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MOSCOW — Concern over the security of Russia's museum collections mounted after officials revealed yet another theft — the disappearance of a famous late architect's drawings, worth millions of dollars, from a Russian state archive.
The crime, blamed by the archive's director on unscrupulous staff, came just more than a week after Russia's most famous museum — the Hermitage — announced the theft over a period of years of more than 220 artworks valued at $5 million.  Read more  Comments(9244)  11.08.
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A religious icon included on a list of more than 220 items stolen from Russia's State Hermitage Museum has been discovered in a trash bin, according to local police.
An anonymous caller reportedly alerted officers on Thursday to where the wooden icon could be found: a garbage container in a yard near the St. Petersburg police station spearheading the investigation.
A police spokesperson told Russian media that the icon appeared in good condition but had been "slightly ... Read more Comments(0) 04.08. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Precious silver and enamelware at St Petersburg's Hermitage Museum worth nearly £2.7m has disappeared and probably been stolen with the connivance of staff, its director confirmed yesterday.
Some 221 icons, religious objects and pieces of jewellery studded with precious stones were found missing after a stocktake was completed at the end of last month. "There is no doubt this could not have happened without the participation of museum staff," the director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, sa... Read more Comments(0) 02.08. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hermitage hit by mystery thieves
Thieves have stolen more than 200 items - with an estimated value of $5m (£2.67m) - from Russia's prestigious Hermitage art museum in St Petersburg.
The thefts are thought to have been carried out over a number of years - police believe as many as 30 years.
Jewellery and precious enamels were amongst items stolen from the museum.
The museum said staff had been involved in the theft. The curator in charge of most of the... Read more Comments(250) 02.08. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Design unveiled of huge extension to Europe's most popular but crowded art gallery
Boxing clever ... An illustration of the planned Tate Modern extension
You thought you had seen enough contemporary art to last you a lifetime. You thought that modern art galleries could never be as big again. But you were wrong. It's back, bigger, bolder, brasher than before. Tate Modern 2. The sequel.
Yesterday, the director of the Tate, Sir Nicholas Serota, unveiled ... Read more Comments(0) 26.07. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Museum Collections: Curatorial Privilege and the Public Interest
This is an overly long post, but a serious subject deserves serious treatment. The following are my promised comments responding to comments made to me last week by Metropolitan Museum curator Gary Tinterow.
One of the prime movers in founding the Association of Art Museum Curators in 2001, Tinterow appears more focused on curator-power than on public accountability, as evidenced by his recent remarks to me on ... Read more Comments(0) 25.07. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blockbusters, Schlockbusters
Yesterday, I raised some questions about Renzo Piano's architecture for the expanded High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Now let's raise some more questions---about the use to which one of its new wings will be put:
The Anne Cox Chambers Wing was specifically designed as a blockbuster magnet, "to bring the world's great art to Atlanta," as museum director Michael Shapiro put it. Beginning in October, it will be venue for three years of cha... Read more Comments(0) 26.05. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Foreign donors give the lion’s share of the $50m needed for renovation and remodelling.
By Lauren Gelfond Feldinger
ERUSALEM. The 41-year-old Israel Museum, an encyclopedic national museum holding around 500,000 works from prehistory to contemporary art, will undergo a $50m redesign and expansion starting in mid-2007, officials announced last month.
The museum buildings, which sit on a 20 acre site, have grown from 5,000 to 50,000 sq. m since the museum opened in 1... Read more Comments(0) 26.05. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
February 26, 2006 - May 29, 2006
(Long Island City, New York – January 12, 2006) Freedom From the Known is Wolfgang Tillmans’ first exhibition for an American museum, and unlike any he has ever previously mounted. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s purely abstract photographs, and explores the presence abstraction has had within his figurative and representational work. Twenty-four of the twenty-five large-scale works on view were produced specifically for this exhibition and ha... Read more Comments(0) 27.02. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chechen militants ransacked the collection over a decade ago. Then the building was bombed by Russian soldiers. Now Russian restorers are doing what they can to save the surviving works - by John Varoli.
GROZNY.
In 1994 Russian tanks entered the Chechen capital of Grozny in an attempt to wrestle control of the breakaway republic from separatists. Two years later, having failed to reassert its authority, Russia pulled its forces out of Chechnya. Today much of Grozny still li... Read more Comments(0) 24.02.
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24.02.2006.