THE man who has run the National Gallery since 1987, Neil MacGregor, is on the verge of being picked as the new director of the British Museum.
read more at: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/
(A very good choice! TC)
Arson fear in Cathedral fire
Police investigating a fire feared to have caused millions of pounds of damage at one of Britain's oldest cathedrals say it may have been started deliberately.
Smoke from the blaze at Peterborough Cathedral is thought to have affected an ornate 13th- century ceiling, which had only just been restored, and severely-damaged the church organ.
more: http://www.itv.com/news/Britain9757572.html
Taliban Took an Ax to Antiquities
More than 2,750 items in Afghan National Museum were destroyed in regime's war on art, experts say.
By PAUL WATSON, TIMES STAFF WRITER
KABUL, Afghanistan -- There was something sadistic about the way two Taliban government ministers and their shock troops destroyed many of Afghanistan's precious works of art. They did it with smiles on their faces. They walked through the National Museum here in the capital last year, inspecting each object to determine which ones depicted living beings. And then they raised their axes and brought them down hard, smashing piece after piece of Afghan history into oblivion. It was such a high priority that the Taliban minister of information and culture, Mullah Qudratullah Jamal, and the minister of finance, Aqajan Motaseb, led the wrecking crew, witnesses said. Over three days, as the Taliban ministers walked from one artifact to another, an Afghan archeologist and a historian followed at a respectful distance, pleading for mercy as if begging for the lives of their own children. The Taliban's war on Afghan art got world attention in March, when its soldiers blew up two enormous Buddhist statues sculpted from a cliff overlooking Bamian, the Hazaras' ethnic heartland.
But the destruction of the Bamian Buddhas--dating back to the 3rd and 5th centuries--was only the most widely publicized event in the Taliban's systematic campaign to destroy Afghanistan's cultural heritage, which went largely unnoticed in the rest of the world. "I don't know why they changed and became the enemy of our ancient things," said Mir Abdul Rauf Zaker, an archeologist and director of the Institute of History at the Afghan Academy of Science. "It was their own idea. I don't think they were trying to punish the outside world, though, because if a father faces a difficult condition, he never kills his own child." Zaker and historian Yahya Mohebzadah had spent years trying to keep thousands of Afghan cultural treasures at the National Museum from ending up in the ruins of war. One Buddhist statue was among the most precious. It was a clay image of a bodhisattva, a Buddhist who seeks complete enlightenment, made 1,600 years ago. "Before, when we needed to move the bodhisattva, we were afraid it would break and didn't touch it," Mohebzadah said. "So it was difficult for me to see it being smashed with an ax.
"I was crying," he continued, and tears welled up in his eyes all over again. "One of the Taliban saw me, and I pretended that my hand was hurt, and that I was cold. They asked me if I was crying, and I said, 'No.' " The Taliban found more than 2,750 items that were renderings of living things and therefore had be destroyed because, according to the regime's interpretation of Islam, they were idols that offended God. Zaker, 50, and Mohebzadah, 38, were ordered to act as guides for the two Taliban ministers. The officials simply wanted a tour of the museum, they were told. "But when they entered, they were like a hungry tiger looking for prey," Mohebzadah said. "The minister told us that if we tried to stop the destruction, they would break our heads with the same ax." On the first day, the delegation arrived about 4:30 p.m. and spent about two hours in the museum, breaking objects with stones. The next day, they returned with axes. When Taliban soldiers from the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice joined in, they used sledgehammers, Mohebzadah said.
Destruction Amused Minister, Historian Says
It meant nothing to them that the Islamic world has produced some of the most beautiful art-- including depictions of living beings--in the history of humankind, he said. "The Taliban wanted to have a superior Islam in Afghanistan," Mohebzadah said. The culture minister himself singled out the remains of a limestone statue of King Kanishka, whose realm around the 2nd century included present-day Afghanistan. It was under Kanishka that Buddhism reached its peak in Central Asia, and during his reign, art and literature flourished. The National Museum's statue of Kanishka, dating from the time he ruled, was already missing the top half of his body on the day of the Taliban tour. The only thing left that resembled a human form were his two feet. Mohebzadah and Zaker gently suggested to the minister that he need not destroy an ancient statue that was half ruined already. The mullah raised his ax and pounded it to pieces, amused by his own work, Mohebzadah said.
Museum staff had managed to hide crates full of other museum pieces, but the Taliban found and destroyed them too. Mohebzadah and Zaker were able, however, to conceal a few statues, such as a delicate 7th century Buddhist male deity. A tourist guide to the National Museum, printed by the Afghan government in 1974, is now Mohebzadah's pocket guide to all that has been lost. Most of the items listed in its glossy pages are gone, he said. When the Taliban seized Kabul in the fall of 1996, ancient Afghan art was at first left alone. The Taliban concentrated instead on what it considered the pollution of Western culture and banned music, films and television. The regime allowed the museum to continue its preservation and storage work with the support of a European-funded organization called the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage. The organization, along with the United Nations, supported the museum's effort to catalog and restore artifacts damaged by the four years of vicious fighting in Kabul that preceded the Taliban takeover. Those very catalogs--its photographs now littering the museum compound--helped the Taliban search for things to destroy as the regime became more isolated and more extreme.
"When the Taliban came to power . . . the process of cataloging and collecting items continued for another two or three years," Mohebzadah said. "Unfortunately, we didn't know that a time would come when all would be destroyed." The two-story National Museum opened in 1979, the year of the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, Mohebzadah said. The museum exhibited prehistoric rarities, such as a sculpted stone head made about 20,000 BC, unearthed by archeologists at Aq Kupruk, and displayed a range of artworks spanning thousands of years, right up to modern times.
Museum Looted, Burned During '90s Civil War
In 1992, three years after the Soviets withdrew in defeat, the district became the front line between fighters of two of Afghanistan's most brutal factions: the Hezb-i-Islami, the biggest recipient of covert U.S. aid during the moujahedeen war against the Soviets, and Hezb-i- Wahdat, an ethnic Hazara militia. The two sides blasted each other from 1992 until the arrival of Taliban troops four years later, and as the front line shifted, one side or another looted and burned the National Museum, which lost most of its roof and second-floor exhibition galleries. After the civil war began in 1992, the museum cataloged all the museum pieces and counted about "34,000 items that were packed and categorized and saved in good places," Mohebzadah said. Many were moved to the Kabul Hotel for safekeeping in 1995. By the time the Taliban seized power a year later, the museum estimated it had lost 70% of its ancient items, including some that were 4,000 years old, Mohebzadah added. The museum might have added some new discoveries to replace the lost artifacts, but the Taliban stopped that too, he said.
Three years ago, Mohebzadah and Zaker got wind of a secret excavation near the town of Khost, where the Taliban were said to be digging up idols that were at least 1,700 years old, Zaker said. He and Mohebzadah saw that Taliban soldiers, perhaps working for smugglers, were making a mess of what could be an important archeological site. So they asked the Taliban government for funds to do a proper dig. They got nothing and finally gave up. The only government help the treasure hunters wanted was from the Ministry of Mines, Zaker said. That was the only place they could get a free bulldozer. http://www.latimes.com/ Jos van Beurden beurden@nwsbank.nl
Afghanistan antiques at the Dutch art market
As we have come to know from some reliable sources, during a major fair for bric-á-brac collectors in the Jaarbeurs in the city of Utrecht in the weekend of November 17 and 18 a couple offered some fourty ancient buddhaheads for sale. Their hight was between eight and 15 centimeter. The underside of each clearly showed traces of theft. The stalholders, both of them foreigners, claimed that the heads had come from Afghanistan. They asked prices of US$ 2,400 and more. The couple was not willing to tell more about the provenance or their own background. The fact that they had chosen a bric-á-brac fair, and not a more prestigious fair or galery, can be an indication that they had come to test the Dutch market. It was the first time since the events in Afghanistan, that objects, which apparently had been illegally excavated in Afghanistan and smuggeld to the Western world, were publicly offered for sale in the Netherlands.
Before The Nazis Came
Anna Rohleder, Forbes.com
There's no museum for French art in New York--between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the subject is thoroughly covered. But now a new museum dedicated to German and Austrian art, the Neue Galerie New York, steps in to fill the gap in art history left by other American institutions. The brainchild of Ronald Lauder, the chairman of cosmetics maker Estee Lauder (nyse: EL - news - people), the Neue Galerie grew out of a fascination that developed with German and Austrian art during his teenage years. Lauder, 57, bought his first drawing, a work by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele, with money from his bar mitzvah. With a net worth estimated at $3 billion, Lauder conceived and funded the museum with the help of the late dealer Serge Sabarsky. It's housed in a mansion on Manhattan's Upper East Side, on the same stretch of Fifth Avenue shared by the Guggenheim, the Jewish Museum and the Met. In addition to his interest in collecting and connoisseurship, Lauder also maintains personal and business ties to Central Europe. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Austria from 1986 to 1987, and funds Jewish educational and religious organizations in Eastern Europe and Russia through the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. He also holds a 29.33% stake in Central European Media, a TV broadcasting company with stations in Ukraine, Slovenia, Slovakia and Romania.
For the better part of the 20th century, German and Austrian art has been underappreciated by collectors in the U.S. and other non-German-speaking countries, primarily because of its largely groundless association with Nazism. Though movements like German Expressionism and the Wiener Werkstätte had enormous influence on the development of visual and decorative arts on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1900s, the art created in Germany and Austria in the early part of the 20th century has often been neglected in America, in favor of other European movements like the Fauves in France or the Italian Futurists. German art in particular was considered specialized, of interest primarily to Germans; though Austrian art enjoyed a broader audience. Well before the rise of Hitler, much German art of the early 20th century developed in response to political or social circumstances of the day. Works created in the interval between the two wars, in particular, often took as their subjects the anonymity of big-city life or the inequalities of capitalism. By contrast, Austrian artists came out of a culture that valued aesthetics over politics, and created works that were often ornamental rather than polemical. As a result, the decorative arts played an important role in the development of modernism in Austria, and the Neue Galerie reflects that. The museum's inaugural exhibition, "New Worlds: German and Austrian Art, 1890-1940" includes furniture by Koloman Moser and jewelry by Josef Hoffmann, both founders of the Wiener Werkstätte at the turn of the century. Translating as the "Vienna Workshop," the Wiener Werkstätte was a school of design and architecture modeled on the Arts-and-Crafts movement in England.
The opening of the Neue Galerie follows just two months after the unveiling of a similar museum in Austria, the Leopold Museum in Vienna. Like the Neue Galerie, the Leopold Museum is the result of an individual vision. In this case the vision belongs to an Austrian eye doctor named Rudolf Leopold, who began collecting in the 1950s and built up the largest collection of works by Egon Schiele in the world. Two of the Schieles from Leopold's collection became the object of controversy when they were seized by the Manhattan district attorney as possible Nazi loot, while on loan to MoMA in 1998. The paintings were eventually returned to Leopold, though he dispensed with any further legal headaches once he sold the collection to the Austrian government. As part of Vienna's brand-new Museums Quarter, the Leopold Museum occupies a stark white cube constructed on the site of the former Imperial stables. By contrast, the Neue Galerie is housed in an elegant 1914 Carrère & Hastings mansion with a Viennese-style café in the museum, meant to add to the atmosphere of fin-de-siècle elegance. Schiele paintings and drawings occupy pride of place at the Neue Galerie, alongside pieces by Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Vasily Kandinsky and Erich Heckel. Currently, most of the works on view at the museum are on loan from private collections--the permanent collection is still being assembled. But with Lauder behind the venture, the Neue Galerie is bound to grow quickly. After all, the closest competition is 4,000 miles away.
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http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/2001/11/21/1121hot.html