ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

VISUAL

France’s New Privately Funded Arts Complex

Arles is famous for Van Gogh and for its Roman ruins. Now there's a new show in town: Luma. "The center doesn’t fit neatly into given ideas about museums, art collections or cultural hubs. ... Luma doesn’t have a predictable program of exhibitions, artist residencies or performance pieces." But it does have a Frank Gehry building, and a lot...

The French Impressionists Had No Idea They Were Painting Masterpieces-To-Be

Of course they didn't, even if some of them believed their work deserved that rating. "It’s easy to forget that for most of them at the time, their work was a risk – to create art in the way they felt was right, they needed to make personal and financial sacrifices." - The Guardian (UK)

William Randolph Hearst Bought A Medieval Spanish Monastery And Shipped It To California

But then the 1175 monastery of Santa María de Óvila wasted away some time in crates on a San Francisco pier. - El Pais (Spain)

Alone In Rome, Before The Tourists Return

Italy was the first to lock down, and one of the hardest lockdowns. "Now most of Italy is in a 'white zone,' and museums can operate at their full summer schedule. Still, on a Saturday, I counted four other visitors to the most anticipated show of the year in Rome: 'The Torlonia Marbles: Collecting Masterpieces,' at the Capitoline, showcasing...

Jersey City Residents Question Pompidou Plans To Build Jersey Outpost

“Everyone agrees that the Pompidou is an extraordinary asset for Jersey City. But we just raised a levy on homeowners because we didn’t have the money for school funding. How can we then bring more financial debt to the table for a museum?” - Hyperbeast

Pompidou Centre Plucks Head Of Picasso Museum As Its Next Leader

Laurent Le Bon, 52, faces a challenging term. The Paris museum is scheduled to close from 2023 to 2027 for renovations to deal with its antiquated heating and cooling system, escalators that frequently break down and asbestos in the structure that needs to be removed. - The New York Times

Construction Of Mexico’s Maya Train Is Turning Up All Sorts Of Antiquities. Are They In Danger?

The 932-mile railroad project, connecting cities, historical sites, and beach resorts in the Yucatan Peninsula, has turned up more than 13,000 Mayan artifacts so far, and it's still early in the building process. The central government says it has hired 80 archaeologists and is spending millions to identify and preserve whatever historical material is discovered, but "the Mayan community...

Egyptian Farmer Discovers 2,600-Year-Old Monument To Pharaoh

The carved sandstone stele, measuring roughly 8½ feet long by 3½ wide, holds 15 lines of hieroglyphs topped by a winged sun disc and a cartouche representing the name of the pharaoh Apries, who reigned from 589 to 570 B.C. - Smithsonian Magazine

Banksy Decides To Own — Files For Trademarks On His Work

The trademarks apply to the use of the images on a huge range of goods including posters, handbags, umbrellas, bedsheets, clothing, rugs and many more. - The Age (Melbourne)

Reset: The Visual Artists’ Impact In Shaping Hip Hop Culture

Jean-Michel Basquiat was part of a constellation of young graffiti artists who used New York City’s streets and subways as their canvases before going on to take both the art world and hip-hop culture by storm. - The New York Times

Fury Over Choice Of Bosses For Pompidou Center’s Brussels Branch

A jury made up of museum professionals selected Kasia Redzisz, a senior curator at Tate Liverpool, to be artistic director of Kanal-Centre Pompidou, the museum's outpost in the Belgian capital. But the museum's board partly overruled the jury's decision, appointing as co-director Bernard Blistène, the jury's runner-up and director of the Pompidou's Paris flagship until the end of this...

AI Used To Restore Rembrandt’s “Night Watchman”

"It is wonderful to be able to now see with our own eyes The Night Watch as Rembrandt intended it to be seen." - BBC

What’s So Difficult About The Color Violet?

"Over the past 20 years, I visited 193 museums in 42 different countries. Equipped with 1,500 Munsell colour chips – the world-standard samples for colour science – I examined 139,892 works of art, searching for violet." - Psyche

Reconciling With Cezanne

You don’t look at a Cézanne, some ravishing late works excepted. You study it, registering how it’s done—in the drawings, with tangles of line and, often, patches of watercolor. - The New Yorker

How Did This Pair Of 17th-Century Paintings End Up In The Dumpster At A Highway Rest Stop?

A 64-year-old man spotted the artworks — a 1665 self-portrait by Pietro Bellotti and a painting of a youth by the 17th-century Dutch artist Samuel van Hoogstraten — in the garbage of a rest stop in Bavaria in mid-May. Authorities have not identified the owner of the canvases and have appealed to the public for information. - Artnet

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