Art Photos mixed

Rocky Creek
Photo by Benjamin Wende

The Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron has won a competition to build a new museum of 20th-century art in central Berlin with a long, low red-brick design that invited comparisons to a rail station, a barn, a temple and an indoor market.The site for the new museum is between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s metal-and-glass Neue Nationalgalerie and Hans Scharoun’s spiky gold Philharmonic, two architectural landmarks of the 1960s. It is also flanked on one side by Friedrich August Stüler’s red-brick 19th-century St Matthäus Kirche.

The winning design “doesn’t attempt to compete with the ‘divas’ by Scharoun and Mies van der Rohe,” said Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, at a press conference today (27 October). “But it still makes a very strong statement. It achieves an almost impossible feat by healing this place and bringing together these buildings.”

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The Arts Council Collection, the world’s largest loan collection of Modern and contemporary British art, is partnering with four major galleries outside London to stage 24 exhibitions over the next three years.Founded in 1946, the collection acts as “the nation’s art lending library”, making nearly 8,000 works by more than 2,000 artists available for loan to museums, galleries, hospitals, schools and other public buildings across the UK. On 27 October, the organisation launched the National Partners’ programme of exhibitions as part of its 70th anniversary celebrations. The scheme will give an itinerant collection four semi-permanent homes until spring 2019: the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, Birmingham Museums Trust, Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The participating institutions responded to an open call by Arts Council England last summer.

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Sunset fine art by Manuel Roger

Vertical Limit by Pascal Schirmer

Hyejin by Ciro Galluccio

Be I am by Lars van de Goor

Five years ago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) literally rolled out the red carpet at its inaugural Art+Film gala in an explicit bid to reach Hollywood players alongside more established museum patrons. And this weekend, the event worked its Gucci-sponsored magic to bring out stars like Bradley Cooper, Gwyneth Paltrow and Leo DiCaprio (who co-chaired the event) and gross about $3.6m (net revenues not available).But the biggest gifts so far towards Lacma’s plans for a new museum building by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor have come from neither art-world or Hollywood royalty, with Eric Smidt and his wife Susan surprising many by announcing this week their pledge of $25m.

Eric Smidt, not to be confused with Google billionaire Eric Schmidt, is a self-made businessman who built Harbor Freight Tools into a company that the Los Angeles Times projects will have $4bn in sales this year (think chain saws, power tools and more). With some guidance from the museum’s director Michael Govan over the last decade, he has shifted from collecting Old Masters to more modern material.

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Over a decade in the making and due to open in 2017, the Louvre Abu Dhabi has evolved into a museum that has gone beyond being merely a showcase for historical European art into one that is a truly global institution reflecting a new kind of universalismSince the announcement in 2006 that a cultural district was to be created on Saadiyat Island off Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), ten years have passed and the conventional art museum sought by the Emiratis has turned into a universal institution as a result of influence almost exclusively from the French side.

Although the term “universal museum” is a venerable one, anchored firmly in the history of European philosophy, it offers the capital of the emirates something quite original today. At the start of the 21st century, the concept behind this new Louvre is shaking up the conventional relationship between thinking and museums.

In July 2006, when the Saadiyat cultural district was announced to the press as an urban planning project centred on a performing arts hub and four museums, the Louvre’s name was not yet involved, unlike the Guggenheim’s, which was then the main focus of interest. At that point, all that was on the cards was a conventional art museum entrusted to the architect Jean Nouvel. However, talks with the Louvre had begun a year earlier, in 2005, a few months before Thomas Krens, the flamboyant director of the Guggenheim Foundation, was contacted.

It was due to a desire to associate the emirate’s name with that of the famous French institution that the project was created in 2004 by the sons of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. That year was marked by the death of their father, Abu Dhabi’s ruler since 1966 and the driving force behind the 1971 unification of the emirates that make up the UAE. The dynastic transition that had begun in 1990 came to an end and the Louvre Abu Dhabi was the most resounding cultural expression of the new distribution of power in the emirate.

The future museum was thus born of a request from Abu Dhabi rather than an outside proposal deriving from the economic globalisation of museums, as the later involvement of the Guggenheim Foundation might appear to suggest. The museological specifications of the Louvre Abu Dhabi project were then defined in Paris, which has also led on the choice of its content.



Christ Showing His Wounds (around 1515–20) (Photo: © Louvre Abu Dhabi / Thierry Ollivier)

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Afraid of Yellow and Blue by Lars van de Goor