Trade News from Around the World
On June 8, the newly renovated Sert Gallery opened to provide increased gallery space for modern and contemporary art at the Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge Mass. The result of a collaboration between the Art Museums and the department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES), the Sert Gallery builds upon the Art Museums commitment to programming and scholarship in the areas of modern and contemporary art. Both the Gallery and the department of VES are adjacent to the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger Museums, and are located within the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (CCVA), the only building in North America designed by Le Corbusier.
Cave drawings an Iowa pilot stumbled on in the Egyptian desert and experts initially said could date back to 7000 B.C. are now considered suspect, with one leading Egyptologist dismissing them as fakes no more than 20 years old, says the AP wire. Egyptian archaeological authorities announced the find in June, saying it seemed to span three eras and included writing that could represent a transition between languages during the early Pharaonic dynastic period from 3000-2500 B.C. Now experts have begun to cast doubt on the drawings, discovered by George Cunningham of Algona, Iowa, while he was hunting for fossils in the desert outside Cairo. “There are suspicious aspects about the drawings that don’t fit into what we know about that period of Egyptian history,” Mohammed el-Saghir, head of the Pharaonic and Greco-Roman sector of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Cairo, Egypt, said in an interview June 30.
The Morgan Library, New York City, announced June 26 that it has received a $1 million grant from the Homeland Foundation, Inc., for a project underway with Princeton University’s Index of Christian Art to catalogue and digitize the library’s entire collection of Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts. These manuscripts will be available to scholars and the public for the first time in Internet-accessible databases.
The curator of art at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Calif., is the new director of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, Neb. Janice Driesbach has served as curator at the Sacramento museum since 1985 and was the lone remaining finalist after University of Wyoming Art Museum Director Charles Guerin withdrew his candidacy earlier this month. The Sheldon position has been vacant since July when George Neubert left to become director of the San Antonio Museum of Art. Driesbach will begin her duties September 1, Harvey Perlman, interim UNL chancellor designee, told the Associated Press.
Anna and Brian Haughton, the directors of The International Fine Art & Antique Dealers Show, have announced that this year’s fair will feature a loan exhibition of 16 rare and important Cartier “Mystery Clocks,” from Friday, October 20 through Thursday, October 26 at the Seventh Regiment Armory, New York City. “The Mystery of Time: The Mystery Clocks of Cartier” exhibition at the fair is the largest presentation of mystery clocks ever to have been assembled. Most come from important private collections and the Cartier Museum in Geneva. London Cartier dealer Harry Fane is the exhibition curator.
