# data[].attributes.body
Young South Korean's in the 1960's were creating performance art and installation art as a response to the civil injustice right after the end of the Korean war to challenge conservative notions of art making at that time. These works went largely unnoticed in the states until the last handful of years when they were first represented in a collection of 88 of the works of several South Korean artists under the title “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s.” Kim Kulim's "meaning of 1/24 of a second." 1969 is one of these works and my personal favorite, you can find the full video on youtube.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Kim Kulim, The Meaning of 1/24 Second, , 1969.Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Editor's Note: This article, originally published in September, has been updated to reflect the current run of "Only the Young" at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

During the 1960s, a group of young artists working in South Korea emerged from a dark time. The Korean War had taken place less than a decade earlier, and the resulting unrest paved the way for a military coup in 1961 that brought dictator Park Chung Hee to power. Two years later, Park became president. By 1972, the state was monitoring speech and the media with a sweeping policy aimed at keeping the dictatorship intact.

These artists were making a living in a young republic fraught with tension between North Korea and Japan, the country's former colonizer.

Reckoning with widespread upheaval, the artists set out to challenge the conservative status quo. They gravitated to video, performance, and installation. Some of these works have gone long unseen because they have been lost, despite efforts to conserve them; others have only recently gained an audience in the West amid a new interest in Korean art and its edgier periods.

A new exhibition devoted to these avant-garde South Koreans, "Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s," just opened at the Hammer Museu in Los Angeles, after previous runs at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. Its 80 works attest to the tumult the artists faced and the ways their practices mirrored it.

"Their lives were responding to this period of exceptional change," said Kyung An, an associate curator at the Guggenheim who organized the show's iteration in New York. "They were their art."

ARTnews spoke to Kyung to learn more about the show.

ARTnews: What was the historical context for these works?

Kyung An: It's a very recent history of trauma, and there's also an engagement with a very unpopular military involvement in Vietnam. At the same time, it's a period of rapid urbanization and modernization. You have beginnings of what you call a rise of a middle class. That all collided with a nationalist ideology and increasingly repressive censorship propagated by the state. Park Chung Hee tightened his grip on power. It's a dark period-I think a lot of people would agree [that it lasted] until his assassination in 1979.

What was going on in the art world in South Korea at the time?

Gestural abstraction had really swept across the Korean art scene in the 1950s, and they were rebelling against that. They saw it as this conservative kind of art-making. They were searching for a new beginning that could reflect the sense of radicality that they had been sensing around themselves.

So, they were breaking away from the art infrastructure already established there, reacting to the abstract painting movement that was baked into their formal education.

If you look at experimental artists, they create their own platforms for exhibitions and create their own circulation of printed materials and journals. They organized their own seminars to discuss the findings of what they were reading about: what was happening contemporaneously outside in Europe, Japan, and America.

This was not organized in conjunction with, but away from, the centralizing force of the academies. The biggest centralizing force, I would say, was the Kukchön,anational annual juried exhibition. If you look at their published conversations, the artists' writing, and even that of critics and historians at the time, was very critical of the kind of art that's embraced by the national art exhibition. They were kind of moving away from it.

Why did you focus on young artists?

The radical thing was, when abstraction entered the academic discourse in the 1960s, it was the mainstream. But abstraction was no longer reflective of both the novelty and the newness that these artists were craving. So, this next generation of experimental artists and authors was fighting against that. For me, it took a long time to settle on an exhibition title. A lot of exhibitions in Korea that dealt with experimental art, really, and focused on the quality of rebellion. I kind of wanted to move away from that. A lot of artists and different art movements reflect that. I wanted to really set them apart.

You also wanted to show how the artists were coming of age.

They were in their 20s, and some were in their early 30s. Just to have that courage and acumen and belief in oneself to create something new, to desire something so strongly-I really admired that.

All the documentation of the performances from the 1960s and '70s is in black-and-white, and a lot of the works are lost. There is a kind of nostalgia that comes, but I wanted these artworks to feel as contemporary as if they were made today, which is how they feel.

There were threats and other material restrictions to them even producing work and finding space to convene. Some artists were the target of censorship.

I think the material restrictions and challenges were real. Remember, it's a country that's coming out of war. A lot of the artists had their own businesses. The later generation tried to see them as this kind of elitist, bourgeois conceptual artists. But they were very connected with what was going on because they were working in the field.

The lack of infrastructure becomes part of the practice. Kim Kulim made important works in the face of these structural challenges.

He was very active as part of the Fourth Group. It was a very interdisciplinary group formed by not only artists, but also people in theater, fashion design, and film. They were only formally active for a very short time. They held a series of performances and public arenas that were often stopped by the police. Kim himself had professed to being interrogated with his family in Daegu, where he was harassed and trailed. These were real challenges that they faced, even within the art world. There's a very famous performance that he did, Phenomenon to Traces (1970). He wanted to tie up the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea with fabric and bury the ends of it in the ground, almost like a tomb. After he did it, he was told to take it down after a day. It was not considered art. What he was saying was: this the death of the old museum. Museum authorities said to dismantle it.

He wasn't the not the only one. Jung Kangja, another artist whose work is featured here, faced pushback from the press and state authorities.

She was one of the few women artists whose works have survived and are in the show. She had a solo exhibition in 1970 that was promptly shut down. Its venue, the national public information office, where a lot of artists held exhibitions, felt it had lent the space under the misassumption that it would host an exhibition of sculpture. She ended up doing a performance that it didn't agree with.

She remains a very prominent and interesting figure. A lot of her work deals with this contradiction that I think women faced that at the time. We tend to focus more on her performances, but we should remember that she made a lot of installations and sculptures as well. It's just that they didn't survive.

In Kiss Me (1967), a gigantic brightly painted pair of lips, entrapped within these blocky rows of teeth is woman's severed head and a rubber glove that you use for washing dishes. Women at the time were still forced to adhere to certain Confucian ideals of womanhood: be a good mother, a good wife, a good daughter, and be loyal to your family.

Lee Kang-So's 1973 performance "Disappearance - Bar in the Gallery." Courtesy Guggenheim Museum.

Kim Kulim's 1969 experimental film The meaning of the 1/24 second figures prominently in the show. It features glimpses of Seoul, which was also a protagonist of sorts for these artists. What was it like to rewatch this film in preparation for this show?

He worked with a few other artists in the actual making of the of the film. For me, it's like energy and life of Seoul at the time. It's composed 224 frames individually spliced frames per second. It's a real montage of the capital city in a state of flux. It juxtaposes images of progress-the newly built expressway, for example-with images of people living their daily lives. You see electrical towers; you see construction workers. What's interesting about this film is that you can see that Seoul as a city caught between the past and the present. These shots are interspersed with displaced figures sleeping on the street, a very old gate fallen into ruin, an elderly woman selling flowers on the streets. The camera never stops, except for when you sometimes see some of the artists who helped make the work. A repeated figure that appears is a child, dressed in a suit. He interrupts the flow, staring straight into the camera. It's almost like an interjection into the overstimulation of the city.

The film was supposed to premiere in July 1969. But due to technical difficulties, it was canceled. Kim ended up projected slides of images from it onto his own body.

What happened to the artworks that no longer exist?

A lot of the works don't exist anymore because when artists moved, they tended to get rid of them. We found a lot of the work from the '60s really difficult to locate. Thankfully, we had images of them archival materials that indicated what they look like. A general curatorial rule was that we would not fabricate a work for the exhibition.

Lee Kun-Yong, who is now in his early 80s, is another big figure in the show. Logic of Hands, from 1975, shows Lee in four separate black-and-white frames, posing with his hands in different gestures. What made him so critical?

His practice was very diverse. He developed performance-based works that use the body as a way to understand one's relationship with the surrounding world. In the show, we wanted to really focus on what he called "events-logical." This is kind of exemplary of his performance work, where the repetition of everyday gestures such mark-making, counting, walking, and standing are made within a particular logical parameter. He removes them from their social conventions.

I think what's interesting is that this work was created at the height of an authoritarian regime where the state not only affected one's ideological routes, but also the physical realm, too. Men were no longer allowed to have long hair. Women were not allowed to be ministers. So, these kinds of restrictions just became part of your daily life. Lee was never overtly political, but it's interesting to see these works within that context.

You said that performance doesn't enter the discourse until the late 1970s to the early 80s. It starts off with happenings. Disappearance, staged in 1973 by Lee Kang-So at Myeongdong Gallery in Seoul, was one of them.

Lee took tables from a local bar he frequented, with cigarette marks or rings left from drinking glasses. The furniture itself embodied all of what was left behind. He loved that the surfaces of the furniture seemed to emit the life of the other people who touched and interacted with those objects. But then they were subsequently lost. I would say he did not know what was happening internationally at the time, with other happenings in New York. If you look at photos, it's all friends, some strangers, some family members. This is a real reflection on like the fleeting experience of everyday life.

You mean that it came out of his experience, that he wasn't necessarily reacting to what was happening with art collectives abroad? It wasn't until 1975 that it was shown publicly.

This was the time of a dictatorship. In 1972, the Yushin Constitution, which banned large gatherings, had just been announced. It closed universities and [introduced] a period of censorship. Disappearance was meant to create a space where artists and thinkers could come together and converse freely. I think that was a very radical move.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Under-Recognized South Korean Artists Come into Focus at the Hammer Museum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
South Korean artists active in the 1960s-1970s are the subject of a show at the Hammer Museum in LA.

# data[].attributes.headline
Jewish family trying to claim Egon Schiele drawing from Art Institute of Chicago.

# data[].attributes.subject
Jewish family trying to claim Egon Schiele drawing from Art Institute of Chicago.

# data[].attributes.body
A Jewish family was attempting to claim an Egon Schiele drawing from the Art Institute of Chicago. Claiming the institute was "a bad-faith possessor." of the work and that it was acquired unlawfully from the death of one of the family's heirs during the holocaust. A federal judge ruling this case acknowledged the institutes lawful ownership of the piece and found the art institute clearly obtained the work lawfully and within good faith in 1966. But funnily enough a second case about the rightful ownership of this drawing being fought by Manhattan Attorney General Alvin Bragg. If you ask me it seems they are pretty entitled, just because your great grandfather owned the painting doesn't mean it belongs to your family, to further insult the institute seems like a low blow to persuade your argument.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A federal judge has reaffirmed the Art Institute of Chicago's legal ownership of a drawing by Egon Schiele, allegedly stolen from an Austrian Jewish performer during World War II.

The heirs of a Fritz Grünbaum, an Austrian Jewish performer who was murdered at the Dachau concentration camp in 1941, had asked Judge John Koeltl of the federal district court in Manhattan to reconsider his decision in a civil lawsuit filed against the museum, seeking the return of the drawing to Grünbaum's heirs.

In his latest February 28 memorandum, Koeltl upheld his prior decision to grant a motion to dismiss the case brought by Grünbaum's heirs-Timothy Reif, David Fraenkel, and Milos Vavra. The case is separate from a criminal investigation led by Manhattan Attorney General Alvin Bragg, who has asked the New York Supreme Court to order Russia War Prisoner (1916) to be returned to the family. That case remains ongoing.

Koeltl reaffirmed his determination that the claims made by the heirs were barred by the statute of limitations and shot down allegations that the museum acquired the work unlawfully in 1966.

Specifically, the judge denied the family the ability to file a second amended complaint which would allow the heirs to make changes to their case and provide new evidence for reconsideration. In effect, he stated that the heirs' arguments are futile and could not be salvaged with an amended complaint.

Koeltl has determined that, because the museum acquired the work in 1966, the statute of limitations would have initially run out in New York in 1969. The statute of limitations in New York, where the case was filed, is three years for such cases.

The judge shot down the argument that the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016, signed into law by former President Barack Obama and which successfully revived the statute of limitations, made a difference in the legal deadlines of this case.

"The only way that the plaintiffs' claims could be timely is if the defendant acquired the artwork by theft, but that is clearly not the case, and the plaintiffs do not argue that the defendant stole the artwork," Koeltl said in his decision.

Koeltl said that the argument that the Art Institute is a "bad-faith possessor" of the drawing is "without merit." He determined that the family did not make factual allegations to support that claim and nowhere in prior court documents did the family accuse the museum of theft.

"Even now, the plaintiffs do not accuse the defendant of theft," the judge said. The family has accused the museum of "having ignored government warnings" and "failing to investigate" while "overlooking" evidence that the drawing had been stolen from Grünbaum by the Nazis.

In his decision, the judge pointed to the outcome of another case, Bakalar v. Vavra, which found that another work in a similar case was legally owned by collector David Bakalar.

"The Art Institute of Chicago recently prevailed in civil litigation in federal court regarding Egon Schiele's Russian War Prisoner. In the ruling, the judge specifically states that we are a 'good-faith possessor' of this work," Megan Michienzi, executive director of the Art Institute of Chicago, said in an email. "We have always acted in good faith. If we had this work unlawfully, we would return it, but that is not the case here, as is made clear in the latest federal court ruling."

In November, Koeltl temporarily halted another case brought by the family against the government of Austria, and the Albertina Museum and the Leopold Museum, both in Vienna.

The case against the Viennese museums is unique because it involves high levels of diplomacy between the United States and Austria, which has resisted past efforts to restitute works housed at the Albertina.

The lawyers for Grünbaum's descendants assert that the Austrian government is bound by a number of U.S. laws, as well as the 1955 treaty that gave Austria its independence from the occupation of Allied powers after World War II, to return the works. The Austrian museums have said there is no evidence that the works in its possession were confiscated by the Nazis.

Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Judge Reaffirms Art Institute of Chicago's Ownership of a Schiele Drawing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A federal judge has reaffirmed the ownership by the Art Institute of Chicago of an Egon Schiele drawing, allegedly stolen by the Nazis.

# data[].attributes.body
Cathy Lebowitz is an abstract guache painter and color pencil illustrator with her recent 2023 solo exhibition at the Skoto Gallery in New York. In this article her works are described as "refreshingly small." and as "microcosmic meta landscapes." To be honest I did not find her work very interesting and the lack of anything of substance being said in the article reaffirms that belief for me. "microcosmic meta landscapes." Is something I cant even find a definition for. The works are small, with each looking like its had less then 10 hours put into it, her color choices can be unconventional and perhaps is making some interesting positive space, but I would argue that is a borderline requirement for an artisan of any merit. Her lack of creative effort makes me agree with one of the first comments on the article simply stating "Not interesting work."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Contributed by Michael Brennan / In Cathy Lebowitz’s “Dark Skies, Rocks, her second solo exhibition at Skoto Gallery, about two dozen themed works on paper wrap around the walls of the cinderblock …

# data[].attributes.headline
Mary Miss artwork saved temporarily from unjust destruction.

# data[].attributes.subject
Mary Miss artwork saved temporarily from unjust destruction.

# data[].attributes.body
The demolition of Mary Miss's artwork "Greenwood Pond: Double site (1996)" was planned for the week of April 9th but was halted when she was pressed to take action and sue the Des Moines Art Center or DMAC for violation of the Visual Artists Rights Act by breaching a contract made between Mary Miss and the art center in 1996, promising not to alter the work without her permission. The center claims the work was irreparable because of its structural, operational, and material problems dating back to its initial construction and that repair would estimate to $8 million, funds that the museum would not be able to cover without 3 new full-time staff positions. The museum has closed the exhibit to the public and claims it as a hazardous environment. Personally, the museums claims of faulty construction, or that the exhibit is too expensive to repair sounds like hoop-la to me, and the fact that they had announced to the public their plans to demolish it before notifying the original artist is uncourteous conduct, The piece of work was made as a series of preservationist acts from several artist's and its demolition would be a serious moment of hypocrisy for the museum's image in my opinion.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Mary Miss, Greenwood Pond-Double Site, Des Moines, Iowa, 1996.© Mary Miss, courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation

An Iowa court has issued a restraining order that will temporarily halt the demolition of an iconic Land art installation by Mary Miss that has fallen into disrepair.

In a legal document filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Iowa's Central Division, a judge granted the temporary restraining order to Miss, who sued the Des Moines Art Center (DMAC) last week to stop it from dissembling Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1996). The museum had initially planned to carry out demolition of the piece, which is sited on the institution's grounds, this week.

Miss, 79, said the museum needed to honor a 1994 contract promising not to alter the work without her permission. She accused the art center of violating the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) through the "destruction of a work of recognized stature."

In the latest filing, Iowa judge Stephen H. Locher said Miss had established "a sufficient threat of irreparable harm" to Greenwood Pond: Double Site, which was initially conceived as a way to to revamp the wetland ecosystem of Greenwood Park. Comprised of a series of walkable wooden parts, the work runs along a lagoon located behind the museum's main building.

In January, when the arts advocacy group the Cultural Landscape Foundation revealed the art center's plans to demolish Greenwood Pond, it brought up questions over how museums contend with preservation needs as their boards and directors change their missions.

Throughout the 1990s, the DMAC commissioned artists like Miss, Richard Serra, and Bruce Nauman for outdoor artworks. Despite repairs in 2014 that extended the Miss work's lifespan, Greenwood Pond was deemed irreparable, prompting the museum board's decision to tear it down in October. The board cited a "recurring pattern of structural, operational, and material problems dating back to 1996" that rendered the artwork vulnerable to decay and harsh weather.

In the latest decision, Locher stated in the document that the Miss installation "faces a threat of irreparable harm because once the artwork is removed, it can never be restored." A hearing to decide whether the suit will move forward is set for later this month.

In the document, Locher also asserted that because the museum doesn't need approval from the city to restore or remove the artwork, it may still be bound to their agreement with Miss, even if the work is damaged.

In a statement, Miss said the decision "reaffirms the rights of all artists and the integrity of their legacies."

In February, DMAC director Kelly Baum told ARTnews that it would cost around $8 million to repair the work and to undertake continued maintenance. To raise those funds, she said, the museum would need to establish an endowment for its indefinite maintenance and open three new full-time staff positions.

In a statement responding to the decision, a representative for the DMAC maintained that the dispute is a matter of concern for public safety. The museum has paused removal plans for the artwork, opting to keep degraded parts closed off to the public, stating, "We are compelled to take action as required per our 1990 agreement with the City of Des Moines to correct what has become a hazardous environment."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Iconic Installation by Mary Miss in Des Moines Is Temporarily Saved from Demolition

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A court has ordered a temporary restraining order to halt the planned demolition of a Mary Miss installation in Des Moines.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Mona Lisa gets too much traffic so they are gonna put it underground

# data[].attributes.subject
The Mona Lisa gets too much traffic so they are gonna put it underground

# data[].attributes.body
when a recent study revealed that 18,000 reviews of the Mona Lisa found it to be disappointing the director of the Louvre, Laurence des Cars responded by saying that the museum was planning to move it underground to a new exhibition space, he stated that the painting was their main attraction and responsible for 80 percent of the museum's traffic. The underground exhibition is part of a large scale renovation to make it more grand. Personally I think anybody who waits in line for multiple hours just to look at a painting that is super famous for debatable reasons and says they are disappointed, I don't really know what you expected, it's a painting, not a roller coaster, moving the painting to a bigger exhibit may make traffic flow more easily and may make the painting seem more "grand" but it's still just a painting quit whining.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Visitors take pictures of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (La Joconde), at the Louvre Museum, in Paris, on April 17, 2024. (Photo Antonin UTZ / AFP) (Photo ANTONIN UTZ/AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images

When I took my mother back to Paris for her first visit in nearly five decades, there was no question we would go to the Louvre. I was more surprised that she wanted to stand in the long line to see Leonardo da Vinci's (1503) for the few seconds we would get to take pictures and selfies with the famous painting.

This experience is often annoying and disappointing for tourists, with one recent analysis of 18,000 reviews deeming the Renaissance portrait "the world's most disappointing masterpiece."

Da Vinci's iconic image of an almost-smiling woman is protected by bullet-proof, antireflective glass, along with tightly controlled temperature and humidity to ensure the painting's conservation.

In an effort to remedy this situation, the Mona Lisa may be moved to an underground chamber, according to a report in the Telegraph Tuesday.

Louvre director Laurence des Cars recently suggested the relocation of the popular artwork to a dedicated room constructed in the institution's basement.

"We don't welcome visitors very well in this room, so we feel we're not doing our job properly," des Cars told staff and supervisors. "Moving the Mona Lisa to a separate room could put an end to public disappointment."

"We've been thinking about it for a long time, but this time everyone is in agreement," Vincent Delieuvin, the Louvre's chief curator of 16th-century Italian painting told the French newspaper Le Figaro.

"It's a large room, and the Mona Lisa is at the back, behind its security glass, so at first glance it looks like a postage stamp," he said.

The Louvre receives nine million visitors annually, and according to museum officials, the Mona Lisa is the main attraction for 80 percent of them. During especially busy days, 250,000 people stand in the same line my mother and I did.

The painting's popularity has prompted other attempts to improve the viewing experience, including a repainting of the gallery's walls from eggshell yellow to midnight blue in 2019, as well as a shift in the queuing system for visitors.

But Delieuvin said that the impact of social media and mass tourism demands a greater effort, as they have multiplied the artwork's celebrity far beyond anything imagined after its theft in 1911.

"In this day and age, you have to have seen something that everyone is talking about at least once in your life, and the Mona Lisa is clearly one of those 'must sees'," the curator said.

A new underground chamber for the painting would be part of a future "Grand Louvre" renovation, including a new entrance to the museum. Visitors would bypass the glass pyramid entry and be led directly to underground rooms: one for the Mona Lisa and the other for temporary exhibitions.

"The mood in the museum is now ripe," des Cars said. "We have to embrace the painting's status as a global icon, which is beyond our control."

The budget for the Louvre's overhaul is estimated at €500 million, according to Le Figaro. But the French economy has yielded worse-than-expected debt and deficit forecasts, resulting in President Emmanuel Macron's government trying to reduce state spending by €25 billion in its next annual budget.

The Mona Lisa was also the site of a protest in January, after activists threw pumpkin soup at it. The painting suffered no damage, but the incident was denounced by culture minister Rachida Dati as an attack on French heritage.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Louvre Considers Moving Mona Lisa to Underground Chamber to End 'Public Disappointment'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Leonardo da Vinci painting is the museum's most popular artwork, prompting long lines for photos and selfies.

# data[].attributes.headline
Paintings that were saved from Notre Dame Fire being put back up in Paris.

# data[].attributes.subject
Paintings that were saved from Notre Dame Fire being put back up in Paris.

# data[].attributes.body
Works that had been recovered from the fires of Notre dame are being re-exhibited in Paris including some works that haven't been shown in 2 centuries. The Exhibition is 76 religious paintings of Charles Le Brun, Laurent de la Hyre, and Charles Poerson. It's great to see works that haven't had a chance to shine in a long time are going back up for people to see, its an exciting opportunity and it looks a great exhibition and it had a story of good interest. if I lived in Paris I would definitely go see it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Aubin Vouet, Le Centurion Corneille aux pieds de Saint Pierre, 1639.Photo by davidbordes.com/©DRAC Ile-de-France / photographie David Bordes

A new exhibition at the Mobilier National in Paris will showcase masterpieces that have been restored since the devastating fire at the Notre Dame cathedral in 2019.

The national furniture collection's exhibition, opening on April 24, includes paintings, tapestries, liturgical furniture, and a 82-foot-long rug commissioned by the 19th century French monarch Charles X.

Of the 22 paintings set for the show the Mobilier National exhibition, 13 works are from the series titled "the Mays", which will be on display for the first time in two centuries.

The private collection of 76 religious paintings were made by the Paris goldsmiths' guild and donated to the cathedral between 1630 and 1707. The artists include Charles Le Brun, Laurent de La Hyre and Charles Poerson.

Emmanuel Pénicaut, director of Mobilier National collections, told the Observer: "We were lucky to get them out quite quickly with just a little water damage and dust. It was rather miraculous."

He added: "We began removing them the day after the fire and decided they would all be restored. The exhibition is a chance to see them all in one place, in the order they were painted, which is how they would have been originally displayed. What you see now is how they would have looked the day they were completed."

The restoration of the paintings was conducted by experts from Direction régionale des affaires culturelles d'Île-de-France, or DRAC Île-de-France, a decentralized department of the French Ministry of Culture responsible for restoration and excavation work on the church, in partnership with the Mobilier National and the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France.

Other restored items that will be shown in the exhibition are nine religious paintings, an elaborate chancel rug used only a few times for major occasions such as the marriage of Napoleon III, as well as 14 tapestries depicting the Virgin Mary. New contemporary church furniture designed by Paris-based design Guillaume Bardet will also be on display.

Notre Dame cathedral is scheduled to reopen in December.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Masterpieces Saved Notre Dame Cathedral Fire to be Exhibited in Paris

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The restored works will include 13 paintings from "The Mays" series, shown for the first time in two centuries.

# data[].attributes.body
1. Content derived from the story of the artist. One of the things we focus on maybe more now then ever is the artist's position in relation to the content of artwork Van Gogh's story never mattered when he was alive, but without it now, his works may seem dull by comparison. Just as Paul Gauguin work may be slightly soured by knowledge of his record. The context in which the artist presents to the work, by being an artist and by making work is essential in interpreting it's soul

2. content implied as emotions and experience. that means, similarly to McEvilley is saying in paragraph one of this text, being a human with an objective perception of the world and of understanding a visual library of inherent things we believe to be representational is essential for an understanding of a paintings context, so too is the emotions and experiences of ourselves as beings just as necessary. Another reason Van Gogh is as acclaimed as he is, is that he felt things very deeply and meant to represent the feelings those through his work. This further aligns with recognizing abstraction and a work being site-specific but I believe it's worth making a distinction for emotion's place in an artworks meaning.

# data[].attributes.headline
Berthe Morisot and Forgotten Impressionists.

# data[].attributes.subject
Berthe Morisot and Forgotten Impressionists.

# data[].attributes.body
in honor of the 150th Anniversary of Impressionism curators everywhere are capitalizing on the impressionist that nobody talks about, like Berthe Morisot and her series of surreal, bright, monet-esque works being exhibited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret in the seaside city, which runs June 7 through September 29. the museum is exhibiting her impressive collection of around 60 works as part of a series of niche women impressionist of a similar time, some even studying under Monet, as a way of "setting the record straight" or vouching for a more honest depiction of the Impressionist period. In fact in examining the records of the museums painting they found that no less then 650 works between 1877 and 1914 all from women. Further research indicates these works all coming out of nice, speculated to be related to Paris’s Académie Julian a school that encouraged female artists to make and exhibit in Nice. I think this movement to discover a more true form of impressionism for its anniversary to be true and exciting, it makes me want to go to an exhibit and contribute to this new attitude towards the era, culture and the artwork.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Daniela Hritcu for ARTnews/Getty Images

Art institutions around the world are celebrating the 150th anniversary of Impressionism, which staged its first exhibit in April 1874, and curators are seizing the opportunity to dig further into the lesser-known aspects of the movement, notably the historically overlooked women artists from the period. Fresh looks at women Impressionists are underway or upcoming at the National Gallery of Ireland, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Musée de Pont-Aven in France, the Museum der bildenden Kunste (MdbK) in Leipzig, and elsewhere around the world.

One particularly intriguing example is the forthcoming show " Berthe Morisot à Nice, escales impressionnistes," ("Berthe Morisot in Nice, an Impressionist Stopover") at the Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret in the seaside city, from June 7 to September 29, 2024. It will travel to Genoa's Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cutura afterwards. Morisot (1841-1895) was a central figure of Impressionism and exhibited in seven out of eight of the movement's shows, including the first one. Yet still today, when most think of the founders of the movement, few mention Morisot. The Nice exhibit attempts to correct the record by showing not only paintings she created there but also works by women in her Riviera circle.

With about 60 artworks by Morisot related to the wintry periods she spent in Nice in 1881-82 and 1888-89, complemented by around 40 pieces by other women artists, the exhibit is among the first to recognize the breadth and wealth of the feminine art scene in Nice at the time. In fact, one of the show's curators told ARTnews that in conducting new research into the museum's own under-examined collection, they discovered that no fewer than about 650 women were making art professionally in the region during the Belle Epoque, between 1877 and 1914. These women came from all over, representing some 20 nationalities.

"While we were researching more about Berthe Morisot and her period, we realized hundreds of women exhibited in Nice's salons, gave art classes, or simply worked on the French Riviera," said Johanne Lindskog, director of the museum and co-curator of the show. "It's crazy, actually, and a spectacular quantity, which has allowed us to reestablish a certain historical reality about the presence of women in [the] Riviera's art scene."

These artists included the better-known Eva Gonzalès (1849-83), who studied under Édouard Manet, Marie Bashkirtseff (1858-84), Louise Breslau (1856-1927), and Mary Cassat (1844-1926), as well as artists whose names are less familiar, such as Thérèse Cotard-Dupré (1877-1920) and Alice Vasselon (1849-1893). "And, of course, they all knew each other and Berthe Morisot, either because they exhibited together or were in the same network," said Lindskog.

Why were so many women making art around Nice and nearby environs like Cannes and Monaco? Perhaps following the example of Paris's Académie Julian, which accepted women, art ateliers for women began to pop up, run by the likes of Jean-Jacques Henner, who encouraged his students to work and exhibit in Nice. In this cosmopolitan, southern French city, women found a thriving art market and patrons who supported them. Moreover, the French Riviera, with its pictorial landscapes, was near Italy, where artists traditionally went to study classical and Renaissance art. Finally, many of these women painters themselves came from relative wealth and had second homes near the coast, an area prized for its warm weather and related health benefits. These women of means depended a little less on their husbands and fathers and were freer to explore their personal and artistic interests.

They also made work in a variety of styles that often dipped into, or was in dialogue with, the 'new painting' that was Impressionism. Breslau, for instance, is known for her naturalistic realism but occasionally showed the influence of the Impressionists, whom she knew-notably Edgar Degas and the important Impressionist dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. "There's a crisscrossing of painting that comes in contact with Impressionism, and hybrid works that are not entirely one or the other," Lindskog noted.

The curators hope to underscore the hybridized aspect of the art made at the time, favoring a less rigid depiction of Impressionism and the context from which it sprang-an approach also seen in the blockbuster Impressionism exhibit currently at Paris's Musée d'Orsay, which emphasizes Morisot's participation. "Museums have tended to favor a thematic, chronological approach, which has given the public the false impression that events occur[ed] in a segmented manner, one after the other," said Lindskog. "Our wish is to reestablish a certain historical accuracy around what people saw at the time and what interested them. What are the points of contact and associations? It's this complexity that is interesting."

In their research, curators including art historian Marianne Mathieu also came across new evidence contradicting the belief that all Impressionist painting was executed swiftly. Mathieu and Lindskog found that Morisot would spend long periods in her studio preparing her final paintings, and that she made relatively few "final" works, suggesting she could take her time, given her financial security. In addition, Lindskog said colleagues discovered previously unknown artworks by Morisot's husband, Eugène Manet, who was her informal dealer and production assistant, as well as by her daughter, Julie Manet. It would appear that the family painted together, often following Morisot's lead and replicating her compositions.

As curators "begin to research Impressionism in alternative ways to simply lining up masterpieces along a wall," Lindskog said, they continue to discover new information about the lives of the artists, which contributes to what we know of as Impressionism. "As we look closer at the real conditions in which these artworks were created, with a more social approach . . . we inevitably discover people and participants that we hadn't noticed until now."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Berthe Morisot in Nice' Delves into the Impressionist Painter's Working Methods

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A forthcoming show reveals new information about the Impressionist painter and her women compatriots.

# data[].attributes.headline
Akeem Smith's Works of social commentary

# data[].attributes.subject
Akeem Smith's Works of social commentary

# data[].attributes.body
Akeem Smith's Gallery "Unbound: Performance as Rupture" are a collection of videos depicting performances from the late 1960's to the present that engage only the person and the camera, making them feel pretty personal. But usually they also make a statement of bigger ideas or of relevant political ideas. I find most interesting when he intersects physicality with ideology such as his work "unbound" a dental x ray depicting "proof" of a story of the artist Lydia Ourahmane when her grandfather pulled out all his teeth so that he did not have to fight in world war 2, she bought a golden necklace and had it melted down into a tooth she now has in her mouth, hence the image. It's a very crazy story but regardless of it's validity it creates a sort of mystique to the image, similar to what a historical piece of artwork might evoke, its part of a history or a story, and I like that a lot. It feels to me like a reason to care about the work, at the disadvantage of not being as interesting without that context, but that goes for all of Akeem Smith's work in this case, it all runs a risk of appearing not as intented or just kind of pretentious without context.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Akeem Smith: Social Cohesiveness, 2020.Courtesy Julia Stoschek Foundation

An ass, stuck high in the air, jiggles inside fishnets. Then, it multiples threefold, repeating across a projection screen trifecta. Cut to a thong peeking out between the top and bottom of a patterned, vibrant set flecked with yellow and blue. People flash their best moves as dancehall music vibrates through the space, the soundtrack to a portrait of Black joy, the camera mostly capturing derrieres.

Akeem Smith gathered this footage as part of his experimental archive of all things dancehall-related. It includes a party that took place on September 10, 2001, then extended into the morning. About 20 minutes into his edit, the sun rises, and twin images of towers clouded in smoke flank the dancers. The attacks have begun, but news hasn't yet reached the partyers.

The work, titled Social Cohesiveness (2020), is on view in an exhibition at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin. Here, for the first time in decades, footage of September 11 feels shocking again.

Smith's work is part of an exhibition titled "Unbound: Performance as Rupture" that surveys performances, from the late 1960s to the present, that are meant for (or completed by) the camera rather than a live audience. There are no live performances, no dry documentation of works once staged before audiences. What we get instead is a grouping of works in which cameras serve as choreographic collaborators, or live pieces that are fully realized only after a visit to the editing suite.

Sanja Iveković's Personal Cuts (1982) is on view next to Smith's Social Cohesiveness, and uses a similar editing technique. Wearing black pantyhose over her head, Iveković cuts holes in the dark membrane, then intercuts that footage with scenes sampled from Yugoslav television. As with Smith's work, the piece resonates for the way it oscillates between the personal and the political: subjects experience their own bodies and, simultaneously, larger sociopolitical contexts. Cutting from establishing shots to close-ups and back again, Smith and Iveković emphasize and obliterate the gulf between them.

It's one of several intergenerational pairings on view here. Another strong one is the opener, which pairs Peter Campus's iconic Three Transitions (1973) with Sondra Perry's Double Quadruple Etcetera Etcetera I & II (2013). The former shows the artist painting his face chroma-key blue before a video camera, which causes it to disappear. Forty years later, Perry filmed two Black performers dancing frenetically in front of a white background. The blurring of the figures in this two-channel piece owes not only to the speed of their movement, but also to the use of an editing tool something like an AI eraser. The result explores the twinned hyper-surveillance and invisibility of Black people in white spaces, Perry's gesture of opacity serving as counterpoint to Smith's voyeuristic view.

These pairings of video art icons alongside a younger, more diverse generation of artists helps craft a lineage and a formal vocabulary. They also show how early experimental techniques are now being updated and wielded to new ends.

The youngest artist in the show is Panteha Abareshi, who in Unlearn the Body (2021) enlists assistive devices to contort their bandaged body: a walker becomes a pull-up bar; the padding of a crutch cradles their neck at an uncomfortable angle. Abareshi recorded it all on Super 8, then edited the footage in a manner that betrays the medium's materiality: the artist has memorably likened the beautiful defunctness of analog media to the experience of being disabled. Mechanisms might work differently, or less efficiently; sometimes, there is elegance in the glitches that ensue. Near Abareshi's work, a photograph shows Joan Jonas contorting elegantly in a hula hoop, her body illuminated by a TV monitor. Another print shows Valie Export bound around the base of a column, back arched.

All this reminded me of a helpful schema that artist Dara Birnbaum charted out in video art's early days. She noticed that documentation of performances by the likes of Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Joan Jonas, tended to be done in black-and-white. Meanwhile, works engaged with critiquing mass media-several of Birnbaum's own, as well as those by Antoni Muntadas and Dan Graham-tended to be in color. The artists in "Unbound," break down this binary, since soon enough, it became impossible to understand oneself as wholly separate from mass media anyway.

That might sound like a somewhat loose theoretical idea, but the show in fact assembles a tight group of works. The line of thinking is much easier to follow than MoMA's "Signals," last year's sprawling intergenerational video art exhibition. What's more, "Unbound" hosts twenty something works in video, but paces them expertly so it all feels watchable-a curatorial feat I had previously thought impossible. Seating helps.

"Unbound" also includes performances so difficult to capture with a camera that the challenge becomes a creative prompt, as in Algerian artist Lydia Ourahmane's In the Absence of Our Mothers (2018). The story behind that work begins in 2014, when Ourahmane bit into something soft and lost a troublesome tooth. The next year, she learned moving details about the life of her grandfather, who decided to pull out all his teeth in an act of self-mutilation that rendered him decidedly unfit to fight in World War II. Not long after, the artist met a man at a street market in Oran who tried to sell her a gold necklace, one he said his mother gave to him to sell to support the family. She bought it, then had it melted down into two teeth: one lives in her mouth, and the other on the wall next to a photograph of sorts-a dental X-ray the artist had taken. It's a wild story, but here, the photograph becomes a kind of proof, all the while insisting this is more than a dental intervention: it's a meaningful homage.

"Unbound," then, is a show about the ways the personal and political intersect; about those places where bodies meet technology, but also ideology; and how the everyday rubs up against larger historical narratives. As we once again try to go about our daily lives while learning of relentless horrors through screens, this subject couldn't be more timely.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Going About Daily Life while Learning of Relentless Horrors through Screens

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Works by Akeem Smith, Joan Jonas, and Peter Campus capture the feeling of going about daily life while learning of relentless horrors through screens

# data[].attributes.headline
Nazi-looted Monet Painting finally makes it's way back to it's rightful owners.

# data[].attributes.subject
Nazi-looted Monet Painting finally makes it's way back to it's rightful owners.

# data[].attributes.body
It's just a small pastel painting of beach side rocks, not the most noteworthy of a Monet's pieces but I still find it to be very competently made and worth looking at, and now has quite the bit of history, it started in 1936 when It was owned by Adalbert Parlagi in Vienna Austria, after the Nazi's annexed Austria in 1938, they were forced to flee but they stowed away their possessions, including the painting in a shipping company warehouse in Vienna. unfortunately before the family could ever reclaim them, they were found by the Germans in 194 and started floating around illegal looted auctions famous looted art trafficker. When the war had ended the family appealed to the Germans to have the artwork returned but, no such thing happened. Fast Forward to 2017 when the work has gone from person to person until now, being owned by some rich guy named Rau, who was of course willing to sell it to the Federal government after a lawsuit was filed, because he's going to get paid. While the court hasn't decided the the rightful owners of the painting Parlagis Grandchildren and only living heirs have are the most likely inhereitors.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Claude Monet: Bord de Mer, ca. 1865.COURTESY M.S. RAU.

A small pastel drawing by Claude Monet that was seized by Nazis during World War II is expected to be returned to the descendants of its previous owners by the FBI, the Times-Picayune reported last week.

Monet's Bord de Mer is currently in storage at the New Orleans Field Office of the FBI after being seized last June. The work was last sold in 2019 by New Orleans-based antiquities dealer M.S. Rau to Bridget Vita and her late husband, Kevin Schlamp, who died in March. The FBI seized the work after its research brought the work's provenance into question.

The work was initially acquired by Adalbert and Hilda Parlagi in April 1936 and kept at their home in Vienna, Austria. Not long after Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, they were forced to flee to Switzerland and, subsequently, London, with their two children.

The family stored the painting and other belongings in a shipping company warehouse in Vienna. Though they planned to fetch the possessions after the war, German authorities seized the property in 1940. The following year, it was auctioned by the Dorotheum auction house, which ultimately sold it to another auction house owned by Nazi Party member and known trafficker of looted art Adolf Weinmüller.

When the war ended, the family and heirs appealed to the German and Austrian governments for the return of the artwork, but were unsuccessful. In 2016 the work was included in an exhibition in Ornans, France, where it was on loan from the Paris-based Galerie Helene Bailly. In 2017 it was purchased from Galerie Helene Bailly by Rau, who sold it on, according to a lawsuit filed by the federal government with US District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana last week.

According to court documents, Vita and Schlamp waived their rights to the painting at the time of the FBI seizure. The federal government is asking the court to decide the proper owner of the painting.

The claimants of the property, Françoise Parlagi and Helen Lowe, among a couple other parties, are the grandchildren and only living heirs of the Parlagis.

While the court has yet to decide, Rau told the Times-Picayune that he expects the lawsuit to be settled without conflict. "All of the parties have reached an amicable agreement to happily return the pastel to its rightful heirs in light of the work's provenance, which was of course completely unknown to all of the trading parties," Rau said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nazi-Looted Monet Painting Held by FBI Expected to Be Returned to Owner's Descendants

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When the war ended, the family and heirs appealed to the German and Austrian governments for the painting's return, with no luck.

# data[].attributes.headline
To Find the Properties of Extravaganza: A Juried Show of Progress

# data[].attributes.subject
To Find the Properties of Extravaganza: A Juried Show of Progress

# data[].attributes.body
These works to me all encapsulate an expression of the figure and an emotion of it's depiction not found in other works, feelings of rage, deep focus, despair and indifference. They dive into the deep wells of angst and contemplation only a tired 20 year old deadline-meeting college student would feel and represents the kind of growth we all probably go through at this age. Accentuated further by a time of technological and informational wealth, that instills depression at a time of uncertainty in the value of an artist as AI art rises in the hills of the east which rumors to land a final blow on the aspirations and careers of aspiring artisans of our age. Despite the looming sense of uncertainty in the face of artistic holocaust we continue to create because it is the process and the love that dictates true artistry, we cling to this belief to discern purpose in an ever changing artistic ecosystem unlike an era before it.