The Getty Museum, in response to critiques over its painting collection, has acquired Édouard Manet’s “Portrait of Madame Brunet.”  The purchase is the first major acquisition under new president and CEO James Cuno, and was made through New York gallery Luhring Augustine.  “This is a significant addition to what I would call the greater museum of Los Angeles, which is how I present any picture to the board,” said curator Scott Schaefer.  (more…)

Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872), via Royal Academy of Arts

London’s Royal Academy of Arts is currently exhibiting an ambitious retrospective of portraiture by iconoclastic French painter Édouard Manet (1832 – 1883), collected from across Europe, Asia and the United States.  This is the first-ever exhibition of work by Manet that focuses on his broad body of portraiture, tracing the artist’s artistic evolution in the format throughout his life, as well as his contributions to modern portraiture in the contemporary era.  While Manet worked across a range of subjects in figurative painting, portraiture makes up about half of his body of work, offering perhaps the strongest evidence of the artist’s creative motivations throughout the course of his life.

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In an unprecedented move, French President François Hollande has cleared Édouard Manet’s 1863 painting Olympia to leave the French capital for the first time since it was given to the nation in 1890.  The painting will travel to Venice for this year’s Biennale, where it will sit beside Titian’s The Venus of Urbino, which itself is legally unable to leave Italy.  “We want to show how Italian cultural models influenced Manet,” says Guy Cogeval, director at the Musée D’Orsay, where the Manet masterpiece has been on view for over 100 years.
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Vik Muniz, Pictures of Magazine 2 (Installation View), via Galeria Elba Benítez

Currently on view at Galeria Elba Benítez in Madrid, Pictures of Magazine 2 is a solo show for Brazilian artist Vik Muniz.  The works in this exhibition are created using Muniz’s unique collage process, combining magazine images to recreate the works of famous artists, all while incorporating his own artistic bent. He then takes photographs of his finished collages, enlarges them, and prints them to create the finished piece. (more…)

The Getty Institute has announced that it will purchase the former Knoedler Gallery’s complete archives. Before the gallery was mired in lawsuits and closed its doors, it was an 165-year old institution whose client roster included Paul Mellon, Henry Clay Frick and Robert Sterling Clark. It exhibited and sold work by van Gogh, Manet, Winslow Homer, Frederic Church, John Singer Sargent, Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman, among others. The well-preserved archive includes stock books, sales books, photos and illustrated letters from artists and collectors. (more…)