Dallas Museum of Art
Bust of Herakles
The Dallas Museum of Art bought a marble bust of the Greek hero Herakles for $175,000 at Sotheby’s, New York. The 18th-century French sculptor Lambert-Sigisbert Adam made the sculpture from two unrelated fragments: a head from late first century AD and a mid-second century AD bust. Anne Bromberg, the museum’s curator of ancient and Asian art, says the combination “is fascinating both for Roman art and for later European art using Classical models”. The acquisition was funded by the Alvin and Lucy Owsley Foundation.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Double-sided painting by Erich Heckel
The first German Expressionist painting to be acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria is, in fact, two in one. Erich Heckel, a founder of the early 20th-century group Die Brücke, painted Landscape by the Fjord (1939) on the back of Great Dancing Pair (1923). He covered the earlier work with a layer of distemper, possibly to prevent it from being destroyed by the Nazi regime, but kept the canvas until he died in 1970. It was bought from Galerie Henze & Ketterer & Triebold in Basel, Switzerland, with funds donated by John and Rose Downer.
New-York Historical Society
Time archive
The Time Inc media group gave its archive of seven million documents and artefacts to the New-York Historical Society’s Patricia D. Klingenstein Library. The archive includes the personal papers of the company’s co-founders as well as original field reports, photographs and illustrations. The society is due to present an exhibition of highlights, including Muhammad Ali’s boxing robe and gloves, in a new gallery next year. The Luce Foundation is supporting the process to move and catalogue the gift with a $2m grant.