Innholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2021 i ARTnews

What a difference 7,000 miles makes. As museums in the United States struggle with tough choices about deaccessioning artworks, museums in South Korea are looking at an embarrassment of riches. In April, the family of the late Samsung head Lee Kun-hee announced that 23,000 works from his collection would go to the country’s museums. The lion’s share of those artworks are traditional Korean pieces, but some 1,200 are modern and contemporary works, including masterpieces by Monet, Gauguin, and Renoir, that will go to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, which has four branches in the country, including one in Seoul. The donation is a game changer. Seoul is one of the cities featured in this issue of ARTnews, in a special section devoted to destinations on the rise…

Greater American Camera: Making Modernism in Mexico Monica Bravo (Yale University Press, $65) Art historian Monica Bravo narrates how the presence of four American expat photographers living in Mexico in the early 20th century—Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Paul Strand, and Helen Levitt—contributed to the renaissance of Mexican photography driven by the likes of Graciela Iturbide and Lola Álvarez Bravo. The Renaissance Restored: Paintings Conservation and the Birth of Modern Art History in Nineteenth-Century Europe Matthew Hayes (Getty Conservation Institute, $65) A conservator makes the case that in 19th-century Europe, restoring Renaissance masterpieces wasn’t just a matter of upkeep: it also led to the kind of close study that constitutes art history as we know it. Were it not for the cleaning and repairing of works by Giotto and Titian, Hayes…

WHEN SOUTH KOREA’S richest man, Lee Kun-hee, died this past October, at 78, rumors immediately began swirling about his art collection, a trove said to include thousands of pieces, and to be worth well more than $1 billion. “The reason many go to the Louvre is to see the Mona Lisa, and the Sistine Chapel, the Creation of Adam,” an anonymous critic who had viewed Lee’s bounty told Reuters, adding that “there are valuable masterpieces that can compare to that in the Lee collection.” Lee’s father, the founder of Samsung, had acquired masterworks of traditional Korean art, and Lee Kun-hee followed in his footsteps, spending more than 30 years as chairman of Samsung, and with his wife, Hong Ra-hee, buying more recent pieces by Claude Monet, Lee Jung-seop, Pablo Picasso,…

Picturing the South Atlanta’s most illustrious art institution since its founding in 1905, the High Museum of Art is known for its holdings of a variety of folk and self-taught art and—especially—for its Photography Department, which oversees a collection of some 7,000 prints from the earliest years of picture-taking to the present. A milestone on the horizon for the department is the upcoming 25th anniversary of “Picturing the South,” a commissioning initiative started by the High in 1996 (when Atlanta hosted the Olympics) with a mind toward presenting the region as seen and experienced by artists from all over. The first year occasioned new work by Sally Mann, Dawoud Bey, and Alex Webb, and the series has since brought close to 300 photographs into a collection that continues to grow.…

THE NORTH AFRICAN GATEWAY MOROCCO Business & Culture “We’ve always had the support of institutional foundations, from banks and insurance companies that offer good support by buying and promoting art and showing it,” said Othman Lazraq, a collector based in Casablanca, and director of the Fondation Alliances, an especially ambitious enterprise. A charitable outgrowth of the Groupe Alliances real estate empire founded by his father, Alami Lazraq, the Fondation Alliances has been instrumental in numerous cultural developments around Morocco, among them the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL), which opened in Marrakech in 2018 with pointedly pan-African interests. But the most notable activity since has been the establishment of the Cultural Space – Fondation Alliances, a hub of sorts that opened in Casablanca at the end of 2020…

Raúl de Nieves Born in 1983 in Michoacán, Mexico Lives and works in New York Raúl de Nieves’s gloriously ornamented sculptures have taken the form of alluring and mysterious beings, wild crystals, and irresistible wearable objects, like these joyous high-heeled shoes. His artworks offer the promise of a never-ending party, a sacred celebration that will endure through the night and beyond. Like the glittering objects of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt and the frenetic Soundsuits of Nick Cave, they know the political potential of embracing and embodying pleasure. Slip them on. Learn to walk in them. Wear them to Nieves’s hotly anticipated show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, when it opens in September. 16 × 39 The approximate height and length, in feet, of a stained-glass-like installation the artist made for…

In the late 1940s, Bedouin shepherds made a momentous discovery in caves on the shores of the Dead Sea: 2,000-year-old manuscript fragments that are believed to be the earliest known versions of portions of the Bible. The so-called Dead Sea Scrolls unearthed in the ’40s and ’50s are today housed in a special building at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Archaeologists made international headlines this past March when they found additional pieces of the famed biblical texts in Israel’s “Cave of Horror,” a site in the Judaean desert said to be haunted by those who died there in a siege during the Jewish Bar Kokhba Revolt against the Roman empire (132 C.E.– 135 C.E.). The parchments, containing parts of the books of Zechariah and Nahum, were found along with a basket from…

THE ART WORLD HAS BEEN invigorated in the past year by the notion that equity and inclusion should be mandates rather than mere abstract concepts. But while we’re good at hashtags, putting on fundraisers, and lifting up what we believe should be ideals, it’s time to walk the walk and lobby Washington to usher in a much more ambitious and nimble approach to the federal government’s role in the arts. We can’t continue to wait and see which way the political winds blow. We must summon the art world’s collective power to set a new and bold agenda for making access to the arts a fundamental component of education in America. There are many paths to progress here, but the one that makes the most sense, and could be pushed…

THE STATELY MANSION AT 9 Avenue Matignon in Paris is steeped in history. Built in 1913 by architect René Sergent, who created commissioned work for the formidable art collector Pierpont Morgan and the famous dealer Joseph Duveen, it spent the last few decades of the 20th century as an art gallery founded by a makeup mogul, L’Oréal CEO François Dalle. Since 2000, the building has served as the headquarters of Christie’s, the auction house owned by fashion magnate François Pinault. When Christie’s arrived on Avenue Matignon, the area around it already boasted some high-quality galleries—including Jérôme de Noirmont and Galerie RX—but as rents ascended, many had to leave and make way for the deeper pockets of international luxury goods stores. Over the past five years, however, that has changed. Emmanuel…

Solidarity Against Inequality As rising real estate prices and perpetually low artists’ wages make Vancouver less welcoming to the creative class on the rise (as has happened in so many other cities), local energy has been devoted to creative ways to nurture the community. “We really suffer from people not being able to afford to work and live here,” Vanessa Kwan, the director of grunt gallery said. Efforts to build coalitions and networks to support emerging practices include collective studio spaces like Duplex, which was established in 2015 and is run on a volunteer basis with a focus on supporting the practices of emerging artists and interdisciplinary and experimental practices. As the pandemic has exacerbated inequalities in Vancouver, mutual-aid initiatives have become central to the art scene. WePress, a community…

IT’S MARCH AS I WRITE THIS, and Dubai is stretching like a cat after a nap. Vaccinations are rolling out at a furious pace and everywhere, there is a kind of manic, delirious optimism. At the end of January, I returned to my hometown after 15 years split mostly between Dubai and New York. I should have come back sooner. During college I would return in the summer, in those heady years post–financial crash when the city was constantly reinventing itself. I would land each time to see new roads, new buildings, a new urban narrative and backstory. Things feel different now; the city is growing into itself. With things largely back in full swing, it has been easy to reacclimate to the art scene. Artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan launched a…

SIX YEARS AGO, THE ANDREW W. Mellon Foundation published a report on the demographics of staffs at American art museums. It found that 84 percent of those surveyed—among them curators, educators, conservators, and other senior staff—were white. “The museum population was about 10 percentage points more racially and ethnically homogenous than the U.S. population,” Mariët Westermann, the foundation’s former executive vice president for programs and research, wrote in a summary of the report. A follow-up report two years later, done again in collaboration with the research firm Ithaka S+R, the Association of Art Museum Directors, and the Alliance of American Museums, was not much better. It found that people of color and women had assumed a greater number of museum leadership roles in the intervening years, but that the “progress…

Updating a Classic After two decades of planning and four years of construction, Frank Gehry’s comprehensive facelift of the interior of the 93-year-old Philadelphia Museum of Art finally reached completion and, as of a reopening in May, now shows off nearly 90,000 square feet of reimagined and newly created space. The project is nothing short of transformational, bringing to light parts of the building that have not been seen in ages: a 640-footlong corridor known as the Vaulted Walkway, for example, has not been open to the public for nearly 50 years. Most important, the rethinking created 20,000 more square feet of exhibition space. The museum is using its reopening to throw a spotlight on local talent. In one portion of the new galleries, curator Erica Battle has put together…

Craft Connections Guadalajara’s connection to artesanías, or handmade crafts, is inextricable from its artistic identity, and informs the ways in which many artists in the city think and create work—with little division among the artist community between so-called fine art and traditional crafts. Founded in the 1950s and still integral today, Cerámica Suro is among the city’s most important institutions as a world-renowned ceramics factory that also works with artists. José Noé Suro, at the helm, originally studied to be a lawyer before feeling the pull back to his family’s workshop, where he had spent his free time as a kid. He told his father (the company founder) that he would like to join the business officially, on the condition that he could begin collaborating with artists. Suro started small:…

INSTITUTIONAL ACTION—AT HOME AND ABROAD With more than 40 museums and 85 galleries in the greater Taipei region, Taiwan’s contemporary art scene thrives on a grand local stage. Museums and institutions in Taipei recorded more than a million visitors this past January alone, according to data from the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, providing a solid base for the area’s art milieu. But boosting the visibility of contemporary art from Taiwan on the global map is high on the agenda among art institutions. “As a small island, we need to overcome geographical and market barriers by reaching abroad, engaging the international community for a dialogue,” said Wang Jun-jieh, director of Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Among the museum’s many initiatives has been an effort to maintain Taiwan’s presence at international art…