The British Prime Minister canceled a meeting with the Greek Prime Minister, who had called for the return of the Parthenon marbles in a BBC interview last Sunday (November 26). The British government then offered Kyriakos Mitsotakis a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden, an offer which was refused. On Wednesday, Sunak told British MPs that the cancellation took place when it appeared that Mitsotakis intended to “bring up and revive issues of the past”. British Museum chairman George Osborne criticized Sunak for his actions. Speaking on his Political Currency podcast on Thursday, Osborne speculated that Mitsotakis’ earlier meeting with Labor Party leader Keir Starmer could have been a factor. Osborne reiterated this week that the British Museum was not seeking to change the British Museum Act of 1963, which prohibits it from disposing of objects from the collection; any deal would involve the loan of sculptures traveling between London and Athens. By contrast, Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, claimed this week that legislation such as the British Museum Act and the National Heritage Act of 1983 had “infantilised” the trustees of national collections when it came to the return of objects they owned. the guard. “We disagree with our colleagues in France, Germany and the Netherlands, and I think that almost affects Britain’s reputation in the world,” Hunt said.
Photographer Elliott Erwitt is dead at the age of 95. Invited to join the Magnum founded in 1953 by its founder Robert Capa, the American photographer remained a member until his death and was its president in the late 1960s. Born Elio Romano Ervitz to Russian Jewish parents in Paris, Erwitt grew up in Milan and emigrated with his family to the United States in 1939. His most famous photographs include Richard Nixon pushing Nikita Khrushchev in the chest, the funeral of John F. Kennedy, and portraits of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara taken in Cuba in 1964. However , the works for which Erwitt is best known are his portraits of dogs, which were the subject of four books. Writing about their call in the introduction to dog dog (1998), he said: “I know of no other animal closer to us in terms of qualities of heart, feeling and loyalty. » He has exhibited at institutions such as MoMA in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Barbican in London, and in 2002 the Reina Sofia in Madrid organized a comprehensive retrospective of his work. Museums also provided Erwitt with another rich source of material, which he published in the book Museum viewing (1999). Christina Middel, current president of Magnum, said in tribute: “It is difficult to measure the impact that Elliott Erwitt had on Magnum and on the world of photography. His images have helped build our general understanding of who we are as a society and as humans (…).
The Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam returned 565 objects, including hundreds of Scythian gold items, at the National History Museum of Ukraine, ending an ownership dispute that began after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. The museum Dutch had borrowed the objects from four Crimean institutions for the “Crimea” exhibition. – Gold and the secrets of the Black Sea”, opened a month before Russia invaded the peninsula. Crimea’s museums, now backed by the Russian government, appealed a series of lower court rulings ordering that the objects should be returned to kyiv, but in June the Dutch Supreme Court upheld the lower courts’ verdict. The National History Museum of Ukraine confirmed that all 565 objects were received safely on November 26. Allard Pierson Museum director Els van der Plas said: “This is a special case in which cultural heritage has become a victim of geopolitical developments.” Writing on X, President Volodymyr Zelensky said the objects would return their former institutions “when the Ukrainian flag is in Crimea.”
Curator and writer Vincent Honoré has died at the age of 48. Since 2019, he has been director of exhibitions at Montpellier Contemporain (MO.CO.), where he has produced critically acclaimed exhibitions including ‘Possessed: Deviance, performance, resistance’ in 2020-2021 and, more recently, an exhibition of the work of Huma Bhabha (until January 28, 2024). His career, during which he gained a reputation for championing women and queer artists, has largely taken place between the United Kingdom and his native France; Honoré also served as director of the 13th Baltic Triennale, which took place across all three Baltic states in 2018. Before joining MO.CO, Honoré was senior curator at the Hayward Gallery in London from 2017 to 2019; from 2008 to 2017, he served as founding director and chief curator of the David Roberts Art Foundation.17and worked as a curator at the Tate Modern in London from 2004 to 2007 and at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris from 2001 to 2004. In 2011, Honoré co-founded Confessions in the living room, a series of books based solely on conversations with one artist per edition. After his death on November 29, Nicolas Bourriaud described Honoré as “one of the most brilliant conservatives of his generation”. (In September 2018Amrou Al-Kadhi reviewed Honoré’s exhibition “DRAG: Self-Portrait and Body Politics” at Hayward for Apollo.)
