All posts tagged: National Gallery

Kengo Kuma to Design National Gallery’s New Wing

Kengo Kuma to Design National Gallery’s New Wing

Published by José Betancourt

The National Gallery in London has selected Kengo Kuma and Associates, the Tokyo-based firm known for designing the V&A Dundee in Scotland, to design its new extension as part of Project Domani, the institution’s £750 million ($995 million) campaign to transform its campus and expand its collection into the 20th and 21st centuries. Two UK-based firms, BDP and MICA, will collaborate with Kuma on the project, which is subject to ratification at the end of a standstill period ending April 16. The new wing will be built on the site of St. Vincent House, which currently houses a hotel and office complex and will be demolished as part of the expansion. The new wing, expected to open in the early 2030s, will add approximately 15,000 square feet of exhibition space, a roughly 15 percent increase, according to the Art Newspaper. Related Articles The wing is expected to cost around £350 million ($464 million), with the rest of the Project Domani funds expected to go toward post-1900 acquisitions and to create an endowment fund to cover …

Portrait of Albrecht Dürer’s Father in National Gallery May Be Authentic

Portrait of Albrecht Dürer’s Father in National Gallery May Be Authentic

Published by Jenni Sidey

In a new catalogue raisonné, scholar Christof Metzger argues that The Painter’s Father (1497), a painting in the collection of London’s National Gallery, is in fact an authentic work by Albrecht Dürer. The Painter’s Father, gifted to King Charles I of England in 1636, has long been thought to be a copy made decades after Dürer’s death in 1528, based on a lost original. But in the new publication Albrecht Dürer: The Complete Paintings, Metzger—a Dürer expert and curator of German art at Vienna’s Albertina Museum—contends that the face is “preserved so well that the painting’s formerly outstanding quality is still perceptible.” He told the Art Newspaper that the London work stands apart from at least seven known early copies of the portrait of Dürer’s father for its “experienced brushwork and masterful glazing technique.” Related Articles Curators at the National Gallery have long taken a different view. In a 2010 catalog entry, Marjorie E. Wieseman, then the museum’s curator of Dutch paintings, wrote that the painting’s “quality and technique are not consistent with authentic works …

UK Museums Increasingly Turning to Public to Make Decisions

UK Museums Increasingly Turning to Public to Make Decisions

Published by Jenni Sidey

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. The Headlines POWER TO THE PEOPLE. British museums are increasingly handing the compass to the public, inviting ordinary citizens to help chart future policy, priorities, and even funding decisions through citizens’ assemblies, The Art Newspaper wrote. The National Gallery’s newly launched NG Citizens panel is emblematic of this shift, following similar experiments at Birmingham Museums Trust, the Imperial War Museum and the Migration Museum. For the gallery, this is not a token consultation but, as it puts it, a culture-shaping collaboration designed to keep the institution relevant, inclusive and publicly accountable. Supporters argue that museums, among the most trusted of public bodies, are ideal laboratories for democratic decision-making. Randomly selected citizens, properly informed, can grapple with complex questions of value, access and resources, challenging assumptions about who gets to decide. Critics fear a dilution of expertise, but advocates counter that assemblies shape guiding principles, not exhibition lists. The real test, they say, however, is whether institutions are genuinely willing to share power, and act on what …