Artworks

Public sculpture is certainly having a moment in the sun – maybe years in the sun.

Just in the last few weeks, the Nasher Sculpture Center has opened Nasher Xchange, the Seattle Art Museum announced that it had received the 46-foot-tall “Echo,” by Jaume Plensa as a gift from American art collector Barney A. Ebsworth, the Public Art Fund in New York said it would erect “a playful new commission by Olaf Breuning entitled Clouds,” which will be installed at the southeast entrance to Central Park this spring, and the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s Mad. Sq. Art announced a new sculptural installation for late winter 2014 called This Land Is Your Land by Brooklyn-based Chilean artist Iván Navarro.

But last weekend I finally saw, in person, what may be the best public sculpture in the U.S. of the 2001-2010 decade, and maybe of the 21st century so far. I am referring to Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, AKA the Bean, in Chicago’s Millennium Park. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t praise this  33 by 66 by 42 feet piece, which and weighs 110 tons, and was dedicated in 2006.

Cloud Gate, supposedly inspired by liquid mercury, reflects the city’s skyline, sometimes in a distorted way — but it’s always gorgeous and it clearly beguiles people.

Take a look at these pictures, which I took — at the way children, teenagers and adults love this piece.

It is fascinating to look at and to watch others look at it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’d be happy to learn of anything better.

Photo Credits:  © Judith H. Dobrzynski 

It happened again, and we have a new — or rediscovered — Murillo, thanks to a chance visit by Salvador Salort-Pons, the executive director of Collection Strategies and Information and curator of European paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts to a historic home called Meadow Brook Hall. Once owned by “the automotive aristocracy’s most remarkable women, Matilda Dodge Wilson,” Meadow Brook is in Rochester Hills, Mi.

Salort-Pons was at Meadow Brook Hall last February, lecturing, “when a painting in a dark corner of the room caught his eye; it turned out to be a work by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo entitled The Infant Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness. Murillo, who was known for his genre scenes and religious works, created the painting around 1670,” according to the DIA.

Salort-Pons says this work was created “at the height” of Murillo’s powers. In the 1600s, it was  owned by Italian merchant Giovanni Bielato, who donated it to Capuchin Convent of Genova. By the 1800s, the press release says, “it was sold to the family of the Duke of Westminster in London and in 1926 entered the collection of Alfred G. Wilson, who kept it at Meadow Brook Hall. This Murillo was exhibited in the Royal Academy in London in 1883, and this will be the first time it will go on view in a U.S. museum.” Wilson was the second husband of Matilda Dodge; they became the founders of Oakland University.

The Infant Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness was acquired by Alfred and Matilda Dodge Wilson in 1926 to hang in their yet-to-be built Meadow Brook Hall living room.

Perhaps that’s why the DIA has turned the discovery into a learning experience as well as a loan. Here are the details:

…the DIA has entered into an agreement with OU to allow a group of undergraduate art history and studio art students to witness the conservation and technical and scientific analysis that DIA specialists are undertaking. The next conservation and study session will take place at the DIA on Tuesday, Nov. 19 at 10 a.m.

“In a series of sessions in our conservation lab, students will learn how we employ our sophisticated equipment and expertise to analyze, research and conserve a work of art before it will be exhibited in the galleries with all the honors,” said Salort-Pons. “This is a rare opportunity for them to see the DIA staff at work and to have at hand unique information produced only in the top museums in the world. We are looking forward to sharing the process and our expertise with them.”

Once the conservation treatment to the painting and frame is completed, the work will be on loan to the DIA for five years, beginning in February 2014, before returning to Meadow Brook Hall.

The DIA already owns two Murillos, The Flight into Egypt and the Immaculate Conception. The Infant Saint John will be hung near them in the museum’s main European Paintings gallery.

Photo Credit: ©Meadow Brook Hall, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

If you can’t crooks on the crime, you can often get them on tax charges — and that appears to be what has happened in Munich. According to an exclusive story in the German magazine Focus, an estimated 1 billion euros worth of art, some 1,500 paintings by “dozens of classic modern masters” including Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and Nolde have been seized from a Munich apartment. They had been confiscated during the Third Reich and have been missing ever since.

If you read German, go right to Focus. (Focus also has a video on the story, also in German.)

If you don’t, some British news outlets have picked up the story. The BBC has a summary, including the following excerpt:

The magazine said the artworks were found by chance in early 2011, when the tax authorities investigated Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive son of an art dealer in Munich. He was suspected of tax evasion, and investigators obtained a search warrant for his home in Munich.

There, they found the cache of some 1,500 artworks which had vanished from sight during the Nazi era.The younger Mr Gurlitt had kept the works in darkened rooms and sold the occasional painting when he needed money, Focus reports….

…There are international warrants out for at least 200 of the works, Focus reports. The collection is being held in a secure warehouse in Munich for the time being.

One of the pieces is said to be a portrait of a woman by Matisse which belonged to the grandfather of French TV presenter Anne Sinclair.

According to the Daily Mail, which has a larger story, the trove was found in an “Aladdin’s Cave behind a wall of tins of beans and fruit in the decrepit flat [above] of loner Cornelius Gurlit in the Munich suburb of Schwabing.”  And:

…Dealer Hildebrandt Gurlitt had acquired the paintings and sketches in the 1930s and 40s for a pittance from terrified Jews and reported them all to be destroyed at the war’s end during the ferocious bombing of Dresden.

Nothing was known about the collection until September 2010, almost 100 years later, when customs carried out a routine check on a train from Switzerland.

Stopping his sole surviving son – who had never worked and who had no visible means of income – they discovered he had an envelope containing 9,000 euros in cash, and a stash of empty envelopes.

…He appeared nervous and the officials issued a search warrant for his £600-a-month rented flat. It was entered in the spring of 2011 and the paintings discovered.

Since then, art historians have been looking for the owners.

Finally, this case may solve some of the mysteries left over from the war.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Daily Mail