Austria: A collection of 150 works on paper by Paul Klee have been donated by the inventor of the contraceptive pill, Carl Djerassi, to the Albertina in Vienna.
They had formerly been on loan to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for 20 years. The collector, who left Austria as a teenage refugee after the 1938 Anschluss, described his decision as an act of peace-making with his country of birth.
Dubai: The state museums in Berlin, Dresden and Munich have entered into a collections-sharing agreement with the newly formed Dubai Culture and Arts Authority. The Universal Museums initiative will provide a home in Dubai for museums, performance spaces, artist studios and galleries.
Partner institutions from around the world will each be given their own structure to host temporary exhibitions. Negotiations are said to be ongoing with the British Museum, the Getty and the Hermitage.
Germany: The Gallery of Contemporary Art, in Leipzig, is facing criticism over its decision to cede curatorial control of half of its galleries to dealers, private collectors and corporate art collections until 2010.
The Carte Blanche initiative allows private participants, who pay for their shows, to display their works as they wish. The gallery defended the project as an "open experiment in the way public and private resources can be used together".
Lithuania: A new museum designed by Zaha Hadid is to be built in Vilnius. Due to open in 2013, the €75m project is a collaboration with the State Hermitage Museum and the Guggenheim, which will lend works to complement the museum's own collections.
The building, which is expected to attract 400,000 visitors a year, will also house an art and information centre dedicated to the Jewish community of Lithuania, 95 per cent of which perished during the Nazi occupation.
Russia: Daria Zhukova, the partner of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, is creating an 8,000 sq metres Center for Contemporary Art in a bus garage in Moscow.
The not-for-profit venture will open in September with a retrospective of Russian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Zhukova is being advised by an international council that includes Nicholas Serota.
Vatican City: The state is launching a campaign to promote contemporary art with religious and spiritual content, and to reopen a dialogue between the church and contemporary artists. It will commission artists of international stature to produce works for next year's Venice Biennale, where the Vatican City will have its own pavilion for the first time. The state's last attempt to embrace contemporary art, in the 1960s, was stalled by traditionalists.
Compiled by Magnus von Wistinghausen. Seen in artsjournal.com, the Art Newspaper and Bloomberg
They had formerly been on loan to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for 20 years. The collector, who left Austria as a teenage refugee after the 1938 Anschluss, described his decision as an act of peace-making with his country of birth.
Dubai: The state museums in Berlin, Dresden and Munich have entered into a collections-sharing agreement with the newly formed Dubai Culture and Arts Authority. The Universal Museums initiative will provide a home in Dubai for museums, performance spaces, artist studios and galleries.
Partner institutions from around the world will each be given their own structure to host temporary exhibitions. Negotiations are said to be ongoing with the British Museum, the Getty and the Hermitage.
Germany: The Gallery of Contemporary Art, in Leipzig, is facing criticism over its decision to cede curatorial control of half of its galleries to dealers, private collectors and corporate art collections until 2010.
The Carte Blanche initiative allows private participants, who pay for their shows, to display their works as they wish. The gallery defended the project as an "open experiment in the way public and private resources can be used together".
Lithuania: A new museum designed by Zaha Hadid is to be built in Vilnius. Due to open in 2013, the €75m project is a collaboration with the State Hermitage Museum and the Guggenheim, which will lend works to complement the museum's own collections.
The building, which is expected to attract 400,000 visitors a year, will also house an art and information centre dedicated to the Jewish community of Lithuania, 95 per cent of which perished during the Nazi occupation.
Russia: Daria Zhukova, the partner of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, is creating an 8,000 sq metres Center for Contemporary Art in a bus garage in Moscow.
The not-for-profit venture will open in September with a retrospective of Russian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Zhukova is being advised by an international council that includes Nicholas Serota.
Vatican City: The state is launching a campaign to promote contemporary art with religious and spiritual content, and to reopen a dialogue between the church and contemporary artists. It will commission artists of international stature to produce works for next year's Venice Biennale, where the Vatican City will have its own pavilion for the first time. The state's last attempt to embrace contemporary art, in the 1960s, was stalled by traditionalists.
Compiled by Magnus von Wistinghausen. Seen in artsjournal.com, the Art Newspaper and Bloomberg
