Apr 23rd, 2024 - In the early 16th century, the Renaissance master  Michelangelo drew a simple scribble. The pen-and-ink sketch, which is just a few lines, depicts a marble block with the word simile (Italian for "similar") inside. Earlier this month, that 1.8- by 2.6-inch drawing sold at  Christie's for $201,600—more than 30 times its low estimate of $6,000. As Penta 's Casey Farmer reports, the sketch was found attached to the back of another work, A Battle of Giants , by an associate of ...

Apr 23rd, 2024 - The painting, which was estimated at between $4m and $6m when it was offered at Christie's in 2022, is now on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has acquired A Drinking and Musical Party (around 1619-20), a raucous genre painting by the renowned Caravaggisti, Bartolomeo Manfredi (1582-1622). The painting goes on view today (23 April) in the Getty Center's East Pavilion. Manfredi was so uniquely successful among the followers of Caravaggio at conjuring the ...

Apr 22nd, 2024 - Spotlights on Mickalene Thomas, Walter Price, and Raqib Shaw all made our list. " biennial and the Venice Biennale. The daughter of a Lebanese president, she grew up in a freewheeling art scene in Beirut until moving to Paris in 1970, five years before unrest engulfed her homeland. Writing in 2021, Walton Ford: Birds and Beasts of the Studio   American photographer Tyler Mitchell catapulted to fame photographing Beyoncé for the September issue of in 2018—the first Black artist ...

Apr 21st, 2024 - Visitors queued up at a southern French basilica Sunday to see a rediscovered painting by Italian renaissance painter Raphael. The small portrait of Mary Magdalene is being displayed for a month in the Sainte-Marie-Madeleine basilica, which houses relics of Mary Magdalene — making it Christianity's third most important tomb.  AFP saw around 50 visitors queuing Sunday afternoon to admire this forgotten painting by Raphael, known for painting "Three Graces" and "The School of ...

Apr 20th, 2024 - Fractured and fetishized. Cropped and contained. Patterned and precise. Christina Ramberg's figurative images share all those qualities and more, a coolly elegant, slyly provocative and enduringly contemporary body of work that continues to influence other artists today. Although she is internationally known, as exemplified by a 2019-20 group show in Berlin subtitled "Christina Ramberg in Dialogue," and much respected by other artists, the Chicago artist nonetheless remains underappreciated. ...

Apr 19th, 2024 - Former head of Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen takes over at a time of central government cuts to cultural institutions in Paris The curator Sylvain Amic, the former chair of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, in Normandy, has been chosen by the French President Emmanuel Macron as the next chair of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Amic replaces Christophe Leribault, who was appointed chair of the Château de Versailles in February. According to a statement from the French ...

Apr 19th, 2024 - From pieces that played an influential role in the male-dominated New York School to nature-imbued paintings created in the French countryside, the abstract artwork of Joan Mitchell took on new lives and iterations over a career that spanned more than four decades. Now, four significant works from the American artist's oeuvre will be offered up next month by Sotheby's in its Contemporary Evening Auction. The quartet of paintings dating from 1955 to 1989 come from the same private collection and ...

Apr 18th, 2024 - Acquisition a month before museum's 200th anniversary makes Gonzalès just the 20th woman artist to be represented in the collection The National Gallery in London has acquired its first painting by Eva Gonzalès, an upper-class French Impressionist painter who was tutored by Edouard Manet but whose work fell out of favour after her untimely death following childbirth in 1883. Gonzalès is the 20th woman to now be represented in the museum's collection, which includes around ...

Apr 17th, 2024 - The artist's dazzling, Boschian composition "Les Distractions de Dagobert" is expected to fetch as much as $18m at Sotheby's in New York next month Sotheby's is once again tapping into the robust market for works by top female Surrealists. The auction house expects to smash Leonora Carrington 's auction record when it offers one of her most dramatic canvases during its evening sale of Modern art on 15 May in New York. Even if Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945)—which a Sotheby's ...

Apr 16th, 2024 - Video: Frick Pittsburgh Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz: The Frick Pittsburgh, the location of the Frick family's residence in Pennsylvania, have just opened a special display of artworks reuniting collections amassed by Henry Clay Frick and his daughter Helen Clay Frick. This has been possible due to the closure of The Frick Collection in New York, which is due to reopen in the autumn of 2024. According to the blurb on the museum's website: The Frick Pittsburgh partners with New York-based ...

Apr 11th, 2024 - On April 15, 1874 – 150 years ago – the first Impressionist exhibition opened on Rue du Capucines in Paris, featuring works by 30 artists, including Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Hosted by the "Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers, etc.," it was founded in response to the Paris Salon, the annual, government-sponsored exhibition that would frequently reject the works of the rising artists. The show, ...

Mar 19th, 2024 - One structured and austere, the other sensual and joyous — Paul Cezanne and Auguste Renoir were two founding fathers of Impressionism, but a new Milan exhibition explores their sharply different styles. Marking 150 years since the founding of the art movement, 52 masterpieces by the two Frenchmen are on loan from Paris for an unprecedented show at the Palazzo Reale — alongside two by Picasso, whom they inspired. The paintings date from the 1870s to the early 20th century. Renoir and ...

Mar 6th, 2024 - Like other shows that have sought to shed new light on artists known to a wide public, such as the Met's " Van Gogh's Cypresses ," "Matisse and the Sea" at the Saint Louis Art Museum illuminates the permanence of the ocean in Matisse's works and how they evolved . Through more than seventy paintings, ceramics and sculptures plus his famous paper cut-outs, Henri Matisse is revealed as not only a visionary but also a disciple and a collector. The exhibition, which considers how Matisse's stays ...

Jan 30th, 2024 - Founded in 1956, Brafa is one of the world's oldest and most prestigious annual art fairs, showing ancient and modern painting, textiles, sculpture, jewelry, silverware and furniture. This year's fair, at the iconic 1930s Brussels Expo buildings (until 4 February) features 132 international galleries from 14 countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. There's plenty ...

Jan 10th, 2024 - MADRID and PARIS — Last year marked 50 years since Picasso's death, and more than 50 major exhibitions around the world have observed the occasion. But the Spaniard's life was long, and it's worth remembering that it's 116 years since he painted "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," which (along with "Guernica" ) is usually cited as his masterpiece. That might make the revelations in a new exhibition in Madrid seem like ancient history. But "Picasso 1906: The Turning Point," at the Reina Sofia ...

Jan 4th, 2024 - Institution in Washington, D.C. is 'both a museum and a megaphone' Museums seldom get the opportunity to reintroduce themselves, show how they've grown or illustrate fresh perspectives. The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C., is doing just that since its recent reopening after a two-year closure for renovation and expansion.  "This major renovation has allowed us to reimagine all of our spaces," said director Susan Fisher Sterling, 68. "We've added a Learning ...

Dec 28th, 2023 - A new show at the Musée d'Orsay brings together works made during his final months. Few artists across history have captured minds and imaginations as fully as Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh , who over the course of his comparatively short career—around a decade—produced over 900 paintings, some of which are the most famous in Western art history, from Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers (1888) to The Starry Night (1889). Along with his prodigious output, Van Gogh ...

Dec 5th, 2023 - For the residency's twelfth year, the Rubell Museum leans into textile art. Miami mega-patrons Don and Mera Rubell like to be thought of as tastemakers in the contemporary art world. Since they began an artist-in-residence program at their private institution, the Rubell Museum, in 2011, their emerging artist resident has been given the prime slot of the December show—timed to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach. Among the art world, the spotlight has come to be known as a fast-track to ...

Dec 5th, 2023 - See works on paper from the likes of Degas, Monet and Cézanne. It is little wonder that an art movement like Impressionism, popular for capturing the elusive immediacy of everyday life, would be drawn to drawing. Works on paper, historically relegated to the status of a preparatory sketch, soon became masterpieces in their own right. Emancipated from the formal rigor and slick stylisations of Rococo and Neoclassicist painting, the Impressionists were able to reveal something that felt ...

Nov 30th, 2023 - Could there be an earlier version of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa painting? Some experts are alleging that a piece depicting a younger version of the sitter could be the original. The Mona Lisa (1503–19) is a Renaissance painting of the Florentine woman Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, by Leonardo da Vinci. The Isleworth Mona Lisa , as it has been dubbed (because it was previously owned by an art dealer in the London suburb), shows Lisa in the ...