Emilie Gordenker announced as new general director of Van Gogh Museum

Our daily round-up of news from the art world 

Emilie Gordenker announced as new general director of Van Gogh Museum | The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has announced Emilie Gordenker as its new general director. Gordenker joins the museum from the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where she has served as director since 2008, overseeing several significant exhibitions, in addition to a major expansion between 2012 and 2014 which doubled the museum’s total surface area. Succeeding general director Axel Rüger, who has moved to the Royal Academy of Arts in London as CEO and secretary, Gordenker will take up her new position on 1 February 2020.

Stefan Edlis (1925–2019) | The Chicago-based collector Stefan T. Edlis has died at the age of 94. Born in Vienna, where he lived until fleeing Nazi occupation in 1941, Edlis later settled in New York, marrying Gael Neeson in the 1970s, with whom he built an important collection of pop art. Among other philanthropic ventures, in 2015 the couple donated 44 pieces, with a value of $500 million, to the Art Institute of Chicago, which included works by Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol, among other important 20th-century artists.

Arthur Jafa named as winner of Prix International d’Art Contemporain | The winner of the 47th Prix International d’Art Contemporain (PIAC) is the African-American artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa. Selected for his video work Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016), Jafa will receive a €75,000 cash prize, which includes funding for the artist to produce a new work. The winning artwork, which was selected by a jury from the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco, will be shown at Palazzo Madama in Turin from 1–13 November.

Thief steals $20,000 Salvador Dalí etching from San Francisco gallery | A man has stolen an etching by the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí from a gallery in San Francisco. Listed at $20,000, the colourful work, La Girafe en Feu (‘The Giraffe on Fire’; 1966), was one of Dennis Rae Fine Art’s most prized pieces. Surveillance footage shows a man wearing a blue cap and blue Nike shirt carrying the work, which had been placed on an easel, along the street outside the gallery.

E. A. Carmean, Jr. (1945–2019) | Modern-art historian and museum director E. A. Carmean, Jr., has died at the age of 74. Born in Springfield, Illinois, Carmean studied at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, receiving a BA in Art History in 1967. He was the founding curator of 20th-century art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and he later directed the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth in Texas and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Tennessee. Carmean subsequently became an Episcopal canon, while continuing to write on art and religion.