Archive for May/2012

IE is pleased to congratulate David Moshfegh, who will be the 2012-2013 International Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at IE University. David Moshfegh is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at UC Berkeley, where his work in European intellectual history has focused on the intersection of the histories of academic disciplines, Orientalism and imperialism. His dissertation, “From Kulturpolitik to Jihad: The Rise of Islamwissenschaft and German Orientalism in the Era of WWI”, examines the emergence of a new Islamicist discipline in German Orientalist scholarship in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and tracks the field’s development through the ‘Jihad debate’ within it during World War I.

La escuela inaugurará el próximo curso un nuevo inmueble en el centro de Mardrid que aumentará su capacidad un 35%. Allí trasladará los MBA y los postgrados que imparte su universidad en Segovia.

Con la llegada del nuevo curso escolar, en septiembre, IE Business School estrenará campus en Madrid. La escuela de negocios española está acondicionando el edificio, de casi 7.000 metros cuadrados, que ha alquilado a la Sociedad Estatal de Patricipaciones Industriales (Sepi), sgún ha adelantado a EXPANSION el decano de la institución, Santiago Iñiguez.

La escuela intentó hace año y medio adquirir los terrenos del Hospital del Aire, en Madrid.Incluso llegó a firmar un preacuerdo de venta con el Ministerio de Defensa por 35 millones de euros, aunque finalmente la operación no salió adelante.

NEW YORK — Sometimes beauty is trumped by the beast. After bullish expectations and an aggressive marketing campaign for an image considered the quintessential expression of modern horror, Sotheby’sNew York sold Edvard Munch‘s 1895 “The Scream” for $119.9 million on Wednesday night, setting a record for the most expensive artwork sold at auction.

The top spot was previously held by Picasso’s 1932 “Nude, Green, Leave and Bust” — a painting of his much-younger lover Marie-Therese Walter that sold at Christie’s in 2010 for $106.5 million.

The identity of the buyer, who was bidding by phone during the 12-minute auction, has not been confirmed. Bidding started at $40 million, with at least five bidders. Rumors before the sale, not confirmed, focused on interest from the royal family of Qatar.

AT THE AUCTION: Can you guess the price?

Munch’s “The Scream” achieved another milestone: It now ranks as the most expensive drawing publicly sold. For this version of “The Scream” — one of four — is best described as a crayon or pastel drawing, not a painting, on board. The Munch Museum in Oslo owns a pastel as well as a painted version, while the National Gallery of Norway holds the earliest painting, dated 1893.

And it easily beat out the previous auction record for Munch, also held by Sotheby’s. In 2008, the auction house sold the 1894 Munch painting “Vampire,” a melodramatic image of a red-haired, bare-armed woman kissing a man’s neck, for about $38 million.

Judd Tully, the art-market expert who is editor at large of Art+Auction magazine, said it was hard to identify the potential pool of buyers. “Under a dozen collectors have been identified who would buy something north of $50 million, and the number gets lower as the prices go up,” he said before the sale.

But in the case of such a “powerful and famous image,” he added, “there could be someone outside of that club who has fallen prey to the marketing campaign or just decided they wanted the image.”

The central image in this artwork is the gaping-mouthed, skull-like face and twisting torso that people know so well from reproductions, cartoons and a seemingly endless stream of merchandise, from shower curtains to neckties. The location depicted is Ekeberg Hill, an overlook point in the south of Oslo that was known as the scene of suicides.

Continue reading in LA Times

Segovia City Council signed a collaboration agreement  with IE University whereby the city’s Casa de Moneda (Royal Mint) building will house a business laboratory run by IE University to promote innovation and help develop an entrepreneurial mindset in the region. IE University will thus be collaborating with the city of Segovia to convert the Casa de Moneda, a cultural heritage building considered the oldest example of industrial architecture of its kind in Europe, into an international incubator for innovative businesses.

As from May 1st, the private University will be running the laboratory in the Casa de la Moneda building, the renovation of which was completed last year. The Casa de la Moneda was founded by Felipe II and built by Juan de Herrera between 1583 and 1588.

The key role of the laboratory will be to serve as a business incubator for students’ business initiatives. A substantial number of students from countries worldwide have already identified international business opportunities and the laboratory will serve to strengthen their projects, as well as opening them up to Segovia’s business community. There are currently ten companies created by IE University students, at different stages of development.

Students will undertake internships in the laboratory under the tutorship of their professors, who will guide them throughout the entire process, while top-tier business experts provide assessment in areas like marketing, funding, strategy and legal aspects. A group of students will work on their business projects during the spring, and another group will then take over and work on their initiatives for the rest of the year.

Work will include the preparation of external consulting projects for companies like HRT F1 Team (the Spanish Fórmula 1 motor racing team), INDRA, Fundación Atlético de Madrid, One to One, the Spanish Olympic Committee, and Prysma. These firms and institutions have signed up to have IE University students carry out consulting projects or draft reports, affording students the opportunity to get hand-on experience of  real business projects. Students who take part in the initiative will attend practical workshops throughout the year led by executives from participating organizations, in addition to having their projects assessed by professors and tutors. The aim is to equip students with the skills needed to meet the challenges they will face in their future careers.

It took three centuries before El Greco’s subversive strategies infiltrated western art

El Greco's 'Laocoön' (1610-14)

Towards the late 16th century, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, Greek icon-painter from Crete, sought his fortune in Venice, then Rome, then at Philip II’s court in Madrid. His quirky genius and difficult manners were rejected everywhere, and he wound up in Toledo, then a Spanish backwater. Here, despite falling out with senior clerics, he won acclaim, and lived for decades away from the mainstream, developing an increasingly visionary private universe of distorted, strangely lit pictorial forms.

At his death, the great outsider was working on “Laocoön” – a portrayal of the elderly Trojan priest, his serpentine naked body twisted in pain, his eyes rolling, as he tries to fend off the looping, rearing snake sent by Minerva to kill him for daring to distrust “Greeks bearing gifts”. One of his sons lies dead, a ghostly figure; the other arches back as a second snake spans his body in dynamic circular motion, setting the entire composition whirling. In the background, the wooden horse trots calmly on, set not for ancient Troy but for a heaving, darkening nightmare version of the city of Toledo beneath a sky rent with storm clouds, streaked with white highlights.
If El Greco saw himself as the Trojan horse of European painting, his subversive strategies had to wait three centuries before they truly infiltrated western art – in the deformations of modernism. El Greco had been more or less forgotten by history when Picasso studied “The Opening of the Fifth Seal” while at work on “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907), calling its creator “a cubist in construction”. A year later, a German critic lamented that “the youth have discovered Greco and now, besides this newest god, can tolerate no other”.

This is a story long waiting to be told: El Greco and Modernism, opening on Saturday in Düsseldorf’s magnificent art deco Kunstpalast, is, however, the first exhibition to dramatise, with some 100 canvases, the decisive effect on 20th-century painting of the Greek-Spanish master’s jagged, abstracting compositions, attenuated figures, and radical treatment of colour and light.

“Laocoön”, a rare loan from Washington, has a special place here: exhibited in Munich from 1911-14, its elemental drama provoked young German and Austrian experimenters to produce a crowd of explosive scenarios that now appear to anticipate the catastrophe of the first world war.

In Ludwig Meidner’s “Apocalyptic Landscape”, a seer-like figure, sprawled in the pose of El Greco’s tragic hero, collapses before a surging, ruined midnight-blue cityscape lit by glaring stars. Adriaan Korteweg’s “Laocoön” reworks the narrative in violent pink-grey swirling marks as a near-abstract composition. Oskar Kokoschka’s innocuous-sounding “Still Life with Putto and Rabbit” has the theatricality of a horror film, with grotesquely enlarged, mocking cherubs and a monster rabbit melting into a destabilised nocturnal landscape following the forms of El Greco’s Toledo.

Egon Schiele's 1912 'Agony (Death Struggle)

The most innovative modernists, as this show perceptively demonstrates, sought in El Greco mirror images of their own concerns. For Egon Schiele it was emotional expressiveness: the skeletal, pallid, racked bodies in “Agony (Death Struggle)” and “Prophets (Double Self-portraits)” have the elongated forms and agitated, nervous manner of El Greco’s saints, such as “St Francis and Brother Leo Meditating on Death”. For Max Ernst it was the proto-surreal disjunctions of colour and scale: Ernst’s sallow-green, reddish-orange “Crucifixion”, with stretched-out figures and many-towered cityscape, is clearly modelled on El Greco’s “Christ on the Cross”.

For Max Beckmann, such oversized figures compressed into claustrophobic picture spaces opened the way to his own mythic narratives of good and evil. This can be seen most notably here in Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza’s “The Immaculate Conception” and Munich’s “The Disrobing of Christ”, where spiritual significance is implied by enlarging Mary and Jesus, icon-like, out of all proportion to setting and other characters.

Continue reading in The Financial Times