The_Art_Newspaper_-_November_2016

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VAN GOGH: © VAN GOGH MUSEUM AMSTERDAM; © VINCENT VAN GOGH FOUNDATION. MOMA: © SCOTT RUDD, 2016; COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF MODER

N ART, NEW YORK. PICASSO: © APIC/GETTY IMAGES. ATLAS: COURTESY OF CHARLES ATLAS/RASHAUN MITCHELL & SILAS RIENER. OTTO UMBEHR, CAT (1927): © DACS

U. ALLEMANDI & CO. PUBLISHING LTD. EVENTS, POLITICS AND ECONOMICS MONTHLY. EST. 1983, VOL. XXVI, NO.284, NOVEMBER 2016 UK £8.50/US $14.99/RoW £10.

BUILT HERITAGE

How the Sydney

Opera House

is kept in pitch-

perfect condition

CONSERVATION

PAGE 37

CHARLES ATLAS

The artist films

dancers in 3D for

next year’s Merce

Cunningham show

REVIEW

PAGE 13

SPECIAL REPORT

Pick of Elton John’s

photographs in

London as Paris

Photo turns 20

REVIEW

PAGES 4-

FOR MORE NEWS

AND ANALYSIS, VISIT

THEARTNEWSPAPER.COM

Modernism

goes Latin

American

at MoMA

Collectors’ gift is part of wider trend in

US museums as they redefine American art

VAN GOGH SLEPT HERE: BUT WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

When Vincent van Gogh died, he left few personal belongings. One was his bed, which he had “flat-packed” and sent on

when he left Arles (much to the relief of the locals). In his new book about the artist’s productive but troubled time in the

south of France, Martin Bailey reveals what happened next to the bed, which survived two world wars and could possibly

still exist, somewhere in the Netherlands. • See p

Musée Picasso launches Mediterranean odyssey

ACQUISITIONS

New York. A major gift of Latin Ameri-

can art to the Museum of Modern Art

(MoMA) stands to change the way in

which Modernism is understood. In

October, the Venezuelan collector Patri-

cia Phelps de Cisneros and her husband,

the media billionaire Gustavo Cisneros,

donated 102 works of Latin American

art to the New York institution. The gift

will enable MoMA to expand its narra-

tive of 20th-century art history and to

install works by Latin American artists

alongside their North American and

European contemporaries.

NEW RESEARCH

“It is no longer acceptable not to cast

your net wide and include the various

ways in which Modernisms have flour-

ished,” says Glenn Lowry, MoMA’s direc-

tor. The Cisneros gift spans the 1940s to

the 1990s and includes work by 37 artists

from Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina and

Uruguay; 21 of them are new to the muse-

um’s collection. MoMA plans to integrate

the works into its permanent collection

displays within the next few years.

The additions will help the museum

to reveal the collaboration between the

Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García

and the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian in the

1930s, and the relationship between the

US painter Ellsworth Kelly and the Ven-

ezuelan artist Alejandro Otero in Paris

in the 1950s. “These are not invented or

revisionist readings,” says Gabriel Pérez-

Barreiro, the director of the Colección

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. “They are the

real contexts in which these works were

made.” A new research centre at MoMA

dedicated to the study of Latin American

art, also endowed by Cisneros, aims to

dig deeper into these relationships.

MoMA is not the only New York insti-

tution with its eye on Latin America.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s

interest has been “ad hoc” in the past,

says its director, Richard Armstrong:

Paris. The Musée Picasso in Paris plans

to lend works to around 40 exhibitions

in venues in Italy, Spain, France, Greece,

Cyprus and Morocco that will present “a

full panorama” of Picasso’s lifelong rela-

tionship with the Mediterranean, the

museum’s director, Laurent Le Bon, tells

us. Starting next year, to coincide with

the centenary of Picasso’s 1917 journey

to Italy, Picasso-Méditerranée will be a

“global exhibition experience” includ-

ing theatre, conferences, a website and

a catalogue, Le Bon says.

The two-year celebration is due to

launch at the Museo di Capodimonte

in Naples in April 2017 with a show

dedicated to Picasso’s costumes and set

designs for the Ballets Russes’ produc-

tion Parade. This will include the 17m-

wide, 11m-high drop curtain that the

artist painted in Rome, and which now

belongs to Paris’s Centre Pompidou.

Other confirmed venues include the

Musée Mohammed VI in Rabat, Morocco,

the Benaki Museum in Athens, MuCEM

in Marseilles and the Picasso museums

in Antibes, Barcelona and Málaga.

Meanwhile, the Musée Picasso,

which has seen its attendance fall by

30% following the terrorist attacks on

Paris in November 2015, is co-organis-

ing major exhibitions with the Musée

du Quai Branly and the Musée d’Orsay.

Primitive Picasso and Picasso: Blue and

Rose are due to open in March 2017 and

September 2018 respectively.

Hannah McGivern

Picasso (left) and the choreographer

Léonide Massine in Pompeii in 1917

Glenn Lowry and Patricia Phelps de

Cisneros at MoMA, beneath a projection

of Raúl Lozza’s Relief N° 30 (1946)

CONTINUED ON PAGE 13