Museum Acquisitions Round-Up: A Double-Sided Print By Kirchner And One Of The Most Depicted Black Models In Pre-20Th Century Art The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Museum Acquisitions Bring New Light to Black Portraiture, German Modernism, and Sound Art

Three institutions have added works that widen the frame of their collections in sharply different ways: a portrait of Pierre Louis Alexandre by Alma Holsteinson at the Art Gallery of Ontario, a double-sided print by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at Jena Kunstsammlung, and an audio work by Jennie C. Jones at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin.

At the AGO, the newly acquired Portrait of Pierre Louis Alexandre (around 1879-80) centers a figure whose life moved across the Atlantic and into the visual record of 19th-century Europe. Born in French Guyana, Pierre Louis Alexandre (1844-1905) stowed away on an American cargo ship and arrived in Stockholm in 1863. There, he worked at the docks and as a life model at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where Holsteinson painted him, likely in the same session as Karin Larsson's portrait of Alexandre, which shows him in the same pose and clothing and was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 2024.

The Holsteinson painting sold at Bukowskis in Stockholm in December 2024 for 760,000 kronor ($82,200), more than seven times its estimate. Caroline Shields, the AGO's curator of European art, said the acquisition advances the museum's goal of“representing a more expansive history of Europe and the global interconnectedness of the African Diaspora.”

In Germany, Jena Kunstsammlung has acquired Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Portraits of Botho Graef and Hugo Biallowons (1915), a double-sided print that places the archaeologist and art historian Botho Graef (1857-1917) on one side and his partner Hugo Biallowons (1879-1916) on the other. Graef was an important advocate for younger artists, especially members of the Brücke group, and Kirchner remained close to both men. After Graef's death, Kirchner wrote,“He did me so much good... It feels to me as if my father were dead, more, much more.”

The print had been in a German private collection for 50 years and was purchased with a contribution from the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation. It was originally part of Graef's substantial holdings, to which Kirchner donated 260 woodcuts, lithographs, and etchings after the historian's death. Those holdings were confiscated by the Nazis in 1937 and, labeled“degenerate art,” were partly destroyed.

The Blanton Museum of Art has acquired RPM (revolutions per minute) (2018) by Jennie C. Jones for its Butler Sound Gallery, the university museum's outdoor space dedicated to sound art. Jones, who created the 2025 Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden commission Ensemble, works across painting, sculpture, installation, and audio composition, and describes her practice as an exploration of“listening as a conceptual act.”

RPM was originally commissioned for The Glass House, Philip Johnson's Modernist house in Connecticut. The nearly four-minute loop is a minimalist audio collage, and its acquisition was funded by the Butler Sound Gallery Endowment, which supports the gallery built with a $5 million gift from Sarah and Ernest Butler.

Together, the three acquisitions point to a broader institutional shift: museums are not only filling gaps in their collections, but also revisiting the histories, media, and voices those collections have long left at the margins.

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