Rebecca Rabinow leaves the Met to lead the Menil Collection

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Rebecca Rabinow named new director of the Menil Collection | Rebecca Rabinow, currently the curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum, where she is also the curator in charge of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, will be the new director of the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. The New York Times reports that Rabinow, who will take up her new post in July, was raised in Houston and interned at the Menil Collection after graduating. Since joining the Met, Rabinow has curated exhibitions on Cubism, and Matisse, and organised the 2007 reinstallation of the museum’s 19th- and 20th-century galleries of European painting and sculpture.

Artists join campaign for the UK to stay in the EU | More than 250 British writers, artists, musicians have signed an open letter arguing that the creative industries will suffer if the UK leaves the European Union; many of the signatories, the letter says, ‘have worked on projects that would never have happened without vital EU funding or by collaborating across borders’. Leading artists who have signed include Steve McQueen, Elizabeth Price, Jeremy Deller, Anish Kapoor, Cornelia Parker, and Richard Wentworth. The commentator and former National Trust chairman Simon Jenkins has poured scorn on what he calls a ‘luvvies’ letter’ – and most of the media coverage has singled out the actors on the list for ridicule or praise. The visual arts sector may need to raise its profile…

Lost Renaissance sculptures found in Moscow | Fifty-nine Renaissance Italian sculptures, thought lost from collections in Berlin during the Second World War, have been found in Moscow’s Pushkin Museum. They include works by Donatello and Andrea del Verrocchio which were housed in what is now the Bode Museum (formerly the Kaiser Friedrich Museum). They were taken to Moscow by the Red Army as reparations for the Soviet Union’s war losses. The discovery was announced at a symposium in Florence in early May, reports The Art Newspaper. The head of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the organisation that has been working with Russian researchers, says, ‘We can’t rule out finding more.’

Indianapolis Museum of Art slightly less in debt | The Indianapolis Museum of Art has announced that it will be able to pay off $17 million in debt by the end of this year, which means that for the first time since 2004, it will owe less than $100 million. ‘We are on the road to financial stability,’ said chief financial officer Jerry Wise.