Toledo Museum of Art criticised for selling artefacts from collection

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Toledo Museum criticised for selling works from collection at auction | Ohio’s Toledo Museum of Art has sold some of the antiquities in its collection, including Greek and Egyptian artefacts, to purchase new works, reports The Art Newspaper. The museum put 68 works up for auction at Christie’s New York last month. The Cypriot ambassador to the US requested that the sale be postponed, citing the ‘unspeakable destruction and illicit looting of cultural heritage’ in the Middle East and North Africa; the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities asked for the objects to be returned to Egypt. Both Christie’s and the Toledo Museum of Art have insisted that there were no legal reasons for not proceeding with the sale.

Galleries in LA’s Boyle Heights vandalised | Several art galleries in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights area have been vandalised – by anti-gentrification protestors according to some reports. The LA Times writes that the Los Angeles Police Department is investigating the vandalism as a possible hate crime. The predominantly Latino district has been a focal point for anti-gentrification activism in recent months, and the L.A.P.D. believes that graffiti daubed on to the galleries may be linked to wider protests.

Protestors demand removal of statue from Contemporary Istanbul | A sculpture of Abdulhamid II the last Ottoman sultan at the Contemporary Istanbul art fair, has sparked protests from members of a conservative religious group, reports Sanatatak (Turkish language article, via Artforum). The work, which was created by artist Ali Elmaci, was on display at Chilean gallerist Isabel Croxatto, and has since been withdrawn from public view.

Recommended reading | The New York Times and the Guardian both look back at the floods that hit Florence 50 years ago this month. Meanwhile in London, Tate Britain’s decision to present Paul Nash as a prominent international modernist, rather than a British artist, seems to have caused controversy. In the Sunday Times (£), Waldemar Januszczak complains that the Tate seems ‘embarrassed’ by British art, but he is nonetheless won over by the ‘fabulous’ loans the museum has secured.