National Gallery of Art Acquires Over Five Thousand Prints
01.05.09
The National Gallery of Art has announced that it has acquired a collection of American prints belonging to Reba and Dave Williams and the Print Research Foundation in Stamford, Connecticut, which was established by the couple in 2003. The acquisition includes about 5,200 works from roughly 1875 to 1975. The collection’s artists range from Winslow Homer to Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Ed Ruscha. A total of 2,070 artists are represented, more than three-quarters of them new to the institution's holdings. In addition, the National Gallery of Art will also receive the research library and related assets of the Print Research Foundation. In an independent transaction, the National Gallery of Art purchased 250 works from the Williams's personal collection. “This is a transformational acquisition,” said Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art. “Reba and Dave Williams's collection has extraordinary quality and breadth and gives the National Gallery of Art an entirely new standing in the field of American prints.”
Director of British Museum Named Briton of the Year
01.02.09
Dave Itzkoff reports in the New York Times that Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, has been named Briton of the Year by The Times of London. MacGregor, who joined the museum in 2002 when it was nearly $7 million in debt and had closed one-third of its galleries, has since helped restore it to an attraction that now receives more than six million visitors a year. He was also believed to be among the candidates to replace Philippe de Montebello at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In naming MacGregor for the distinction, Rachel Campbell-Johnston noted in The Times that, “He is a committed idealist who, in a world in which culture is increasingly presented as the acceptable face of politics, has pioneered a broader, more open, more peaceable way forward.”
Twenty-Five Additions to National Film Registry
01.01.09
James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, has added twenty-five American motion pictures to the National Film Registry. Additions include John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), and John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972). Spanning from 1910 to 1989, this year’s selections bring the number of films in the registry to 500. Billington conducted extensive discussions with members of the National Film Preservation Board and the library’s motion-picture staff, solicited public nominations at the Film Board’s website, and also issued a call for lesser-known but culturally vital films. This year’s list includes Disneyland Dream, a significant home movie and record of Hollywood and Los Angeles in 1956 by Robbins and Meg Barstow, and Mitchell Block’s student film No Lies (1973).
Congress established the National Film Registry in 1989 and reauthorized the program in September 2008 when it passed the Library of Congress Sound Recording and Film Preservation Programs Reauthorization Act of 2008. For each title named to the registry, the Library of Congress’s Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center ensures that the film is preserved. "Both as a public-awareness tool and as an educational learning aid for students, the registry helps this nation understand the diversity of America’s film heritage and, just as importantly, the need for its preservation. The nation has lost about half of the films produced before 1950 and as much as 90 percent of those made before 1920. In addition, more and more nitrate-based and acetate-based films are deteriorating with the passage of time,” noted Billington.
Sir Michael Levey (1927–2008)
12.30.08
Sir Michael Levey, director of the National Gallery between 1973 and 1987, has passed away, reports the Guardian’s Terence Mullaly. It was while he was at the National Gallery that Levey brought in the intelligent, if controversial, policy of cleaning and restoring the pictures in the collection. Levey was also responsible for the National Gallery’s catalogues of the eighteenth-century Italian Schools and of the German School. As early as 1956 he wrote Six Great Painters, followed by volumes on Bronzino, Botticelli, and Jacob van Ruisdael. His Rococo to Revolution was published in 1966, and he wrote extensively on eighteenth-century French art and architecture.
Levey was a professor of fine art at Cambridge from 1963 until 1964 and at Oxford from 1994 until 1995 and a supernumerary fellow at King's College, Cambridge, 1963–64. He was also made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature—something very rare for an art historian—and two of the world's greatest learned societies recognized his achievements: In 1983, he became a fellow of the British Academy and, a source of particular pleasure to him, he joined the small and highly select band of foreign members of the Ateneo Veneto. He was knighted in 1981. He resigned as director of the National Gallery in 1987 after his wife, writer Brigid Brophy, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and they moved to Louth in Lincolnshire, England. There Levey continued to write; his last published volume, in 2005, was Sir Thomas Lawrence.
Alanna Heiss to Retire from P.S. 1
12.30.08
The Museum of Modern Art has announced the retirement of Alanna Heiss from her position as the director of the curatorial department at P.S. 1 after thirty-seven years of running the institution. The New York Press’s Jerry Portwood calls Heiss the “powerful force that put the former schoolhouse on the cultural map as an experimental, edgy art destination” before it became affiliated with MoMA in 2000. Portwood notes that John Baldessari has said, “She is P.S. 1, and P.S. 1 is her. It doesn’t seem like she could be replaced.” Following her retirement, Heiss will launch Art International Radio, “an organization that will be devoted to artistic, musical, performance, and experimental programs, in early 2009. Taking its lead from Heiss’s brainchild Art Radio WPS1.org, Art International Radio will bolster a tradition of bringing thought-provoking conversations with noteworthy artists, curators, and academics to a listening audience.” A search committee will be formed in 2009 to locate the person who will replace the retiring director. “Alanna Heiss is a creative and visionary leader whose efforts brought the originality of contemporary artists to a worldwide public and built a landmark center for the visual and performance arts,” said Glenn Lowry, director of MoMA. “Literally hundreds of artists from around the world have felt the impact of her tireless efforts over the last thirty-seven years, and that impact will continue to resonate with artists for years to come.”
Marc Mayer to Direct National Gallery of Canada
12.30.08
Marc Mayer will succeed Pierre Theberge as director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada, reports the Canadian Press. For the past four years, Mayer has served as director general of the Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal. His new job begins on January 19. Mayer has served as curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, as director of the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery at Toronto's Harbourfront Center, and as deputy director for art at the Brooklyn Museum. The National Gallery of Canada has been in existence since 1880 and has one of the largest touring art-exhibition programs in North America.
According to Canada’s National Post, Mayer said he knows from experience that the real "inside" story of an institution can be very different from the news that leaks out. So, he wants to learn for himself the "strengths and weaknesses" of the gallery and its staff before deciding what remedies may be needed. Mayer's comments were in reference to the summer court case pitting David Franklin, the gallery's deputy director, against Theberge. Franklin went to court to stop being fired amid accusations he improperly deleted sensitive e-mails and to declare Theberge "medically" unfit to do his job. The case made headlines across the country and abroad.
Artist Barbara Prey to Serve on National Council on the Arts
12.29.08
Artist Barbara Ernst Prey has been confirmed by the US Senate to serve on the National Council on the Arts, the advisory body of the National Endowment for the Arts. The confirmation follows her nomination by President Bush to serve on the council. A visual artist who specializes in watercolor, Prey has work included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, as well as the White House. Prey earned her undergraduate degree in art history from Williams College and her master’s degree from Harvard University. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, enabling her to travel, study, work, and exhibit extensively in Europe and Asia.
The National Council on the Arts advises the NEA chairman on programs and policies. Council members review and make recommendations to the chairman on grant applications, funding-program guidelines, and national initiatives. Members are chosen for their widely recognized knowledge of the arts, their expertise or profound interest in the arts, and their established record of distinguished service or achievement in the arts. The council comprises fourteen private citizens and six ex-officio members of Congress. Prey was confirmed to serve a full six-year term until 2014. She will replace outgoing council member Mark Hofflund, managing director of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival. “Barbara Prey’s nomination continues our tradition of having prominent visual artists as members of the National Council on the Arts,” said NEA chairman Dana Gioia. “We welcome her participation and counsel.”
Harold Pinter (1930–2008)
12.29.08
Harold Pinter, the British playwright, died on Wednesday, December 24, report the New York Times’s Mel Gussow and Ben Brantley. Pinter was seventy-eight. He learned he had cancer of the esophagus in late 2001. In 2005, when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was unable to attend the awards ceremony at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm but delivered an acceptance speech from a wheelchair in a recorded video.
In more than thirty plays—written between 1957 and 2000 and including masterworks like The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal— Pinter captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life in the second half of the twentieth century with terse, hypnotic dialogue filled with gaping pauses and the prospect of imminent violence. An actor, essayist, screenwriter, poet, and director as well as a dramatist, Pinter was also publicly outspoken in his views on repression and censorship, at home and abroad. He used his Nobel acceptance speech to denounce American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq but had also “supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship” in the past fifty years.
Gussow and Brantley write that, along with another Nobel winner, Samuel Beckett, his friend and mentor, Pinter became one of the few modern playwrights whose names instantly evoke a sensibility. The adjective Pinteresque has become part of the cultural vocabulary as a byword for strong and unspecified menace. As British playwright David Hare, said of Pinter, “The essence of his singular appeal is that you sit down to every play or film he writes in certain expectation of the unexpected.”
