Word: museume
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sales are controversial, but they go on. In recent weeks Sotheby's has been bringing down the hammer on scores of works from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y. The museum is shedding older pieces, like a Shang Dynasty bronze vessel that went for $8.1 million, to fatten its endowment for the purchase of contemporary art. In recent years its fund for that purpose has hovered at about $1 million annually--chump change in the current market. For Louis Grachos, director of the Albright-Knox, the sale simply allows the museum to focus on its chief purpose...
...same, while the Albright-Knox is mainly a contemporary collection, it's also the only significant art museum in Buffalo. The local Museum of Science also has examples of Greek, Roman and Egyptian artifacts, but for anyone in that city hoping to see a range of art, the Albright-Knox is pretty much the only game in town. So its deaccession plan led to an angry public meeting in March at which Grachos was confronted by residents insisting he could have done more to find other sources of money...
...million--one of the touchstones of 19th century American painting, The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins, who spent nearly all of his turbulent career in Philadelphia. It didn't help that one of the buyers was Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, who wanted it for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which she's bankrolling in Bentonville, Ark. This would be the same Alice Walton who paid the New York Public Library about $35 million two years ago for Asher B. Durand's 19th century landscape Kindred Spirits, a local icon that nobody seemed to remember was a local...
...Arkansas, the good people of Philadelphia reared up like Italians hearing that plundered Roman marbles were being earmarked for Malibu. By the end of January they had cobbled together enough real or potential financing to keep the Eakins at home in a joint purchase by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the much smaller Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), with the same kind of back-and-forth lending between the two institutions. Then came the next shock. To defray its part of the purchase, PAFA announced it was selling a lesser but still important Eakins, The Cello Player...
...over the next several weeks. At least some of what's sold in them will go back up on public display, though not in Buffalo. The buyer of a circa 10th century granite statue of the Hindu god Shiva that went for just over $4 million was the Cleveland Museum of Art, which, unlike the Albright-Knox, already has a substantial Asian collection. But much of the rest will disappear into the possession of dealers and private collectors. In the way of such things, in due time some of it may well make its way back into the public domain...