Museum of Fine Arts Boston new Norman Foster designed American wing. Photo: Manuel.A.69 via Flickr

The Museum of Fine Arts Boston has hired Hirshhorn curatorial assistant Al Miner as assistant curator of contemporary art.

Last December the museum announced the hiring of Jen Mergel, the former associate curator at Boston’s ICA as the MFA’s contemporary curator. (Boston Globe report here)

Here’s a blog posting  on D.C. pub TBD which mentions Miner’s own artworks. Here’s Miner’s website.

Here’s the  all-staff message circulated by the museum:

“The Department of Contemporary Art and MFA Programs is pleased to announce that Al Miner, currently Curatorial Assistant at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian’s contemporary art museum in Washington D.C., will become our new Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art. Al is scheduled to start at the MFA in mid-September.

Since 2005, Al has supported and coordinated a wide array of contemporary exhibitions at the Hirshhorn and he has been directly responsible for a number of major artist projects and commissions. As curator and project team leader, he helped realize key works by Yoko Ono, Catherine Opie and Dan Graham, each resulting in gifts and acquisitions to the Hirshhorn.…

Metropolitan Museum of Art cornice. Photo: laudylaudy via Flickr

Art Market Views contributor Mackie Healy has complied a list of the Met’s upcoming shows.

Her picks? Baldessari and a photo exhibit uniting early 20th century geniuses Stieglitz, Steichen and Strand. I would add a show of Charles Rohlfs sinuous furniture designs and 16th century Flemish painter Jan Gossart — in a show partly funded by Hester Diamond, who was among Larry Salander’s victims.

Met’s Upcoming Exhibitions, Fall 2010 and Spring 2011

The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty
September 28, 2010 – January 2, 2011
Exhibit will feature work from Khubilai Khan’s reign in the Yuan Dynasty from 1215 though 1368 and highlight art forms that emerged as a result of the unification of China.

The Roman Mosaic from Lod, Israel
September 28, 2010 – April 3, 2011
Feature exhibition of a well preserved and colorful mosaic floor from a large home in Israel. Exhibited for the first time ever outside of Israel.

Miró: The Dutch Interiors
October 5, 2010 – January 17, 2011
A series of three paintings by Joan Miró is juxtaposed with two…

Bruce Nauman. "Self-Portrait as a Fountain" from the portfolio Eleven Color Photographs. 1966–67/1970. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gerald S. Elliott Collection © 2010 Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

Dolls, dummies, toothpaste, Brancusi’s studio and French cathedrals are among subjects on display at MoMA’s cerebral and sweeping new photography exhibit.

The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today runs until Nov. 1. The show opens with a 1981 Barbara Kruger work, starring a statue with supermodel cheek bones, borrowed from the collection of hedge funder Steve Cohen and wife Alexandra. Titled Untitled (Your Gaze hits the Side of My Face) the slick and sly eye-wink of a piece is the perfect introduction to a show by turns witty, hard-core art historical and altogether pleasurable.

Curator Roxana Marcoci spotlights the intersection of photography and sculpture with over 300 images by more than 100 artists. Her presentation is artful, down to the immaculate vinyl wall labels.  Don’t miss the show’s comprehensive website, found here. (In these cash strapped days, we noticed collector David Teiger is among the show’s funders).

The exhibit is arranged into ten themes, beginning with early photographs by Charles Nègre’s French cathedrals and other representations of classic sculpture.  Gyula Halász’s — AKA Brassaï–  snapshot of the students…

Howard N. Spiegler, attorney for the estate of Lea Bondi Jaray, in front of a projected image of Egon Schiele's "Portrait of Wally," at ceremony at Museum of Jewish Heritage. Photo: Mackie Healy

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

About fifty heirs of art dealer Lea Bondi Jaray gathered this morning for the unveiling of Egon Schiele’s 1912 Portrait of Wally, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan, marking the resolution of the landmark Nazi looting case.

Andre Bondi, Lea Bondi Jaray’s great-nephew, spoke at the event, wiping tears from his eyes with a red cloth.

The museum’s chairman, Robert Morgenthau, took the podium after Bondi. “All’s well that ends well,” he said.

As Manhattan’s District Attorney, Morgenthau was responsible for the 1998 subpoena of the painting.

The portrait of the artist’s red-headed muse, in storage for the last 11 years, remains on view at the Jewish Heritage Museum until August 18. Then it will return to the Leopold Museum in Vienna where it will hang beside a 1911 Schiele self-portrait.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and police commissioner Raymond Kelly attended the morning’s proceedings. Howard Speigler, attorney for the Bondi Jaray estate and Andre Bondi, the heirs’ spokesman, were among speakers on a panel about the case.

The court case was settled last week, on the eve of…

Norman Rockwell "Rose the riveter." Photo: Crystal Bridges

Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton’s Bentonville, Arkansas, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art may still be under construction, but that doesn’t mean parts of the collection can’t be admired elsewhere.

The museum has loaned two major examples of illustration art by Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell to the Toledo Museum of Art.

The loans are Parrish’s noctural 1908  The Lantern Bearers and Rockwell’s 1943 Rosie the Riveter.  The works will be on view in Toledo beginning Aug. 17.

Both works are familiar to American painting auction goers.

Parrish’s Lantern Bearers, depicting clowns holding lanterns on a staircase, sold for $4.3 million at Christie’s in New York in 2006. The patriotic Rosie sold for $4.95 million at Sotheby’s in 2002.

Since 2005 Crystal Bridges has loaned 68 works of art to 38 institutions, according to a museum press release. Some 34 works are currently on loan to 15 museums in the US and beyond.

The outdoor bar at David Bohnett and Tom Gregory's cocktail party for LACMA's new Resnick Pavilion. Photo: Patrick McMullan

Amid Southampton’s hedgerows and Bentleys, LACMA trustee and technology entrepreneur David Bohnett and partner Tom Gregory hosted a cocktail party last Sunday to herald the Oct. 2 opening of the museum’s Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion.

The $54 million one-story Renzo Piano designed Resnick Pavilion is located beside the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. The 45,000 square foot structure is open-plan, naturally lit and wrapped in a glass and marble exterior.

The Resnicks are serial entrepreneurs. They own POM–which sparked the the pomegranate juice craze–as well as Fiji Water and Teleflora, among others. They used to own the Franklin Mint. A 2008 New Yorker profile of the “Pomegrante Princess” is here.

LACMA’s fall gala on Sept. 25 will honor the Resnicks. The host committee includes David Geffen, Terry Semel, Michael Milken and Jane Nathanson.

Shelley and Donald Rubin via New York Social Diary

Himalayan art collectors Donald and Shelley Rubin, founders of the Rubin Museum of Art, were motivated sellers.

Their 8,000 square foot townhouse at 122 East 70th Street lingered on the market for a year, tagged $20.9 million. In May the Rubins slashed the price to $14.9 million and snagged a buyer, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

The article quotes brokers predicting fallout from the Rubins’ re-pricing efforts, warning other would-be sellers “expect to see lower offers.” (See property listing here.)

It’s hard to work up much sympathy for sellers of Upper East Side townhouses, or even the Rubins, who acquired the house, with a hot tub and roof garden, in 1995 for a mere $5 million. It seems the Rubins cleared around $10 million on the deal.

Rubin, who founded a health care network, forked over $22 million three years later for the former Barneys building on 17th Street. The Rubin Museum opened in 2004 and has an annual budget of $13 million. The museum is currently searching for a new chief curator, more here.

Governor Paterson and other museum officials at Parrish museum groundbreaking. (Director Terrie Sultan in pattern dress to Patterson's right). Photo: Phyllis Tuchman

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

Governor Paterson donned a hard hat and wielded a shovel this morning on a grassy field in Long Island for the groundbreaking of the new $25 million Parrish Art Museum.

Paterson, accompanied by museum director Terrie Sultan, trustee Dorothy Lichtenstein and assorted others, kicked off the estimated two-year construction project.  The 14-acre Southampton site will house a new 34,000 square foot building, slated to open in 2012.

Designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, the sleek low-slung one-story building will rise on the north side of Montauk Highway in Watermill and double the footprint of the current space. The building includes 12,000 square feet of exhibition space, with 7,500 dedicated to the permanent collection of American art, along with educational and multi-purpose spaces, offices, on-site storage, a gift shop and a café.

The new Parrish is the first art museum to be built on the East End of Long Island in over a century.

The groundbreaking begins just one year after the initial design was announced. Nearly seventy percent of the $25 million budget has already been raised.

The Parrish…

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

A retired elementary school educator from Winchester, Kansas gave most of her estate to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for the study and acquisition of Judaica.

The estate of Jetskalina Phillips, who had “no known history” with the MFA, according to a notice about the gift from director Malcolm Rogers, will support two new Judaica endowment funds: one for acquisition and another for curatorial work.

A search for Judaica among the 346,000 objects listed on the museum’s website  yielded zero matches. The MFA was historically a bastion of Yankee taste and patronage. (UPDATE: Last year the museum acquired a 1750 German silver gilt Hanukkah Lamp, found here.)

“These are both firsts for the MFA and will undoubtedly make a significant statement about our commitment to Judaica as an art form,” said Rogers in his announcement.

Phillips died in December of last year. Her hometown, Winchester, Kansas had little in common with Boston. Winchester boasted fewer than 600 residents in 2000 and more than ten percent of families live below the poverty line.

She was 85-years-old at her death, according to an obituary on the

Emile Bernard "Self Portrait with Portrait of Van Gogh," 1888, Van Gogh Museum

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views, Contributor

The Indianapolis Museum of Art has acquired a rare 10-foot tall cabinet by French artist Emile Bernard, better known for his flat, atmospheric, and melancholy tinged paintings of rural people and their countryside. The 1892 cabinet is only one of only four known examples of carved wood furniture created by Brittany’s Pont-Aven School.

The corner cabinet belonged to Swiss Post-Impressionist collector of Samuel Josefowitz who made a fortune from mail order and record clubs. Josefowitz has been  trustee of the Indianapolis Museum since 1990. In 1998 he sold 17 paintings (and donated 84 prints) by Gauguin and followers to the museum, for an estimated $30 million.

The folksy cabinet is carved and painted to depict scenes from Breton life. The polychromed wood surface is adorned with flowers, tendrils and a woman’s headdress, recalling the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts movements.

Bernard was an innovator in early modern painting. His auction record stands for the Portrait de Madame Schuffenecker, which sold at Tajan for $515,707 in 2006.

Bernard, along with Paul Gauguin, was the founder of the group of artists known as the…