Art Photos mixed

There was a distinct dearth of flamboyant garb at Tate Britain’s private view of Queer British Art—honourable exceptions being the young man in underpants and a feathered headdress, and the gentleman sporting a collar of pink rhinestone roses.

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The National Gallery has created a new frame for Sebastiano del Piombo’s The Raising of Lazarus (1517-19) altarpiece, which was unveiled in its new Michelangelo & Sebastiano exhibition (until 25 June). The new composite frame, which contains a mix of carefully sourced antique pieces as well as newly made replicas based on 16th-century architectural elements, is much closer stylistically to the original frame and gives the large-scale painting even greater visual impact. The original frame was probably designed by Sebastiano’s mentor, Michelangelo, according to new research by the gallery’s curator of 16th-century Italian paintings, Matthias Wivel. Sebastiano then supervised the carving and gilding, which was done in Rome.



Before: Sebastiano del Piombo, The Raising of Lazarus (1517-19). © The National Gallery, London

The frame was considered lost, but the original predella (lower part) has been identified in Narbonne Cathedral, in southern France. The three feathers of the Medici family’s arms can be seen above the two festoons. Although the altarpiece was commissioned for the cathedral, it was sold off in 1722 and replaced by a copy. It was only in the 1980s that scholars realised that the predella (but not the rest of the frame) was original.The British businessman John Julius Angerstein (1732-1823) bought the painting in 1798 and sold it as part of his collection to establish the National Gallery in 1824. It was the first work to be inventoried and given the number NG1.

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The National Portrait Gallery will begin collecting Yoruba sculptures similar to this example in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, California (Sculpture of Queen Victoria carved by Thomas Ona Odulate, Yoruba.*Collected by William R. Bascom)

London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) is to expand its collection to include significantly more works created before around 1500, with a view to displaying its pre-Tudor objects for the first time. The gallery is also seeking to enhance its holdings of works made outside of the UK, which, until now, have been restricted to portraits of sitters who have had a significant impact on British life and culture.“Looking at pre-Tudor material is a real departure for the gallery,” says Louise Stewart, the museum’s cross collections curator.

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The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) announced last week plans for a new photography centre that will house the museum’s collection following the controversial decision to transfer 270,000 photographs from the National Media Museum in Bradford to the London-based institution.*The museum’s curatorial team will also organise touring exhibitions of the collection, alongside an existing programme of UK and international loans. A museum spokeswoman says that the “photographs will be available for loan and the photography curators will be working with both UK regional museums and venues abroad to develop exhibitions in dialogue with venues’ collections”.



Under the landmark agreement announced in February last year between the V&A and the Science Museum Group, which runs the National Media Museum, the collection of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) in Bradford will join the existing collection of 500,000 photographs at the V&A. More than 26,000 publications and 6,000 pieces of camera-related equipment in the RPS collection, which was founded in 1853, will also be transferred to the V&A where the holdings will be digitised.

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"We needed to build something to keep people away from this piece that remains of the Berlin Wall"


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Lower Manhattan’s Trinity Church has been sued by the Pennsylvania sculptor Steve Tobin for violating his moral rights when it removed his 9/11-themed work from the church’s courtyard, where it had been installed for ten years. The sculpture The Trinity Root recalled a sycamore tree that stood in front of the 320-year-old church and bore the brunt of the debris from the collapse of the Twin Towers on 11 September, preserving the church from more extensive damage.

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The French journalist Anne Sinclair has given an enlightening interview to our French sister paper Le Journal des Arts about her late grandfather, the influential art dealer Paul Rosenberg (1881-1959).

A recent exhibition at La Boverie in Liège, Belgium, entitled 21 Rue la Boétie, featured paintings that passed through Rosenberg’s hands, with 63 works on display by artists such as Matisse, Braque and Picasso. In a controversial move, the show did not travel to the Centre Pompidou in Paris as planned, but instead opened at the Musée Maillol in the capital (until 23 July). Sinclair says that Picasso hoped to paint her portrait but she resisted, fearing that she would end up as one of the artist’s “distorted faces”.

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The opening exhibition at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art in New York, a new cultural space founded by the Qatari national Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani, will include works by four women artists. Prints and works on paper by Dana Awartani, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Zarina Hashmi, and Nasreen Mohamedi will feature in the show, entitled Exhibition 1, opening on 4 May in a temporary venue at 3 Howard Street in lower Manhattan.

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Marlene Dumas, The Widow (2013). (Courtesy of Defares Collection and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp. Photo: Peter Cox)

Strangely, the capital city of Belgium and the de facto capital of Europe has no dedicated museum of contemporary art. The contemporary collection of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium is mostly in storage amid ongoing renovation.

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The only industrial building designed by Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964), the Dutch designer and architect associated with the De Stijl movement, sat empty for nearly a decade before its current owner bought it and set about bringing it back to life. Fast forward two years and not only has the former textile factory in Bergeijk, a city in the Netherlands’s Noord-Brabant province, undergone a sympathetic restoration, but a visitors’ centre devoted to the building’s celebrated designers is due to open this month. Rietveld built the factory in 1957 for De Ploeg, a manufacturer of curtain and upholstery fabrics. Unlike typical industrial buildings of the period, Rietveld’s Modernist construction was more horizontal than vertical, with a distinctive saw-tooth west façade, glass roof panels that afforded plenty of natural light and the bold, primary colours of De Stijl dotted throughout. Rietveld was thinking about a new, modern culture when he designed De Ploeg, says the art historian Edwin van Onna, from the Rietveld & Ruys Foundation. Rietveld also designed two nearby houses as well as a bus stop, which was restored in 2011.



The 12-hectare park that surrounds the factory, which was designed by the landscape architect Mien Ruys and is owned by the City, is also being given a new lease of life. “The park and factory were conceived as an ensemble,” Van Onna says. Burgmans estimates that “99.9% of the park will also be restored to its original appearance”. In the summer, the park hosts popular design and music festivals.

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