Good Morning!
- Guillaume Cerutti is stepping down from his relatively new role as president of the Pinault Collection.
- Forgotten in storage for nearly a century, one of Napoleon’s two-cornered hats has been identified and will go on display in June.
- Precious Okoyomon’s Whitney Biennial installation of around 50 hanging stuffed animals and dolls has gone on view after a delay.
The Headlines
SACKED. Guillaume Cerutti has been dismissed from his plush position as president of the Pinault Collection, with its museums in Paris and Venice, according to a report by Glitz. The Art Newspaper later confirmed he is stepping down. The surprising departure comes only 13 months after the former Christie’s chief executive officer moved to Paris from London for the job of leading French billionaire Francois Pinault’s massive private collection. In the interim, the 89-year-old Pinault, despite reported health issues, will do Cerutti’s job himself. No explanation has been given for Cerutti’s exit. At 60, Cerutti still chairs the boards of Christie’s and the Stade Rennais Football Club, which, along with the luxury goods conglomerate Kering, are all owned by Pinault’s holding company Artémis.
TIP OF THE HAT. One of Napoleon Bonaparte’s rare, unmistakable two-cornered hats will be displayed at the Musée Condé in Chantilly, France, after it went unnoticed and forgotten in museum storage for over a century, reports Le Monde and AFP. When curator Jean-Guillaume Parich did a bit of digging for an exhibit about Napoleon’s sister and queen of Naples, Caroline Murat, he discovered the black felt, bicorn hat, and was able to piece together its impeccable provenance. Newly restored and authenticated, the hat is the centerpiece of the Musée Condé’s Murat exhibition, from June 6 to Oct. 4, and is also one of only four of Napoleon’s signature hats that the disgraced emperor took with him when exiled to St. Helena Island from 1815 until he died in 1821. In his will, Napoleon left the very same hat to his son Aiglon, but after the latter’s premature death, it was given to Napoleon’s sister Caroline in 1836.
The Digest
Bose Krishnamachari resigned as director of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) and from the board of trustees of the Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF), which he co-founded, following an accusation of sexual harassment by one of his subordinates, which Krishnamachari has denied. [The Indian Express]
The Kennedy Center has begun firing staff ahead of a two-year closure for renovation, including top appointees since President Trump took over the center: Nick Meade and Rick Loughery. [The Washington Post]
Precious Okoyomon’s Whitney Biennial installation of around 50 hanging stuffed animals and dolls has gone on view after a delay, and she talks to critic Alex Greenberger about the endeavor, which he lauds as “oddly beautiful, despite an uncomfortable mix of cuteiness and queasiness.” [ARTnews]
German filmmaker and author Alexander Kluge has died at 94. [ArtReview]
The artist Theaster Gates will return a large ceramic vase by the enslaved artisan and poet David Drake (c. 1800-1874), also known as Dave the Potter, from his personal collection to Drake’s descendants. [The Art Newspaper]
The Kicker
SWAN SONG. When an anti-nuclear weapons arts collective known as the SWANS organized a show about the environmental and human cost of nuclear weapons since the Cold War, at Pitzer College Art Galleries, Los Angeles, they didn’t realize that their message would become so ominously topical, reports the Los Angeles Times. Weeks after the show titled Atomic Dragons opened on February 7, the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran. According to the LAT‘s interviews with experts, the Gulf conflict risks triggering a long-term nuclear proliferation crisis by suggesting to some countries that nuclear weapons are needed to secure their sovereignty. SWAN stands for “Slow War Against the Nuclear State,” and the group includes artists, as well as activists, and family members of workers in the nuclear industry. “My maybe-naïve hope is that the artworks help to provide an avenue into that understanding of the severity of what it means to play with the nuclear,” said artist Fiona Amundsen. She is displaying a photograph of trees that survived the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima, which she developed using elements contaminated by Fukushima wastewater.
