Caravaggio, “Saint Jerome in his Study” (1605-06), oil on canvas (image via Wikimedia). Caravaggio’s rediscovered remains will be inaugurated in a new funerary monument this July 18.
Art Movements is a weekly collection of news, developments, and stirrings in the art world.
The fundraising campaign for the Committee to Save Cooper Union Legal Fund has surpassed its $150,000 goal, with $157,866 raised and 15 days left. The fund will go toward an ongoing suit filed against the university’s trustees over alleged financial mismanagement leading to the institution of tuition at the historically free school.
Conservators at the Acropolis Museum completed a three-and-a-half year cleaning of five 2,500-year-old Caryatids. The successful restoration is bolstering Greece’s efforts for the Elgin marbles to be returned from London.
The restaurant plan for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in downtown Manhattan was abandoned.
To assist in paying for a £14m (~$24m) extension to the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, the Northampton Borough Council is planning to auction an ancient Egyptian statue. Arts Council England cautioned the move could result in the museum losing accreditation; comic book legend and Northampton local Alan Moore derided it as “undercutting one of the fundamental principles by which museums acquire artifacts in their collections.”
After a 12-year, $145 million expansion project, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute reopened in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Faced with budget cuts, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (Macro) may close.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is planning a new wing — a skyscraper that would combine museum space, hotel, condominiums, and possibly the archives of Frank Gehry.
Roman, Early Imperial Porphyry vessel with bearded masks, (1st‒early 2nd century AD) (image courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art) The urn was recently acquired by the Met.
The recently rediscovered remains of Caravaggio will be reinterred in a new funerary park built at a cost of €65,000 (~$88,000). The monumental arch for Caravaggio topped with a fruit basket will be inaugurated on July 18.
An ancient Roman urn for cremation ashes, made from porphyry, a rare purple-red stone, was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The urn still has traces of “burial deposits,” and sports masks of Silenus on its sides.
On Nikola Tesla’s birthday this Thursday, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk pledged $1 million to help restore Tesla’s long-neglected Wardenclyffe lab into a museum.
A long battle over rare Jewish books in the Schneerson Collection, partly held by the Library of Congress, progressed this week. After last year’s US ruling that Russia would pay $50,000 in fines a day if it didn’t give the rest of the collection to the US, a Russian court made the same ruling against the US if the books are not returned to Russia.
Glittering in regilded gold, the Philadelphia Museum of Art unveiled its newly restored “Diana” sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The statue of the goddess with her hunting bow was originally placed on Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden in Manhattan — torn down in 1925.
A filling station designed, but never built, by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1927 for Buffalo, New York was completed in the Pierce-Arrow Museum. The indoor construction was modeled on plans from the Wright Foundation and took a decade of funding.
Christopher Y. Lew is moving from his position of assistant curator at MoMA PS1 to associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
William Hogarth, “Mrs. William James” (1744), oil on canvas (image courtesy Worcester Art Museum), the restored painting goes on view July 19
An “Anti-Amazon Law” was passed by the French parliament to block the online retailer’s ability to give both a 5% discount and free shipping to France for books, a move intended to support local bookshops.
Opening July 19 at the Worcester Art Museum, a new exhibition presents two freshly restored pendant portraits by William Hogarth. Arriving at the museum in 1910, the paintings were the first of Hogarth’s to join an American museum collection.
Brazenhead Books, run out of an Upper East Side apartment since 2008 after it closed due to rising rents in Brooklyn in the 1990s, is facing eviction.
As of this writing, a Kickstarter to make just potato salad has raised $46,410 — skyrocketing past its modest $10 goal.
A robot programmed to write the Torah is scribbling at the Jewish Museum in Berlin through August 3, never mind that the scrolls it creates can’t be used in a synagogue.
The New York State Council on the Arts launched an anonymous survey this week about how the public participates in the arts. The results will be taken into account for future priorities.
