Kunsthalle Bremen
Albrecht Dürer’s Saint Eustace
The Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany has bought back an Albrecht Dürer print more than 100 years after selling it off. The museum sold Saint Eustace (1501), the artist’s largest copperplate engraving, as a duplicate in 1903 but the second copy was later lost. The back of the print still bears the Kunsthalle’s original stamp. Saint Eustace “is one of [Dürer’s] unsurpassed masterpieces and proof of his skills as an engraver”, says Christien Melzer, the museum’s curator of prints and drawings from the 15th to 18th centuries. “It fills a major gap in the Kunsthalle Bremen’s collection of printed works, which resulted from heavy losses incurred during the Second World War.”
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Parmigianino painting
The J. Paul Getty Museum plans to acquire Virgin with Child, St John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene (around 1530-40) by the Italian Renaissance artist Parmigianino. The Mannerist painting belongs to the Sudeley Castle collection in England and was previously on long-term loan to the National Gallery in London. The acquisition, which is being arranged through Sotheby’s, will require an export licence from the UK and is awaiting a decision from Arts Council England.
Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Norman, Oklahoma
Ed Ruscha gift
The Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha and his wife Danna have donated 30 works from their private collection to the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma. Ruscha grew up in Oklahoma and approached the museum after receiving the Oklahoma Cultural Treasure award last year. The gift includes 13 works by the artist as well as examples by his Oklahoma-born friends Joe Goode and Jerry McMillan, with whom he moved to Los Angeles in the late 1950s.