ART MOVEMENTS

This week in art news: Iran’s National Museum opened an exhibition of works from the Louvre, activists planted satirical merchandise in the American Museum of Natural History, and the MFA Boston revised its wall labels to address sexual abuse allegations leveled against Egon Schiele.

Tiernan Morgan

Rembrandt van Rijn, portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit (1634), joint acquisition by the Dutch State and the French Republic, collection Rijksmuseum/collection Musée du Louvre, 2016 (photo by David van Dam)

Art Movements is a weekly collection of news, developments, and stirrings in the art world. Subscribe to receive these posts as a weekly newsletter.

The Louvre at Tehran: Treasures from France’s national collections opened at Iran’s National Museum, the first major exhibition by a western museum in the country’s history. The show is the culmination of a cultural exchange agreement ratified between France and Iran in January 2016.

The Clean Money Project planted satirical merchandise inside the American Museum of Natural History’s store. The group is calling on the museum to remove billionaire Rebekah Mercer from its board of trustees. The Mercer Family Foundation has funded organizations rejecting the scientific consensus around fossil fuel-driven climate change.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, produced new wall labels detailing the sexual abuse allegations leveled against Egon Schiele for its exhibition Klimt and Schiele: Drawn.

BAE Systems withdrew its sponsorship of the Great Exhibition of the North days after a number of artists pledged to withdraw from the festival in protest. Over 2,300 people signed an online petition calling on the exhibition’s organizers to deny sponsorship from the British defense, security, and aerospace company. BAE Systems has come under increasing scrutiny for providing arms to Saudi-Arabia and has long been the subject of war profiteering and fraud allegations.

Rembrandt’s pendant portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit (1634) went on display at the Rijksmuseum’s High Society exhibition following a major restoration. The paintings were jointly purchased by the Dutch and French governments from the Rothschild family in 2016 for €160 million (~$197 million).

The US arts and culture sector contributed $763.6 billion to the nation’s economy in 2015 — more than the entire GDP of Switzerland — according to data compiled by the nonpartisan Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Emmanuel Macron appointed author and economist Felwine Sarr and art historian Bénédicte Savoy to investigate the repatriation of African artifacts held in French museums.

The Cover of Mr Chow: 50 Years, featuring Keith Haring’s 1986 portrait of the eponymous restaurateur (via Prestel)

Prestel published Mr Chow: 50 Years, an illustrated memoir by restaurateur and art collector Michael Chow. The book features work by Mr. Chow regulars, including Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Ed Ruscha, and Keith Haring.

Raymond Pettibon was arrested for violating a restraining order against his wife, Aida Ruilova.

Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe the Frog, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Alex Jones’s conspiracy theory website InfoWars. The site is currently selling a poster featuring Pepe alongside Donald Trump, Milo Yiannopoulos, Roger Stone, Matt Drudge, Kellyanne Conway, and Jones himself.

Dario Franceschini, Italy’s minister of cultural heritage, lost his parliamentary seat to Maura Tomasi of the center-right Eurosceptic Northern League.

A judge authorized the federal government to seize Martin Shkreli’s assets, including his unique copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin — for which the former hedge fund manager reportedly paid around $2 million — a Picasso painting, and a copy of Lil Wayne’s album Tha Carter V. Shkreli, often referred to in the press as “Pharma Bro” and “the most hated man in America,” is best known for hiking the price of Daraprim by 5,000% overnight.

The French High Court annulled the conviction of Pierre and Danielle Le Guennec who were found guilty of possessing 271 works stolen from Pablo Picasso’s estate. A new trial has yet to be scheduled.

Max Beckmann’s “Eisgang” (1923) will remain part of the Städel Museum’s collection following a “goodwill agreement” between the Frankfurt museum and the heirs of the painting’s original owner, Fritz Neuberger. As part of the agreement, a plaque will be displayed detailing the deportation and murder of Neuberger and his wife Hedwig by the Nazis.

A Claude Monet painting that belonged to collector Kōjirō Matsukata (1865–1950) was returned to Tokyo’s National Museum of Western Art after it was found “rolled up in the corner” at one of the Louvre Museum’s storage facilities…………………….

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