€500m Cerruti Collection goes to Castello di Rivoli

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Castello di Rivoli enters partnership with Cerruti Collection | The Castello di Rivoli in Turin has announced a ‘special partnership’ with the Cerruti Collection, the encyclopaedic art collection of the late Francesco Federico Cerruti, worth an estimated €500 million. Around 300 sculptures and paintings, as well as several hundred rare books and furnishings, will be incorporated into the contemporary art museum and housed in a newly renovated villa that Cerruti built at Rivoli, expected to open to the public in January 2019. The museum’s director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev described the project as the first of its kind, noting that ‘Instead of a museum of the past adding a contemporary wing, we are a museum of today, looking at the art of the past from a contemporary perspective’.

£3 million jewellery heist at Masterpiece London | Around £3 million worth of jewellery has been stolen from Genevan jeweller Boghossian’s stand at Masterpiece art fair in London. The Evening Standard reports that the theft took place between the hours of 5pm on Tuesday evening and 9:30am on Wednesday this week. The fair, which is continuously monitored by professional security teams, has said that it is ‘fully co-operating’ with investigating police.

New Orleans Museum of Art acquires works by 10 African-American artists | Ten works have been acquired by the New Orleans Museum of Art from an Atlanta-based foundation that seeks to increase museum representation of African-American artists from the American South. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation has placed in the museum’s permanent collection works by artists including Thornton Dial, Ronald Lockett and Mary Proctor, as well as five quilts made by the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama.

Recommended reading | Swedish-Cherokee artist America Meredith has written a piece for Artnet titled ‘Why it Matters that Jimmie Durham is not a Cherokee’. Meanwhile, writing for the London Review of Books, Anne Stillman explores the life, or lives, of Jean Cocteau recorded in Claude Arnaud’s newly translated biography: ‘the more time you spend with Cocteau the more Cocteaux appear’ (£). At Artsy, Isaac Kaplan looks at three notable cases from art lawyer and holocaust restitution specialist Nicholas M. O’Donnell’s book A Tragic Fate: Law and Ethics in the Battle over Nazi-Looted Art. And the Architect’s Journal has compiled a series of tributes to Bryan Avery, the ‘thinking man’s architect’ behind London’s IMAX cinema, who died earlier this week aged 73.