Showing posts with label New York City. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York City. Show all posts

Museum Gives Out Fake Drugs In Art Exhibit Experiment

"The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Taipei assured the public Tuesday that all of its exhibitions follow law and safety regulations in the wake of a controversial art show that was staged April 3. The show involved a local ..." [Read Full Article]

Published By: Focus Taiwan News Channel
On: 05/04/11
Website: http://focustaiwan.tw/

 

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Ai Weiwei's Public Art Project In Manhattan To Proceed As Planned

"The installation of Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, a 12-piece sculpture to be installed at the Pulitzer Fountain near the Plaza Hotel and Central Park, 'will go forward even if Mr. Ai, who was detained by Chinese authorities on Sunday, is unable to be present.'" [Read Full Article]

Published By: New York Times
On: 04/05/11
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/

 

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Hungary Auctions Off Communist Kitsch

By GORDON FAIRCLOUGH And VERONIKA GULYAS


BUDAPEST—Competition was fierce for Lot No. 38, a fine ceramic sculpture of Vladimir Lenin.

The winning bidder was 22-year-old Timea Szabo, who offered nearly $1,000 for the small likeness of the communist hero. Ms. Szabo, too young to remember Hungary's socialist past, is firmly engaged with its capitalist present.

"We're not into Lenin, really," says Ms. Szabo, who works at a real-estate company that caters to Budapest's newly rich.

[SB10001424052748703296604576005812165749354]

But sizing up her new acquisition—which portrays the first Soviet leader grasping the lapel of his overcoat, a stern expression on his bearded face—she declares: "It will look pretty in the office."

More than 20 years after the collapse of communism here, Hungary's government is holding a vast rummage sale, auctioning off socialist-era paintings, sculptures and photographs that have been gathering dust in storage.

The proceeds will be used to help clean up after another reminder of central planning: an industrial accident that in October left villages in western Hungary flooded with caustic red sludge—waste from a once state-owned aluminum factory.

On Monday night, hundreds of people joined the bidding at an art gallery that formerly served as a warehouse for Hungary's secret police.

Hungary's current political leadership views the purge in part as a symbolic exorcism of the ghosts of socialism—and a reminder of past suffering.

To advertise the auction, the government created a logo showing the hammer of the communists' old hammer-and-sickle emblem striking Lenin's head and causing him to see red stars. Below it is inscribed the motto, "Never Again."

"It's an important gesture. Almost every Hungarian family was somehow a victim in the communist period," says Gergely Boszormenyi Nagy, an official of the Ministry of Public Administration and Justice, which organized the auction. "This is the end of the line. We won't keep this stuff anymore."

But the event also comes at a time of rising nostalgia for the socialist years —at least in some quarters of Hungarian society.

The country's economy has been upended by the global financial crisis. Unemployment soared as the country sank into its worst recession since the transition to capitalism in 1989.

Many older people thrown out of work now say that at least under the communist regime everyone had a job and something to eat.

Gyorgy Torok, 45, who bought a vintage Lenin lithograph for about $50 on Monday night, says that the art works on sale reminded him of his youth and of his father, a mining engineer and avid collector of communist-era memorabilia who died earlier this year.

"When I was young, I didn't really look deeply into the faults of the system," says Mr. Torok, a real-estate entrepreneur who says that his business is struggling amid the economic downturn. "I lived a calm, secure life where bread cost 3.5 forints and everyone had a job."

Today, a loaf of bread costs about 200 Hungarian forints, or $1.

rt played an important propaganda role throughout the Soviet sphere. When communism collapsed in 1989, politicians across Central and Eastern Europe had to decide what to do with decades' worth of statues, paintings and other works of public art.

In most countries, the hulking images of Lenin, Stalin and other communist VIPs were pulled from their pedestals in parks and corralled in museums.

Many of Hungary's are now in a sculpture garden outside Budapest.

Some pieces were snapped up by collectors of communist kitsch in the West and put on display—like the Lenin statue perched on the roof of Red Square, an apartment building on New York City's Lower East Side.

The art works for sale this week in Hungary are a mixed bag. They offer a glimpse of the iconography of socialism as well as the dissonant results when artists' varying styles were applied to what the communist party deemed appropriate subjects.

On offer was an impressionist-style painting of women working on a television factory assembly line, as well as lush oil paintings of shipyards, railroads and steel mills.

A painting entitled "Soviet-Hungarian Friendship" from 1950, six years before Hungary's unsuccessful revolt against Russian domination in 1956, shows Hungarian peasants relaxing with Soviet soldiers, one of whom holds a submachine gun. Two Soviet tanks idle in the background.

A few of the pieces are by well-known Hungarian artists who, willingly or unwillingly, joined the communist government's propaganda efforts.

The Lenin statue bought by Ms. Szabo was the work of Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl. He was famous in Hungary and the U.K. for his depictions of figures as disparate as George Bernard Shaw and the future Queen Elizabeth.

"We need to take into consideration the experiences of the old times and learn from them, to confront the past and use it cleverly," says Gergely Mikola, 33, the chairman of the British Chamber of Commerce in Hungary. He had his eye on several lots, but was outbid.

At Monday's auction, the Wende Museum of Culver City, Calif., purchased 25 pieces that it termed "significant works" of communist-era Hungarian art.

The museum specializes in visual arts of Cold War Eastern Europe.

"The works are representative of an extinct era in world history," says Justinian Jampol, the museum's executive director.

Sales reached $63,000 on Monday, the first day of the auction. Wednesday's session, which also included non-socialist pieces, raised roughly $96,000, organizers say. The auction concludes Thursday.

Peter Pinter, the owner of the gallery that is handling the auctions for the Hungarian government, believes that many of the items on the block are those that apparatchiks didn't deem good enough to pilfer when the communist system fell apart.

"Since the auction was announced, a lot of people have been calling, saying, 'We have a Lenin, we have a Stalin at home. Will you sell it for us?'" Mr. Pinter says. "Parents most likely kept these pieces due either to nostalgia or because they held a certain value to them.... But children feel that these are just a burden."

This article is from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704250704576005442795543116.html

Philadelphia History Museum Selling Thousands of Items From Collection

Museum Sells Pieces of Its Past, Reviving a Debate


By ROBIN POGREBIN

PHILADELPHIA — A galloping horse weather vane sold for about $20,000, and the cigar store Indians brought in more than $1 million. A Thomas Sully oil painting of Andrew Jackson netted $80,500, and a still life by Raphaelle Peale, part of the family that put portraiture in this city on the map, was auctioned at Christie’s for $842,500.



These were just a few of more than 2,000 items quietly sold by the Philadelphia History Museum over the last several years, all part of an effort to cull its collection of 100,000 artifacts and raise money for a $5.8 million renovation of its 1826 building.

In doing so the museum stepped into the quicksand of murky rules, guidelines and ethical strictures meant to discourage museums everywhere from selling collections to pay bills. It is one of the hottest issues in the museum world today. With budgets shrinking in a bad economy, the pressure to generate revenue is growing along with fears that museums are squandering public trusts meant to preserve the artifacts of the past for future generations.

The National Academy Museum in New York, Fisk University and Brandeis have all recently drawn fire — and even sanctions — for selling or planning to sell artworks, and none of them sold as many works as the museum here.

In general art and objects are supposed to be sold only to finance acquisitions, though different museums are governed by different standards. Art museums, regulated by a formal code of the Association of Art Museum Directors, may not sell work for any other reason.

As a history museum, though, this institution — formally called the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent — is subject to separate, less stringent guidelines put forward by other associations. So museum officials say the installation of new carpet, paint and lighting were all legitimate expenses to be paid from the proceeds under the guidelines of the American Association of Museums, which say that sales can be used for the “direct care” of a collection. Adding to the confusion, there is a third set of standards maintained by the American Association for State and Local History permitting proceeds to go toward the “preservation” of a collection, a similarly broad term.

The New York State legislature, confronting this maze of precepts, recently considered passing a law that would make selling collections — the art world term is deaccessioning — to pay operating expenses illegal. It never made it to the Assembly floor because museums opposed it.

Some museum professionals say that having differing guidelines for art and history museums only fosters confusion at a time when finding any means of raising money is especially appealing.

“This rapidly becomes a slippery slope,” said Derick Dreher, the director of the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia. “What museum director wouldn’t be tempted to say that air-conditioning is absolutely crucial for care of collections? Heating, humidification and dehumidification, similarly. But if we go down this road, we end up paying our gas, electric and water bills — classic operations costs — with deaccessioning proceeds.”

But, some argue, museums sometimes have to pare down their collections to remain viable. “Museums really cannot continue to accumulate and accumulate and accumulate ad infinitum,” said Janet C. Marstine, founding director of the Insitute of Musuem Ethics at Seton Hall University and now a lecturer and program director at the University of Leicester. “What does one do with former acquisitions policies that did not make sense, or not having an acquisitions policy, or having so many objects they can’t care for or don’t really fit within their purpose?”

The Philadelphia History Museum, which has been closed for nearly two years for renovations, hopes to finance the completion of the project — about $1.5 million — from the sale of “an artifact” it would not identify. It views its sales as falling within the history museum guidelines.

“We view the entire reconstruction project as preserving and caring for our largest artifact, the building,” said Gregory J. Kleiber, the museum’s treasurer, “and making possible the display and conservation under museum-appropriate conditions of the other pieces of our collection.”

The state and local history association — which serves nearly 4,000 institutions — said that history museums resist easy definition and therefore make rigid regulation difficult. “History artifacts include everything from locomotives to artwork — it’s a very broad type of collection — so it’s really hard to set one ethics statement that covers the kaleidoscopic nature of the history collections,” said Terry Davis, the association’s president. “We intentionally leave our policies — our ethics statement — rather loose. Our belief is a board should take the ethics statement and make thoughtful decisions about what’s best for the care of their collections.”

Ford W. Bell, the president of the American Association of Museums, acknowledged that his group’s policy was “less clear” than the one governing art museums, and that whether or not a history museum’s sales fit within the guidelines “is somewhat subjective.”

“In general, we hope that museums will not use the collections as an asset to support the operations of the museum or things that are not directed to collections’ care or buying new objects,” Mr. Bell said.



In selling items, the Philadelphia History Museum’s officials say they are trying to maintain their collections responsibly within limited storage capacity and to keep the institution focused on its core purpose. In addition to large-ticket items, the museum has sold relatively minor pieces, like two wooden 19th-century rocking chairs (one in need of caning), which together brought $35, and assorted lithographs of New York City from the mid-19th century, which went for $12.50. Some objects have been given to other institutions.

“We’ve collected a lot of things over the years, many of which have very little to do with our mission as a history museum,” said Mr. Kleiber, the treasurer, who was president of the museum from September 2007 to September 2010.

“We want to continue the process, to continue looking at what doesn’t fit our needs and move forward,” he added. “We were very conscious when we started the process that this sort of thing raises eyebrows. We feel we’ve been very careful and very thoughtful about the entire thing.”

The history museum initially said it had no record of how many items it had sold, how much the sales had brought in or where the proceeds had been directed. “I’m sure there are records around,” Mr. Kleiber said. “I’m not sure I’ve seen them.”

The museum later acknowledged that between 2003 and 2009 it sold 2,595 items at Philadelphia-area auction houses, earning a total of about $115,000. Another 64 items — some of which were transferred to the museum in 2001 by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which shared in the proceeds — were auctioned at Christie’s, bringing in $3.4 million. The museum has sold “mountains of stuff,” Mr. Kleiber said, but much of it is only “little bits of paper, odd bits of this and little bits of that.”

Some museum professionals say the institution should have been more transparent about its sales, explaining what it was selling and why.

“I wish some of these things were staying here and wish there had been a greater opportunity for local museums to purchase them,” said Page Talbott, a trustee of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. “There wasn’t time built into it, to have a conversation about it. The sale had already been planned and catalogs printed.”

Others say the scope of the sales is troubling. “The motivation appears to be liquidation, rather than preserving the embedded knowledge and experience that these artifacts bring,” said Kenneth Finkel, lecturer in American studies at Temple University who briefly served as deputy director of the museum. “Decisions made by donors and curators and libraries become the legacy. And the decision to deaccession stupidly is also a legacy.”

Many of the more prominent works sold were paintings done by members of the Peale family, whose most famous member, Charles Willson Peale, is viewed as the founder of America’s first major museum, which operated in Philadelphia in the 1800s. “There is nothing that’s more centrally Philadelphian than the Peale family,” said Mr. Dreher of the Rosenbach museum. “Though I respect the museum’s right to act as it did, it’s taking away the opportunity for the public in and around Philadelphia to be enlightened by these works, and now one of the best stories can’t be told because it’s gone.”

Mr. Kleiber said that making sales more public is “something we’ll consider.”

Regarding the Raphaelle Peale still life, one of the more valuable items sold at Christie’s, Mr. Kleiber said: “The Peale we felt was very much outside the mission. We’re a history museum, not an art museum. It’s a picture of a fish.”

 

This Article is from: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/arts/design/06sales.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

Art Basel Miami - Up Significantly From Last Year

In Miami Beach, a More Daring Art Basel


By ERICA ORDEN




[ICONS miami]'Educate, Agitate, Organize, 2010' by Andrea Bowers, to be shown at the Andrew Kreps Gallery's Art Basel Miami Beach outpost;






Last December, many dealers and collectors, still reeling from the economic implosion, sat out the most prestigious U.S. art fair, Art Basel Miami Beach.

This year, galleries are back: Booth applications rose by 20% from last year. After robust fall auctions in New York, "we're seeing people back in the market," said Marc Spiegler, co-director of the Basel, Switzerland, fair and its sister event in Miami, now in its ninth year. And after several years of safer, blue-chip offerings in a soft market, dealers are bringing back experimental art.



Opening to the public Dec. 2, this year's four-day event is expected to draw more than 40,000 people. Within the main sector, which has more than 180 galleries, New York-based Skarstedt Gallery will show Jenny Holzer's black granite sarcophagus and LED sign, "Laments: The knife cut runs as long..." Galerie Urs Meile, of Beijing and Lucerne, Switzerland, will show "Kui Hua Zi," a pile of porcelain seeds by Beijing-born artist Ai Weiwei, who has often crossed swords with the Chinese government.



ICONS miami

'Athens' by Gilbert & George (to be featured at Bernier/Eliades Gallery)






Among the unconventional works at New York powerhouse Lehmann Maupin will be a printed-vinyl floor installation by multimedia artist Tony Oursler, "Synchronistic Lick." A buyer can customize the dimensions and therefore the patterns of the work, which mixes a gray background, fluorescent colors and photorealistic imagery. Each of three available editions costs $40,000.



Another full-booth installation, by Ashley Bickerton, sold quickly to a major European collector at 2008's fair in Basel, Lehmann Maupin said. But during the last two years of fairs, the gallery presented more conservative choices, like paintings, embroideries and photography, co-founder Rachel Lehmann said, adding: "We feel like this is a moment where we can do it again."



In October, London's Frieze Art Fair saw a return to boom-era big prices for pieces other than "wall works." A formaldehyde-based installation by Damien Hirst, for example, sold at the Frieze's opening for about $5.6 million.



ICONS miami

'Piquanteagle' by John Chamberlain (Anthony Meier Fine Arts)






In Miami, the fair's leadership is experimenting in another way: Its sector for emerging galleries, Art Positions, is limiting participating galleries to one artwork per booth. That part of the fair "needed to have a unique identity to it," Mr. Spiegler said. At $10,000, booths for Art Positions are 20% cheaper than last year (booths for the main sector cost $52 per square foot and range from 646 to 1,292 square feet).



Finding the right work was tricky for Simon Preston, owner and director of an eponymous New York gallery selected as one of the 14 Art Positions presenters. The gallery needed to have "the perfect project at the right time for a particular artist." Mr. Preston is showing "Crushed by the Hammer of the Sun," a mechanical sculpture involving a silk skirt, by Los Angeles-based artist Kara Tanaka, who is still in her 20s. The piece is priced at $30,000.



The auction world is showing increasing interest in the fair, with its influx of influential collectors. For the first time, Christie's will host a preview in Miami, showing works by Mr. Hirst, Keith Haring, Richard Pettibone and Antony Gormley, all to be included in the auction house's February postwar and contemporary sale in London.

 

This article is from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704170404575624690309062292.html?mod=WSJ_ArtsEnt_LifestyleArtEnt_2

Chelsea Museum Gets One More Year in Foreclosed-On Building

Chelsea Museum End Near


Building Sale Approved; New Home for Art Collection Must be Found in a Year


By CRAIG KARMIN And ERICA ORDEN


A long-running saga surrounding the Chelsea Art Museum moved toward its conclusion after a bankruptcy court paved the way for a $19.35 million sale of the museum's building to a New York developer.

The sale would allow the museum to continue operating at its West 22nd street site, rent-free, until the end of 2011, according to terms of the agreement with Albanese Development Corp.

After that date, the museum would likely have to find a new home to continue operating. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York approved the sale on Friday.

The agreement would also reduce the amount of debt owed by the building owner, a company controlled by the museum's director and founder Dorothea Keeser. The lender, New York fund manager Hudson Realty Capital, has agreed to settle the debt for $13 million, down from its previous claims for about $14 million, according to court documents.

Ms. Keeser responded to an email inquiry about the situation by saying she would not open another museum in New York.

"It's always been our objective to be paid what we are owed, and this accomplishes that goal," says Renee Lewis, a Hudson Realty managing director.

Christopher Albanese, a principal for the purchaser, said he expects to close on the property in approximately two weeks.

A sale likely marks the end years of drama over the fate of the eight-year old museum. The museum's permanent collection features paintings and prints by abstract artists such as Jean Arp, Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell.

Mr. Albanese said his firm intends to lease the building to one or several art galleries once the museum vacates at the end of next year. "It's a prime location and it's a beautiful building and that area continues to get better and better," he said. "We saw it as a good opportunity."

The fate of the museum's permanent collection, worth about $2.5 million, according to Ms. Keeser, remains unclear.

In August, Ms. Keeser said she had pledged the entire collection as collateral for a separate, $350,000 loan to make an interest payment on the mortgage. That move could violate regulations of the state Department of Education's Board of Regents, which supervises and grants charters to museums.

A spokesman for the department didn't respond to a request for information on its review of the matter.

Hudson Realty refinanced the mortgage for the building in 2008 with an $11 million loan. The terms called for Ms. Keeser's company to pay a portion of the interest until January 2009, when the principal and balance were due.

That deadline came and went without payment. In April 2009, Hudson Realty agreed to extend the loan for 18 months, making payment of the principal due in July 2010. That deadline was also missed and in August, Ms. Keeser's company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Write to Craig Karmin at craig.karmin@wsj.com and Erica Orden at erica.orden@wsj.com

This article is from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704243904575631012994652750.html

Guggenheim Struggles With Its Finances



[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"]Asymptote Architecture artist's conception of ...[/caption]


Tax Filings Show Struggles for Guggenheim


By KATE TAYLOR




The last two years haven’t been easy on New York museums, but they’ve been particularly challenging for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. In a disastrous 2008, the museum’s net assets declined by 25 percent.

The latest tax filings show that 2009 was not nearly as bad, though the numbers still offer cause for concern. Despite a round of layoffs (completed midyear), expenses exceeded revenue by more than $12 million. Contributions were down from the previous year, to $20 million. The foundation’s endowment decreased slightly, to $62.5 million from $64.4 million.

A Guggenheim spokeswoman, Betsy Ennis, said that the foundation expected the endowment to finish 2010 slightly higher. (The foundation includes the museum on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street and its satellites abroad.)

Richard Armstrong, the new director of the Guggenheim, made $612,550 in 2009 — roughly comparable to the pay for his colleagues at other major New York museums. The exception was Glenn D. Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art, who took home twice that amount between July 1, 2008, and June 30, 2009 (the period that that museum uses as its fiscal year).

Mr. Armstrong’s salary was lower than the $1 million the Guggenheim paid its former director, Thomas Krens, last year, as the second installment of a $2 million severance package. The Guggenheim also paid $816,295 in fees to the company that Mr. Krens started after leaving the Guggenheim, Global Cultural Asset Management, which was consulting on the planned new Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi.

The tax filings show that the Guggenheim received $715,000 in 2009 for doing a feasibility study, jointly with the State Hermitage Museum, for a possible museum in Vilnius, Lithuania. Because of the economic crisis and turnover in the local government, that museum has not gone forward.

 

This article is from: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/tax-filings-show-struggles-for-guggenheim/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Phila. Museum Acquires Major Paul Strand



Art Museum acquires trove of photographs by Paul Strand


By Stephan Salisbury


The Museum of Art has acquired more than 3,000 photographic images by Paul Strand (pictured above).

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has acquired more than 3,000 photographic images by the pioneering modernist Paul Strand, catapulting the museum into the front ranks of worldwide photography meccas, and creating the greatest single repository of Strand's work anywhere.

The acquisition, made through gifts and a purchase agreement with the New York-based Aperture Foundation, is expected to be announced Thursday.

"It's a landmark in terms of our holdings of photography," said Timothy Rub, museum director. "It makes the Philadelphia Museum of Art the go-to place for the study of Strand."

The Strand works will add "richness, depth, and texture to our collection of modern photography to an extent that no other acquisition has," Rub said. "That has to do with Strand's greatness."

Strand was born in 1890 in New York, studied with Lewis Hine, worked with Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Charles Sheeler, and other giants of early modernist photography, and died in France in 1976. He was a committed socialist, which for a time was reflected in his work, and led him to leave the United States for Europe in 1951 in disgust with what he viewed as growing American anticommunist hysteria.

There are three parts to the acquisition. First, the museum has received 1,422 images from the Paul Strand Archive at Aperture, thanks to funding from philanthropists Lynne and Harold Honickman, Marjorie and Jeffrey Honickman, and H.F. "Gerry" and Marguerite Lenfest; an additional 566 master prints made from Strand's negatives by the artist Richard Benson came by the same route.

Simultaneously, the museum has entered into an agreement with Aperture to purchase an additional 1,276 photographs.

Museum officials declined to disclose the cost of the acquisition, citing museum policy, but it is believed that the price extended well into seven figures, if not higher.

An excited Lynne Honickman said she and her husband, both deeply interested in photography, believed the Strand body of work should be held together.

"We both feel it needs to be in a place where it is well cared for and studied," she said. The possibility that Strand's work might ultimately wind up in different institutions was "bloodcurdling," she added.

"Paul Strand was one of the first great modernists," she said. "The body of his work is not only together, but it has been maintained fastidiously. It's in exquisite condition."

Juan Garcia de Oteyza, Aperture's former executive director who shepherded the Strand images through the latter stages of the six or seven years of negotiations with the museum, noted that Aperture was "not really a collecting institution" and lacked exhibition space to display the images.

"It really doesn't make sense for Aperture to hold on to the work," he said. "We're really very, very pleased. This is much better than if we placed works in many museums."

The Art Museum has had a long association with Aperture, as well as with Strand's creative work, thanks to the efforts of Michael Hoffman, the museum's longtime adjunct curator of photography and Aperture director.

Hoffman, who died in 2001, knew Strand well, formed the photographer's archive, and organized the museum's landmark 1971 Strand retrospective, the first anywhere since 1945. In 1972, the artist gave the museum one of his most important early platinum prints, City Hall Park, New York (1915), along with six other works, and the museum purchased 10 other prints. These acquisitions were followed by purchases in 1974 and by gifts from Strand's widow, Hazel, in 1977 and 1978.

In 1980, the artist's estate gave the museum the entire contents of his retrospective exhibition - 497 prints, including a group of seven of his early exhibition platinum prints, among them the iconic images Wall Street (1915), Man in a Derby (1916), and Telegraph Poles, Texas (1915).

With the new acquisition, the museum is now custodian of about 4,000 Strand images. All of the newly acquired images are at the museum and are being studied in preparation for a major Strand exhibition scheduled for 2014, museum officials said.

Peter Barberie, museum curator of photography, described the acquisition as a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Strand, he said, "helped define the vocabulary of 20th-century photography and what it would be about."

Within the museum's holdings, Barberie said, were works covering every aspect of Strand's career across seven decades - from his early soft-focus images, through harder, socially significant street portraits, and on into abstraction and studies of landscape and place.

The sweep of the Strand holdings, he said, includes prints from the majority of his negatives, including most known variants and croppings of individual images. The museum is now also able to keep together prints made from a single negative using different processes, at different times, and with different papers.

"Between our publishing [program], our study room, and our exhibitions, I think they're going to have a great life here," Barberie said.


Article from: http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20101117_Art_Museum_acquires_trove_of_photographs_by_Paul_Strand.html#ixzz161S8vt1t
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