May 5th, 2021 - The work is part of a campus-wide exhibition exploring themes around European and African mythologies A monumental bronze sculpture by the Harlem-based artist Sanford Biggers was unveiled this morning at Rockefeller Center. The work Oracle (2020) continues the artist’s recent Chimera series of sculptures, which combine elements of African and ancient Greco-Roman sculpture to reference historical revisionism and the “white washing” of Classical sculptures that were once polychromatic, and ...
May 4th, 2021 - This week, Frieze makes its return to New York. Scuttled last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, the five-day event will be the city’s first in-person, single-venue art fair since the Armory Show last spring (and Frieze’s first showing since Frieze L.A. in February 2020). Much about Frieze New York will be familiar to regulars, from the wide-ranging group of participating galleries to the engaging program of discussions, screenings, and other activations planned; but perhaps more still ...
May 4th, 2021 - It’s no secret that the American painter and master of " romantic symbolism " Cy Twombly is one of the most accomplished artists of his generation: throughout his career, Twombly produced spare works of astonishing depth that frequently referenced great poets and ancient myths. The Cy Twombly Foundation recently launched a complaint against changes made to the surroundings beneath Twombly’s ceiling in the Louvre; his representatives are as passionate as his fans. Last week, Sotheby’s ...
May 3rd, 2021 - He was the inventor of ‘art brut’ who rebelled against his parents, his teachers and then art itself. Yet the impact of his wild provocative paintings, often culled from graffiti, can still be seen today W hich great artist of the 20th century has been most influential on the 21st? Neither Picasso nor Matisse, as they have no heirs. And not Marcel Duchamp, however much we genuflect before his urinal. No, the artist of the last century whose ideas are everywhere today was a wine merchant who ...
May 1st, 2021 - Eli Broad , a collector who dramatically reshaped Los Angeles’s art scene with a museum in his name and large financial contributions to top arts venues, has died at 87. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which oversees his collection, announced his death on Friday night. "Eli saw the arts as a way to strive to build a better world for all," Joanne Heyler, the founding director of the Broad , the L.A. art museum he opened in 2015, said in a statement. "He was a fiercely committed civic ...
Apr 29th, 2021 - Agar isn’t as well known as some of her peers, partly because her artwork is so tricky to pin down. For years, the Tate has held a trove of artworks by 20th-century British artist Eileen Agar without even necessarily knowing it. “Interestingly, [her assemblages are] in their archive, not in their collection of artworks,” says Laura Smith, the Whitechapel Gallery curator who organized an Agar retrospective opening this May. “But she made them as artworks.” This misplacement isn’t ...
Apr 26th, 2021 - Is this the art crime of the century? “One name keeps cropping up in regard to people not to be trusted due to their links with forgeries—that of Giuliano Ruffini.” So begins a 3,000-word anonymous letter sent to the Paris art crime squad in 2014 that set in motion a chain of events destined to throw the Old Master market into turmoil. The missive—which has never before been made public—called for “an investigation into the origins of works that have appeared from nowhere.” Over ...
Apr 15th, 2021 - Adventures with Van Gogh is a weekly blog by Martin Bailey, our long-standing correspondent and expert on the artist. Published every Friday, his stories will range from newsy items about this most intriguing artist to scholarly pieces based on his own meticulous investigations and discoveries. David Hockney follows in Van Gogh’s footsteps, painting fleeting spring blossom Martin Gayford’s book pays tribute to Britain’s greatest living artist before an exhibition at London’s Royal ...
Apr 13th, 2021 - The recently rediscovered painting made headlines in 2017 when it fetched $450m at auction. Then it vanished again EVEN BY THE standards of blockbuster shows, “Leonardo da Vinci” promised to be one to remember. The exhibition, which ran for four months from October 2019, marked the 500th anniversary of the master’s death and was hosted at the Louvre, a museum which owns more of the painter’s work than any other institution. Two years earlier a recently rediscovered artwork of Jesus ...
Mar 25th, 2021 - PARIS (AFP) — One of the few paintings by Vincent van Gogh still in private hands, "Street Scene in Montmartre," was sold for over 13 million euros Thursday at auction after going on public display for the first time this week, Sotheby’s said. The painting — which emerged after a century spent in the same collection and has not been exhibited in public since it was painted in 1887 — fetched 13.091 million euros ($15.414 million), Sotheby’s said. Reaching well above the estimate of 5-8 ...
