Portland Art Museum criticised for raising money for provisional extension

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Portland Art Museum has raised $27m for extension without planning permission | Portland Art Museum has been criticised after raising some $27m for an extension project that it does not yet have planning permission. The $50m project was announced in 2015 as the ‘Rothko Pavilion’, in honour of one-time Portland resident Mark Rothko. The museum has since announced that it has raised funds, but without having secured permits from the local authority. ‘It’s a pretty big error in judgment,’ planning consultant Peter Finley Fry told Willamette Weekly.

Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève named European Museum of the Year | The Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève has been named 2017’s European Museum of the Year, reports Deutsche Welle. The jury of the prize hailed the MEG, which reopened in 2014 after four years of renovations, as an ‘excellent example of a living museum’. The award was founded in 1977 and seeks to recognise innovations in the museum sector.

Tracey Emin and Lehmann Maupin part company | Tracey Emin will no longer be represented in the USA by New York gallery Lehmann Maupin, reports the Art Newspaper. The gallery, which has represented Emin since the 1990s, announced that it would be parting ways with the artist by mutual agreement.

Recommended reading | In the Art Newspaper, Anna Sansom gauges the reactions the reactions of France’s artists, gallerists and art historians to Emmanuel Macron’s victory over Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election. Meanwhile in New Orleans, tempers have flared over the city government’s proposals to remove statues of monuments commemorating Confederate Civil War figures – Richard Fausset investigates for the New York Times. In London, Tate Modern’s Giacometti new exhibition has so far received blanket praise from the critics. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones describes it as a ‘truly great exhibition of an artist whose compassion and honesty matter more now than ever’.