In the late hours of March 22, four thieves broke through the front door of the Magnani-Rocca Foundation, a private museum housed in a Neoclassical villa outside Parma in Italy.
Art Galleries & Museums
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing was built over the course of the 1970s to showcase the world-class collections of art from sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and the Ancient Americas assembled by Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller.
Improvisation, the ability to respond spontaneously to the moment, is a defining characteristic found in the work of two giants of modern art, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Improv is also a necessary element in understanding and playing jazz, the freestyle musical genre born in the late 19th and early 20th century in African American communities in the southern United States.
At Bowery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the New Museum has stood since 2007, a 13-foot aluminum sculpture of two embracing figures now greets visitors before they step inside the recently renovated building.
A current pocket exhibition at the Neue Galerie New York hearkens back to a time when the relationship between artist and patron was more direct, intimate, and collaborative than it is now that global capitalism has transformed art into an asset to enhance the ever-dizzying fortunes of billionaires. Today, art is merely a commodity, and by extension, artists are too.
The Louvre has weathered both revolutions and occupations over the centuries. Yet, the past few months have exposed a different kind of vulnerability in its leaking pipes, aging cameras, and institutional drift. The world’s most-visited museum is struggling to find steady footing in the wake of a series of mishaps and misdemeanors.
Tavares Strachan approaches art the way he thinks about music—fluid, improvisational, and open to interpretation. “Because I grew up listening to so much music, I just love the idea that it frees you up,” he said in an interview at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). “It doesn’t put this constraint on what you’re looking at. It empowers you in a way that visual art doesn’t.”
“The Smithsonian is not going to show somebody like me right now — specifically me,” Catherine Opie says in a recent Teams interview from Los Angeles, her voice matter-of-fact. “I’m not welcome right now in America.”
In late January, the Smithsonian announced that it would return a Shiva Nataraja statue and two other Chola Dynasty bronzes to India from the National Museum of Asian Art under a “shared stewardship” policy introduced in 2022.
The idea that 18th and 19th century landscape painting could be the setting for one of art history’s fiercest rivalries may seem unlikely, but Turner & Constable: Rivals and Originals, the current exhibition at Tate Britain, explores the competitive relationship between two giants of British landscape painting, J.M.W.
