Good Morning!
- Ukrainian drones struck and set on fire the Defense of Sevastopol museum in Crimea.
- Self-taught photographer Duane Michals has died at 94.
- Brussels’ 2003-founded dépendance gallery is closing.
The Headlines
CRIMEA CULTURAL CONFLICT. Yesterday, Ukrainian drone strikes on supply chains to Russian-controlled areas also set ablaze a war museum in the Russian-annexed region of Crimea, called the Defense of Sevastopol, reported Reuters. Images showed the roof of the 19th-century building on fire, and according to a statement by Sevastopol city official Mikhail Razvozhayev, the museum’s early 20th-century panorama painting by Franz Roubaud, The Siege of Sevastopol, was damaged. However, “pieces” of the original canvas remained unharmed, a museum spokesperson added. Meanwhile, in related news from the region, staff at Ukraine’s Oleksii Shovkunenko Kherson Oblast Art Museumhave identified an allegedly Russian-looted painting by artist Nina Marchenko, made in 1986, taken from their collection in 2022, and currently housed in Crimea’s Central Museum of Tavrida. The painting was spotted in a photo taken during an official visit by “the occupation administration,” according to a Kherson Art Museum social media post.
IN MEMORIAM. Self-taught photographer Duane Michals has died at 94, reported the New York Times. His dealer, Bridget Moore of DC Moore Gallery, confirmed his passing at a hospital in Manhattan on Tuesday. He is credited with shaking up modern photography with narrative forms often told like a comic strip, supplemented with his own, often poetic, handwritten captions and titles. He was inspired by autobiographical themes as well as by the works of William Black, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Cornell, and René Magritte. “When I write, it’s to talk about what you cannot see in the photograph,” Michals said in a 2019 interview. “It’s to augment the photograph, to give voice to the silence of it.” Michals published over 25 books and exhibited throughout much of his career, which continued into his 90s, and included retrospectives at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan. In recent years, he collaborated on short films with Josiah Cuneo. “I want to know what something feels like, not what it looks like,” he once said.
The Digest
Frieze London and Frieze Masters have named nearly 300 exhibitors for fall fairs. [ARTnews]
The beloved, 2003-founded Brussels gallery dépendance (styled in all lowercase), is closing. [press release]
Charleston’s International African American Museum is temporarily furloughing its entire staff, including leadership, in staggered increments between July 1 and December 31 due to financial pressures. [ABC News 4]
Painter Khoo Sui Hoe, an influential figure of Malaysian and Singaporean art, died in his home in Arkansas at age 86. [ArtAsiaPacific]
Over the next three years, the Scottish government has pledged to grant £56 million (nearly $75 million) to the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) to build The Art Works, a major interactive storage art space in north Edinburgh that will house over 130,000 previously ‘hidden’ works from Scotland’s national collection, modeled after London’s V & A East Storehouse. [The Art Newspaper]
The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., has just landed a $15 million gift from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, the largest in the museum’s history. [The Art Newspaper]
See photographs of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia Basilica in Barcelona illuminated and surrounded by fireworks to celebrate Pope Leo XIV’s blessing of its newly completed tower 100 years after Gaudí’s death. [El País]
The Kicker
HOME SWEET HOME. Heading to Europe this summer? Here’s a guide to Italy’s unique, smaller house museums, by Artribune. There’s the Casa Mollino Museumin Turin, dedicated to the eponymous designer who lived from 1905 to 1973. It is located right in his self-designed apartment, conceived as a “spiritual” home. “Here, one walks among walls covered with hundreds of butterflies under glass, mirrors that multiply the corridors, and a boat-shaped bed resting on a sea-blue carpet,” writes Luisa Taliento. Or check out the labyrinth-like home of sculptor Lodovico Pogliaghi (1857 – 1950) in Varese, who famously made the Milan Cathedral’s main portal. In his eclectic studio and home, you’ll find a life-size plaster model of the cathedral portal, as well as a collection of Roman glassware, antique fabrics, and Roman Baroque drawings. Read on to learn about the Remo Brindisi House Museum in Lido di Spina, and the 14th-century Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo in Arezzo, to name a few.
