who wrote the report, and Julie Lomax, the CEO of a-n, The Artists’ Information Company, which has published the study. And this episode’s Work of the Week is An Old Woman (around 1513) by the Northern Renaissance artist Quinten Massys, a painting better known as The Ugly Duchess.

A new exhibition at the National Gallery focuses on this work in its collection, exploring its origins in a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, and the combination of satire, folklore, humanism and misogyny from which it emerged. Emma Capron, the curator of the show, tells us more.A PDF of Industria’s Structurally F–cked report can be found at a-n.co.uk. Industria’s website is we-industria.org.The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance, National Gallery, London, until 11 June.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

March 10, 2023: Is the Old Masters market struggling? As Tefaf opens its fair in Maastricht, we look at this major moment in the market calendar and what it tells us about the strength or otherwise of the market for historic art.

The Art Newspaper’s Acting Art Market editor, Anny Shaw, joins us from the fair. The Institut du Monde Arabe, or Arab World Institute, in Paris has just received a major gift of more than 1,600 modern and contemporary works from the French-Lebanese dealer and collector Claude Lemand and his wife, France—a collection that will transform the displays in the institute’s museum. We talk to the director of the museum,

Nathalie Bondil, about her future plans and the €6m project to transform the institute. And this episode’s Work of the Week is a self-portrait in red chalk by the Venetian Rococo artist Rosalba Carriera. Dagmar Kornbacher, the director of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, tells me about the drawing, which is a key work in Muse or Maestra?, the museum’s new exhibition of work by historic Italian women artists.Tefaf Maastricht, until 19 March.Muse or Maestra?: Women in the Italian Art World, 1400-1800, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, until 4 June. 

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

March 3, 2023: as the Art Dubai fair opens, The Art Newspaper’s acting digital editor Aimee Dawson tells us about this latest edition, its ongoing commitment to displaying the art of the global south and its continued focus on digital art.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York opens the largest media exhibition it has ever staged, Signals: How Video Transformed the World on 5 March. It looks at how artists around the globe have used video as a networked technology capable of reaching huge audiences but also how they have employed video to reflect on or engage in activism and urgent political developments.

We talk to the show’s curators, Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo. And this episode’s Work of the Week is a coffee pot and milk jug from 1960 by Lucie Rie, the great modernist potter. Eliza Spindel, co-curator of the exhibition Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, UK, tells us about these objects and Rie’s life and work.Art Dubai until 5 March.Signals: How Video Transformed the World, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 March-8 July.Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK, 4 March-25 June. 

Preview: Art In America Magazine – March 2023

Magazine cover featuring an artwork of digitized images of flowers taken from video games. The logo Art in America is in black letters at the top of a white border.

ART IN AMERICA MAGAZINE – MARCH 2023 – The artwork on the cover of this issue looks pretty simple: an elegant arrangement of colorful, cartoon-like flowers. Pretty it is; simple it most certainly is not. Artist Jill Magid scoured the digital worlds of hundreds of video games—from Super Mario to Minecraft—and selected pixelated plants and photo-realistic flowers from virtual landscapes that she then assembled into bouquets worthy of the fanciest dinner party.

After that, she took the resulting images and crafted her first series of NFT-backed artworks, which dropped on Valentine’s Day. The collection comprises 165 animated bouquets, including one that you can view online at artwrld.com and on Art in America’s Instagram, where Magid has generously collaborated with us on our first animated cover. 

Arts & Culture: The Art Newspaper – March 2023

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The Art Newspaper – March 2023 Issue:

The hunt for as many as nine elusive Vermeer paintings continues

As the Rijksmuseum’s once-in-a-lifetime blockbuster brings together an unprecedented number of works by the Old Master, paintings including a self-portrait are still missing

Michiel van Musscher’s A Self-portrait of the Artist in his Studio (1670) is thought to have been inspired by a lost Vermeer work Courtesy of Christie’s
Michiel van Musscher’s A Self-portrait of the Artist in his Studio (1670) is thought to have been inspired by a lost Vermeer workCourtesy of Christie’s

With only 37 authenticated Johannes Vermeer paintings (28 in the Rijksmuseum’s sold-out exhibition), could there be more out there, not yet recognised as from his hand? Vermeer’s production was certainly larger, so the hunt continues for the missing masterpieces. Experts believe that a number are still unaccounted for.

What are the implications of artificial intelligence for the future of art? The robot artist Ai-da and her creators discuss

Ai-da is an artist, she marks a challenge to the category, and it is in this sense that she becomes Duchampian, argue her creators

International Art: Apollo Magazine – March 2023

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Apollo Magazine – March 2023

How Italy protected its art from the Nazis

An exhibition in Rome recounts the complicated tale of efforts to safeguard masterpieces across the country during the Second World War

4 things to see this week: Egyptomania

Our hand-picked selection of ancient Egyptian treasures includes a breastplate once worn by an actual pharaoh and a glittering golden crocodile

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (February 24, 2023): Nigeria heads to the polls this weekend; what are the implications for its museums and art scene?

Dolly Kola-Balogun, director of the Retro Africa gallery in Abuja, reflects on the candidates and discusses the importance of art, and culture more widely, to the country’s future. We also talk to Patrick Bringley, the author of a new book All the Beauty in the World: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, in which he reflects on his experiences as a guard at the museum and coming to terms with the loss of his brother.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Boats in Front of the Grotto in the Park at Méréville by Hubert Robert. It features in The Garden: Six Centuries of Art and Nature at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, whose curator, Magnus Olausson, tells us about the painting.All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, by Patrick Bringley, Simon and Schuster (US) $27.99, out now. The Bodley Head (UK), £20, 16 March.The Garden—Six Centuries of Art and Nature, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden, until 7 January 2024. 

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

February 17, 2023: Turkey and Syria. As the countries reel from the devastation of the 6 February earthquake, how can communities and agencies protect damaged heritage?

We talk to Aparna Tandon from Iccrom, the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property about culture’s significance in the humanitarian response to the crisis. As Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle arrives at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, we take a tour of the show’s key moments with its curator, Eleanor Nairne.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is a Germantown “eye-dazzler” blanket, made between 1895 and 1905 by a Diné weaver from the Navajo Nation. It’s part of a new show at the Bard Graduate Center in New York,

Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest. Hadley Jensen, the curator of the exhibition, tells us more.Disasters Emergency Committee’s Turkey-Syria Earthquake: dec.org.uk; a PDF of Aparna Tandon’s handbook First Aid To Cultural Heritage In Times Of Crisis is available for free at iccrom.org.Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle, Barbican Art Gallery, London, until 21 May.

The book accompanying the exhibition is published by Prestel, priced £24.99 or $29.95.Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest, Bard Graduate Center, New York, until 9 July. An online exhibition featuring an interactive catalogue has approximately 250 items from the American Museum of Natural History’s collection of Navajo textiles will be available later this month at bgc.bard.edu.