In Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Ólafur Elíasson has transformed the museum’s South Wing into a rocky river landscape with a site-specific installation combining nature, architecture, and art.
Ólafur Elíasson, Riverbed
R4, Île Seguin
In Boulogne-Billancourt, a western suburb of Paris, an island in the Seine is being developed into an “artistic micro-city” designed by Jean Nouvel. The project for Île Seguin will create artists’ studios, commercial gallery and auction spaces, an exhibition hall, and a conference center to transform the island into a modern cultural hub.
Guggenheim Helsinki? Not so fast…
Last month, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Helsinki city officials announced an international design competition for a proposed new museum in the Finnish capital. The Guggenheim proposal has been met with disapproval in Helsinki since 2011, and there is no certainty that the design competition will gain public support for the project.
Claude Monet, Nymphéas
Last week in London, a Monet water lily painting sold for $54 million in Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale. The work, a 1906 Nymphéas, is one of a series completed from 1905 to 1907 at Giverny.
Richard Serra and Qatar
This spring, coinciding with his first major exhibition in the Middle East, American sculptor Richard Serra launched a public art commission in Qatar entitled East-West/West-East. Serra’s large-scale assemblies of sheet metal are famously minimal and massive, and this site-specific work in Qatar is absolutely monolithic.
LACMA update
We recently explored LACMA’s new campus plans – codylee.co/lacma.
In short, architect Peter Zumthor has designed a massive new pavilion to replace a dysfunctional set of older buildings. However, officials from the Page Museum identified that Zumthor’s new building could encroach upon and damage the adjacent La Brea Tar Pits, which are an active paleontological research site with important deposits of Ice Age-era fossils.
Today, revised designs show Zumthor’s amoeba-like building sparing the tar pits and instead spreading across Wilshire Boulevard. This is insane bold.
New Museum in LA: LACMA
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the largest art museum in the Western United States with more than 120,000 works in its permanent collection and more than 1 million visitors annually. Its collection is encyclopedic, its programs are exemplary, and its leadership is solid, but LACMA’s mid-Wilshire campus is a hot mess.
New Museum in LA: The Broad
Eli Broad has been a primary benefactor of the LA art world for decades. He was the founding chairman of MOCA in 1979 and is a lifetime trustee. In 2008, The Broad Foundation gave MOCA a $30 million bailout after its endowment had been depleted. Broad is also a lifetime trustee at LACMA, where The Broad Foundation gave $60 million for the Renzo Piano-designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum building. In total, the Broads have given over $800 million to LA’s art institutions.
Simultaneously, the Broads and The Broad Art Foundation have developed a combined art collection of nearly 2,000 important modern and contemporary works. So, Eli Broad is building a new museum.
New Museums in LA
Los Angeles. We use superlatives to describe its population, economy, climate, and traffic, and its museums are no exception. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the largest in the Western United States. The Museum of Contemporary Art has one of the world’s most important collections of post-war art. The J. Paul Getty Trust is the world’s wealthiest art institution. LA has an impressive list of museums. Some have plans to expand, and there are a few entirely new ones in the works. Our next series of posts will provide an overview of notable museum projects in LA.
Related posts:
New Museum in LA: The Broad
New Museum in LA: LACMA
New Museum in LA: The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
New Museum in LA: The Petersen Automotive Museum
Henry Moore
“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”