The French Ministry of Culture has published a detailed report advising French museums on how to avoid acquiring traded works of art. The report, published on November 21, argued that the country’s reputation and cultural influence are at stake, especially in a busy international art market where competition – particularly from its Anglo-Saxon neighbors – is stiff.

Culture Minister Rima Abdul-Malak commissioned the special report in June ongoing scandal with the indictment of former Louvre director Jean-Luc Martinez and curator Jean-Francois Charnier. Both have been accused of “complicity in gang fraud and money laundering” in acquiring allegedly looted antiques from Egypt, which were bought by Louvre Abu Dhabi for over $50 million. In February, a French court will decide whether to drop those charges.

The investigation has cast a shadow over France’s leading cultural institutions and agencies, which it likens to diplomatic envoys, and is therefore an essential part of maintaining the country’s economic clout. The development of the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum was as much an exercise in international relations as it was an artistic exchange. The collection was designed by the consultancy France Muséums.

The report, titled “Improving the Security of National Museum Acquisitions,” makes it clear that while there “is no risk,” making sure similar fiascos don’t happen again should be a top priority for the state.

“In other countries endowed with large art markets or large museums, the unfortunate acquisition of a museum has little consequence other than the return of the artwork by the private museum and legal procedures to obtain a refund (this is the case in the US, for example ). “, says the report. [The U.S. reference may pertain to the return of looted artworks by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as a result of the same art trafficking investigation that implicated French museum workers.] “In France, on the other hand, the reputation of the state is being damaged by the same situation,” the report states.

The report outlines a current context for concerns about the art trade, as competition in the global art market “is particularly fierce among large countries in terms of their cultural influence”. Added to this are rising demands for restitution and the “European reconfiguration” due to Brexit, the report warns of the once “growing dominance of Anglo-Saxon public auctions”.

In short, an effective “response is necessary to ensure France’s ability to influence”, “to increase confidence in the French market” and to help in the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing, both of which are linked to the sale of looted art, note The report’s authors: museum and art market experts Marie-Christine Labourdette, Christian Giacomotto and Arnaud Oseredczuk.

The trio interviewed more than 60 art experts before making 42 recommendations, which Artnet News said the culture ministry was quick to respond to.

“On our side, we have already started to advance certain recommendations that will be applied as early as 2023,” said a ministry spokesman. The other ministries referenced in the report, which calls for far-reaching, concerted government efforts, “also showed they are aware of the challenges,” the official added.

The 70+ page document reviewed by Artnet does not focus on a single incident, but goes into depth on how art is acquired and offers ways to review and balance that process. It advocates a more unified, “collegial” approach to acquisitions that allows for different perspectives – both inside and outside museums. For example, the establishment of a dedicated provenance and acquisitions unit made up of people from several ministries, law enforcement officials and artists. In this regard, the report states that access to police files on sellers of artworks should be made more accessible and digitised.

Other advice includes new forms of training and education within the Ministry of Culture: A new master’s degree in provenance studies at the Ecole du Louvre is an original proposal.

Researchers also criticized the current lax criminal penalties for improperly handling pedigree information, particularly in an unregulated market where it can be common to do the bare minimum to verify an artwork’s provenance – a process that is inherently unclear and piecemeal , says the report. It pleads for the strengthening and clarification of acquisition rules with a new “methodological and deontological framework” that integrates recommendations from the OCBC (Office Central de lutte contre le traffic des Biens Culturels), the French art trade investigative unit.

Also on the agenda are new audits and “certificates of integrity” that demonstrate expertise in particular on provenance and authenticity for the purpose of public sale. Other recommendations include: setting up an alert system if there is any doubt about the provenance of an object; a modernized export certification process; greater transparency in public sales; and new recruits to the understaffed OCBC.

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U of A Bands will present the Wind Ensemble and Wind Symphony in the second concert of Fall 2022 at the Jim and Joyce Faulkner Performing Arts Center on Monday, November 21 at 7:30 p.m.

The wind symphony will perform four pieces. Percy Grainger’s “Spoon River”, conducted by graduate assistant Jason Reznicek, is a concert band arrangement of an American folk fiddle tune. John Mackey’s “Sheltering Sky”, conducted by Chase Jones, vice leader of the bands, evokes the spirit of folk music, although the music was originally written by Mackey.

Bela Bartok’s “Romanian Folk Songs”, conducted by Jeffrey Summers, Associate Director of Bands, showcases the beauty of Eastern European folk songs. Jones then conducts the finale of the wind symphony with the Mediterranean-inspired piece “Opa!”. by Julie Giroux.

Following the wind symphony, the wind ensemble opens its performance with “Early Light” by Caroline Bremer, conducted by Jones.

“Bremer’s piece is based on her experiences growing up, going to baseball games and listening to the national anthem beforehand. So you hear a lot of quotes from the anthem throughout the piece,” Jones said.

Following the patriotic spirit, the wind ensemble will perform Darius Milhaud’s “Suite Francaise” conducted by Summers.

“This piece is a collection of French folk songs commemorating the French and American soldiers who fought in World War II,” Summers said. “Each movement is based on a different part of France.”

Originally written as a string quartet, the wind ensemble will then perform Zhou Tian’s “Nocturne,” transcribed for band by David Thornton. “‘Nocturne’ was inspired by the cold and loneliness of winter,” Summers said.

The final performance of the evening will be Joan Tower’s Fascinating Ribbons. The U of A was part of a consortium that commissioned this piece from Tower in 2001.

Admission to the performances is free, but a ticket is required. Tickets can be purchased through the Faulkner Performing Arts Center.

The frequent attacks on art by climate activists that made headlines over the past month tended to be concentrated in Western Europe. This can no longer be the case.

On Saturday afternoon, two women associated with the group Stop Fracking Around threw maple syrup at an Emily Carr painting at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada before taped themselves to the wall below. They were filmed by a third accomplice.

stumps and sky (1934), a landscape painting, was not permanently damaged by the action, the gallery confirmed. It said it was working with the police investigating the incident, but no arrests had been made.

The artwork was conceived as a lament about the commercial exploitation of old-growth forests and offers some resonance to contemporary environmental issues.

“The Vancouver Art Gallery condemns acts of vandalism of the works of cultural significance in our custody or in any museum,” the museum’s director, Anthony Kiendl, said in a statement.

The activist group is calling for an end to the Coastal GasLink pipeline currently under construction in British Columbia, which will pass through traditional and unceded lands of several First Nations, including the Wet’suwet’en Territory.

“I think any amount of publicity that we can get as an organization is worth it because the climate crisis is the most pressing crisis of our time,” said one of the protesters, Emily Kelsall CBC News.

The other protester who taped herself to the wall is 19-year-old Erin Fletcher. In a statement, she said: “If we exceed an increase in average global temperatures of more than 2 degrees Celsius, we are looking at death and hunger on an unprecedented scale due to inaction on climate change.”

“And the government, instead of acting responsibly, is building fossil fuel infrastructure. They are doing the exact opposite of what science and ethics require of us.”

In another recent climate action, two activists from the group Last Generation taped themselves to the base of a dinosaur skeleton at the Natural History Museum in Vienna. An earlier attempt to do so was intercepted in September.

The escalation in attacks was sparked by an incident in which climate activists linked themselves to Just Stop Oil spilled tomato soup over Van Goghs sunflowers at the National Gallery in London on October 14. Since then works by Monet, Vermeer, Goya, Botticelli and Raphael were also targetedand a Attempted attack on Munchs The Scream was defeated on Friday.

Museums are stepping up security to mitigate this growing threat to their collections. Several experts agreed Artnet News about what action can be taken, including bag searches and special training.

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ATHENS, Nov 2 (Reuters) – Fifteen ancient Greek artifacts from a US billionaire’s private Cycladic art collection were displayed for the first time in Athens on Wednesday, under an agreement that has sparked controversy in Greece.

The Cycladic antiquities, which Greece says are “masterpieces of unique archaeological value,” traveled following an agreement between Greece and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the repatriation of 161 artifacts collected over the years by Leonard N. Stern, a businessman who was collected philanthropist.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, speaking at a ceremony on the eve of the opening of the exhibition, said it was “truly a special day for the country’s cultural life,” and described the works as “priceless antiques of rare beauty that will return to their homes.”

After a year-long exhibition in the Cyclades Museum in Athens, the 15 works – the most important of the collection – will be on display in New York for 25 years from the beginning of 2024. They will be gradually returned to Greece.

The Stern Collection comprises around 161 works that were created on the Cyclades archipelago in the Aegean Sea, mainly in the Early Bronze Age. The Greek Ministry of Culture says many of the objects in the collection, including figurines and vases, are considered “extremely rare” or unique examples of the art and technology of the Cycladic civilization.

The deal between Greece and The Met, ratified by Greek lawmakers in September, has sparked controversy in Greece, where both the opposition and many archaeologists and conservators have called for their immediate, permanent return.

Five unions representing archaeologists, restorers and ministry employees called the agreement “a scandal” in a statement ahead of the opening.

“These objects have not been legally verified as genuine or fake, nor how they got from the Cyclades to the collection of a multi-millionaire in New York,” the statement said.

A small group of protesters held a white banner that read “You have been stolen” outside the museum during Wednesday’s event.

Mitsotakis defended the deal as a “blueprint for other future solutions,” hinting at the “Elgin Marbles,” as they’re often called — 75-meter Parthenon frieze, 15 metopes and 17 sculptures — that Greece has championed since their removal from the British diplomat Lord Elgin in the early 19th century when he was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and then ruling Greece.

The British Museum, custodian of the marbles, has ruled out a return.

Reporting by Karolina Tagaris; Additional reporting by Angeliki Koutantou; Edited by Rosalba O’Brien

Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Policy.

Modern and contemporary works have taken up most of the oxygen at Sotheby’s and Christie’s lately, but the former has assembled an important collection of ten paintings for the forthcoming Master’s Week sale on 26 January 2023, led by an early painting by Peter Paul Rubens expects to raise between $25 million and $35 million.

Such a result would represent a fivefold increase over its previous appearance at public auction following its rediscovery in 1998 Salome presented with the severed head of Saint John the Baptist (c. 1609) also sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $5.5 million, a record price for the Flemish Baroque master’s work at auction at the time. That number has since been surpassed ten times, most famously just four years later when the Monumental The Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1609-11) fetched a staggering £49.5 million at Sotheby’s in London. (This work is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.)

That Salome presented with the severed head of Saint John the Baptist being auctioned in January – an extraordinarily gory depiction of the biblical beheading scene painted by so many old masters – was exhibited at the National Gallery in London in the early 2000s and then included in the gallery’s exhibition Rubens: A master in the making 2005-2006. According to Christopher Apostle, Head of Old Masters at Sotheby’s in New York, the painting “in so many ways embodies the essence of the Baroque.” Its return to the market comes with the endorsement of Keith Christiansen, former Chair of the Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s European Paintings Department (now Curator Emeritus), who said in a statement: “Ruben’s depiction of the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, painted after his return to Antwerp, is a work in which the fledgling artist, like a pre-cinematic Martin Scorsese, fearlessly explores the violent and sexual dynamics of the biblical narrative. It’s the kind of painting that, once you see it, you never forget.”

Christiansen may have had many opportunities to examine the painting up close since his sellers are retired real estate mogul and Met trustee Mark Fisch and his estranged wife, former judge Rachel Davidson. The two are involved in one complicated divorcein which the fate of her $177 million art collection is a major factor.

Ten works from this collection will be the main lots of the Sotheby’s Master’s Week Sale and alongside the Rubens, standout lots include a Darkling Penitent Saint Mary Magdalene by Orazio Gentileschi (estimated at $4-6 million) and an early Baroque painting by Valentin de Boulogne, Christ crowned with thorns (c. 1614, estimated $4–6 million), which last changed hands at auction in 2016, also at Sotheby’s, fetching a record $5.2 million. Another important rediscovered work in the group is the Apostilic Portrait of Georges de la Tour Saint James the Greater (estimated at $3.5 million to $5 million), which was long thought to be lost until it surfaced in 2005.

Paintings from the Fisch and Davidson collection are on view at Sotheby’s headquarters in New York until October 27, when they will be on display there again from November 4-13 during the house’s previews of its major November auction , before touring to its facilities in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and London.

You may know Auguste Rodin for his famous sculpture The Thinker, But the work of the French goes far beyond that. “He was really a great innovator and in many ways very radical in his approach to sculpture,” says Claudia Einecke, Curator of European Art at the High Museum of Art. “If you think of traditional classical sculpture since the Greeks, turns all about making the body beautiful and with right proportions and smooth skin or whatever. When you look at Rodin’s work, especially later, it becomes almost abstract.” Rodin’s work is scattered around the world, but luckily for Atlanta residents, it will be on display in the high school exhibit. Rodin in the United States: confrontation with modernityruns from October 21st to January 15th.

The show will include 45 sculptures and 25 works on paper, charting the artist’s rise in the United States (he was popular in Europe but didn’t make a splash in the United States until around 1900, Einecke says). The exhibition tells the story of how Rodin caught the attention of various collectors across the country from Philadelphia to San Francisco.

Courtesy of the High Art Museum

What is exciting about this exhibition?
If you’ve always wanted to see The Thinker or The kiss personally, now is your chance. The first of these sculptures is in the Musee Rodin in Paris, but several were made using the same mold that Rodin originally used. “You can cast more than one from this mold, and they are all considered originals because they come from the original mold,” explains Einecke.

For this exhibition, it was important to Einecke that the bronzes found fit a specific chapter of the exhibition. One chapter of the exhibition is about Jules Mastbaum, the Philadelphia film mogul-turned-Rodin collectors in the early 1920s. So the pieces that fit into this part of the exhibition had to come from Philadelphia (which now houses one of the largest Rodin collections outside of Paris).

Beyond the bronze sculptures, however, Einecke is particularly looking forward to the lesser-known works of Rodin. A showcase, for example, will contain small plaster studies of arms and hands. When Einecke first saw them, she thought Rodin made a cast of hands — and then she noticed they were only three inches tall. “He actually sculpted them because he was so interested in figuring out how the human body could be so expressive,” says Einecke. “It doesn’t need equipment and symbols. It can only be in the poses and the expression of the body can be very powerful.”

Courtesy of the High Art Museum

So how does an exhibition of this magnitude come to life?
Planning for the Rodin exhibit, like most high school exhibits, began about a year ago. Einecke and Skye Olson, the exhibition and design manager, worked in the model room (located in the depths of the museum) where they could concretely plan the exhibit and its figures – a bit like a game of chess. The model itself is reminiscent of a doll’s house. “All of our showroom models are half an inch equal to a foot,” explains Olson. “We start with the gallery layout. There are some walls that will move depending on the size of the exhibit.” Everything has been thought of with the model, right down to the wood grain of the floor. (This element especially helps with scaling, Olson says.)

Using the model, Einecke and Olson arranged printed miniatures of the sculptures and drawings. They even used a 3D printer to create small platforms for the model sculptures to sit on. “The purpose of these platforms is to provide what we call ‘touch distance’. As a general rule of thumb, if someone is standing right on the edge of the platform, they can’t touch the artwork with their arm,” says Olson. “This is really for the safety of the artwork. We try to get those who are uninviting to perform.”

Courtesy of the High Art Museum

The model also helps them envision how visitors might experience the work — something that’s especially important from an ADA perspective. “We try not to overdo things for children or wheelchair users. We want to make sure there’s a variety of things and things are as accessible as possible,” says Olson. They also have mockups of the section text to check the scale of the copy and make sure it’s legible and has good contrast.

Even the wall color is taken into account in the model. Colored strips of paper with possible hues cling to the walls of the model. In the end, the duo settled on a light green and an almost neutral pink. “Actually, the choice of color is very important. These ideas are not just decoration, they can really influence how the works are viewed,” says Einecke. Olson adds, “The lighting and color always support the art and material and shouldn’t stand out too much, but it’s important to have some contrast for the dark bronzes, but in a tone that doesn’t compete where you are.” can really see these strong silhouettes of the work.”

Courtesy of the High Art Museum

How the heck do these sculptures travel?
These sculptures aren’t lightweight, to say the least, so it’s a modern marvel that they can travel across the country. “Today’s packaging technology is amazing,” says Einecke. Take a marble sculpture, for example: it has bespoke upholstery to fit the sculpture, and then it is placed in a box that fits in another box. To get a bronze sculpture on the pedestal, it takes about six people to move it. Some of these sockets even have hidden steel reinforcements. But, much like Rodin’s work itself, you’ll never know just how much work went into it just by looking at it. “Sometimes we’ve done our best work when you can’t see it at all,” says Olson. “It’s supposed to look effortless.”

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