Government officials in Bilbao, Spain, have proposed that a new branch of the Guggenheim Museum there be built in the countryside, beyond the city’s outskirts, Reuters and the New York Times reported. José Luis Bilbao, who leads the Vizcaya provincial government, said that local officials could finance the project, to be built in a nature reserve.
Juan Ignacío Vidarte, director general of the Bilbao Guggenheim, known for its twisting, titanium-clad building designed by Frank Gehry, said the new branch would link art with the notion of environmental sustainability. He did not say who would design the building or when it would open.
A set of matryoshkas, traditional Russian dolls, depicting the band members of The Rolling Stones, who played in front of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in 2007. (AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)
Ears aren’t the only items that may suffer from blaring rock music. The preliminary results of a Russian study by scientists at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg found that rock concerts by the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and others in the adjacent Winter Square have affected their collections over the past three years, The Independent of London reported.
The research, now being examined by the Grabar Art Restoration Institute in Moscow, showed that every 10 concerts above 82 decibels added an extra year to the age of a work because of vibrations. After a 2004 McCartney concert shook the windows of the Hermitage, the museum asked the Stones last year to keep the sound level below 85 decibels to protect works by the likes of Cézanne and Matisse in the palace’s nearby wings.
Rolling Stones “Start Me Up” played live in St Petersburg in 2007
An empty part of Palais de Tokyo (Photo: AFP/JOËL SAGET)
Opening a branch of Paris’s Centre Pompidou in the Palais de Tokyo is proving a difficult task. As Le Monde’s Clarisse Fabre reports, the original date for the opening, slated for 2009, has been pushed back, twice, to the end of 2010. The national museum was supposed to expand into the empty sections of the vast Palais de Toyko building, which houses the Palais de Tokyo: Site de Création Contemporaine. After renovations there, the Centre Pompidou would have an additional 42.650 sq m (139.931 sq ft) of exhibition space for solo shows by midcareer and established artists in design and the visual arts.
Alain Seban, president of the Centre Pompidou, has insisted that the new site constitutes “an antenna of the Pompidou—not an autonomous place,” while minister of culture Christine Albanel wants the site to be driven by the artistic community instead of “reproducing the old models of organization” of the Pompidou.
Lithuania’s government Wednesday approved the construction of a new museum in its capital, Vilnius, a joint project between the Baltic state, Russia’s renowned Hermitage museum and America’s Guggenheim. The museum is due to open in 2013, in a building designed by the acclaimed Anglo-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid whose project was chosen in a bidding process earlier this year. The building appears like a mystical object floating above the extensive artificial landscape strip, seemingly defying gravity by exposing dramatic undercuts towards the surrounding entrance plazas.
The front of the Musee Rene Magritte is covered with a hoarding as it is prepared for opening in a neo-classical building known as the Altenloh Hotel, part of the Museum of Modern Art complex on the Place Royale in the Belgian capital Brussels. Some 200 works by the surrealistic painter René Magritte will be on display.
p.s.: the nearby René Magritte Museum (notice the word order) occupies the house in which the Belgian surrealist painter worked nearly 24 years of his life.
Inside Konstantin Melnikov’s bus depot (photo courtesy Art Newspaper)
The Art Newspaper reports that Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes magazine at $19.5 billion, has pulled out as general sponsor of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s first retrospective in their native Russia. Read the rest of this entry »
Butyrka (Butyrskaya tyurma), a notorious czarist and Soviet-era prison near central Moscow that, according to some, could be turned into a museum in commemoration of the victims of Soviet-era repression.
The International Herald Tribune reports that former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has urged the creation of a national museum and memorial to honor victims of Soviet-era repression and to document their demise. A statement announcing the initiative, signed by Gorbachev and about 25 rights activists and cultural figures, said “the current and future generations need memory and knowledge of the repressions of the Stalin regime,” which it said left few families untouched. Read the rest of this entry »
The new building of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Fransisco is set to open on June 8. The CJM’s new home is dedicated to using contemporary art to illuminate and explore Jewish culture and history. Founded in 1984, the museum has no permanent collection.
The museum occupies a low-slung, brick-wrapped power company substation from 1907, which was carefully hollowed out and extended with a signature torqued cube by starchitect Daniel Libeskind. The Los Angeles Times architecture critic wonders whether the result is an example of a maturing architect, known for his iconic Jewish Museum in Berlin, or simply a low-cost version of Libeskind Lite. His final verdict is that the building manages to feel spatially ambitious and architecturally resolved at the same time.
Model version of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Fransisco
The Reichsbahnbunker Friedrichstrasse (State Railway Bunker) was built in 1942 to to offer protection against Allied air raids, and now houses a new private museum that has 3000 m2 of exhibition space.
Starting June 7, Christian Boros and his wife are making their collection of contemporary art available to the public in a converted bunker in Mitte, a central borough of Berlin. For a ten-euro ($15) fee visitors can sign up online for guided tours. The Boros Collection (Sammlung Boros in German) displays 90 works, mostly sculptures, by 57 highly acclaimed artists such as Damien Hirst, Tobias Rehberger, John Bock, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Michiel van Iersel
