PORTLAND, Maine (AP) – Four art museums, all located in Maine, are entering the new year seeking new top executives. The Portland Museum of Art, Farnsworth Museum of Art in Rockland, Ogunquit Museum of American Art and Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick are all operating with interim directors.

The biggest of the four is the Portland Museum of Art, which has been without a permanent director since Daniel E. O’Leary retired last spring. There’s no timetable for naming a successor at the museum, which lures 150,000 visitors a year and has a budget of $4.5 million.

Michael Conforti, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, says the situation in Maine is a fluke and doesn’t suggest any particular trend.

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Information from: Portland Press Herald,
http://www.pressherald.com

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-ES-01-11-09 0938EST

LONDON (AP) – Local officials say a British museum has agreed to return two Aboriginal skulls and thigh bones to Australia.

Council officials in Brighton, southern England, say the remains are due to be taken back to Australia but has not said when. They say the Australian government has agreed to meet the bill for their transport.

The council says the bones were donated to the Booth Museum of Natural History nearly 100 years ago and have little in the way of research value.

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WASHINGTON (AP) – The Smithsonian Institution is receiving $700,000 for the inauguration.

The Presidential Inaugural Committee has announced that it is donating the money to fund security, maintenance and special programs at the museum complex on Inauguration Day.

Among other things, the money will allow the National Museum of American History and the Castle building to open at 8 a.m. on Inauguration Day, two hours earlier than normal.

The money also will help the Smithsonian present special programs such as Renewing America’s Promise. The history museum’s three-day celebration runs from Jan. 17-19. It will feature music, gallery talks, book signings and actors portraying presidents and First Ladies.

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Information from: The Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-ES-01-07-09 0914EST

LOS ANGELES (AP) – The financially troubled Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles has accepted a bailout from billionaire Eli Broad worth as much as $30 million.

In a deal to be announced Tuesday, Broad has promised to match donations to the museum’s endowment up to $15 million, and to give $15 million over five years toward exhibitions, Broad and museum board members said.

The museum – better known as MOCA – has a respected collection of works produced since 1940, but has recently suffered from severe money shortages.
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WASHINGTON (AP) – George and Martha Washington, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and other costumed characters greeted thousands of visitors Friday as the National Museum of American History reopened after a two-year, $85 million renovation.

Former Secretary of State and retired Army Gen. Colin Powell read President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to a crowd of at least 200 people on the museum’s steps before the doors opened.

“It is the 19th of November, 1863,” Powell said after the blare of horns announced the start of the famous speech. “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Powell’s Army uniform hangs in the museum’s gallery on military history.

The museum opens “a new era of education and inspiration,” Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough said. “We aspire to tell the story of America and of Americans to ourselves and to the world.”

The Children’s Chorus of Washington sang the national anthem, the crowd waved small American flags, and many wore red, white and blue top hats.

The museum opened a three-day festival with the firing of a cannon from the era when The Star-Spangled Banner poem was written in 1814. Set to the British tune To Anacreon in Heaven, the poem became the U.S. national anthem.

Inside, visitors found favorite exhibits, such as Kermit the Frog, and a gallery devoted to the American presidency, where President-elect Barack Obama’s picture already has been added to a timeline of presidents. Several people gathered around the small photo to take pictures with their cell phone cameras.

“He’s already on here! It’s exciting,” said Amelia Castelli, 26, who was visiting from Florida and spent several minutes getting the right snapshot of Obama’s picture.

Her goal for the day lay elsewhere.

“What I wanted to see were Dorothy’s ruby red slippers,” Castelli said. “That’s the only thing I really remember from being here years ago.”

Museum officials plan to have costumed historic characters on hand every weekend and daily during the busy summer months. George Washington greeted many children on the opening day, teaching them to bow “as we do in Virginia,” he said, rather than shake hands.

Sometimes called America’s attic, the Smithsonian is a collection of more than one dozen museums, including the National Museum of American History, plus the National Zoo. It resulted from a bequest of Englishman James Smithson, a scientist who died in 1832. His will said, without explanation, that the money should be used to build in Washington “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” He had never been to the United States.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

AP-CS-11-21-08 1656EST

ROME (AP) – The Cleveland Museum of Art agreed Wednesday to return 14 ancient treasures ranging from Etruscan jewelry to a Medieval cross that authorities say were looted or stolen from Italy.

Italian Culture Ministry officials and the director of the Cleveland museum signed a deal in Rome to transfer the artifacts within three months in exchange for long-term loans of other treasures.

The agreement is the latest success in an Italian campaign to recover artifacts that survived for centuries only to be dug up by looters, smuggled out of the country and sold to prestigious museums across the world.

Similar deals have yielded the return of scores of pieces from museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in California and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Director Timothy Rub stressed that the Cleveland museum had not knowingly acquired or received looted items. He said they were bought or donated to the museum in the 1970s and 1980s.

The treasures to be returned from Cleveland are mostly a sampling of art produced by the Etruscans and by Greek-influenced cultures that dominated central and southern Italy before the rise of Rome.

The objects are “of great historical, artistic and archaeological interest,” Italian Culture Minister Sandro Bondi said.

Among them are a pair of Etruscan silver bracelets from the 6th century B.C. and a bronze statue of a horned warrior, dated to the 9th-8th century B.C., which experts said is one of the finest remaining from a civilization that populated the island of Sardinia.

Most of the artifacts are elaborate and richly decorated pottery pieces from 5th to 4th century B.C. southern Italy.

They include vessels shaped as a donkey head, a pig and a duck as well as a 3-foot-tall vase attributed to the so-called painter of Darius – an artist named after one of his works which depicts the ancient Persian king.

The odd object in the group is a 14th century gold-plated processional cross stolen in the 1960s from a church near Siena, in Tuscany.

The artifacts were shown to have been looted mainly because photos and documents related to them turned up in raids conducted in the 1990s on the Swiss warehouses of antiquities dealers accused of controlling the flow of illegal art exports from Italy. The raids sparked what has turned into a worldwide hunt for Italy’s lost treasures.

The deal signed at the Culture Ministry came after nearly two years of negotiations that began when the museum contacted the Italians to check if Rome was seeking to recover any of its antiquities.

“When putting together a collection it is important that any museum acquire works ethically,” Rub said.

Bondi and Rub said the two sides had established a joint commission to determine within six months the provenance of two more contested pieces: a statue depicting Nike, the winged victory deity, and a bronze of the Greek god Apollo.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-CS-11-19-08 1549EST  

PHILADELPHIA (AP) – Philadelphia is preparing for an exhibit of works by postimpressionist painter Paul Cezanne and the artists he influenced.

The show is called ‘Cezanne and Beyond’ and will open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in February. It will be the exhibition’s only world viewing.

The show includes about 60 Cezanne paintings, plus paintings by Picasso, Matisse and others who were influenced by Cezanne.

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) – The Harvard Art Museum has received a gift of $45 million and 31 major works of art, including three paintings by Picasso.

Harvard University on Friday announced the gift from Class of 1936 alumna Emily Rauh Pulitzer, a former curator at the museum and wife of the late newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer Jr.

The financial gift is the largest in the history of the museum.

The donated artwork includes Picasso’s paintings, Harlequin, Landscape and Portrait of Dora Maar; the Joan Miró painting Woman in the Night; and a Roy Lichtenstein sculpture, Sleeping Muse.

The gifts coincide with the start of a museum initiative that includes an extensive renovation and efforts to better integrate the collections and programs into university life.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-CS-10-17-08 1143EDT