Rubens Sketch Returns 80 Years After Theft, Ontario Rejects Plan to Build Spa on Modernist Island Complex, and More: Morning Links for June 24, 2024

The Headlines

UARTS’S ABRUPT CLOSURE has continued to generate discontent, with union representatives now alleging that the Philadelphia art school doesn’t have the money owed to employees who were abruptly terminated this month, Karen K. Ho reports for ARTnews . The school’s attorney and associate vice president of human resources allegedly didn’t offer union workers any proposals on health insurance, severance, or other benefits, and are reported to have said information about the school’s finances “does not exist.” In a statement, union officials said the school “lacks the cash flow to comply with laws requiring 60 days of advance notice and pay before mass layoffs,” and added that their meeting with the school officials was “insulting and unsubstantial.”

RUBENS RETURNS! Eighty years after it was stolen in the weeks after World War II, a Peter Paul Rubens oil sketch is coming back to the collection of the Friedenstein Castle in eastern Germany, reports the New York Times. St. Gregory of Nazianzus (1620) was among the most valuable artworks taken from the castle at the end of the war and sold by the ducal family that had once owned the palace. The complex became a public museum after 1918.  But now, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in New York, which says it bought the work from a New York gallery in 1952, has agreed to return the painting, and will receive “a low seven-digit figure” below market value in exchange. The sketched paintings were part of a series for the ceiling of Antwerp’s Jesuit church that burned down after being hit by lightning in 1718.

The Digest

New York’s Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery will close its Chelsea space and transition to “a project-based advisory space” that will represent select artists and estates, founders Lucy Mitchell-Innes and David Nash said on Friday evening. Founded in 1996, the gallery has shown artists such as Pope.L, Martha Rosler, and Jacolby Satterwhite. [ARTnews]

The Ontario Divisional Court has rejected a legal challenge to plans for developing a $350 million spa on Toronto’s modernist complex of islands, Ontario Place. Critics of the plan say it will harm the landscape designed by Michael Hough, as well as the area’s natural environment. [Toronto Star and The Art Newspaper]

The inaugural Art021 fair in Hong Kong will now run from August 28 to September 8 across four locations. The event was initially planned for July but has been expanded to include an outdoor sculpture exhibition, and will open later as a result. [South China Morning Post]

Patrick Moore, the former executive director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, was named the director of the Panarae Partnership Limited private equity and advisory firm, which operates between the UK and the Middle East and North Africa region. Among his new duties, Moore will serve as an advise to the forthcoming London edition of South by Southwest festival. [The Art Newspaper]

The Moulin Rouge has gotten its wings—or blades, anyway—back. They had fallen off the famous cabaret in Paris’ Montmartre district in April. New blades, made of aluminum and steel, that maintain the original design arrived this morning. [Le Figaro]

As the Brutalist Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden turns 50, director Melissa Chiu and other museum curators discuss the institution’s current show of work that the institution has acquired. [El Pais]

The Los Angeles nonprofit the Brick is hosting a benefit garage sale of the collection of late photographer and critic Allan Sekula and his wife, art historian Salley Stein. After extensive donations to the Getty in Los Angeles, the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, there are still remaining items to be auctioned, including a library of over 3,000 books, mementos, and “Sekuliana.” [Artnet News]

The Kicker

AFFORDABLE ART BY WOMEN. Collector Christian Levett has opened Europe’s first museum devoted to female artists, in a medieval building in Mougins, south of France, the Financial Times reports. The space previously welcomed visitors to Levett’s collection of antiquities, which has been replaced with artworks by women, from the 19th -century Impressionists to contemporary artists. After Levett began collecting more modern and contemporary art by both men and women, including Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Cecily Brown, and others, he realized, “it was possible to put together a ‘museum-quality collection’ of work by female artists, because the very best works by women’ still come up for sale at a fraction of the price of art made by men,” he said. Progress, it would seem, is slow, but it is definitely happening.