Feast your eyes on this stackable furniture, maybe not worth the nearly 9,000 dollars but a neat idea for future furniture projects. Via BoingBoing
The government of Au-Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates has paid the International Agency for French Museums, $520 million dollars for the rights to use the name “Louvre” on the new art museum, set to open on 2012.
The building itself, pictured above in a computer rendering, will cost around $108 million dollars and was designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel. Planned as a universal museum, it will include art from all eras and regions, including Islamic art.
Femme, femme, femme: Paintings of Women in French Society from Daumier to Picasso from the Museums of France. The exhibition, shown exclusively at NOMA, begins March 3, 2007 .
“The works in Femme, femme, femme are appearing together for the first and only time,” said E. John Bullard, director of the New Orleans Museum of Art. “We are extremely grateful to the nation of France for their support of NOMA and for their dedication to reviving the art community in New Orleans.”
“This exhibition represents our dedication to maintaining the New Orleans art community as it rebuilds following Hurricane Katrina,” said Ambassador Levitte. “We encourage world citizens to visit NOMA to view this one-time-only grouping of some of France’s best-known works.”
Continue reading ‘Femme, femme, femme opens at the NOMA’
A humble electrician from
Colombia has won the Fernando Botero painting “Hombre Fumando” (Man Smoking, 1977 pictured left) through a sweepstakes contest held by the colombian brewery Bavaria.
The man identified as Luis Alfredo RodrÃguez is a humble electrician from the city of Buenaventura the main maritime port of Colombia on the Pacific Coast
RodrÃguez says he plans to sell the painting in order to provide his family with a proper home and education for his two sons.
The artwork is valued at more than $600,000 usd.
This is the first comprehensive survey of Edward Hopper’s career to be seen in American museums outside New York in more than 25 years. Focusing on the period of the artist’s great achievements—from about 1925 to midcentury—the exhibition will feature such iconic paintings as Automat (1927), Drug Store (1927), Early Sunday Morning (1930), New York Movie (1939), and Nighthawks (1942).
Edward Hopper’s classic works captured the realities of urban and rural American life with a poignancy and beauty that have placed them among the most enduring and popular images of the 20th century. This exhibition of about 60 oil paintings, 25 watercolors, and 14 prints will reveal Hopper (1882–1967) as a creator of compelling images who produced remarkably subtle and painterly effects in both oil and watercolor. It will also examine how his images were seen in his own time.
Organization: Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; and The Art Institute of Chicago.
Sponsor: The exhibition is made possible by a generous grant from the global consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.
Schedule: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, May 6–August 19, 2007; National Gallery of Art, Washington, September 16, 2007–January 21, 2008; The Art Institute of Chicago, February 16–May 11, 2008
Two Picasso paintings valued at more than 66 million dollars were stolen from the Paris home of Diana Widmaier, Picasso’s grandaughter.
The paintings were identified by police as “Maya a la poupee” (Maya with doll, pictured a left) a 1938 portrait of the artist’s daughter, and “Portrait de femme, Jacqueline”.
There were no signs of a violent break-in at Widmaier’s house and details of the theft were not given out by the parisian police.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) painted landscapes throughout his life. However, during the first two decades of his long career they constituted an especially important area of experimentation for the artist where he explored composition, paint handling and pictorial structure in innovative new ways.
The exhibition “Renoir Landscapes” examines this vital aspect of Renoir’s achievement, and brings together some 70 landscapes.
It begins with works of the 1860s, when the young artist was meeting and working beside the painters who would become his fellow Impressionists. These works show his remarkable ability to emulate technical and stylistic innovations and then turn them to his own uses.
In the 1870s Renoir defined his distinctive quick, silvery brushstrokes and began to explore colour and structure in order to gain an audacious painterly freedom.
In the early 1880s he travelled to the South of France, Italy and North Africa, where new intensities of sunlight and colour had a profound impact on his landscape art.
The exhibition ends in 1883 with the vibrant oils he executed on a visit to Guernsey.
‘Renoir Landscapes 1865-1883‘ is organized by the National Gallery, London, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and runs from the 21st of February, 2007 through the 20th of May, 2007
The Tate Modern museum at London “slid” to the top as London’s most visited attraction. The museum now outranks both the British Museum an the National Gallery in terms of number of visitors.
According to the report, a gret deal of this success is attributed to a string of blockbuster shows and innovative installations such as the huge slides by Carsten Holler installed in the cavernous Turbine Hall which allow visitors to slide between the different levels of the museum.
According to Will Gompertz, director of Tate Media:
The Unilever Series: Carsten Holler installation has been an extraordinary success. To date, more than 600,000 visitors have been down the slides and been exhilarated by their experience of this remarkable artwork.
Visitors to top 5 London attractions in 2006 (2005 position in brackets)
1 (3) Tate Modern 4,915,000 visitors.
2 (1) British Museum 4,837,878
3 (2) National Gallery 4,562,471
4 (5) Natural History Museum 3,754,496
5 (6) Science Museum 2,421,440
Press Release
Studying Claude Monet’s Relationship with the Norman Landscape,
This Exhibition will be on View February 18 – May 20, 2007
CLEVELAND (Jan. 25, 2007) — The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is thrilled to announce the opening of Monet in Normandy, a groundbreaking exhibition celebrating the intimate relationship between Claude Monet and the stunning landscape of Normandy, on view February 18 through May 20, 2007, at CMA.
Organized by The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the North Carolina Museum of Art, Monet in Normandy is the first scholarly exhibition to examine Monet’s lifelong attachment to this unique region of France. The rugged shoreline and imposing cliffs of Normandy’s coast, the countryside of shimmering wheat and poppy fields, the picturesque villages of the region’s interior and the artist’s garden at Giverny were mainstays in Monet’s life. His evolving depictions of this quintessentially French landscape over more than 60 years trace the development of a long and remarkable artistic career. Monet in Normandy features works on loan from American and european museums and private collections.
Note: I wish more museums, galleries and websites, offered a press area as complete as the one from The Cleveland Museum of Art.
I love these Anamorphic Cups, the plate has a distorted message that is revealed when it is reflected upon the stainless steel cup’s shiny surface.
Designed by Ross Mcbride. Check his other wonderful ideas.
Click on the picture to get a better view of them. Via NotCot
