As flames devastated Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral on April 15, more than just a worldwide center of Catholic worship and an architectural masterpiece was threatened. Jewish history is also reflected in the cathedral, for better and for worse. When its massive construction began almost one thousand years ago, Notre-Dame de Paris reflected theological messages that…
A month after a Virginia high school student’s drawing solicited concerns from community members who believed the artwork to be anti-Semitic, The Washington Post ran an editorial condemning the school district’s official response as “a groveling apology” with a “feeble reference to students’ First Amendment rights.” The editorial was titled “A High Schooler’s Controversial Artwork…
Last week, in a sea change for the world of art philanthropy, three major museums decided to reject donations from the Sackler family. The museums, which announced their decisions over the course of three days, are the London-based National Portrait Gallery and Tate galleries and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Yesterday, the…
Carolee Schneemann, a boundary-shattering visual, film and performance artist has died at the age of 79; her often messy, always provocative mark on the culture survives in figures as diverse as Marina Abramović, Lena Dunham and Lady Gaga. ArtNews reported Schneemann’s passing, confirmed to them by a New York representative and her dealer P.P.O.W. Gallery….
Samantha Bee slapped the Sackler name on yet another art institution. To draw attention to Purdue Pharma’s alleged role in the opioid crisis, Bee enshrined the family behind the company in “The Sackler Museum of Stupid S—t the Sacklers Bought with Their Blood Money” on Wednesday’s “Full Frontal.” The museum presentation is a nod to…
In 1938 when the Germans annexed Austria, the art world suffered a major blow. Modernists like Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt had their work labeled degenerate. Jewish artists were forced to flee and many more were unable to. One more casualty of the Anschluss is often overlooked — the many women sculptors and painters whose…
Following a new complaint against Purdue Pharma brought by the State of Massachusetts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is reviewing its gift acceptance policy. The court filing, reported on by The New York Times last week, alleges that the Sackler family, the founders of Purdue Pharma and longtime donors to the Met, directed a misinformation…
In the art world, forgeries are an unfortunate inevitability; painters, sculptors and photographers are copied for their work’s cachet, artistic merit and monetary value. But it’s more rare for an artist to be imitated not for their talent, but for their extreme notoriety. Yet on January 24, police arrived at the Kloss auction house in…
Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister and main architect, was known as “the Nazi who said sorry” for acknowledging his complicity in Nazi war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. While Speer maintained he never knew about the Holocaust, his daughter, Hilde Schramm, is spreading awareness of the genocide, and doing much more than apologizing for it….
On the face of it, there’s not much that’s Jewish about Highpoint II. The pre-World War II apartment complex, located in the Highgate suburb of London, is a sequel of sorts to architect Berthold Lubetkin’s groundbreaking Highpoint I from 1935. The first building was the apogee of modernist architecture with its white concrete, flat roof,…
There is no one way to grieve or process a tragedy of an unimaginable scale. Still, few displays of grief are as curious as that favored by the 92-year-old Israeli artist Dov Or-Ner, a Holocaust survivor who appears in public dressed as Adolf Hitler. Or-Ner, a veteran sculptor and painter whose parents died in the…
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