Art Movements
A Strozzi goes to LACMA, photojournalist sues AFP and Getty and wins $1.2M, Haring Foundation donates to New Museum, Smithsonian gets $1.8M from Oman, and more.
Art Movements is a weekly collection of news, developments, and stirrings in the art world.
Bernardo Strozzi’s “St. Catherine of Alexandria” (1615) was recently promised to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and it is currently on display at the museum. The LA Times looked at its curious history:
The painting is among Strozzi’s supreme early achievements. It disappeared after the 1943 Nazi occupation of Florence, one of nearly a dozen works stolen from the collection assembled by Charles A. Loeser, an American expatriate and heir to a Brooklyn department store fortune. Loeser moved to Italy in 1890 and died in 1928.
Ten years after Loeser’s death, prior to the outbreak of World War II, Mussolini’s fascist government passed a series of anti-Jewish “racial laws.” Loeser’s widow, daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter left Florence before the German occupation, leaving behind valuable works of art restricted from leaving Italy. The painting vanished in April 1944, after the Nazi prefect set up headquarters in the family’s Villa Torri di Gattaia, located on the city’s highest hill.
Ouch. “In January of 2010, Daniel Morel, a professional photojournalist, was in Haiti when an earthquake struck. Within a few hours, he had taken hundreds of photos and uploaded a select few onto Twitter. A photo editor at Agence France-Presse found them being passed Twitter, under another user’s name, and he put them into the AFP photo system, which linked to Getty Images. On Friday, a jury ruled that AFP and Getty would have to pay Morel $1.2 million for willfully taking and selling his pictures.”
The Keith Haring Foundation donated $500,000 to the New Museum‘s School, Teen, and Family programs. The New Museum reports that over the last six years, the Museum has “welcomed approximately 20,000 young people and families to participate in education and community programs … The next phase of the partnership will prioritize bringing youth together around issues of social responsibility.”
Arnold L. Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum, Karen Brooks Hopkins, president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum of Harlem, Oskar Eustis, artistic director of The Public Theater, and Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer, the executive director of Queens Council on the Arts, has all been named to NYC mayor-elect Bill de Blasio’s 60-person transition team.
Sotheby’s announced this week that the Company and Tobias Meyer, Worldwide Head of the Contemporary Art Department, have agreed to end his association with Sotheby’s. And according to the New York Times, “He said he wants a career change that will put him on the opposite side of the auction podium he has dominated for 20 years. He said he intended to continue working with collectors, only this time as a private dealer.”
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art today announced that the Sultanate of Oman will give $1.8 million to support a series of programs celebrating Omani and East African arts and culture. This is the largest donation to the museum to date.
SFMOMA has appointed two new Deputy Directors to provide strategic leadership as the museum builds toward its 2016 reopening following completion of its 225,000 square foot expansion: Nan Keeton has been named Deputy Director, External Relations, and Janet Alberti has been named Deputy Director, Administration and Finance. Nan Keeton comes to SFMOMA from the San Francisco Symphony, where she has served as the Director of External Affairs since 2008, and was previously the Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. Janet Alberti comes to SFMOMA from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, where she most recently served as Deputy Director, after her tenure as the MCA’s Chief Financial Officer.
Radu Dogaru, the Romanian man who masterminded the theft of seven masterpieces from a Dutch museum, was sentenced to serve six years and eight months in jail on Tuesday, but the fate of the paintings remains a mystery.
