Our daily round-up of news from the art world
Edmund Capon (1940–2019) | Edmund Capon, the London-born curator, art scholar and director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) between 1978 and 2011, has died at the age of 78. Capon’s leadership transformed the AGNSW; in the 33 years of his tenure, visitor numbers increased fourfold and the number of artworks in the collection more than doubled, with major acquisitions of works by Cézanne, Picasso, and Sidney Nolan. In 1994 Capon was made a member of the Order of Australia, and in 2003 he was awarded an OBE for his promotion of British art in Australia.
Barbara Hammer (1939–2019) | The experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer has died at the age of 79. Hammer rose to prominence in 1974 with the short film Dyketactics; her first full feature film, Nitrate Kisses (1992), looked at the persecution of LGBT people since the First World War. In 2017 Hammer founded the annual $5,000 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant and in October 2018 she performed ‘The Art of Dying’, a lecture about her experience of producing art while suffering from terminal illness.
Research into Gurlitt hoard identifies Signac painting as Nazi loot | Provenance researchers from the German Lost Art Foundation have identified that a painting by Paul Signac, part of the Gurlitt collection currently held in the Museum of Fine Art in Bern, was stolen by the Nazis during the Second World War. The painting was bought by the real-estate broker Gaston Prosper Lévy in 1927, and was seized by the Nazi officials shortly after he fled France in 1940. It is the seventh work from the collection of Cornelius Gurlitt to have been identified as Nazi-confiscated. German culture secretary Monika Grütters has commented that she expects the painting to be restituted to Lévy’s descendants soon.
Recommended reading | In the Guardian, Hettie Judah speaks to Mike Nelson about his new commission for Tate Britain, which opens today. In the The Times Louis Wise interviews Julian Schnabel about his new film At Eternity’s Gate, a biographical drama about Vincent van Gogh.
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