Celebrity Life

One watchmaker takes its place in the United States' most comprehensive collection of movie magic.

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Just over 39,000 sq m dedicated to the study of the cosmos.

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Just over 39,000 sq m dedicated to the study of the cosmos.

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Founded in 2010, Peter W. Mullin’s astonishing luxury car collection has been open to the public under the name of Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, California. But due to COVID-19 induced lockdown, the establishment was forced to close down. But here is some good news for the fans. The museum will now be starting from […]

The post Mullin Automotive Museum to reopen for the public from April 9 appeared first on Upscale Living Magazine.

The Baltimore Museum of Art's controversial proposal to auction three works by Clyfford Still, Brice Marden and Andy Warhol from its collections, to raise funds to diversify and maintain its collections, has been shelved.

The practice, commonly called "deaccessioning," has provoked strong reactions and much debate in the last few months.

"1957-G" by Clyfford Still was estimated to sell for US$12 million to US$18 million (between HK$93 million and HK$139.5 million) while Brice Marden's "3" was expected at US$15 million (HK$11.6 million) at a sale at Sotheby's. Andy Warhol's monumental "The Last Supper" was expected to fetch US$40 million (HK$310 million) at a private sale.

The sale of these pieces, which could potentially have generated US$65 million (HK$503.8 million), would have permitted the Baltimore Museum of Art to "rebalance" its collections, adding more works by women and artists of colour. The American museum's "Endowment for the Future" financial plan would also have allowed it to fund the research, conservation, documentation and exhibition costs for these new works, as well as increase the salaries of employees and offer longer opening hours.

[caption id="attachment_211812" align="aligncenter" width="800"] 1957-G by Clyfford Still was originally set to be auctioned as part of the "Endowment for the Future" plan by the Baltimore Museum of Art. (Image: Sotheby's)[/caption]

"We believe unequivocally that museums exist to serve their communities through experiences with art and artists. We firmly believe that museums and their collections have been built on structures that we must work, through bold and tangible action, to reckon with, modify, and reimagine as structures that will meet the demands of the future," said the museum in a statement.

The board of trustees and industry group the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), however, were unconvinced. Two Baltimore Museum of Art board members rescinded US$50 million (HK$387.5 million) in pledged donations, while the AAMD appeared to reverse the temporary guidelines it had issued in April to help cultural institutions weather the pandemic. These directives had relaxed the rules about deaccessioning to permit US museums to sell certain works to finance the care of their permanent collections.

"I recognise that many of our institutions have long-term needs — or ambitious goals — that could be supported, in part, by taking advantage of these resolutions to sell art. But however serious those long-term needs or meritorious those goals, the current position of AAMD is that the funds for those must not come from the sale of deaccessioned art," said Brent Benjamin, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors and the director of the St. Louis Art Museum, in an October 27 letter.

[caption id="attachment_211811" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The Baltimore Museum of Art had hoped to receive up to US$65 million from the sale of the three works at Sotheby's. (Image: Jon Bilous/ Shutterstock)[/caption]

While this official statement did not explicitly mention the BMA, opponents of the sale of the Still, Marden and Warhol works seized upon it as proof that the museum's plans were in violation of AAMD directives.

The Baltimore Museum of Art isn't the only US cultural institution contemplating letting go of some of its possessions in response to the pandemic. The Brooklyn Museum recently auctioned off a dozen pieces from its collection at Christie's, hoping to receive up to US$40 million (HK$310 million) to finance the upkeep of its collections. Among them was Lucas Cranach the Elder's "Lucretia" portrait, which surpassed its initial estimation of US$1.8 million to see the hammer fall at US$5 million (HK$37.8 million).

(Main and featured image: Jon Bilous/ Shutterstock)

The post Should Museums Sell Their Art? A Baltimore Institution Draws Backlash appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

Just as its products help skin resist the ravages of time, La Prairie will support the Swiss museum’s efforts to protect and conserve paintings by Piet Mondrian.

The link between La Prairie and the art world has stood strong for as long as the brand has been creating skincare products, its approach to the science of beauty heavily influenced by the spirit espoused by artists – explorative, adventurous, free-spirited and boundary-breaking.

And in an era in which a house’s affiliations speak as loudly as the quality of its wares, La Prairie has sought to deepen and strengthen its connection to society via earnest support of causes that resonate with its own home values, focusing on areas such as Swissness, Science, and Art and Culture.

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Art patronage is a relationship that has existed through all ages, and La Prairie is proud to honour and continue that tradition via a partnership with Fondation Beyeler that will begin this year and continue until 2022.

Just as its exceptional skincare products seek to restore youthful radiance to complexions around the world, La Prairie has sought to reestablish the glory of a series of Piet Mondrian works that sit in the collection of the Fondation Beyeler. After all, the Dutch painter – with his minimalist approach and dedication to purity and precision – has long been an influence for the house, whose packaging exhibits a similar starkness and clarity of vision.

[gallery ids="211724,211725,211726,211727,211728,211729,211730,211731,211732,211733,211734,211735,211736,211737,211738,211739,211740,211741,211742,211743,211744,211745,211746,211747,211748"]

The comprehensive research and conservation project will see the restoration of four paintings: Tableau No. I; Composition with Yellow and Blue; Composition with Double Line and Blue; Lozenge Composition with Eight Lines and Red, which were created between 1921 and 1938 and are among the painter’s most iconic works.

Like the science of beauty, art conservation is deceptively simple – in reality, it is a multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary process that is personal to each work, and involves not simply reversing the ravages of time, but anticipating future damage and taking steps to mitigate this, so that the visual intention of the artist can be preserved throughout the ages.

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Through its patronage of these processes, La Prairie hopes to reinforce its connection to the community, going on a journey through the past and towards a future that reveals the true timelessness of beauty.

laprairie.com

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Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was the greatest style icon of the 20th century, and her designs continue to shape what we wear today.

Yet the Coco Chanel who emerges from the first exhibition ever dedicated to her work in Paris will come as a shock to fans of her brand's bling.

The creator of the little black dress, tweed suits, two-tone shoes and quilted handbags that are synonymous with French elegance was a very different animal to Karl "the Kaiser" Lagerfeld, who turned her label into a $100 billion business.

While the flamboyant German impressario had a magpie eye for street fashion, the Coco Chanel presented at the new show at the city's fashion museum, the Palais Galliera, was a futurist visionary of almost spartan refinement.

[caption id="attachment_210949" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Creations by French designer Gabrielle Chanel displayed during the exhibition "Gabrielle Chanel, Fashion Manifesto" at the Galliera Palais fashion museum. (Image: Stephane de Sakutin/ AFP)[/caption]

Many of the dresses she designed and wore a century ago are so startlingly modern they could grace the catwalk now. The cliche is that Chanel freed women from the tyranny of Victorian corsetry, borrowing liberally from men's wardrobes to do so.

But for the curators of "Gabrielle Chanel, Fashion Manifesto", an ongoing exhibition at Paris' Palais Galliera that runs till March 14, was only the tip of the iceberg.

Style revolution

Chanel created so much of modern style's DNA that her radicalism has been hiding in plain sight, said the museum's director Miren Arzalluz.

[caption id="attachment_210950" align="alignnone" width="1024"] (Image: Stephane de Sakutin/ AFP)[/caption]

"Even for us it was a surprise how much even we didn't really know her work in depth," she told AFP. "Her style is so timeless and present in our lives... and so ingrained in our collective memory that no one thought it necessary to do a retrospective, because we all thought we knew it."

From her striped "mariniere" sailor top in 1916, to making black the colour of cool, letting women move freely in their clothes and being the first to see the potential of sportswear, her influence is utterly pervasive, Arzalluz argued.

Her Chanel No. 5 perfume, sold in simple square bottles with utilitarian black and ivory labels, was minimalist before minimalism was even a thing. "And her Chanel suits of the 1950s and 1960s were the uniform of modern women," she added.

[caption id="attachment_210953" align="alignnone" width="1024"] (Image: Stephane de Sakutin/ AFP)[/caption]

But it is the breathtaking elegance of her cut and silhouettes which will come as the biggest surprise for those raised on Lagerfeld's showy 36-year reign.

What is also striking, Arzalluz insisted, was how Chanel stuck to her revolutionary guns despite the arrival of Christian Dior's New Look after World War II, with its return to wasp-waist corseted looks. "There's a coherence in her style from the beginning to end," Arzalluz said, in a span that goes from 1912 to her death in 1971.

That this is not shouted from the rooftops more often is partly because of what Chanel did during the war, and her subsequent flight to Switzerland after the liberation.

Don't mention the war

[caption id="attachment_210952" align="alignnone" width="1024"] (Image: Stephane de Sakutin/ AFP)[/caption]

Arzalluz acknowledged her "complex personality", a reference to her "horizontal collaboration" with France's Nazi occupiers, and her attempts to use their anti-Jewish laws to prise back control of Chanel No. 5 from the Wertheimer family who had fled for their lives to the US.

Whole shelves full of biographies have dealt with how Coco spent the war tucked up in The Ritz with her German intelligence officer lover, Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage.

Which was why Arzalluz said the museum — whose newly opened galleries have been partly funded by Chanel — took the "radical decision to concentrate on her work" rather than her private life. That was best "left to scholars and biographers", she said.

[caption id="attachment_210951" align="alignnone" width="1024"] (Image: Stephane de Sakutin/ AFP)[/caption]

However, Arzalluz was at pains to point out that Chanel was never in thrall to men, a lesson she learned early when he father put her in an orphanage. "I don't like the idea that she discovered everything thanks to the men in her life — that she only used tweeds because of the Duke of Westminster... or her Russian-influenced period was because of (another of her affairs with) Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich," the last Russian tsar's cousin, and one of the men who killed Rasputin.

"It is just not true," the curator insisted.

Arzalluz said Chanel was "an avant-gardiste", far ahead of her time pioneering things "we all do now, mixing the ordinary with the chic, the masculine and the feminine, costume jewellery with the real thing.

"The way we dress today, wearing tailored jackets with jeans, or men's shirts, or trainers with airy chiffon dresses" is directly down to her influence, she said.

(All images: Stephane de Sakutin/ AFP)

The post How Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel Forged Much of Modern Style’s DNA appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

The Lindt Home of Chocolate, a 65,000-square-foot museum complete with interactive exhibitions, the world’s largest Lindt chocolate shop, a ‘Chocolateria,’ and the world’s largest chocolate fountain, will open its doors in Zurich on September 13. Designed by Basel-based architectural firm Christ & Gantenbein, the contemporary, light-filled museum building in Zurich’s Kilchberg suburb will complement the […]

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The Virtual Online Museum of Art (VOMA) is scheduled to open on Friday, August 14.

The post World’s first fully interactive virtual museum to open in August appeared first on The Peak Magazine.

The Virtual Online Museum of Art (VOMA) is scheduled to open on Friday, August 14.

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