Hauser & Wirth Institute to preserve the legacies of modern and contemporary artists Hauser & Wirth has announced a new non-profit, private operating foundation that will help enable greater public access to their archives for research.
Primarily based in New York, the new study centre will catalogue and digitise various primary research materials for direct study and free online public access. It will also fund a number of fellowships in partnership with artists’ estates, foundations, and educational institutions.
The institute will feature projects related to artists represented by Hauser & Wirth, plus artists who are unaffiliated with the gallery. It will include public programmes, exhibitions of archival material and symposia, plus a series of online catalogues and print publications.
The first of these is dedicated to Franz Kline’s paintings from 1950 to 1962, plus an ‘online portal’ hosting the extensive archive of the late installation artist Jason Rhoades.
Labour shadow minister says arts funding ‘should be conditional on ethical employment’ Justin Madders, MP for Ellesmere Port and Neston, has claimed that if his party were in power it would push bodies who grant public money to the arts to make their funding conditional on ethical employment practices.
He made the comments at a meeting of the 27 art educators who are claiming unfair dismissal by the National Gallery. Despite some of them having worked at the gallery for decades, the gallery says it did not dismiss the educators because they were self-employed.
As Arts Professional reports, Madders said that law in this area has “never been satisfactory” and that his party had the ambition of there being a “presumption of employment”.
He commented: “There is a role for us to be pushing whoever is in charge of your funding to actually say a condition of the funding is that you employ people to what we consider an ethical and legal standard, and there isn’t this shortcut to self-employment and precarious employment that we have seen in recent years.”
The National Gallery operates as a non-departmental government body supported by grant-in-aid from the DCMS, receiving £24.1m (42% of its income) in 2017/18.
Minimalist artist Robert Morris dies aged 87 The American sculptor, painter and art critic died of pneumonia on 28 November in Kingston, New York. Among his wide-ranging influences were dance and performance art, with Morris’ working with his wife and choreographer Simone Forti at the Judson Dance Theatre. However, he was best known for his conceptual minimalist sculptures.
Jeffrey Weiss, the Guggenheim’s senior curator who worked with Morris to catalogue his early sculpture, told the Art Newspaper: “Robert Morris was a complicated, restless, often controversial, sometimes misunderstood, and utterly crucial figure in the history of art after 1960.
“As both artist and critic, much of his work during the 1960s and ’70s was foundational to so-called minimal, post-minimal, and conceptual art, which means that his legacy is far-reaching and indelible.”
Louvre launches free admission night in order to attract low-income and younger visitors The Paris-based gallery will scrap its usual standard €17 entry fee and open its galleries free of admission for one Saturday night every month. Despite having 8.1m visitors in 2017, the museum said it was becoming ‘increasingly homogonous’.
Initially, the museum launched a programme offering free admission on only six Sundays a year, but felt this was not inviting enough diversity. In a statement, it said: “Working-class visits were not going up. The number of French visitors coming to the Louvre for the first time was dropping during these free Sundays, while the number of foreign visitors was going up considerably.”
The first free night at the Louvre will be 5 January, 2019, 6.45pm.
Young boy in famous photo is not Vincent van Gogh A photo that for 50 years has been believed to be a portrait of a 13-year-old Vincent van Gogh is actually of his brother Theo, who was 15 when it was taken. Billed as the earliest known photograph of Van Gogh, it has appeared in numerous books and catalogues.
However, research undertaken by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam means that the only existing photo of the Dutch artist is one taken when he was 19.
Willem van Gogh, the great-grandson of Theo and an adviser to the museum’s board, said: “It is essential that Vincent van Gogh’s legacy is correctly passed on and preserved and this research makes a significant contribution to such efforts.”
The photograph was first made public in 1957 at an exhibition organised by Mark Edo Tralbaut, a Belgian Van Gogh researcher. Teio Meedendorp, a senior researcher at the Van Gogh Museum, added: “The question of whether it could be someone else never came up.”
Images:
1. Franz Kline, Wanamaker Block, 1955. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935. © 2018 The Franz Kline Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
2. Louvre, Paris. Photo: Ethan Gruber via Flickr; CC BY-SA 2.0
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