Arts news

• British Museum Receives $1.2 B. Worth of Chinese Ceramics, the Largest Gift in its History

  14-11-2024 21:32 via artnews.com
  
  The British Museum has been gifted one of the world’s most prodigious collections of Chinese ceramics, worth £1 billion ($1.27 billion), in what is likely the highest-value donation of art ever received by a UK museum.The 1,700-piece collection—including a wine cup painted with chickens from the Ming Dynasty—was donated by the trustees of the Sir Percival David Foundation and has been on long-term loan to the London museum in a dedicated gallery since 2009. Such a high-va
  
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• German Museum Will Keep Pissarro in Settlement with Heir of Persecuted Owner

  15-11-2024 19:32 via artnews.com
  
  After nearly a decade of negotiations, a Pissarro painting sold under duress by a Jewish family during the Second World War will remain in a German museum as part of a settlement.The agreement stipulates that the Kunsthalle Bremen, which has owned the painting Le Repos (Girl Lying in the Grass) since 1967, will publish a book that details the persecution of its original owners, the van den Bergh family, including the forced sale of their art collection. The Pissarro was sold to fund the family&r
  
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• Billionaire Collector Kenneth Griffin Donated $100 M. for 2024 Election, Fifth-Most for Individual Donors

  15-11-2024 19:03 via artnews.com
  
  Billionaire art collector Kenneth C. Griffin is among the top donors to outside spending groups for the 2024 election, which resulted in former President Donald Trump winning a second term.The founder and CEO of the investment firm Citadel donated $100 million to conservatives, the fifth-largest amount for individual contributions to federal election spending, according to data released by the Federal Election Commission and analysis from Open Secrets, a non-profit research and government transp
  
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• The crown should consider the restitution of cultural artefacts | Letters

  15-11-2024 18:26
  
  Unparalleled collections hidden from public view got Mary Evans thinkingYour report on the return of art looted by the Nazis (10 November) also refers to campaigns for returning artworks now held in the global north to their countries of origin. Mentioned are collections in museums and other institutions. Among those institutions should be the crown, which holds unparalleled collections of art of various kinds, the great majority of it never seen in public. While we might wish the British Museum
  
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• Bouchardon Bust, Once Used as a Door Stopper, Officially Set for Sale with $3 M. Estimate

  15-11-2024 17:48 via artnews.com
  
  Invergordon, a small town in central Scotland, could see its coffers filled following a decision by county committee to sell a marble bust made by the French artist Edmé Bouchardon in 1728 that, a quarter of a century ago, was propping open the door of a storage shed.The bust, which was bought for roughly $6.31 in 1930, could fetch more than $3 million through a private sale brokered by Sotheby’s, which appraised the sculpture at the request of the local government last ye
  
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• Jeffrey Gibson Opens a Portal in Two-Spirit Tribute at MASS MoCA

  15-11-2024 17:38 via artnews.com
  
  There was a lot of talk about portals earlier this month at MASS MoCA, the enormous art space in Western Massachusetts now playing home to an eye-popping, shape-shifting installation by artist Jeffrey Gibson through the winter of next year. Gibson had already been granted access to a big stage when he was chosen to represent the U.S. in this year’s Venice Biennale—the first time a Native American artist has done so with a solo show since the exhibition’s inauguration in 1895. B
  
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• Timothy Hyman obituary

  15-11-2024 17:35
  
  My friend Timothy Hyman, who has died aged 78, was an artist, writer and teacher. His canvases and drawings celebrated his love of London, reflecting his allegiance to the north and east of the city.As a teenager, Timothy was introduced to artists and writers destined to shape him – Sienese painters, Pierre Bonnard and John Cowper Powys – and made a solo trip to Siena in 1963, aged 17. Continue reading...
  
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• Santiago Yahuarcani’s Anti-Colonial Paintings Tell the Story of His Amazonian Ancestry

  15-11-2024 15:00 via artnews.com
  
  Santiago Yahuarcani’s visual vocabulary is neither derivative nor dependent on Western art history. His paintings—including three of them currently starring in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale— are a testament to the consciousness, affection, and intelligence of the rainforest and its inhabitants that invite us to see beyond the parameters of settler coloniality. Through the overlapping of bright-colored figures in dense groupings that combine symbolic or descriptive
  
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• More Consigners to the New York Sales, Revealed!

  15-11-2024 13:00 via artnews.com
  
  With the US presidential election behind us and the marquee New York evening sales just a few days away, collectors, advisors, and all manner of art world professionals have been combing through the full list of auction house offerings, ARTnews included. This November, works by art historical heavyweights David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Ellsworth Kelly, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jean Michel Basquiat (of course) take the stage behind auctioneers who hope to coax out as many bids as pos
  
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• 80s a-go-go, hanging with Calder and a Scots stitch-up – the week in art

  15-11-2024 12:00
  
  Plus: a magical Picasso print, a farewell to Frank Auerbach and polyamorous bohemian Dora Carrington gets her own show– all in your weekly dispatchThe 80s: Photographing BritainReel around the fountain with this trip down memory lane to a decade of social division, war and riots.
  • Tate Britain, London, 21 November to 5 May Continue reading...
  
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• New Bank of America Report Says Art Buyer Conditions are Improving But Adds Market Concern is ‘Understandable’ After Trump’s Victory

  15-11-2024 11:57 via artnews.com
  
  A new art market report by Bank of America suggests buying conditions are improving for collectors thanks to lower auction estimates, discounts at galleries, and interest rate cuts, among other factors.Titled “Art Market Update Fall 2024: Opportunity Knocks?,” it says next week’s New York fall auctions and Art Basel Miami in early December can expect higher collector participation as a result.“Bidder competition at auction has slowed, meaning buyers may be able to purchas
  
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• Bank of America’s New Report Says Art Buyer Conditions are Improving But Adds That Market Concern is ‘Understandable’ After Trump’s Victory

  15-11-2024 11:57 via artnews.com
  
  A new art market report by Bank of America suggests buying conditions are improving for collectors thanks to lower auction estimates, discounts at galleries, and interest rate cuts, among other factors.Titled “Art Market Update Fall 2024: Opportunity Knocks?,” it says next week’s New York fall auctions and Art Basel Miami in early December can expect higher collector participation as a result.“Bidder competition at auction has slowed, meaning buyers may be able to purchas
  
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• Art Buying Conditions Improve, Despite ‘Understandable’ Concerns Over Trump Reelection, Bank of America Reports

  15-11-2024 11:57 via artnews.com
  
  A new art market report by Bank of America suggests buying conditions are improving for collectors thanks to lower auction estimates, discounts at galleries, and interest rate cuts, among other factors.Titled “Art Market Update Fall 2024: Opportunity Knocks?,” it says next week’s New York fall auctions and Art Basel Miami in early December can expect higher collector participation as a result.“Bidder competition at auction has slowed, meaning buyers may be able to purchas
  
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• Joseph Beuys’s Game-Changing Art Plants Seeds for Change in Two Vast LA Projects

  15-11-2024 11:00 via artnews.com
  
  “If you have all my multiples,” Joseph Beuys once said, “then you have me completely.” The polymathic German sculptor was referring to the editioned objects that bore the intellectual and emotional freight of his artistic project. Ranging from blackboard erasers to carved blocks of copper-infused beeswax, these objects were small in scale and large in edition size. Because of that, Beuys believed they could disseminate his radical notions of art as a transformational soci
  
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• A Wonderful Orphism Show at the Guggenheim Surveys the Modernist Movement That Wasn’t

  15-11-2024 11:00 via artnews.com
  
  Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Surrealism. These are among the many -isms of early 20th-century European modernism, an artistic lineage that’s chock full of movements appended with that suffix. But Orphism? That’s not likely one discussed much today outside academia, and perhaps for a good reason: it barely existed.This, at least, is something one could draw from the Guggenheim Museum’s sprawling Orphism survey, a wonderfully nerdy exhibition about
  
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• Manhattan District Attorney’s Office Returns More Than 1,400 Antiquities Worth $10 M. to India

  14-11-2024 21:20 via artnews.com
  
  The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has announced the return of 1,440 artifacts, collectively valued at $10 million, to India.The items were recovered as part of ongoing investigations into criminal trafficking networks, including ones linked to convicted art trafficker Subhash Kapoor and Nancy Wiener. Notably, two of the items were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the same year, 1993, and had been seized by the office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit (ATU).The return
  
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• Sotheby’s Agrees to Pay New York 6.25 M. To Settle Art Sales Tax Fraud Case

  14-11-2024 20:23 via artnews.com
  
  Sotheby’s has agreed to pay the State of New York $6.25 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Attorney General Letitia James, that alleged the auction house helped collectors in avoid sales taxes on high-value art purchases. The New York Attorney General’s office claimed that from 2010 to 2020, Sotheby’s accepted fraudulent resale certificates from at least eight collectors, enabling them to skirt New York state sales taxes on artworks worth tens of millions of dollars. The
  
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• Iceland’s Top Fishing Company Wins Judgment Against Icelandic Artist Over ‘Fishrot Scandal’

  14-11-2024 19:12 via artnews.com
  
  On Thursday, a judge in the UK ruled in favor of Iceland’s largest fishing company, Samherji, after it sued an Icelandic artist who, posing as the company, apologized for its alleged role in the so-called Fishrot scandal.The decision comes after a hearing in London in September, when Samherji accused the artist – Oddur Eysteinn Friðriksson, known as ODEE – of intellectual copyright and malicious falsehood, among other charges. Samherji was also seeking damages and demanded
  
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• Walter Dahn, German Painter Who Led the Charge Against Prevailing Styles, Dies at 70

  14-11-2024 17:54 via artnews.com
  
  Walter Dahn, an artist whose paintings reacted against Minimalism and Conceptualism with humor and grace, earning him a cult following both within Germany and abroad, has died at 70. His death was announced on Wednesday by his gallery, Sprüth Magers, which did not state a cause.Dahn was a member of the Junge Wilde group, an informal movement of artists that responded to the dominant styles of the day with paintings that were expressive and rough-hewn. Like many of his colleagues, Dahn drew
  
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• British Museum Receives Its Most Expensive Gift, Michelangelo May Have Painted a Woman with Breast Cancer, Two Ben Enwonwu Works Discovered, and More: Morning Links for November 14, 2024

  14-11-2024 14:50 via artnews.com
  
  To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.The HeadlinesBRITISH MUSEUM RECEIVES MOST VALUABLE GIFT. The British Museum has received its highest-value donation to date, as the BBC reports,in the form of 1,700 rare Chinese ceramics worth $1.27 billion. They were donated by the Sir Percival David Foundation, which had previously loaned the precious, thousand-year-old treasures to the museum. British businessm
  
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• Creative sparks: how the Mughal empire made opulent art with power

  14-11-2024 09:00
  
  The V&A’s Great Mughals shines a light on a cultured and enlightened reign over India and south Asia that still wields influence today. Take a close look at some of the remarkable artefacts of that eraPerhaps the best known cultural remnant of the mighty Mughal empire, which held sway across what is today Afghanistan, Pakistan, northern India and Bangladesh in the 16th and 17th centuries, is the English word “mogul”, denoting someone of almost unimaginable wealth
  
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• British Museum receives record £1bn donation of Chinese ceramics

  13-11-2024 22:30
  
  Collection of 1,700 pieces dating from third to 20th century is highest-value gift of objects in UK museum historyThe British Museum has been given a private collection of Chinese ceramics worth about £1bn, the highest-value object donation in UK museum history.The 1,700 pieces dating from the third to the 20th century have been given permanently by the trustees of the Sir Percival David Foundation. They had been on loan to the London museum since 2009. Continue reading...
  
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• Eric Oglander’s Tiny Curiosities Summon a Sense of Simplicity and Play

  13-11-2024 21:43 via artnews.com
  
  Eric Oglander makes his sculptures—poetic and odd, searching and guided by a sense of play—in the back of an eccentric antique shop. Hidden behind a wall in Tihngs, a store he stocks with one-of-a-kind finds, and operates on Sunday afternoons in Ridgewood, Queens, is a workshop filled with scraps of wood, piles of button-down shirts, and other cast-off materials that Oglander crafts into curious contraptions, often at minuscule scale. Some are elaborate and mechanical, like the homes
  
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• San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum to Close to the Public for a Year or More

  13-11-2024 21:00 via artnews.com
  
  The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco will shutter its galleries for at least a year, a move that its leadership attributed to continued financial difficulties resulting from the pandemic.Because of the temporary closure, the museum will lay off some of its employees, though details for those cuts were not available by the time the shuttering was announced on Wednesday. The museum also said it could not yet supply a timeline for reopening.Kerry King, director of the Contemporary Jewish
  
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• Pro-Palestine Activists Call for MoMA to Sever Ties with Honorary Chairman Ronald S. Lauder

  13-11-2024 20:43 via artnews.com
  
  Last night, pro-Palestine protestors gathered outside the Museum of Modern Art in New York as it hosted the annual assembly for the World Jewish Congress, an influential organization led by honorary MoMA chairman Ronald S. Lauder.The World Jewish Congress has repeatedly made statements in support of Israel and claimed that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism. In a 2022 report submitted to the United Nations, the organization denounced what it described as the “false depiction of Israel
  
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• Anna Weyant Graces the Cover of ‘Vogue’ with a Portrait of Kaia Gerber

  13-11-2024 19:04 via artnews.com
  
  A recent cover of Vogue‘s December 2024 issue may look strikingly familiar to art world audiences, who may recognize it as the work of Canadian artist Anna Weyant.One of two iterations—the other shot by American photographer Steven Meisel—captures actor and model Kaia Gerber. Weyant, who became known for her intimate, yet uncanny depictions of girl- and womanhood, has rose to art world stardom in the last few years. The issue’s first U.S. guest editor, fashion mogul Marc
  
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• Yves Bouvier to Stand Trial in France Over Missing Picasso Artworks

  13-11-2024 18:41 via artnews.com
  
  A French court has ruled that Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier and his business partner Olivier Thomas should stand trial over allegations related to the disappearance of multiple Picasso artworks from a storage unit over a decade ago, according to the Art Newspaper.The decision, handed down November 7 by a Paris appeals court, dismissed Bouvier’s attempt to curb the legal proceedings against him related to the works. The case began in 2015 when Catherine Hutin, Jacqueline Picasso’
  
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• Hauser & Wirth Asia Managing Partner Elaine Kwok Departs After Two Years

  13-11-2024 18:00 via artnews.com
  
  Elaine Kwok, a veteran of the Hong Kong art market, has officially left her position at Hauser & Wirth after a two-year stint. The gallery announced her departure in an email to staff.In that email, which was obtained by ARTnews, Hauser & Wirth’s leadership wrote “Elaine’s contribution in leading our Asia activities has been invaluable. Her commitment to our artists, programs, clients, and community, along with the successful opening of our new Hong Kong space she spear
  
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• Amid Art Market Slowdown and High Interest Rates, Specialist Art Lenders Claim Business Is Booming

  13-11-2024 17:30 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.Back in June, Puck’s Marion Maneker created a minor stir when he proposed a previously untold effect of the ongoing art market slowdown. High interest rates, he reported, had slammed the brakes on art lending, the growing business of banks and specialist firms lending against high-net-worth collec
  
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• Steve McQueen Pulls Out of Film Festival in Protest of Its Leader’s Comments on Female Cinematographers

  13-11-2024 17:27 via artnews.com
  
  Steve McQueen, a Turner Prize–winning artist and filmmaker, said he would not appear at a Polish film festival after the event’s leader published a controversial comments on female cinematographers.The Camerimage Film Festival, an event held in Toruń that is focused specifically on cinematography, is still slated to screen McQueen’s latest feature, Blitz, starring Saoirse Ronan as a woman looking for her lost child in war-torn London. McQueen was to be present at the scree
  
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