Curator Bernice Rose Dies at 87, the Dutch Make Venice Biennale Pick, and More: Morning Links for April 18, 2023

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The Headlines

THE CROWN JEWELS. The Royal Collection of the British royal family is world-famous, stocked with works by giants like Rubens and Rembrandt, and effectively held in trust for the nation. But, the Guardian’s Maeve McClenaghan reports, the royals also have art in personal, private collections—works that members bought privately or received as gifts outside of their official capacities. Details about those holdings are hazy. The paper has identified nearly 400 pieces in that category (including examples by Lucian Freud and Salvador Dalí), and estimated that they could be worth more than £290 million ($360 million), though it’s hard to say. One thing that is clear from the investigation is that the late Queen Mother was an astute art buyer. At a 1942 auction, she grabbed a John Everett Millais for £630 that could be worth £1.5 million (about $1.86 million) today, and in 1945 she bought a Claude Monet from the Wildenstein gallery for £2,000, which could now be worth £20 million ($24.8 million) today.

BERNICE ROSE, a pioneering curator of drawing at the Museum of Modern Art, died on Sunday at the age of 87, Carol Vogel reports in the New York Times. Over the course of a nearly three-decade career at MoMA, Rose organized exhibitions like the storied “Drawing Now: 1955–1975,” which highlighted how contemporary artists were transforming the medium, and “A Cezanne Treasure: The Basel Sketchbooks.” Rose was hired by the Pace Gallery to be director of special exhibitions in 1993, and later became the first chief curator at Menil Drawing Institute in Houston. Christophe Cherix, MoMA’s chief curator of drawings and prints told Vogel that Rose “recognized early that for a generation of artists who emerged in the 1960s, the art of drawing knew no boundaries.”

The Digest

At the 2024 Venice Biennale, the Netherlands will be represented by Renzo Martens and the collective Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC). They will simultaneously open an exhibition at the White Cube, which Martens and CATPC established in Lusanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. [ArtDependence and ArtReview]

The director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Youn Bum-mo, resigned today, midway through his term, following reports that he was being pressured to quit. Youn had been reappointed by the previous presidential administration shortly before the 2022 election, sparking criticism from opposition politicians. [Yonhap]

Jay Xu, who was tapped in 2008 to lead the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, will step down in 2025. Xu oversaw a $100 million capital campaign in 2017 to fund a renovation, and said in an interview that “the succession plan is as important as anything for any organization.” [Datebook]

And one last museum director item: The embattled Orlando Museum of Art has selected Cathryn Mattson, an executive coach and consultant, to be its interim director. Its previous leader was ousted last summer after the FBI raided a show it was presenting of allegedly fake Jean-Michel Basquiat works. [Press Release/Cision]

The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia has named Denise Ryner curator. Ryner has previously been the director and curator of Or Gallery in Vancouver and the associate guest curator of Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. [Press Release/ICA Philadelphia]

For its latest round of grants, the National Endowment for the Humanities in the U.S. said that it is giving $35.6 million to more than 250 groups in 44 states. The recipients include the Museum of the City of New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (for a show about Byzantine-era North and East Africa, which will travel). [The New York Times]

The Kicker

CE N’EST PAS DE L’ART. In Conway, New Hampshire, a bakery owner is in a legal showdown with the town zoning board over a pastry-filled mural that local high school art students painted above the sign for his shop, the Associated Press reports. The board says the mural is advertising—and larger than rules allow. The proprietor, Sean Young, contends that it is an artwork protected by free speech—and has filed suit against the zoning board. “They said it would be art elsewhere,” Young told the AP. “It’s just not art here.” Let’s just agree on this: It’s a satisfying piece of painting. (Fans of James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann, have a look.) Well done, students! [AP]