The Getty gets £24.5m Parmigianino after no UK museum tries to match price
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Parmigianino's The Virgin and Child with Saint Mary Magdalen and the Infant Saint John the Baptist was sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles for £24.5m
The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has successfully acquired Parmigianino’s £24.5m painting of The Virgin and Child with Saint*Mary Magdalen and the Infant St John the Baptist. Dating from around 1535-40, it is one of the finest works by Parmigianino (Francesco Mazzola) in private hands. The painting was sold by the Dent-Brocklehurst family of Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire, and has been in the UK for nearly 250 years. Sotheby’s handled the private sale.A UK export licence was deferred last February, to enable a British buyer to match the price. Although London’s National Gallery had shown the painting on loan, it decided against trying to raise the funds, partly because it has recently been considering other acquisitions. No other UK museums attempted to make a bid.
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A Renaissance masterpiece is unveiled, but its mystery remains unsolved
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Giovanni da Rimini, Scenes from the Lives of the Virgin and other Saints (around 1300-1305) (© The National Gallery, London)
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Giovanni da Rimini, Scenes from the Life of Christ (around 1300-05) (© Courtesy Ministry of Heritage, Culture and Tourism, and Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica di Roma; Photo: Mauro Coen)
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Welcome to Basel (and Mulhouse)
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The Brussels-based, Greek-born curator, historian and writer Katerina Gregos is bringing an expanded version of her exhibition A World Not Ours, which debuted in 2016 at the Schwarz Foundation on the Greek island of Samos—a major European entry point for refugees—to La Kunsthalle Mulhouse. “In Europe, [migration] has become one of the most fundamental political and existential issues of the continent, testing its attitudes towards human rights, notions of tolerance and peaceful coexistence,” she says, adding that she is “particularly interested in how artists respond to such questions because very often their work proffers a much more considered, critical and nuanced way of understanding such complex problems”.
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Chinese virtual art is a hit with Korean kids
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Chinese art came to Korea earlier this month—virtually.
Art Busan, a fair which ran 1 to 5 June in the South Korean port city, invited the DSL Collection Virtual Reality Museum to participate.
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Kassel to build permanent Documenta Institute
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Kassel’s city council has settled on a location to build a new Documenta Institute to serve as a research centre and to host events, conferences and exhibitions studying its significance in the contemporary art world.The city has budgeted the construction of the new centre at €24m and plans to build it on a plot of land that is currently a carpark in the north of the city, close to the university. The German government will stump up €12m, the state of Hesse will provide a further €6m and the city will raise the remaining €6m.
The new centre will be managed by the Documenta team, the city of Kassel and the Fridericianum museum. The idea is to “keep alive the concept and experience of Documenta in the years between exhibitions”, the city council says in a statement.
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Fontainebleau theatre restoration enters final phase
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The final stage of the United Arab Emirates (UAE)-funded renovation of the 19th-century imperial theatre at the Château de Fontainebleau—a Unesco World Heritage site near Paris—begins in June. Designed in 1857 for Napoleon III, the theatre reopened in 2014 after the first phase, which cost €5m and saw 25 specialists and 135 craftsmen revive the original décor of the main auditorium. The final phase focuses on restoring the theatre’s machinery, the upper levels of the salons and the podium that houses one of France’s most important stage sets. The project is expected to be completed in spring 2019.
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Historic Mexico City swim club gets a second life as art gallery
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Artists in Mexico City have taken over a disused historic pool and turned it into a pop-up art gallery, months before the facility is due to be torn down to make way for a new mixed-use development.Formerly known as Club Condesa, the pool opened in 1940 to house Mexico City’s first women’s-only swim club and became co-ed in the 1960s, counting an estimated 250 members at its peak. But maintaining the property at Tlaxcala 103 became nearly impossible for its owners as larger fitness centers moved into the now trendy neighbourhood of Roma Sur. The club closed in 2015, and the building was bought by a group of private developers including Antonio Cordero, who wanted to repurpose the space before it is torn down. Together, Cordero and the curator Angelica Montes created the exhibition Thresholds of Time, which includes the work of nearly 50 local and international artists.
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