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Vincent van Gogh Painting Stolen in Overnight Raid

A painting by Dutch master Vincent van Gogh was stolen in an overnight smash-and-grab raid on a museum that was closed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, police and the museum said on March 30.

According to the Singer Laren museum east of Amsterdam, “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring 1884” by the Dutch master was taken in the early hours of Monday. By early afternoon, all that could be seen from the outside of the museum was a large white panel covering a door in the building’s glass facade. Museum General Director Evert van Os said the institution that houses the collection of American couple William and Anna Singer is “angry, shocked, sad” at the theft. The work was on loan from the Groninger Museum in the northern Dutch city of Groningen. Van Gogh’s paintings, when they rarely come up for sale, earn millions at auction. Police are investigating the theft. “I’m shocked and unbelievably annoyed that this has happened,” said Singer Laren museum director Jan Rudolph de Lorm. “This beautiful and moving painting by one of our greatest artists stolen - removed from the community,” he added. “It is very bad for the Groninger Museum, it is very bad for the Singer, but it is terrible for us all because art exists to be seen and shared by us, the community, to enjoy to draw inspiration from and to draw comfort from, especially in these difficult times.” The 25-by-57-centimeter (10-by-22- inch) oil on paper painting shows a person standing in a garden surrounded by trees with a church tower in the background. Emergency Relief Grant for Women Artists Over 40 Artists can be of the first and perhaps most deeply impacted by economic hardship. During this time of crisis, that may be even more true when other factors such as race and class are considered. A new emergency relief grant, launched by Anonymous Was A Woman in partnership with the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), seeks to address two of these factors—gender and age—by supporting women artists age 40 and older who have lost income or opportunities due to the coronavirus pandemic. The new grant will distribute a total of $250,000 in funding, up to $2,500 for each grantee, to eligible women-identifying visual artists in the US and its territories. A report by the National Endowment for the Arts found that as women age, they earn less and less than their male counterparts. By the time they reach ages 55 to 64, they make only $0.66 for every dollar male artists make. “In many cases, women over the age of 40 carry additional stress as caregivers for both children and parents,” said Susan Unterberg, founder of Anonymous Was A Woman, in a press release. Unterberg has traditionally funded an annual unrestricted grant of $25,000 to ten artists, but the COVID-19 crisis prompted her to launch the emergency relief grant in addition to the yearly award. Her initiative is an example of how other existing funding programs could rework their missions to serve those in urgent need. Today, the Women’s Center for Creative Work (WCCW) in Los Angeles, California announced it would adapt its 2020 Emergency Health Grant, offering a shorter form application and a rolling weekly deadline for $1,000 awards. “Low-income artists who work in any genre or medium, who identify as a woman, as trans or nonbinary, and/ or as a person of color, who live in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside or San Bernardino Counties are eligible to apply,” the WCCW explains. The application for Anonymous Was A Woman’s grant will be made available on April 6 at 10 AM EST and remain open through April 8. Funds will be awarded to eligible applicants on a first-come, first-served basis, and they will be notified of their funding status by April 30. More information can be found on NYFA’s website, here. Cleveland Museum of Art Receives Gifts Valued at More Than $100M The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) Van Gogh painting stolen from Dutch museum closed by virus.

has announced that it had received a gift and a promised gift from a local couple of more than 100 Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modern European and American paintings, drawings and prints and other coveted works intended to enrich and transform the story it tells of the history of art. Valued at over $100M, the gifts from Joseph P. and Nancy F. Keithley include 97 works donated outright and 17 that are promised. A major exhibition comprising the majority of gifts is reportedly planned in the fall of 2022 along with the publication of a catalogue.

William Griswold, the institution’s director said that the combined gifts are the largest to go to the museum since 1958, when the philanthropist Leonard C. Hanna Jr. made a $38M bequest (today valued at $300m) that has financed dozens of art purchases at the institution over the last six decades.

Some of the highlights of the Keithleys’ outright and promised gifts he cited are a landscape by Braque, The Port of l’Estaque, the Pier (1906); a still life by Caillebotte, Chickens, Game Birds and Hares (around 1882–“It’s like Chardin meets Manet, a very cool thing,” Griswold says) and Pissarro’s Fish Market (1902). There are four works by Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis, two each by Milton Avery, Joan Mitchell and Félix Valloton and striking individual examples by Picasso, Matisse, Andrew Wyeth, Vilhelm Hammershøi and Henri-Edmond Cross. The donations also encompass Chinese and Japanese ceramics, including contemporary examples of the latter, that will bolster the museum’s Asian holdings.

“It fills some interesting gaps,” Griswold said. “We had small holdings by the Nabis, for example, and this adds 25. The other thing is that it creates not only a possibility for new juxtapositions and dialogues but gives us depth in the work of individual artists.” He added: “We had no landscape and no still life by Caillebotte–now we have both.”

Additionally, five paintings by Bonnard donated by the couple boosts the museum’s total by the artist to nine, he notes. “It’s important to understand how rare it is for us to accept a gift of so many works from a single collection,” Griswold added. “Ours is primarily a collection that has been assembled one gift or purchase at a time.” He said that Joseph Keithley, who formerly led a company that manufactured advanced electrical testing instruments, and Nancy Keithley, who became a trustee of the museum in 2001, had consulted closely with the CMA in amassing their collection over the last two decades. “Their yardstick always was, ‘Was it good enough for the Cleveland Museum of Art?’” he said.

Around 18 months ago, the couple asked the museum to compose a list of everything in their collection that the institution wanted, “and it was virtually everything,” Griswold says. “Then in November they came to my office and said they’d been thinking about it a lot and wanted to give us everything on the list.” “I think the Keithleys really saw it as a gift not only to the museum but to Cleveland.”

Patrick Devedjian—the Driving Force Behind New Museum Dedicated to the Sun King—Has Died of Coronavirus

Patrick Devedjian, a prominent French politician, died of Covid-19 at the Antony hospital near Paris on Monday, Marc 30. He was 75 years old. Devedjian was the head of Hauts-deSeine, France’s wealthiest district, and was a leading advocate for a museum dedicated to Louis XIV’s reign in SaintCloud, west of Paris. The future of the project is now in doubt. An 11,500 sq. m, 19th-century army barracks in Saint-Cloud, built by King Charles X in the 1820s, has been chosen as the site for the proposed museum. In March, three companies Patrick Devedjian

were short-listed for the €100m restoration works of the barracks built by King Charles X in the 1820s, which will house it. The new site and its research center was due to open in 2025. Pierre Rosenberg, an 83-year-old academician and former director of the Louvre, has pledged to donate his collection to the new museum.

Devedjian, a man of art and culture who was a member of the Musée du Louvre board, was the driving force behind the project which, with the current financial crisis, may now be called into question. His successor might have to agree to continue with a museum that could bear Devedjian’s name, a suggestion that has been made by the project’s director Alexandre Gady.

Gady, an architecture historian who left the Sorbonne University to lead the new museum, says he last met Devedjian after a board meeting at the Louvre on 13 March. They went together with Pierre Rosenberg to the museum’s laboratory to examine a painting by Poussin that had been proposed as a donation by a collector from London.

Himself recovering from coronavirus, Gady underlines the personal involvement of Devedjian in the museum project. He says that since January, Devedjian has been pushing for acquisitions of paintings, drawings and sculptures to complete the 600 paintings that make up the core of the new museum’s collection. Gady fell ill with his wife upon their return from the recent Tefaf fair in Maastricht, where he made several purchases. Loans from the Louvre and Versailles for the future museum are also currently being planned, Gady says.