World news digest
Canada: Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi will spend 10 days this month creating site-specific drawings on the walls of the Roloff Beny Gallery at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The work will remain on display until summer 2010. Dan Perjovschi: Late News is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Canada.
Chechnya: A museum devoted to Leo Tolstoy has reopened in the Chechen village of Starogladovskaya, where the writer lived during the 1850s. Funding of $3.4m came from the foundation of Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s president.
Tolstoy’s great-great grandson, Vladimir, has pledged to loan copies of archival documents to the new institution. Curators at the Yasnaya Polyana museum, based at Tolstoy’s estate in the Tula region, will launch a permanent exhibition at the new venue.
France: The Musée du Luxembourg in Paris closed last month and is not set to reopen until early 2011. Twenty-five members of staff were subsequently made redundant and two planned exhibitions have been cancelled.
The closure follows the decision by the senate, the upper house of parliament that manages the institution, to terminate the contract with the commercial company SVO late last year, which had organised 17 exhibitions at the museum since 2002.
Germany: German officials have refused to return an ancient bust of Queen Nefertiti to Egypt, following demands by Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. The 3,300-year-old artefact is too fragile to travel and was acquired legally by the Prussian state almost a century ago, say representatives at the newly reopened Neues Museum in Berlin, where the bust is on display.
US: Michael Brand has resigned from his post as director of the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles a year before his contract was due to expire. He will be available to serve as a consultant until the end of the summer while David Bomford, associate director for collections, will serve as interim director.
Meanwhile, New York art dealer Jeffrey Deitch has been named as the next director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
US: The Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art and Science in California closed last month because of financial losses. The museum has been struggling since a three-year renovation, completed in 2008, went over budget.
Compiled by Gareth Harris.
Seen in the Los Angeles Times, The Art Newspaper, San Francisco Chronicle, BBC and Le Monde