Author Archive for emily

From Felicia R. Lee at The New York Times…

A 370-year-old painting that belonged to a Jewish art dealer who fled the Netherlands around the time of the Nazi invasion in 1940 will be returned to his family by the J. Paul Getty Museum, The Associated Press reported.

The painting, “Landscape With Cottage and Figures,” done by Pieter Molijn around 1640, belonged to Jacques Goudstikker, a prominent dealer who died in a fall on a ship while fleeing the Nazis with his wife and son. His collection was looted, and some of the art ended up in the hands of the Nazi leader Hermann Goering, according to the Associated Press report.

In a written statement released Monday, museum officials stated: “Working in cooperation with representatives of the Goudstikker heirs, the Getty’s research revealed that the painting was in Goudstikker’s inventory at the time of the invasion in 1940, and that it was never restituted after World War II. Based on its findings, the Getty concluded that the painting should be transferred to the heirs.” More…

From The Economist…

On April 7th, as part of its spring season in Hong Kong, Sotheby’s will be selling 77 lots of imperial Chinese porcelain from the Meiyintang collection. The announcement, made last month on the day that the auction house held a record-breaking modernist art sale in London, has attracted little public attention. But to those who follow the market in Chinese artworks, news of the Hong Kong auction was nothing short of a thunderbolt. For Meiyintang is regarded as the greatest collection of Chinese treasures still in private hands in the West, a name ranked alongside Alfred Clark and Sir Percival David, passionate scholars whose collections were among the most important ever made outside the great museums of Beijing and Taipei.

Not so long ago the Chinese were prevented by the Communist Party from celebrating the achievements of their forebears. But with new fortunes being created all the time now in China, dealers and collectors from Hong Kong and the mainland have become enthusiastic buyers. They have a thirst for their own history, especially for anything that connects modern China with the glories of its imperial past. For the first time last year, according to a report released on March 14th, China overtook Britain to become the biggest art market in the world after America. More…

From Simon Stephens at the Museums Journal…

Work has started on the restoration of objects damaged by looters at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, according to Zahi Hawass, the Egyptian minister of antiquities.

Hawass, writing on his website on 8 February, said that up to 25 of the 70 objects broken at the museum are now being restored. Among the objects damaged when looters entered the museum on 28 January was a small statue of Akhenaten, which was the first object to be cleaned and restored.

Hawass has also continued to reassure people that reports of large-scale looting and damage to cultural sites and museums in Egypt are untrue.

“I would once again like to say that the rumours claiming that the tombs of Maya, Nefer and the Two Brothers in Saqqara were recently damaged are not true,” Hawas wrote on his blog. “The Imhotep Museum and the storage magazines of Saqqara are also safe.”

Meanwhile, international effort has focused on messages of support for those working on the ground to protect Egypt’s cultural heritage. Museums and collectors have also been urged not to buy Egyptian material with unclear provenance. More…

News from ICOM…

ICOM expresses its deepest concern for Egypt’s great historical treasures, currently under threat from looting in the wake of recent events that have swept the nation. ICOM urges and encourages local authorities and civil society to pursue their efforts in protecting and safeguarding the invaluable cultural heritage of this country.

It is essential to protect the exceptionally rich collections of the Egyptian museums so that they may continue to enrich the collective memory of mankind. The international museum community is fully aware of the significant efforts already made by the country’s heritage authorities to preserve these collections, and ICOM wishes to encourage those authorities to take further precautions to protect the country’s overall heritage, and in particular that of museums. More…

From Lucas Mearian at Computerworld…

The Computer History Museum this week opens a $19 million, 25,000-square-foot building expansion and a signature exhibition titled “Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.”

In development for more than six years, the new exhibit represents the world’s most comprehensive physical and online exploration of computing history, spanning everything from the abacus and slide rules to robots, Pong and the Internet.

“Many times, people coming to the museum have very basic questions: ‘How did that computer on my desk get there? How did that phone I’ve used for so long get so smart?’ ” said John Hollar, CEO of the museum in Mountain View, Calif. “It’s an exhibition that’s primarily aimed at a nontechnical audience, though there’s a ton of great history and information for the technical audience as well.”

The exhibition is designed to be accessible to visitors in multiple ways and includes documents, video presentations, more than 5,000 images and 1,100 artifacts in 19 galleries. It also features hands-on interactive stations that will demonstrate the principles of computing; for example, visitors will be able to pick up a 24-lb. Osborne computer or play a game of Pong, Pac-Man or Spacewar. More…