The First Art Newspaper on the Net
by Doreen Carvajal
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- For more than 70 years, Léone Meyers family has fought to reclaim a looted painting, and yet she cannot bear the thought of displaying it in her Left Bank home, across from the River Seine. The small work, by Camille Pissarro, shows a shepherdess tending her flock, and hangs not far away at the Musée dOrsay, with other precious French impressionist paintings. But the peaceful countryside scene from 1886 is fraught with a backstory of plunder, family tragedy and legal battles that stretch from Paris to Oklahoma. Meyers mother, grandmother, uncle and brother died in Auschwitz. Her father hid the painting in a French bank that was looted in 1941 by the Nazis, and the work vanished in the murky universe of art market collaborators and middlemen. Decades later, in 2012, she discovered the whereabouts of La Bergère, or Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep, in the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, at th
The Kind Cruelty. León Ferrari, 100 Years , exhibition now on view at Museo Reina Sofía
Installation view.
MADRID
.- The project The Kind Cruelty. León Ferrari, 100 Years stems from an agreement reached between Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari Arte y Acervo (FALFAA, Buenos Aires) and Museo Reina Sofía. It aims to shine a light on the work of León Ferrari (Buenos Aires, 19202013) in Europe, preserving his heritage trough three institutions by dint of a far-reaching and pedagogical vision fostering the contextualization and dissemination of his legacy.
The project is a long-term collaboration between three museums: the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven and the Musée National d Art Moderne Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Ferrari family proposed to each of these institutions the donation of a complementary heritage set that covers the diversity of techniques, themes and materials that Ferrari used in his long artistic career and that will be made kno