The Anne Frank House alongside the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Photo by Massimo Catarinella, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
THE HAGUE (AFP) – An Amsterdam court on Wednesday ordered the city’s Anne Frank museum to return archives on loan from a Swiss foundation set up by the father of the Jewish teenager, after an acrimonious legal spat.
The court said that Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House had until the end of the year to return the extensive family archives, including letters and photos, on loan from the Anne Frank Fonds Basel.
The court also ordered the Anne Frank House to pay the legal costs of the foundation, which was set up by Otto Frank in 1963.
The Anne Frank House said in a statement that it “finds it regrettable that the archives cannot remain in the Anne Frank House.”
The museum said it did not dispute who owned the archives, but had not been able to return the documents immediately because they were on long-term loan.
“The Anne Frank House finds it deeply regrettable that the two organizations stood in opposition to each other in court,” Anne Frank House director Ronald Leopold said.
“We hope that with this court ruling we can now put this period behind us, and that the partnership… can be resumed in close consultation and dialogue, in the interests of the legacy and the spirit of Anne Frank,” Leopold said.
Anne Frank’s diary is a moving account of her two years in hiding from the Nazis with her family in a secret annexe that is today a popular museum in central Amsterdam.
She died in 1945 aged 15 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
The case did not involve the actual Anne Frank diaries, which belong to the Dutch state and have been given to the Anne Frank House on permanent loan.
“We didn’t expect anything else. The situation is clear, the ownership was clear, the international law is clear,” Yves Kugelmann, a member of the board of the Anne Frank Fonds Basel, told AFP.
“It was strange to have to go to court, it was so clear that it was a loan and nothing else.”
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ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
The Anne Frank House alongside the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Photo by Massimo Catarinella, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Sculptures of cattle outisde the National Ranching Heritage Center, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. Photo by Billy Hathorn, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) – A 14-year-old West Texas boy is dead after he ran into a bull statue on the Texas Tech University campus and impaled himself on one of its horns.
University spokesman Chris Cook says Miguel Martinez impaled himself while playing hide-and-seek with friends in the pre-dawn hours of Saturday morning.
Campus police say Martinez was at the museum with two adults and two minors when police were called to the scene. Police say Martinez was running on the National Ranching Heritage Museum on the Texas Tech campus when the horn pierced his chest.
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Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Sculptures of cattle outisde the National Ranching Heritage Center, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. Photo by Billy Hathorn, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
Poster announcing the exhibition ‘Picasso, Nudity Set Free’ at Le Centre d’Art la Malmaison. Image courtesy of the museum.
CANNES, France — As a child, Pablo Picasso’s granddaughter Marina often found herself shut out of his sumptuous Cannes villa “La Californie”. Four decades after his death, the gates of the house she inherited, along with thousands of his art works, are always promptly opened to visitors.
“Living in this house, unconsciously perhaps it’s a way of recapturing lost time in a place where we were once excluded,” says Marina, who for many years struggled to accept “an inheritance given without love.”
To mark the 40th anniversary of Picasso’s death this year, Marina has opened up her private collection to help stage an exhibition exploring the recurrence of nudes in the great Spanish artist’s work.
“Picasso, Nudity Set Free” features 120 works. Around 90 come from Marina’s collection, some of which have never before been on public display.
But Marina, who was in her early twenties when her famous grandfather died, is matter-of-fact about the loan.
“This comes from my inheritance, I don’t make anything special of it,” she tells AFP with an air of detachment.
Marina and her elder brother Pablito’s childhood was punctuated by rare and unhappy visits to see their grandfather, who spent most of his life in France.
These often featured “long waits behind the gate” while “the master” woke up, she says. Picasso’s second wife “Jacqueline used to order that we wait; she rejected anything that disturbed him,” Marina recalls.
Born in 1950, Marina is the daughter of Paulo Picasso, son of Picasso, and his first wife, Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova.
Marina grew up in poverty despite her illustrious lineage and Paulo, an alcoholic, died in his fifties two years after the artist. “He was always a bit the toy of his father. He was never able to grow up,” she says.
As an adult, Marina underwent years of therapy and poured her painful childhood memories into her 2001 memoir “Picasso: My Grandfather.”
“At the beginning, I couldn’t bear to see his paintings. It took me a lot of time to make the distinction between the artist and the grandfather,” she says.
“He was not a real grandfather, or a benevolent father (to Paulo)…”
The legacy of childhood rejection took a terrible toll on Pablito. Following Picasso’s death at the age of 91 in April 1973, he swallowed bleach after Jacqueline refused him permission to see his grandfather. He died three months later.
According to Marina, “my brother wanted to embrace him for one last time and Jacqueline threw him out.”
“He went home and killed himself by drinking bleach.”
But if Picasso’s grandchildren suffered as a result of their relationship with him, the fate of his muses — bronze busts of whom dot the villa — was equally tragic.
Marie-Therese Walter hanged herself. Jacqueline Picasso shot herself. Dora Maar suffered depression and became something of a recluse. Marina’s grandmother Olga died in Cannes in 1955 unvisited by her estranged husband.
“He loved women and used them in order to be creative,” she says flatly.
Four decades on, Marina has tried to overcome the bitter legacy of the past.
The Cannes house, long since renamed Pavillon de Flore, has been restored and is now filled with paintings, sculptures and ceramics by Picasso, and other artists.
Funding projects such as an orphanage in Vietnam has also helped the mother-of-five feel she has put her inheritance to good use and she now plans to turn her attention to philanthropic work in France.
With children, she says, it is what happens at the start of their lives that is the most important.
“The more that one can help (when they are) young, the better they will live later,” she adds.
“Picasso, Nudity Set Free” runs until October 27 at the Centre d’art La Malmaison at Cannes.
Rene Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967), ‘La Trahison des Images’ (The Treachery of Images), 1928-9. Low-resolution image originally from Univ. of Alabama site ‘Approaches to Modernism.’ The artwork is now owned by Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Image restored and enhanced by Shimon D. Yanowitz, 2009, for Wikipedia. Fair use of low-resolution image of possibly copyrighted artwork to illustrate an educational article about Magritte’s move into surrealism.
NEW YORK (AFP) – A new exhibition focused on Belgian painter Rene Magritte’s embrace of surrealism will visit museums in Chicago, Houston and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, organizers said Tuesday.
“Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938” groups some 80 paintings, collages, photographs and objects, and will be at the MoMA from September 28 through January 12 before moving on to the Menil Collection in Houston and the Art Institute of Chicago.
“This will be the first show in a museum devoted to the work of Magritte to be held in New York City in over 20 years, a generation,” Anne Umland, the organizer of the MoMA exhibition, told reporters.
After starting out as an impressionist and trying his hand at cubism, Magritte (1898-1967) started edging closer to surrealism in 1926 while still living in Brussels.
The following year he moved to Paris and from then on committed completely to the surreal style of painting, creating fantastical landscapes and portraits incorporating bowler hats, apples and pipes.
Josef Helfenstein, director of the Menil Collection, noted that while “Magritte stayed for less than three years in Paris, … it was the most productive period in his life. He produced over 200 paintings.”
The exhibit includes some of his best-known works, such as “La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images), “Les amants,” (The Lovers) “Le faux miroir” (The False Mirror) and “L’assasin menacé,” (The Menaced Assassin) giving an appreciation of “Magritte’s unique genius,” Umland said.
“Many of the key strategies that we will see Magritte developing — framing, doubling, repetition for defamiliarizing the familiar and for making the ordinary and the everyday deeply strange.”
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ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Rene Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967), ‘La Trahison des Images’ (The Treachery of Images), 1928-9. Low-resolution image originally from Univ. of Alabama site ‘Approaches to Modernism.’ The artwork is now owned by Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Image restored and enhanced by Shimon D. Yanowitz, 2009, for Wikipedia. Fair use of low-resolution image of possibly copyrighted artwork to illustrate an educational article about Magritte’s move into surrealism.
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) – A Virginia Beach man is selling his historic plane collection and may close a museum that houses them.
Gerald Yagen owns the Military Aviation Museum near Pungo. He told The Virginian-Pilot Monday he no longer has the money to keep his collection of World War I and II-era planes that is billed as one of the world’s largest.
He says only nine groups visited the museum last week.
“I’m subsidizing it heavily every year and my business no longer allows me to do that financially, and therefore I don’t have a solution for it,” he said.
So far, he said he’s sold two planes: a Boeing B-17, a heavy American bomber, and a Focke-Wulf 190, a single seat German plane. Both were used during World War II.
Yagen said he doesn’t know how many planes he owns. Some in Virginia Beach have never been exhibited. He said he has other around the world that won’t make it to Virginia Beach.
The Aviation Institute of Maintenance in Chesapeake and three other vocational trade schools Yagen owns have been acquired, he said.
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Information from: The Virginian-Pilot, http://pilotonline.com
Two birdhouses created for this year’s auction by Tricia Marshall and Dorothy Strauss. Image courtesy of Wellfleet Preservation Hall.
WELLFLEET, Mass. – Wellfleet Preservation Hall will conduct its Sixth Annual Birdhouse and Garden Auction on Sunday, July 14, 2013. A preview and silent auction will be held from 10-11 a.m., with the live auction starting at 11:15 a.m. A $15 admission fee includes Morning munchies, coffee and tea.
“The Birdhouse Project started with the idea of recycling some of the old materials from the building as part of a our green building project. Building a habitat from these materials for our nearest neighbors – the birds that inhabit the lovely garden park behind the hall – inspired a lot of creativity in the community. The birdhouses become little pieces of history from the hall,” said Anne Suggs, WPH founding board member.
Artists, artisans, builders, community members and woodworkers have been creating unique hand-painted and crafted designs for birdhouses and other garden-inspired art using recycled wood, tin and slate that were once part of Wellfleet Preservation Hall. This is the sixth year of the project that began as a fundraiser for the restoration of the building. Proceeds from the event now support ongoing programming at the two-year-old Community Cultural Center in the heart of Wellfleet center.
The birdhouse and garden art auction will take place in the garden behind Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St, Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Cape Air, 3 Harbors Realty and Donna L. Drown, First Vice President – Financial Advisor, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney are the event’s sponsors.
Wellfleet Preservation Hall, fully renovated and restored, opened two years ago in the heart of Wellfleet Center. It is a year-round community cultural center offering theater, music, dance performances as well as community gatherings and classes.
Marker stones at the Little Bighorn Battlefield, Montana. At left: the marker for a Cheyenne warrior, Hahpehe’ Onahe (Closed Hand). At right: the marker for a US 7th Cavalry soldier. Both photos by Mark A. Wilson, Dept. of Geology, The College of Wooster.
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) – Settlement talks have broken down between the government and the director of a Custer-themed Montana museum seeking the return of items seized during an artifact fraud investigation, according to court documents.
The two sides have filed legal papers asking U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen to resolve the dispute, after negotiations that began last year and had been overseen by another judge came up short.
Custer Battlefield Museum director Christopher Kortlander has said for years that the museum in Garryowen legally possessed the 22 war bonnets, medicine bundles and other items confiscated by federal agents in 2005 and 2008.
The raids came during a five-year investigation into Kortlander’s alleged dealings in fraudulent artifacts and eagle feathers in violation of federal law. Although no charges were ever filed, government attorneys have continued to question whether Kortlander and the museum acquired the items legally.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said in court documents filed Friday that most of the items the government has not returned have feathers from protected eagles, making them possible contraband. Several of the items were stolen from a member of the Crow tribe, the government claims, although there’s been no allegation that Kortlander was involved in the thefts.
The government dropped its investigation into Kortlander in 2009. Most of the items seized during the raids — including 7th Cavalry memorabilia, other American Indian artifacts and thousands of pages of documents — have since been returned.
But the government’s refusal to return the remaining items has shadowed Kortlander, and he has struggled in federal court to discredit the government’s claims. Those efforts have included a lawsuit in which he unsuccessfully sought $188 million in alleged damages from the dropped investigation.
Kortlander’s attorneys said the items rightfully belong to the museum, and that the dispute has lingered even though “each alternative explanation offered by the United States for its continued possession of the Items has been thoroughly refuted.”
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Victoria Francis asked Christensen to reject Kortlander’s attempt to reclaim the items. She wrote that he has not followed up on prior promises to provide documents proving his ownership and has offered “confusing and contradictory statements” about where he got the items.
Christensen has ordered that reply briefs be filed in the case by mid-August.
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Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
Marker stones at the Little Bighorn Battlefield, Montana. At left: the marker for a Cheyenne warrior, Hahpehe’ Onahe (Closed Hand). At right: the marker for a US 7th Cavalry soldier. Both photos by Mark A. Wilson, Dept. of Geology, The College of Wooster.‘Call of the Bugle’ by J.K. Ralston, depicting the Battle of Little Bighorn. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service, U.S. Dept. of the Interior.
An Alutiiq, or Sugpiat, dancer participating in a biennial ‘Celebration’ cultural event. 2005 photo by Christopher Mertl.
KODIAK, Alaska (AP) – A Kodiak art museum is looking to buy some artwork.
The Kodiak Daily Mirror reports the Alutiiq Museum will add the artwork to its permanent collection.
A grant from the Rasmuson Foundation’s Art Acquisition program will allow the museum to purchase artwork which is reflective of the culture, history and environment of the Alutiiq people.
Previous acquisitions under the program allowed the museum to purchase a parka, jewelry collection, dolls and headdresses.
The works to be purchased must be less than five years old, already completed and created by an artist living in Alaska.
For more information about the program and to download application materials, see the museum’s website: www.alutiiqmuseum.org .
NEW YORK (AP) – The first newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence appeared on July 6, 1776, and the edition will be for sale.
Robert A. Siegel Galleries in New York City is auctioning The Pennsylvania Evening Post issue Tuesday. It’s estimated to fetch up to $750,000.
The seller wished to remain anonymous.
Four issues of the Post‘s Declaration have appeared at auction in the past 50 years. The last sold with other documents at Sotheby’s in December 2012 for $722,500.
Seth Kaller, an expert in American historic documents, says the Post printing was only the second printing of the Declaration in any form. The first was the official broadside printed by John Dunlap.
The versions differ in capitalization.
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Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Photo of outfielder Roger Maris (1934-1985) during his rookie year with the Cleveland Indians. Image from the March 1957 issue of Baseball Digest.
FARGO, N.D. (AP) – An annual charity auction in Fargo that helps raise money for the Roger Maris Cancer Center was targeted by thieves this year but still raised money for cancer work.
More than 100 items that were to be auctioned were taken from a storage facility earlier this month, a majority of them baseballs autographed by Hall of Famers including Whitey Ford, Paul Molitor and Rollie Fingers.
Autographed baseballs are historically among the top-grossing items at the auction. An autographed baseball from New York Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera had a winning bid $375 on Sunday, when a scaled-back auction was held, The Forum newspaper reported.
The missing baseballs might have raised as must as $4,000, organizers told KVLY-TV.
The auction is part of the annual Roger Maris Celebrity Golf Tournament. The event is named in honor of the late New York Yankees great who grew up in Fargo and benefits the cancer center, Hospice of the Red River Valley and Shanley High School in Fargo. Maris died of cancer in December 1985, at age 51.
Auction coordinator Jerry Rostad told The Forum that the theft of items was discovered when preparation for the tournament began earlier this month. Burglars used bolt cutters to break the lock on the storage locker and made away with 111 items.
Rostad said he wants to get the word out in the event the thieves try to sell the stolen merchandise through online bidding sites or local pawn shops and sports collectible hobby stores.
“I don’t know if we will get them back, but after something like this happening you feel a little bit violated,” he said.
The highest-grossing item at this year’s auction was a full-size Minnesota Vikings “Purple People Eaters” football helmet autographed by Alan Page, Carl Eller, Jim Marshall and Gary Larsen, which netted a $3,000 winning bid.
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Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Photo of outfielder Roger Maris (1934-1985) during his rookie year with the Cleveland Indians. Image from the March 1957 issue of Baseball Digest.
