In the museum of contemporary art in Tehran, all paintings exhibited in the public galleries are by Iranian artists. But in the basement, squirreled away behind a high-security door, it hides a startling array of world famous paintings by the likes of Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Miró, Pollock and Warhol. The paintings were purchased when the shah’s monarchical regime was flush with oil wealth and reputable works of art were selling relatively cheaply.

Despite being widely judged as the most important and comprehensive western art collection in Asia, there are no plans to display them publicly. The works have fallen prey to the cultural isolationist beliefs of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s radical president. The “buried” art is part of a general clampdown on social, intellectual and cultural freedoms, according to a report by the Guardian (October 29, 2007)

Germany has inaugurated a new museum at the site of the Nazi concentration camp where diarist Anne Frank died. The new exhibition centre at Bergen-Belsen, in the north of Germany, highlights the fates of those who died at the camp during World War II. Among the exhibits are the drawings and diaries of Jews imprisoned there, plus video statements by survivors.

Liberated by Allied troops in 1945 and later razed, Bergen-Belsen began life as a prisoner of war camp. From 1943 until the end of the war it was a concentration camp for Jews, gypsies and homosexuals, with an estimated 125,000 people held there.

Read article (BBC, October 28, 2007)
Go to website Bergen Belsen Memorial

Daniel Libeskind’s design (l) for a glass roof for Berlin’s Jewish Museum (r)

The Art Newspaper reports on the new design by architect Daniel Libes­kind for a glass roof ­covering the u-shaped courtyard of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, for which he also made the exuberantly zig-zag shaped and much talked about extension that officially opened in 2001.

Inspired by Sukkah, the temporary huts in which the Israelites dwelled during their 40-year exodus from Egypt, the structure consists of free-standing tree-like steel pillars that support a glass canopy. The pillars spread out to form a latticed web across the ceiling while a glass façade extending from the front of the Old Building turns the courtyard into an enclosed space for museum events.

Go to website Jewish Museum Berlin

Anselm Kiefer talking during the press conference at Musee du Louvre

In the Louvre the German artist Anselm Kiefer has produced a monumental painting over 30 feet high and nearly 15 feet. It will be on view in a stairwell linking the Egyptian and Mesopotamian antiquities in the museum’s Sully wing.

The staircases, ceiling and so on were chosen because “they were the only places left,” said Marie-Laure Bernadac, the Louvre’s chief curator of contemporary art. From Anish Kapoor’s huge curved mirror in the middle of the Khorsabad courtyard to Mike Kelley’s video projections in the medieval moats, she has repeatedly implanted temporary exhibits of contemporary artwork side by side with ancient artifacts. She said she was following a trend that the French have been slow to embrace. “The Anglo-Saxons had been doing this for more than 10 years,” she said. “I thought, “Why don’t we do the same thing at the Louvre?’”

Kiefer’s contribution will be followed by those of three other artists over the next three years. The American artist Cy Twombly will paint the vast white ceiling in the Salle des Bronzes, and François Morellet of France will decorate the windows of the Lefuel stairwell. The fourth artist was meant to be Luciano Fabro of Italy, but he died last summer, and his replacement has yet to be announced.

Go to website Musée du Louvre
Read more about contemporary art at the Louvre (Magazine No. 5 , March 2005)

Read what the international papers have to say about it:
New York Times (October 21, 2007)
Die Welt (October 24, 2007)
Le Monde (October 24, 2007)
Der Standard (October 25, 2007)

Recent examples of traditional museums inviting contemporary artists, include the National Gallery in London where in 2003 the Australian artist Ron Mueck was asked to make new work in response to the Gallery’s collection. In 2005, the German artist Thomas Struth was asked to show his Prado pictures next to the respective paintings in the Madrid museum.

Readers of this blog have seen a recent surge in news on the Amsterdam Museum Night. The latest instalment in this series is the KPN Mobile Museum Guide. Visitors of the Museum Night can text ‘n8′ to 4628 to receive the complete program on their mobile phone. The Mobile Museum Guide includes an interactive map of Amsterdam with all the museums, the n8 blog, nachtgeluiden, a quiz and an interactive tour with Blue Tooth, designed for the Amsterdam City Archives.

In the future, the n8 intends to build upon the current infrastructure to launch more services, such as streaming audio and video, mapping and tagging. The Mobile Museum Guide was launched on 24 October. The Amsterdam Museum Night will take place on Saturday 3 November.

Art diagnostician Maurizio Seracini has waited 30 years to get to the bottom of his biggest mystery yet: whether Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest lost fresco lies behind a wall in the Palazzo Vecchio here.

Seracini’s team of 30 will scan the palazzo’s 177-foot-long wall in mid-November, looking for the Battle of Anghiari, a work so magnificent it has been called the “school of the world.” The $1.5 million search expedition will jump-start a multidisciplinary conservation program at the University of California at San Diego’s Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology.

Since founding the art- and architectural-diagnostic center Editech in 1977, Seracini — a fourth-generation Florentine — has synced studies in engineering, art history and medicine to examine more than 2,000 buildings and artworks. He augments standard archival work with the use of ultrasound, X-rays, infrared, thermography and ultraviolet devices.

Editech’s notable discoveries include the original positions of the Three Graces in Botticelli’s Allegory of Spring and the hasty cover-up by a lesser hand of Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi, which earned Seracini a mention as the only real-life character in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

Wired News caught up with Seracini at his office. From behind a no-nonsense desk in a historic palazzo with high ceilings ribboned with frescoes, he talked about the relationship between technology and art.

Read full article (Wired, October 24, 2007)

There will be only a brief time allotted to indulge in aesthetic nostalgia, since the new Uris Center for Education opening today at the Metropolitan Museum will very soon — with its crisp grandeur, open spaces, natural light, technological tools, state-of-the-art studios, WiFi-equipped library, teacher-training rooms and 82-member educational staff — sweep away all recollection of its past.

Today’s inaugural events are scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. with a ribbon cutting to be attended by politicians, donors and others; the ceremony will be followed by a public daylong sampling of the center’s range and wares: a bazaar of arts education for all ages. These events will allow little time to dwell much on an era that came to an end three years ago, when the center was closed for this ambitious $75 million, 25,000-square-foot reconstruction.

But art education is a strange and surprising enterprise. It makes memories as important as celebration, traditions as crucial as innovation. And in itself, the new physical setting, however impressive, doesn’t guarantee anything, particularly for those who in the last two decades have shepherded their children through the Uris’s once ramshackle and cramped setting, watching them begin to feel as if the great museum above their heads was partly their own, worth exploring well into adulthood.

Read full article (New York Times, October 23, 2007)

France, home to some of the world’s great art, is trying a six-month experiment. If museums are free, culture officials wonder, will they attract the kind of people who would usually rather watch television?

Starting Jan. 1, 14 French museums and monuments, most of them low-profile, will open to visitors free of charge for six months, Culture Minister Christine Albanel said Tuesday. Three are in Paris — Guimet, home to Asian art; Cluny, with a collection of medieval treasures; and Arts et Metiers, dedicated to scientific inventions. Their full-price tickets range from €6.50 ($9.27) to €7.50 ($10.70).

Conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy campaigned for free museums before his May election, and the idea has stirred debate in France’s culture world since then, with critics asking whether it’s merely a superficial way of addressing the profound, decades-old question of how to democratize culture.

Another underlying question is how France — proclaimed by its prime minister to be in “a state of bankruptcy” — could afford the measure.

Albanel, who has been skeptical in the past about free museums, said officials would study the experiment’s results and decide how to proceed.

Read full article (International Herald Tribune, October 23, 2007)

An entire museum burnt to the ground, complete with all of its exhibits: it is a nightmare that has become reality for the director of the Armando Museum in the Dutch town of Amersfoort. As if this wasn’t bad enough, works on loan from other museums and collectors have also gone up in flames. For Armando, the Dutch artist to whose work the museum is devoted, the fire is nothing short of a disaster.

Read full article (Radio Netherlands Worldwide, October 23, 2007)
Go to website Armando Museum