Feb 24th, 2021 - The Paris court shot down the Pompidou and Koons's appeal of the long-running case. In a double hit of bad news for art star Jeff Koons, a French appeals court not only upheld a 2018 decision that found him and the Pompidou Centre guilty of copyright infringement , but also increased his fine. French photographer Frank Davidovici initially brought the lawsuit in 2015, alleging that Koons had copied his photo for an ad campaign for the clothing line Naf Naf. Koons’s 1988 sculpture Fait d’hiver , from his "Banality" series, depicts a woman lying in snow next to a pig wearing a ring of roses ...
Feb 24th, 2021 - Estimated at €5m to €8m, the work finds a distinctive pastoral side to the Paris neighbourhood An 1887 painting of Montmartre in Paris by Vincent Van Gogh is appearing on the market for the first time next month after belonging to the same French family for over a century. It is being sold on 25 March at Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art sale in Paris in conjunction with the Parisian auction house Mirabaud Mercier. Titled Scène de rue à Montmartre (Impasse des deux frères et le Moulin à Poivre) and estimated at €5m to €8m, the painting had never previously been exhibited. ...
Feb 24th, 2021 - New research suggests that the painting’s artist, Edvard Munch, wrote the secret message around 1895 Edvard Munch’s The Scream attracted intense criticism when it was first exhibited in Norway in 1895. Some viewers interpreted the open-mouthed central figure, who stands on a bridge in a sea of swirling color, as an embodiment of the artist’s own fragile mental health . Historians have long speculated that this controversy provoked a viewer to pencil a curious piece of graffiti on the top left corner of the canvas. The Norwegian message translates to "Could only have been painted by a ...
Feb 23rd, 2021 - London’s Courtauld Gallery Fills Out Modern Art Holdings with Key Gift Significant pieces by Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky , and more are heading to London’s Courtauld Gallery as part of a transformative gift of modern drawings. The 25 works on paper were assembled by the late British collector Howard Karshan, and donated in his memory by his wife, the artist Linda Karshan. The Courtland gallery’s renowned collection includes masterpieces like Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère . Its massive holdings of works on paper count pieces ...
Feb 22nd, 2021 - The artist's plans for his 'Last Supper' were more exacting than many realized. An unpublished Salvador Dalí drawing is giving new insight into one of the Surrealist’s most famous paintings, The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955), which is housed in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Collector Christopher Heath Brown, an oral and maxillofacial surgeon, owns the drawing and has collaborated with art historian Jean-Pierre Isbouts, a professor at California’s Fielding Graduate University, to publish a book this spring with their research on the work. One of ...
Feb 19th, 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. Pissarro predicted that Van Gogh 'would either go mad or leave the Impressionists far behind' Fresh evidence of Camille’s admiration for Vincent: an unpublished document reveals he owned the Dutch artist’s portrait of their paintseller friend Père Tanguy Camille Pissarro met Vincent van Gogh while ...
Feb 19th, 2021 - Discover the captivating stories behind a few of the art world’s most famous and enduring friendships. In the often-solitary life of an artist, it is rare to find a trustworthy peer to take on the role of confidante. And there’s a good reason why: critique, both internal and from others, is a never-ending obsession for an artist, whose livelihood is dependent on the personal outpouring of their craft. Indeed, it takes a very special sort of friendship between artists to persist through the highs and lows of their unique lifestyles and to overcome professional jealousy, easily bruised ...
Feb 18th, 2021 - She's been dubbed the "world's favorite artist." But while images of her kaleidoscopic infinity rooms are hot on , she's no derivative newcomer to the art scene. This Japanese pop-art icon has been creating fresh work since the 1950s, and her creative output hasn't subsided over the decades. Now a nonagenarian who has voluntarily made a home for herself in a Tokyo psychiatric asylum, Yayoi Kusama continues to produce her signature larger-than-life polka-dotted pumpkins, reflective infinity rooms and myriad other pieces that first captivated the world long before social media. This year, shows ...
Feb 17th, 2021 - The 28 most valuable works he and Jeanne-Claude collected and created were offered in a live auction on Wednesday; a timed online sale of another 347 lots will end on Thursday. The Bulgarian-born artist Christo, who died last May at 84, was famous for the spectacular ambition of the environmental projects he created in collaboration with his wife, Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009 . Over the decades, as they tirelessly battled (not always successfully) to bring celebrated temporary artworks like “The Gates” in New York’s Central Park to fruition, Christo and Jeanne-Claude also acquired ...
Feb 17th, 2021 - Local people disappointed as artwork of girl hula-hooping with bicycle tyre is bought for six-figure sum A Banksy mural in Nottingham has been removed and sold to an Essex art gallery, disappointing local people who had hoped it would stay in the city. The artwork showing a girl hula-hooping with a bicycle tyre appeared on the side of a building in Rothesay Avenue in October and was claimed by Banksy via his Instagram page. Brandler Galleries in Brentwood said it had bought the mural from the building’s owner for a six-figure sum and it had been removed by workers from a specialised company ...
Feb 11th, 2021 - If the French capital is "well worth a mass", as King Henri IV supposedly once said, so are its myriad churches stacked with overlooked treasures – all the more so in the bleak age of Covid. Had le bon roi Henri lived in present times, he may well have decided Paris was worth a miss. With the city’s cherished museums, theatres, cinemas and concert halls all desperately shut , and a “not-even-in-wartime” 6pm curfew in place, it’s currently all work and no play for most Parisians, holed up in cramped and ludicrously expensive dwellings. Mercifully, the capital’s nearly 200 churches ...
Feb 10th, 2021 - In a compelling new HBO documentary, film-maker Sam Pollard speaks to prominent creatives to tell the struggle and success of African American art “I get up at 7.30 in the morning and then I’m at my computer working, thinking about new ideas, pushing along the projects that I’m involved in,” 70-year-old Sam Pollard explains. The documentary film-maker, as an editor, frequently collaborated with Spike Lee on films such as Mo’ Better Blues, 4 Little Girls and Bamboozled. His storied directing career features the seminal civil rights docuseries Eyes on the Prize, the electrifying blues ...
Feb 9th, 2021 - No artist is more celebrated for their compassion and empathy. So why has the Dutch master’s work been included in a shocking new show linking art and the slave trade? T he title of the show is simple and stark: Slavery . Due to open this spring at the mighty Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, this bold exhibition documents the importance of this abhorrent trade in the rise and wealth of the Netherlands, by juxtaposing shackles and slave inventories with works of art. There is a metal ring that has been in the Rijksmuseum since the 19th century. Previously catalogued as a dog collar, it is now ...
Feb 7th, 2021 - Cleveland Museum of Art faced a curatorial nightmare last year when the coronavirus pandemic turned its precisely calibrated exhibition calendar from a Swiss watch into Swiss cheese. Big shows on topics including 7th-century sculpture from Cambodia, and Pablo Picasso’s works on paper got postponed, punching holes in a timetable complicated further by temporary closures of the museum from March to June, and then again from November to this January . The museum first addressed its exhibition dilemma by extending the run of “ Proof ,’' a major show on contact sheets by famous modern and ...
