Arts news

• Venice Diary Day 1: A First Look Inside the Biennale’s ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ Main Exhibition

  16-04-2024 23:39 via artnews.com
  
  Representation and opacity are the two primary tensions that artists have been grappling with in recent years. This year, the Whitney Biennial took the softer, less legible, more protective approach. At the Venice Bienniale, meanwhile, visibility trumps vulnerability.In “Foreigners Everywhere,” some culturally specific references get lost in translation to be sure, but being represented, and being seen, is framed as a good thing. Some curators might have hesitated to include wor
  
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• New Fair Founders Are Testing What Gallerists (and Collectors) Want in an Alternative

  30-04-2024 15:54 via artnews.com
  
  Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.In September 2021, when Rachel Mijares Fick and Rebeca Laliberte launched the first iteration of Future Fair, they intended it to be a cooperative space where they could minimize the hierarchies so conspicuous at the major fairs. Their first in-person edition, held at the Starrett-Le
  
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• Last Hours of Plato’s Life Revealed, Controversy at Nino Mier, Iranian Artist Arrested, and More: Morning Links for April 30, 2024

  30-04-2024 15:11 via artnews.com
  
  To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.THE HEADLINESPLATO’S LAST NIGHT. Researchers using new imaging techniques have made groundbreaking discoveries about the life and final hours of the Greek philosopher Plato, narrated in a papyrus scroll that was buried under the volcanic ash of the CE 79 Mount Vesuvius eruption. The scroll found in Herculaneum, a town near Pompeii, recounts how Pla
  
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• Esther Mahlangu’s South African Retrospective Asks: Whose Abstractions Count as “Modern”?

  30-04-2024 13:00 via artnews.com
  
  In 1989 Esther Mahlangu (b. 1935) participated in “Magiciens de la terre” at the Pompidou Center in Paris. One of the first exhibitions to mingle artists from across the globe, it remains influential—largely for the troubling issues it raised. One critic, Rasheed Araeen, pointed out the “biases of the way in which the organizers of the exhibition selected artists—searching for the ‘authentic,’ bypassing anything truly modern in Third World cultures.&rdqu
  
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• 10 Museum Shows to See in New York This Week

  30-04-2024 11:00 via artnews.com
  
  May is undoubtedly a market-oriented art month in New York, with Frieze quickly followed by another fair, Independent, and then a succession of big-ticket auctions to boot. But even as moneyed dealers and collectors flex their might, the city’s museums have plowed forward, mounting some of their most high-profile shows planned for this year.The polarizing Whitney Biennial continues its run at the Whitney Museum; the debate over its curatorial framework is sure to be a mainstay at gallery d
  
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• Senegal Postpones Dakar Biennale by Six Months Amid Widespread Protests

  29-04-2024 22:31 via artnews.com
  
  The 15th edition of the Dakar Biennale, in Dakar, Senegal, will not open on May 16 as originally planned and has instead been postponed to November, the country’s ministry of culture has announcement, citing “the national and international context, and the desire for new authorities in the sector to organize the Biennale under optimal conditions” that match its standards. The exhibition will now run from November 7 to December 7.The late-stage announcement confirms recent
  
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• Who Was Mary Cassatt and Why Was She So Important?

  29-04-2024 20:00 via artnews.com
  
  One of the notable distinctions of the first exhibition of the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. (later known as the Impressionists), held 150 years ago this year, was that women artists were welcome. The Impressionist exhibitions gave women—largely excluded from official contexts—the opportunity to show their work to a public audience, and the American artist Mary Cassatt took full advantage, participating in four out of eight of them. This year Cassatt&rsq
  
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• 18 Impressionist Artworks that Capture the Spirit of the Movement

  29-04-2024 19:11 via artnews.com
  
  Between 1853 and 1870 under Emperor Napoleon III, Paris saw a radical transformation from medieval city to modern metropolis. This renovation saw old buildings razed and narrow streets erased in favor of wide boulevards and more open space for a cleaner and safer city.Just as the city of Paris—not to mention society itself—was transforming radically in the latter part of the 19th century, so too were the styles and subjects of some of the painters of the time. Bucking academic conven
  
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• The Five Most Essential Books About Indigenous Art

  29-04-2024 18:37 via artnews.com
  
  Indigenous arts of North America are expressions of deep cultural traditions as diverse as the lands with which they are inextricably linked. Here are five key texts that survey the subject.
  
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• Pope Visits Venice Biennale, Dakar Biennale Postponed, Vienna Actionism Show Protested, and More: Morning Links for April 29, 2024

  29-04-2024 14:55 via artnews.com
  
  To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.THE HEADLINESDAK’ART POSTPONED. The 15th edition of Dak’Art – Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain in Dakar, Senegal has been postponed at the last minute from its original May 16 opening date, to November 7. Reasons are due to “the national and international context, and the desire for new authorities in the sector
  
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• Potential Legal Heir Emerges to Claim Long-lost Klimt Portrait Auctioned in Vienna

  26-04-2024 23:04 via artnews.com
  
  A potential heir to the legal successor of Adolf Lieser has emerged and claimed ownership of the Gustav Klimt portrait sold for $32 million in a buzzy auction in Vienna, per Der Standard. The individual, a Munich-based architect, is not a relative of the Leiser family, but lodged a claim after learning last week that the painting missing for a century had resurfaced at im Kinksy auction house.Titled Portrait of Fräulein Lieser (1917), the work was purchased by an anonymous Hong Kong de
  
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• Dani Levinas, Art Enthusiast Who ‘Collected Collectors,’ Dies at 75

  26-04-2024 18:05 via artnews.com
  
  Dani Levinas, an art collector who gained a following for interviewing other collectors, has died at 75. The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., where he formerly served as board chair, announced his death on Wednesday.“Dani Levinas’s passion and enthusiasm for art by living artists will have an enduring impact on The Phillips Collection,” said current board chair John Despres in a statement. “We will truly miss his inspiration and guidance.”With his wife Mirel
  
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• Postwar and Contemporary Art from Iowa Business Leaders to Be Sold at Christie’s Spring Sales

  26-04-2024 17:50 via artnews.com
  
  Works from the art collection of Iowa business leader and philanthropist John Pappajohn and his wife Mary will be offered as a group of highlights during Christie’s Spring sales in New York next month, the auction house announced Friday. The Pappajohns were a mainstay of ARTnews’s Top 200 collector list from 1998 to 2014. John passed away last year on April 26 at 94. Mary, aged 88, died in 2022.The collection, which is comprised of works by post-war and contemporary luminaries i
  
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• Post-War and Contemporary Art From Iowa Business Leaders To Be Sold at Christie’s Spring Sales

  26-04-2024 17:50 via artnews.com
  
  Works from the art collection of Iowa business leader and philanthropist John Pappajohn and his wife Mary will be offered as a group of highlights during Christie’s Spring sales in New York next month, the auction house announced Friday. The Pappajohns were a mainstay of ARTnews’s Top 200 collector list from 1998 to 2014. John passed away last year on April 26 at 94. Mary, aged 88, died in 2022.The collection, which is comprised of works by post-war and contemporary luminaries i
  
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• Moscow’s Garage Museum Is Reportedly Searched by Police Amid Crackdown on LGBTQ+ Literature

  26-04-2024 16:54 via artnews.com
  
  Various Russian publications reported on Friday that Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art was being searched by local police, potentially in connection to LGBTQ+ literature that is thought to be housed at the institution.On the social media platform Telegram, Ostorozhno Novosti, a local news channel, said that police officers were at a building that holds the Garage Museum’s archives. The museum’s leaders and curators were reportedly being kept from using their phones and
  
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• Surrealism in the Age of AI

  26-04-2024 16:46 via artnews.com
  
  In 1924 the French poet and critic André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto. The 4,000-word document marked both the birth of the eponymous movement and the moment when its dogmas were codified, effectively laying the groundwork for the countless derivations of the form that would follow—in the 15 years before World War II, certainly, but also after, up to, and including today. The Surrealist movement may have waned, but its ideas have not.Now, exactly one century removed fro
  
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• At Americas Society, Artists Look at the Myth That Started Natural Resource Extraction in Latin America

  26-04-2024 15:28 via artnews.com
  
  In Colombian artist Carlos Motta’s 2013 video, Nefandus, an indigenous man and a Spanish man travel down Colombia’s Don Diego River telling stories of the violent sodomization against natives by the Spanish during the conquest in Latin America. “The landscape does not confess what it has witnessed; the images are out of time and veil the actions that have taken place there,” the narrator explains.This question of colonial violence against the land and the passage of time
  
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• Getty Returns Bronze to Turkey, Man Claims Ownership of Buzzy Klimt Portrait, ‘Britain’s Pompeii’ Exhibit to Open, and More: Morning Links for April 26, 2024

  26-04-2024 15:12 via artnews.com
  
  To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.THE HEADLINESNEW KLIMT CLAIM. A potential heir to the legal successor of Adolf Lieser came forward with a claim they own the Gustav Klimt portrait of Fraulein Lieser, right before it sold at auction for a low estimate of $32 million, according to Der Standard. The potential heir, a Munich-based architect who is not a relative of the Lieser family, learned last week abo
  
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• In the Early 20th Century, Jean Cocteau’s Queer Art Was Notably Cocksure

  26-04-2024 12:00 via artnews.com
  
  This essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.The French polymath Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) was never content to work in one mode—and was ostracized for it. His retrospective at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice is titled “The Juggler’s Revenge”: it makes a case for this versatility, showing a cohesive spi
  
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• John Cage’s Frequently Misunderstood 4’33” Remains a Masterpiece

  25-04-2024 22:50 via artnews.com
  
  John Cage’s 1952 work 4′33″ has proven a touchstone for artists, composers, and thinkers of all kinds, spawning conceptual artworks, experimental gestures, and even an iPhone app. But even as almost everyone agrees on its importance, misunderstandings about the work proliferate. For one, 4′33″ is sometimes affectionally known as Cage’s “silent piece,” since the work calls for its enactor to stop using their instrument for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
  
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• Louvre Considers Moving Mona Lisa To Underground Chamber To End ‘Public Disappointment’

  25-04-2024 20:19 via artnews.com
  
  When I took my mother back to Paris for her first visit in nearly five decades, there was no question we would go to the Louvre. I was more surprised that she wanted to stand in the long line to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503) for the few seconds we would get to take pictures and selfies with the famous painting.This experience is often annoying and disappointing for tourists, with one recent analysis of 18,000 reviews deeming the Renaissance portrait “the world’s most
  
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• Sotheby’s to Auction $30 M. Monet Painting in May Evening Sale

  25-04-2024 20:17 via artnews.com
  
  Sotheby’s will auction Claude Monet’s Meules à Giverny (1893) in its modern art evening auction on May 15. The house has has estimated that the work sell for a sum “in excess of $30 million”.The sunny landscape painting features a haystack in a tree-filled field. It was brought to the United States in 1895 by its first owner, the American landscape painter Dwight Blaney. According to Sotheby’s, the painting was immediately lent to the Museum of Fine Arts in B
  
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• 5 Must-See Shows at Gallery Weekend Berlin 2024

  25-04-2024 19:00 via artnews.com
  
  Like clockwork, springtime in Berlin brings brighter skies, warmer temperatures, and a wave of must-see exhibitions for Gallery Weekend Berlin. This year, the event celebrates its 20th anniversary edition, taking place April 26–28, with over 90 presentations at more than 60 locations across the city.Even as one of Berlin’s most important art events reaches an important milestone, its new director, Antonia Ruder, said the key to Gallery Weekend Berlin’s continued success is high
  
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• Venice Residents Protest New Entry Fee to the City

  25-04-2024 18:54 via artnews.com
  
  A week after the Venice Biennale opens to thousands of art world VIPs, journalists, curators, and arts workers, the city has launched a fee program aimed at curbing the effects of “excessive tourism” that will require visitors and tourists to pay a €5 (about $5.36) in order to enter the city, the Guardian reports.The trial program is unprecedented among major cities in the world, and despite Venice mayor Luigi Brugnaro’s announcement that the fee will make the ci
  
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• Gladstone Gallery Now Represents the Estate of Lawrence Weiner in New York

  25-04-2024 18:00 via artnews.com
  
  The estate of Lawrence Weiner, the Conceptualist artist who molded language into a means of visual expression, has new representation with Gladstone Gallery, which now represents the artist’s estate in New York. Pace Gallery will continue to represent the estate in Asia, with a focus on South Korea. Lisson Gallery will also continue to represent Weiner, as will galleries Marian Goodman Gallery, Mai 36, and Regen Projects.“I feel incredibly grateful for this opportunity to work a
  
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• Lawsuit Over ‘Irreversible’ Damage to Donald Judd Sculpture Is Tossed Out by Court

  25-04-2024 17:53 via artnews.com
  
  A lawsuit by an artist’s foundation against two galleries alleging “irreversible” damage to a Donald Judd sculpture was tossed out by New York’s Supreme Court in March.The Judd Foundation had sued Kukje Gallery and Tina Kim Gallery in 2022, claiming that the two galleries had been responsible for fingerprints left on an untitled 1991 sculpture worth $850,000.The Judd sculpture, the foundation said, had been consigned to the galleries in 2015 and was sent back in 2018 to M
  
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• The Eight Most Essential Books About Surrealism

  25-04-2024 16:05 via artnews.com
  
  This year marks the centenary of Surrealism, or more specifically the publication of its founding manifesto and attendant journal. The title of the latter, La Révolution surréaliste (issued from 1924 to 1929), made plain the movement’s ambition: nothing less than a social and political revolution, a radical synthesis of unconscious desire and waking reality. Hamstrung both by Communist resistance to its “interior model” and by the rise of fascism and a new World W
  
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• Eight Essential Books About Surrealism

  25-04-2024 16:05 via artnews.com
  
  This year marks the centenary of Surrealism, or more specifically the publication of its founding manifesto and attendant journal. The title of the latter, La Révolution surréaliste (issued from 1924 to 1929), made plain the movement’s ambition: nothing less than a social and political revolution, a radical synthesis of unconscious desire and waking reality. Hamstrung both by Communist resistance to its “interior model” and by the rise of fascism and a new World W
  
  Read more

• Klimt Portrait Sells for Low Estimate, Residents Protest Venice Entry Fee, Art Institute of Chicago Rebuffs Accusations Schiele Drawing Was Looted, and More: Morning Links for April 25, 2024

  25-04-2024 15:28 via artnews.com
  
  To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.THE HEADLINESLOW ESTIMATE. The mysterious Gustav Klimt Portrait of Fräulein Lieser (1917) sold for €30 million, €35 million with fees, ($32.15 million, $37.51 million with fees), on the lower side of its presale estimate of €30 to €50 million. The sale was still a record for Austria, where the auction took place in Im Kinsky, Vienna. Previously
  
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• 18 Must-See Impressionism Shows Around the World in 2024

  25-04-2024 15:04 via artnews.com
  
  On April 15, 1874, a group of some 30 painters, many rejected by the jury of the official Paris Salon, were invited by the photographer Nadar to showcase their works in his former Paris studio. The daring display, a radical departure from the accepted academic conventions in place, included Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872). The landscape, depicting the port of Le Havre, prompted art critic Louis Leroy to coin the term Impressionism, which now refers to the work of a group of indep
  
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