An undated photo provided by The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge shows Gustave Courbet’s “La Ronde Enfantine,” painted circa 1862. A panel has recommended that a British museum return the landscape painting to heirs of a Jewish engineer who joined the French Resistance. (The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge via The New York Times)
by Julia Jacobs
NEW YORK, NY.- Shortly before the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, a Jewish engineer from a prominent family fled his Paris home with his mother, abandoning their apartment in the city’s affluent 16th arrondissement. Among the possessions they left behind was a 19th century painting of a lush forest scene, with children playing under a canopy of trees. As the Nazis took over, the artwork — by Gustave Courbet, the French realist painter — was carried off and reserved for the collection of a top Nazi official, while the engineer, Robert Bing, joined the French Resistance, working to distribute clandestine newspapers on behalf of the movement. A decade after it was stolen, the painting ended up at the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, where it has remained since. Now, following a decision by a British government panel, the painting is expected to be returned to the heirs of Bing, who died in 1993. The panel’s report, released on Tuesday, determined that the artwork had been looted b ... More
Giacomo Piussi, Punk Rocker Girl, 2022. Oil on canvas.
NEW YORK, NY.- The Robin Rice Gallery will present Daylight, an exhibition of 20 paintings by Giacomo Piussi. Come to meet the artist, all the way from Florence, Italy! The opening reception will be held on Wednesday March 29, 2023, from 6pm to 8pm, at 325 West 11th Street, New York, NY. Daylight explores a playful world where dreams and reality meld together to create surreal moments. When engaging with Piussi's work, we enter an arena where we are immersed in childlike delight. We experience snapshot images of a world reduced to its essence, in a seemingly comic-book style that has echoes of Giotto and Paolo Uccello, and even of medieval illuminations. My work is simple: the subject matter is stripped to basics, so all that is engagement, controversy and links to reality is taken away, and what remains is an icon with an aura of philosophical suspension, and a window into the eni ... More
GLEN COVE, NY.-Roland Auctions NY Saturday, April 1st, 2023 Multi-Estates Auction, will feature hundreds of lots of Fine Art, Decorative Arts, 20th Century Modern, Antique & Vintage Furniture, textiles, silver, Gold and Silver Jewelry, rugs, Collectibles, Asian Art and lighting. Previews will be held on Thursday, March 30th and Friday, March 31st from 10am - 6pm. Fine jewelry and fine art are front and center at this month’s auction. High end fine jewelry pieces by many top names will take the spotlight this month, with Roland offering a stunning GIA Certified Diamond & Platinum Ring, marquise diamond in platinum setting; diamond 3.34 carats, F color, SI2. Report #5175040. Platinum setting size 7 1/2, with two (2) 50-point diamond baguettes. Estimate $20,000-$30,000, a David Webb 18K Gold & Mabe Pearl Ring, yellow gold ring featuring a 20mm pearl in a large octagonal ... More
Beatriz Milhazes, Romantico americano, 1998 (detail). Oil on canvas, overall: 187.96 x 220.03 cm (74 x 86 5/8 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of Tony Podesta Collection, Washington, DC. 2023.4.1
WASHINGTON, DC.- The work of Beatriz Milhazes (b. 1960), one of Brazil’s most celebrated contemporary artists, reveals her deep engagement with her native country’s complex colonial history, characterized by the meeting of Indigenous, African, and European cultures. Milhazes’s work also brings visual forms related to Brazil’s vernacular arts, such as ceramics and textiles, into conversation with those drawing from the tradition of modernist abstraction. Her signature, brightly colored circles and curvilinear forms overlap and intersect with organic shapes and floral motifs that reference the ornately patterned costumes of carnaval. The National Gallery of Art has acquired Romantico americano (1998), generously given by Tony Podesta. Milhazes made this work using a ... More
Ernie Barnes, Daddy, acrylic on cotton canvas, 1973. Estimate $250,000 to $350,000.
NEW YORK, NY.- The spring offering of African American Art will take place on Thursday, April 6, featuring a broad range of scarce and significant art from the Harlem Renaissance to the Post-War and Contemporary. Ernie Barnes headlines the sale with Daddy, circa 1970. The painting, which depicts a joyful scene of a father with his son perched upon his shoulders, is an important oil-on-canvas work that captures the artist’s expressive figuration of the 1970s that often displayed moments of everyday life in action ($250,000-350,000). Additional figurative works include Hughie Lee-Smith’s beautiful The Ribbon, circa 1960—a quintessential mid-career oil painting showcasing his unique vision of a modern, existential landscape with Surrealist undertones ($120,000-180,000), as well as one of Lee-Smith’s few known nude works with Nude, oil on board, 1949 ($30,000-40,000). A beautiful example of Eldzier Cortor’s late career oil painting with Trilogy No. I, oil on canvas, ... More
Amba Sayal-Bennett, Strike Root, 2023. Powder coated mild steel, PLA, magnets, fabric, rope, 139 x 93 x 33 cm. 54 3/4 x 36 1/2 x 13 in.
DUBAI.- Marking CARBON 12's 87th exhibition and Amba Sayal-Bennett's third solo exhibition with the gallery, the artist presents a series of new works. Coinciding with Art Dubai 2023, the exhibition, Architectures of Excess, continues Sayal-Bennett's exploration of translation, boundaries, and migration. Amba Sayal-Bennett is a British-Indian artist working across drawing, projection, and sculptural installation. Her practice explores how methods of abstraction are exclusionary and performative, crafting boundaries between what is present, manifestly absent, and othered. Her recent work focuses on the architectural legacies of Modernism, tracing the migration of rational forms across the ocean to places such as Chandigarh in the Punjab, where her maternal grandparents were born. Using translation as method, she explores the movement of bodies, knowledge and form across different sites, processes inherent to the diasporic experience. Centr ... More
The exhibition coincides with the artist’s acclaimed survey exhibition, entitled SAME MAN, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, now on view until 10 April 2023.
LONDON.- Opening in March 2023, Richard Prince presents his seventh solo exhibition at the gallery, entitled Everyday, a body of recent paintings that expand his iconic Joke Paintings series. In Everyday, Prince replicates the jokes of Rodney Dangerfield (1921-2004), the renowned American stand-up comedian best known for disarming one-liners that captured an everyman humour in the banal or a self-deprecating loss of face. Prince, known for his collection of counter-cultural material, acquired an index of the comic’s jokes. Just my luck I was at the airport when my ship came in is the joke repeated in many of the exhibition works, retraced verbatim across several paintings. Prince knowingly subjects the joke to scrutiny, the repetition adding to its hopeless melancholy. In other paintings, the roster of one-liners and throwaway gags at first sight deliver their intended punch. Yet reframed in abstract perpetuity on canvas ... More
NEW YORK, NY.-Bonhams is presenting Lynne Drexler: Play of Color, a private-selling exhibition, public view now through April 14 in New York. Featuring 29 works by the lyrically abstract American painter, the exhibition charts the evolution of Lynne Drexler’s (1928-1999) signature style from early to mid-career through precursory works on paper, works on board, and oil paintings. Drexler was an inimitable 20th century artist whose charged work and life exuded a vitality that is now experiencing overdue, renewed art historical and market interest. The exhibition is curated by gallerist and art consultant, John Kenneth Alexander, a longstanding champion of the artist. Trained by Robert Motherwell and Hans Hofmann, Drexler toiled in the Abstract Expressionist-dominant New York in the 1950s. While her embrace of “push-pull” color theory is evident in her work, mosaic fields that exude vitality and establish atmospheric depth, Drexler ... More
Auctions such as this always offer the chance to pick up a nearly new branded watch at a price way below retail.
LONDON.- The Specialist Watches sale at Chiswick Auctions on March 22 included a number of very special modern issues – including a diver’s watch made for MI5 employees. Direct from family member who worked with the Security Service was an extremely rare Breitling stainless steel automatic Superocean Steelfish. It has the MI5 Security Service crest to the dial at the nine o’clock position and appropriate engraving to the case back. These were made in 2009 e in a limited edition of just 900 pieces to mark 100 years since the creation of the Secret Service in 1909. It came for sale with box, papers, extra bracelet links and tags and sold at £4,750. One fortunate collector bid £13,750 for a limited edition Chopard LUC tourbillion with a 60 hour power reserve. This was number 64 of only 150 made in 2011 with a titanium case and bezel. The openwork window displays ... More
More than any other nationality perhaps, the British have both commissioned and collected portraits of dogs.
LONDON.- A much anticipated and truly magnificent exhibition of dog portraits – postponed due to the pandemic in 2020 – will finally go on display at The Wallace Collection next year (29 March – 15 October 2023). Portraits of Dogs from Gainsborough to Hockney explores our devotion to four-legged friends across the centuries. Through carefully selected paintings, sculptures, drawings, works of art and even taxidermy, the exhibition highlights the unique bond between humans and their canine companions. Dog portraiture developed as an artistic genre contemporaneously with its human counterpart – dogs are represented in the earliest cave paintings alongside humans – and it flourished, particularly in Britain, from the seventeenth century onwards. More than any other nationality perhaps, the British have both commissioned and collected ... More
Famakan Magassa [Malian, b. 1997]. La ballade, 2022. Acrylic on canvas. 57 1/2 x 49 1/2 inches | 146 x 125.5 cm.
LOS ANGELES.-albertz benda is thrilled to announce Famakan Magassa: Insatiable Animal, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and his second with the gallery, on view from March 22 - April 15, 2023. This exhibition will present an incisive cycle of acrylic paintings that examine correspondences between fact and fiction, truth and falsity, meaning and ambiguity. This will be Magassa’s first solo presentation following his winning of the 2023 Norval Sovereign African Art Prize. Magassa casts himself in the role of the griot – traveling poets, musicians, and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa – drawing meaning from the irrationality and unpredictability of life. The works in Insatiable Animal often contradict or elaborate on reality, delving into personal fantasy and allegory. Compositions are at times populated by grotesque ... More
Authentic circa-1920 Type I original photograph of Babe Ruth from his first New York Yankees season, credited to Paul Thompson, one of the premier baseball photographers of the early 20th century. Size: 6.5in x 8.5in. PSA/DNA authenticated and encapsulated. Sold for $78,529 against an estimate of $20,000-$35,000
YORK, PA.-Hake’s served up a pop culture feast at their March 21-22 Premier Auction, with one exciting rarity after another eliciting pre-sale comments like, “I’ve never seen one of those in the marketplace before” or “I never even knew that piece existed.” Closing at $2,570,000 inclusive of buyer’s premium, the two-day event was led by heavy hitters from the baseball, political memorabilia, Star Wars, comic art and vintage toy categories. Many items powered past their high estimates, and some set new world auction records along the way. Leading the list of top 10 prices realized was a 1-inch version of the elusive 1920 Cox/Roosevelt jugate button. One of only six of its type known to exist, and likely ... More
The New Orleans Museum of Art announces the appointment of Dr. Redell Hearn to the newly created position of Chief Educator.
NEW ORLEANS, LA.- The New Orleans Museum of Art announces the appointment of Dr. Redell Hearn to the newly created position of Chief Educator. On Monday, February 6, Hearn officially began her position, which leads the museum’s Learning and Engagement department, including programming, partnerships, and community engagement initiatives. Hearn brings over two decades of experience in museums and higher education with an emphasis on creating new digital and in-person learning practices—from curriculum development for internships to supporting institutional efforts to expand community engagement. “We are thrilled that Dr. Hearn is bringing her expertise to NOMA, where she will work to ensure we are fulfilling our mission to inspire lifelong learning through the arts with our communities here in New Orleans and beyond,” said Susan M. ... More
Quote The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible. Ralph Waldo Emerson
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South Korean artist Jukhee Kwon's new exhibition Liberated is now open LONDON.-October Gallery, on March 16th, opened a solo exhibition of works by South Korean artist Jukhee Kwon, who lives and works in Italy. This exhibition comprises new and recent sculptural pieces created entirely from paper. Kwon’s primary material comes from unused and abandoned books, which, by skilful slicing and precision cutting, she converts into captivating pieces that inhabit their surroundings. These ‘found’ books are painstakingly manipulated and transformed by hand, creating sculptures that burst from the books’ spines, stream out in cascading waterfalls, or radiate as paper tendrils to explore ambient surface areas. While Kwon’s latest body of work develops several new avenues of approach, her imaginative leaps and their surprising results remain a constant feature, as does the artist’s evident concern for clarity of expression within each sculpture. ... More
Medals from one of the last survivors of Rorke's Drift to be sold at Noonans LONDON.- Alfred Saxty was one of the last few survivors of the renowned Battle of Rorke’s Drift, synonymous with the iconic film Zulu. His campaign pair will be offered at Noonans in a sale of Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria on Wednesday, April 19, 2023. They are being sold by a collector and are estimated to fetch £15,000-20,000. As Christopher Mellor-Hill, Head of Client Liaison at Noonans commented: “Alfred Saxty of 2nd Battalion, 24th Foot served as a Corporal in “B” Company at the defence, and was one of the last few survivors, of Rorke’s Drift. He was just 22 years old when he was involved in one of the most famous battles in British military history, which saw just over 150 British and colonial troops defend the South African hospital against attacks by 3,000 to 4,000 Zulu warriors in January 1879, and in fact Saxty was promoted ... More
Ethiopian artist Elias Sime at James Cohan this April NEW YORK, NY.- TIGHTROPE: አረንጔዴ ነው (IT IS GREEN), an exhibition of new work by the Ethiopian artist Elias Sime, which will open this coming Saturday, April 1 at 48 Walker Street, this is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at James Cohan. Elias Sime deftly weaves, layers and assembles reclaimed technological components into abstract compositions, often on a monumental scale. Sime moves fluidly between suggestions of topography, figuration, sublime color fields, and sculptural relief, allowing his materials to guide his transformative process. His works serve as records of the global exchange of commodities, and express the tenuousness of our interconnected world, alluding to the frictions between tradition and progress, human contact and social networks, nature and the man-made, and physical presence and the virtual. The works in this exhibition ... More
Milwaukee Public Museum provides first look at Thinc Design's for the future museum MILWAUKEE, WI.- Today, Milwaukee Public Museum and exhibit design partner Thinc Design unveiled sketches of the Future Museum’s Wisconsin Journey gallery, the second of five permanent galleries to be revealed through the coming months. Each gallery, or group of related exhibits, will focus on a specific overarching theme, and its many dioramas and individual features will help visitors learn about the interconnectedness of nature and culture tied to that larger concept. In Wisconsin Journey, visitors will take a look at the wealth of natural and cultural wonders Wisconsin offers and its distinct, diverse and dynamic natural and cultural landscapes. The gallery will also examine how people are part of Wisconsin’s many wonders and share the responsibility and privilege of caring for them. “At the outset of this once-in-a-generation ... More
53 years after Miles Davis' album, a fresh spin as 'London Brew' NEW YORK, NY.- In 1970, Miles Davis released “Bitches Brew,” an album so musically daring that some critics and listeners didn’t know what to make of it. By then, the trumpeter’s ear had drifted from traditional jazz to edgier blends of funk and psychedelic rock; he wanted to craft an amorphous sound only loosely tethered to any genre. “Instances of subtlety and formal improvisational mastery come thick and fast,” critic Carman Moore wrote of “Bitches Brew” in The New York Times upon its arrival. “It is all so strange and new and yet so comfortable.” Others weren’t sold. “With ‘Bitches Brew,’ Davis was firmly on the path of the sellout,” Stanley Crouch wrote in 1990. “It sold more than any other Davis album, and fully launched jazz-rock with its multiple keyboards, electronic guitars, static beats and clutter. Davis’ music became progressively ... More
Review: In 'Alma,' flamenco star Sara Baras warms up NEW YORK, NY.- Spanish star Sara Baras has appeared many times before an adoring public in the annual Flamenco Festival New York. Over the years, I’ve been impressed by her undeniably high technical abilities, suspicious of her fancy productions and ultimately left cold by a diva-like showmanship that retreats to the shallows. That’s ultimately how I feel about “Alma,” which Baras and her company performed at New York City Center on Thursday as the sole dance production of this year’s festival. But “Alma” is a looser, warmer show, its two hours spotted with soothing moments and good times. I was nearly won over. Much of its distinct tone derives from the music. The score — by Keko Baldomero, who plays guitar in the excellent band — crosses traditional flamenco rhythms and forms with the wistful, slow-dance romance of boleros. ... More
Haring's Pop Shop and Warhol's Factory lead Heritage's April 18 Prints & Multiples Event DALLAS, TX.- "...only people who could afford big art prices could have access to the work. The Pop Shop makes it accessible... it is totally in keeping ideologically with what Andy was doing. It was about participation on a big level." -Keith Haring There are places and eras that changed the trajectory of modern culture, and New York City has produced some cycles that are hard to top. It's difficult to describe just how different downtown Manhattan looked and felt in the 1980s compared to the last couple of decades. Movies and documentaries shot on location back then can give you a taste of it, with cult fave Downtown 81 – which tracks then-burgeoning artist Jean-Michel Basquiat through some scrappy days – being a solid reference point, given that the film chronicles and acts as a harbinger of how explosively creative ‘80s NYC was. Much ... More
From Stagecoaches to monorails! Rare artifacts from Disneyland history bring in $1.8 million at Heritage DALLAS, TX.- On Saturday, March 25 a lucky bidder rode off into the sunset with a one-of-a-kind original stagecoach offered by Heritage during its two-day Disney Theme Parks auction. The Art of Disneyland: From Stagecoaches to Monorails… and More! spanned the Parks' fascinating evolution and brought in $1.8 million, with 100% of lots sold and some significant results for rarities from Disneyland, Disney World, Disney Stores and more. This Heritage Disney event, the first of 2023, follows last year's record-breaking $2.2 million Art of Disneyland auction, and it just happened to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney Company and the 50th anniversary celebration for Walt Disney World. "This event showcased every aspect of the Parks," says Jim Lentz, Heritage's Director of Animation Art. "More than 850 lots spread ... More
50 Years New in Asia: The Making of a Joan Miró
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Flashback
On a day like today, French painter Georges Seurat died
March 29, 1891. Georges-Pierre Seurat (December 1859 - 29 March 1891) was a French post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. He is noted for his innovative use of drawing media and for devising the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism. In this image: Georges Seurat (French, Paris 1859-1891 Paris), Pierrot and Colombine Ca. 1886–88. Conté crayon on paper, 9 3/4 x 12 3/8 in. (24.8 x 31.2 cm). Kasama Nichido Museum of Art.
