Arts news

• Maynard Solomon, Provocative Biographer of Composers, Dies at 90

  08-10-2020 18:13 via nytimes.com
  
  Mr. Solomon probed the psyches of Mozart and Beethoven in critically acclaimed works; he was also co-founder of Vanguard, an adventurous record label.
  
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• Sotheby’s London Racks Up Highest-Ever Sale of Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art at $26.2 M., Setting Nine Artist Records

  29-09-2026 23:25 via artnews.com
  
  On Tuesday, Sotheby’s London’s sale of modern and contemporary South Asian art rang up at £19.8 million ($26.2 million), the highest total realized for the category in the house’s history. The 73-lot sale achieved a 99% sell-through rate, with some 89% of works exceeding their high estimate. The house’s previous high in the category was £18.9 million ($25.5 million), also achieved in London, one year ago.Along the way, new auction records were set for Antonio
  
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• Lauren Halsey to Transform the Hollywood Bowl with Immersive World for a Concert Headlined by Erykah Badu

  29-09-2026 23:18 via artnews.com
  
  The Los Angeles–based artist Lauren Halsey will transform the Hollywood Bowl tonight for a one-night only event with a star-studded line-up, headlined by Erykah Badu.With some tickets still available, doors to the Bowl open tonight at 6 p.m. where visitors will see a large-scale installation-cum-environment that Halsey has created to set the stage for Badu—she’s also done the stage design. Also performing are The Alchemist, DJ Pee .Wee (Anderson .Paak), Flea, and artist Charles
  
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• At U.C.L.A., a Bollywood Dance Team Like ‘Best of the Best’

  29-09-2026 22:46 via nytimes.com
  “For a lot of South Asians, dance is the way we connect,” said a member of the U.C.L.A. team Nashaa. Our photographer captured glimpses of the team last year, from audition to competitions.
  
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• Nicole Eisenman Opens Up About Supporting Gaza: ‘Artists Are Hesitant to Grapple With the Destruction’

  29-09-2026 22:39 via artnews.com
  
  Earlier this year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired The Auction (2024–25), a painting by artist Nicole Eisenman. Like much of Eisenman’s oeuvre, it’s a fanciful work of figuration, featuring a feverish bidding war overseen by a fruit-headed, black-robed judge. While Eisenman’s works are funny at first glance, a nuanced narrative, interweaving the personal and political, can usually be teased out of them. That was not the case with The Auction, which didn&rsqu
  
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• Nicole Eisenman Open Up About Supporting Gaza: ‘Artists Are Hesitant to Grapple With the Destruction’

  29-09-2026 22:39 via artnews.com
  
  Earlier this year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired The Auction (2024–25), a painting by artist Nicole Eisenman. Like much of Eisenman’s oeuvre, it’s a fanciful work of figuration, featuring a feverish bidding war overseen by a fruit-headed, black-robed judge. While Eisenman’s works are funny at first glance, a nuanced narrative, interweaving the personal and political, can usually be teased out of them. That was not the case with The Auction, which didn&rsqu
  
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• Ancient Roman Settlement Discovered in Austria May Be Lost City of Claudivium

  29-09-2026 22:09 via artnews.com
  
  An interdisciplinary team, including archaeologists from the University of Innsbruck, has mapped the remains of a previously unknown Roman town in Lower Austria. Researchers think the settlement could be the lost city of Claudivium, abandoned over 1800 years ago. The news was reported by several sites, including Arkeonews, following a September 25 announcement by the University of Innsbruck.The site, located at the hamlet of Stein/St. Pantaleon-Erla, is just a few miles east of the ancient Roman
  
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• Senators Blumenthal and Cornyn File Amicus Brief in Case of Heirs Suing for Nazi-Looted Egon Schiele Works

  29-09-2026 22:07 via artnews.com
  
  Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and his Republican counterpart John Cornyn of Texas have filed an amicus (or “friend of the court”) brief defending their own Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act, which was signed into law in 2016, against claims of unconstitutionality by Austrian defendants seeking to hold on to Nazi-looted works by Egon Schiele.The senators filed the brief on September 18 in the Southern District of New York in the case Reif v. Republi
  
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• Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament to Screen in Eight-Hour Event at New York Masonic Hall

  29-09-2026 21:24 via artnews.com
  
  Twelve years after premiering in New York, back then at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler’s epic film River of Fundament will return to the big screen in an eight-hour event at the Masonic Hall of New York, on West 23rd Street in Chelsea.On November 14, the film’s three acts, which run for nearly five and a half hours in total, will be separated by intermissions to allow the audience “to move throughout the adjoining spaces of the Masonic Hall&rs
  
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• Long-Lost Drawing May Be a Previously Unknown Manet

  29-09-2026 21:11 via artnews.com
  
  A drawing that has spent decades in an Italian collection is now believed to be a previously unknown work by Édouard Manet.The small red-chalk study shows a child crouching on the ground, according to The Guardian, which first reported the discovery. Francesco Baccanelli, an Italian art historian who encountered the work in a private collection in northern Italy, told the outlet he became interested after noticing that its mount carried an old attribution to Manet. He subsequently brought
  
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• Artists Christine Sun Kim, Rodney McMillian, and Vincent Valdez Win MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grants

  29-09-2026 20:54 via artnews.com
  
  The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced the 20 recipients of its annual MacArthur Fellowships, colloquially called “Genius Grants,” which comes with $800,000 in unrestricted funds.This year’s cohort includes four artists: Christine Sun Kim (based in Berlin), Rodney McMillian (Los Angeles), Vincent Valdez (Houston and San Antonio), and Chip Thomas (Flagstaff, Arizona).The subject of a recent Whitney Museum survey, Kim is known for her works that challenge
  
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• As Mr. Belding on “Saved by the Bell,” Dennis Haskins Made Principals Your Pal

  29-09-2026 20:12 via nytimes.com
  As Mr. Belding on “Saved by the Bell,” Dennis Haskins helped change an onscreen dynamic that paved the way for principals to come.
  
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• My Favorite Phone Songs

  29-09-2026 20:00 via nytimes.com
  Stow your devices and listen to these telephone-themed songs from Blondie, Chuck Berry, R.E.M. and more.
  
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• In ‘How Shakespeare Saved My Life,’ Tragedy Mingles With Comedy

  29-09-2026 18:54 via nytimes.com
  The actor Jacob Ming-Trent faced numerous rejections. But in this solo play at the Public, he tells how he found redemption through the playwright’s worlds and words.
  
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• National Gallery of Victoria Executive Accused of Stealing $5.6 M. in Smartphone Scheme

  29-09-2026 18:28 via artnews.com
  
  A former senior executive at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, has been accused of stealing some AUD 8 million ($5.6 million) from the museum over a six-year period.According to ArtAsiaPacific, the unnamed former employee allegedly used a work account to purchase smartphones, which he then resold for a profit. Authorities allege that he used his senior position at the museum to conceal the scheme.The alleged theft began in September 2019 and continued until it was discove
  
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• Anna Weyant’s Upper East Side Apartment Hits the Market for $3.5 M.

  29-09-2026 18:25 via artnews.com
  
  Canadian painter Anna Weyant’s Upper East Side co-op hit the market this week for $3.49 million, Curbed reports. She purchased the apartment in 2024, shortly after breaking up with then-boyfriend and gallerist Larry Gagosian, who was some 50 years her senior.Weyant had a quick trajectory to art world fame, from selling $450 drawings and paintings in 2019 to having her work hit the auction block for $1.6 million in 2022. At 27, she became the youngest artist on Gagosian’s roster, whic
  
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• MacArthur Foundation Announces 2026 ‘Genius Grant’ Winners

  29-09-2026 18:01 via nytimes.com
  The 20 fellowship recipients across the arts, humanities and sciences will each receive an $800,000, no-strings-attached stipend for their work.
  
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• MoMA to Stage Eva Hesse’s First Major US Museum Exhibition in Two Decades

  29-09-2026 17:00 via artnews.com
  
  The late German-American artist Eva Hesse, best-known for her works that challenged the conventions of Minimalism, will have a career-spanning exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York next year that foregrounds her drawing practice and how it informed her canonical sculptures and paintings. The show “Eva Hesse: Wild Space, 1957-1970,” on view from May 30–September 25, 2027, will bring together more than 150 works that reframe Hesse’s experimental practice.The ex
  
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• MoMA to Stage Eva Hesse’s First Major Museum Exhibition in Two Decades

  29-09-2026 17:00 via artnews.com
  
  The late German-American artist Eva Hesse, best-known for her works that challenged the conventions of Minimalism, will have a career-spanning exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York next year that foregrounds her drawing practice and how it informed her canonical sculptures and paintings. The show “Eva Hesse: Wild Space, 1957-1970,” on view from May 30–September 25, 2027, will bring together more than 150 works that reframe Hesse’s experimental practice.The ex
  
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• Hachette Book Group Names New C.E.O.

  29-09-2026 17:00 via nytimes.com
  Ben Sevier, who has led the publishing house’s Grand Central division since 2017, will succeed chief executive David Shelley in January.
  
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• New Scientific Analysis on Claude Monet’s The Luncheon Possibly Reveals a Self-Portrait in an Earlier Composition

  29-09-2026 16:00 via artnews.com
  
  To mark the 100th anniversary of Claude Monet’s death in 1926, the Musée de l’Orangerie and the Musée d’Orsay are celebrating his work with an exhibition apiece, “Claude Monet, Painting Time” and “I Spend My Life Painting,” respectively. The Orsay’s display includes five works that have recently undergone technical examination with several new revelations about the father of Impressionism’s practice.The most important of these n
  
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• Kehinde Wiley Wants to Buy Back Denigrated US Embassy Painting, UK National Museums Stay Free, and More: Morning Links for September 29, 2026

  29-09-2026 15:01 via artnews.com
  
  To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.Good Morning!
  Kehinde Wiley has offered to buy back his painting that was denigrated by the current administration and removed from the US Embassy in the Dominican Republic.UK national museums will remain free to enter, announced a government official.ARTnews has revealed the nominees for the 2026 ARTnews Awards.The Headlines BUY BACK. Kehinde Wiley has offered to buy back his painting that wa
  
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• A Knockout Show Resets the Record With ‘Krasner and Pollock’

  29-09-2026 15:00 via nytimes.com
  She had to settle for the kitchen as her studio but Lee Krasner finally gets her share of the spotlight at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  
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• Rare Turner Roman Landscape Painting Heads to Sotheby’s With $66.2 M. Price Tag

  29-09-2026 14:33 via artnews.com
  
  A rare J.M.W. Turner painting is coming to Sotheby’s with an estimate of £50 million ($66.2 million). Rome, from Mount Aventine (1836) will be auctioned in London on December 9 during the house’s Old Master Evening Sale, but before it does, it will be exhibited at Palazzo Rondinini, an 18th-century Baroque palace in Rome, through to October 1.The painting is one of the few Turners that’s still in private hands. According to Sotheby’s, the painting is believed to hav
  
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• Art Basel Miami Beach Names 272 Exhibitors, With a Major Overhaul to the Fair’s Floor Plan

  29-09-2026 14:00 via artnews.com
  
  Art Basel Miami Beach has named the 272 exhibitors that will participate in its upcoming 2026 fair, scheduled to run December 4–6, with VIP preview days on December 2–3.For its 24th edition, Art Basel Miami Beach has announced a number of changes, including a completely revamped floor plan, fewer exhibitors, and the elimination of the Meridians section, for large-scale works.“It’s important for the show, now in its 24th year, to stay evolving, to stay dynamic, and to keep
  
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• In a Letter to President Trump, Artist Kehinde Wiley Asks to Repurchase His Painting Removed from US Embassy

  29-09-2026 13:57 via artnews.com
  
  Artist Kehinde Wiley is asking to purchase his painting Young Artists After Siamesas 1960 (2013) back from the US State Department, after it was removed from the US Embassy in the Dominican Republic in August.On Monday, the artist’s gallery Sean Kelly Gallery shared a letter that Wiley had sent to President Donald Trump on September 24. “I am writing regarding Young Artists After Siamesas 1960, the painting I created for the United States Embassy in Santo Domingo through the State De
  
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• Hard Truths: Can Senior Citizens Be Sage Social-Media Ambassadors?

  29-09-2026 13:00 via artnews.com
  
  With a world in crisis and an art market spinning out of control, ace art-world consultants Chen & Lampert deliver hard truths in response to questions sent by Art in America readers from far and wide.The viral popularity of septuagenarian curator Alison Luchs’s posts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is amazing. Gen Z loves her, and the director of our small museum wants us to join in on the trend. I am basically the communications team and was tasked with identifyin
  
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• Dennis Haskins, Mr. Belding on ‘Saved by the Bell,’ Dies at 75

  29-09-2026 12:06 via nytimes.com
  Mr. Haskins played the exasperated but well-meaning principal on the popular high school sitcom. He reprised the role in a long-running spinoff.
  
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• In ‘Incorrect,’ Sam Morril Makes Being a Loser Look Like Fun

  29-09-2026 11:03 via nytimes.com
  Sam Morril’s new Netflix special, “Incorrect,” is filled with lowlife stories that don’t always make him look good. That’s why they’re so funny.
  
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• Maine’s Opera Houses Are the Light on Main Street

  29-09-2026 11:00 via nytimes.com
  With a distinctly American vision of communal life and entertainment, these theaters have survived fires and floods because they were always about more than classical music.
  
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