Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin. Huber collection of Spanish and Portuguese colonial art: The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin has purchased the Roberta and Richard Huber collection of Spanish and Portuguese colonial art. Amassed by the New York-based couple over 45 years and valued at around $2.5m, the 119 objects include paintings, sculptures, furniture and silverwork made across what is now Latin America between the late 1600s and early 1800s. A selection will go on show in the museum’s exhibition Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial America, opening in October. Courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek. Cecily Brown’s Where, When, How Often and with Whom (2017): The British artist Cecily Brown has donated a 10m-long painting to Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The work Where, When, How Often and with Whom gives its title to Brown’s current solo show at the museum, and will remain on view there after the exhibition ends on 10 March. The large triptych reflects Brown’s interest in the Old Masters, drawing inspiration from shipwreck paintings by Delacroix and Géricault as well as from news images of French police officers accosting a veiled woman on a beach in Nice in 2016. The museum’s director Poul Erik Tøjner describes the artist’s gift as “a uniquely generous gesture”. Courtesy of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Whitney Museum of American Art. New York Norman Lewis’s American Totem (1960): The Whitney Museum of American Art has bought Norman Lewis’s American Totem, a 1960 painting by one of the few African-Americans associated with the New York School of Abstract Expressionist artists. Lewis (1909-1979) executed the painting while shifting from looser, brighter gestural calligraphic forms to a series of black-and-white paintings. The totem references a hooded Ku Klux Klansman composed of forms evoking skulls and masks. Acquired from Lewis’s estate at an undisclosed price through the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York, the painting is due to go on view at the Whitney on 28 June. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum
Foundling Museum. London Andrea Soldi’s Isabella Duchess of Manchester (1738): The Foundling Museum has bought a portrait of Isabella Montagu, Duchess of Manchester, a key early supporter of the Foundling Hospital—Britain’s first home for abandoned children. It is only the third portrait of a woman to enter the museum’s permanent collection, having featured in the recent exhibition Ladies of Quality and Distinction. The show gathered portraits of the 21 women who signed Thomas Coram’s 1735 petition to King George II for a royal charter to establish the hospital. The £95,000 purchase was funded by the Art Fund, the Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant Fund, the Friends of Thomas Coram and a number of individual donors. Courtesy of Foundling Museum
University of Texas at Dallas. Crow collection of Asian art: Upholding the adage that “everything is bigger in Texas”, the Crow family has made a bumper gift to the University of Texas at Dallas. This comprises the Crow Museum of Asian Art in the Dallas Arts District, which the university will now run, and its collection of more than 1,000 works of Asian art assembled by the late Trammell and Margaret Crow, as well as a library of 12,000 books, journals and catalogues and $23m to open a second museum on campus. Dallas-born Trammell Crow, a property developer, became interested in Asian art on business trips to the continent, and he and Margaret began their collection—spanning ancient to contemporary works from 12 countries—in the 1960s. Highlights include Chinese jades and an 18th-century carved red sandstone facade from Rajasthan Courtesy of University of Dallas
Kunstmuseum Basel. Seven classical Modernist works: The Christoph Merian Foundation has given seven Modern works to the Kunstmuseum Basel with a combined insurance value of SFr20m ($19.8m). They were bequeathed to the Basel-based charitable foundation by a local couple, Frank and Alma Probst-Lauber, as part of their SFr120m ($119m) fortune to benefit the city. The gift includes three Picassos—a 1953 drawing of a woman in an armchair, a 1948 oil-and-gouache painting of a bouquet of flowers and Faun unveiling a sleeping woman, an aquatint from the Vollard Suite (1930-37)—as well as abstract compositions by Klee, Léger and Dubuffet, and Giacometti’s Portrait of Caroline (1962). Courtesy of Kunstmuseum Basel
Top six acquisitions of the month
Our pick of the most significant new gifts and purchases to enter museum collections worldwide, from a totemic Klansman to the art of colonial Latin America
Cecily Brown’s Where, When, How Often and with Whom (2017) © Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; courtesy of the artist