Amedeo Modigliani, Nu Couché (1917), Price Realized: $157,159,000, via Sotheby’s

A marathon week of auctions in New York is now underway, but not quite off to a roaring start, as Sotheby’s capped an unsteady and often struggling auction this evening at its uptown location.  Led by a strong performance by an Amedeo Modigliani masterpiece, the sale failed to achieve much beyond its marquee lots, ultimately capping the sale with 13 unsold works that brought the sale to a final tally of $318,313,600.

Pablo Picasso, Le Repos (1932), Price Realized: $36,920,500, via Sotheby’s

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Attempts to move a Bernini sculpture has led to a missing right ring finger of his subject, St. Bibiana.  “After this incident we have much to reflect on, as art historians, which you are becoming,” says Professor Giovan Battista Fidanza, who discovered the damage. “We know that moving works of art is always a huge stress for them.” (more…)

The Guardian has a piece this week recapping the sale of the Rockefeller estate last week at Christie’s, noting that the sales raised a final total of $832 million, breaking 22 auction records for artists in the sale. (more…)

For the second time, a Steve Wynn-owned Picasso has been damaged, leading to Christie’s withdrawal of the artist’s Le Marin piece from auction this week.  It was valued at $70 million.  Information on the damage to the work was not specified, but Wynn previously put his arm through Picasso’s Le Reve last year.  (more…)

Charles Ray is profiled in the New York Times this week, as the artist opens a show of new works at Matthew Marks. “When I was a younger man I was very aware — and perhaps still am today — of a degree of provocativeness carrying a work into a room and grabbing people’s attention,” he says.

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Gagosian will unveil a new sculpture by Urs Fischer titled “Things,” at 511 Fifth Avenue this week, opening a disused bank building northeast of Bryant Park until June 23.  “It happened by accident,” Fischer says of the work, which features a massive rhinoceros. “I just saw a rhino and was like, ‘That’s my protagonist that I’ve looked for for years.’” (more…)

Jenny Saville, Fate I (2018), via Josie Berman for Art Observed

Jenny Saville returns to Gagosian this month in New York, bringing her iconic painterly style and remarkably attentive perspective towards the human body with her.  The artist, whose past 25 years of practice have seen her delve into an ever-evolving interest in the nuanced erotics and endlessly narrative capacities of the human form, returns here to her frequent interest in couples and pairings of form, using intertwined bodies and interlocked figures to explore human relation and emotion.  (more…)

Harold Ancart, Untitled (2018), via Clearing

The painterly technique of Harold Ancart draws particular strength in accumulation and mass.  Accenting his rough line-work with thick layers of paint and broad fields of paint, Ancart’s compositions have long drawn on the grey areas between addition and subtraction, as if his paintings and sculpture existing in a state where void states are always present, yet somehow, always just beyond comprehension. Past works have seen the artist negotiate between different perceptions of space with masterful skill, creating pieces where the accumulation of paint only draws additional strength from its later removal, or vice versa, ultimately creating complex interactions between time and space, depth and flatness. (more…)

The Court of Arbitration for Art, or CAA, a new juridical body formed to resolve international conflicts over art, has been founded in The Hague, Artforum reports.  “Courts are reactive bodies,” founder William Charron of the New York firm Pryor Cashman says. “They don’t go out and independently try to search for the truth on their own. They take the evidence that is presented by the parties and they do the best they can. The thinking with CAA is, if you have art practitioners as the deciders, they’re going to be better positioned to evaluate the evidence.” (more…)

Following the success of a Claude Monet sale this week at Christie’s, the auction house will try its hand at the higher end of the artist’s market next month in London, announcing a second work depicting La Gare Saint-Lazare for £22-£28 million. “The paintings represent a dialogue between Monet and the increasing modernity of everyday life in Paris, which was rapidly changing at that time,” says Keith Gill of the auction house’s Post-War and Impressionist Department. (more…)

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University have partnered to create a new three-year program that combines academic training and work experience to develop and encourage a diverse body of new arts curators. “We need things to start changing now,” LACMA head Michael Govan says. “Addressing it directly and speaking loudly sends a strong signal.” (more…)

A group of British artists including Tracey Emin and Wolfgang Tillmans have published an open letter decrying the current state of British arts education. “There is compelling evidence that the study of creative subjects is in decline in state schools and that entries to arts and creative subjects have fallen to their lowest level in a decade,” the letter reads. “Young people are being deprived of opportunities for personal development in the fields of self-expression, sociability, imagination, and creativity.”  (more…)

Two teachers at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan have been removed from their posts following complaints of improper conduct by students. Roy Frumkes and Robert Haufrecht were both fired over violation of the school’s misconduct policies. “The College is firmly committed to the rights of all members of its community,” says spokeswoman Joyce. “SVA responds to sexual misconduct complaints swiftly, investigates them thoroughly and resolves them in accordance with local, state and federal laws.” (more…)

New York’s Joan Mitchell Foundation has named Kay Takeda as its new senior director of artist programs. “Joan Mitchell was not only at the vanguard of American abstraction, but forward-thinking in endowing a foundation to assist generations of artists in developing and sharing their creative work,” Takeda says. “This is a mission I have long shared and it’s an honor to help steward such an important vision and resource into the future.” (more…)

Nicolas Bourriaud, the director of Montpellier Contemporain in France and the cofounder of the Paris’s Palais de Tokyo museum, will curate the next Istanbul Biennial.  “I am very honored to be able to contribute to the history of Istanbul Biennial, which has always been a place of strong curatorial statements since its creation in 1987,” Bourriaud says.  “Also, as a crossing point, the city of Istanbul takes a specific signification today, in a global political era marked by binary thought. I will try to build an exhibition that measures up to our historical situation.” (more…)

Harmony Hammond, Inappropriate Longings (detail) (1992), via Alexander Gray

Alexander Gray’s exhibition of the work of Harmony Hammond highlights the artist’s work from the 1990’s, mixing together a divergent series of works using wallpaper, linoleum and other decaying materials plucked from a world between the constructed and cosmetic.  Her objects have seen better days, truth be told, eerily reminiscent of slowly rotting farms in the Midwest, or the nefarious forces of Capote’s dark American landscapes.  In Hammond’s hands, the two-dimensionally sculpted debris, peppered with brand names of long-gone industrial companies, invoke a yearning for something other than what we experience: the passage of time, the sense of a specific battered place, vague violence, foul weather or foul play. (more…)

Henning Strassburger, The Big Air Conditioner (2018), via Blumenthal

For the past five years, collector Robert Blumenthal has been wading deeper and deeper into the world of exhibition-making, mounting shows with a flair for the adventurous and the scholarly in his gallery that has moved from the Upper East Side and the Hamptons to Chinatown. Having embraced a collecting style that pairs conceptually ambitious work with more classical approaches towards lyrical and figurative painting, Blumenthal’s shows have been a distinct analog to his own collection, which features work by Darren Bader, Isa Genzken, Chris Burden, and Mary Weatherford, among others.
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Pablo Picasso, Fillette a la corbeille fleurie (1905), price realized: $115,000,000, via Christie’s

With the final bids placed and the hammer falling on the last lot of the evening, Christie’s has closed the book on an outstanding outing, concluding the star evening sale of its spring season, the sale of the David and Peggy Rockefeller Collection.  A jewel of modern art collection, the works from the family’s holdings were wide and deep enough to fill several evening sales in Christie’s calendar this week, with this 19th and 20th Century Sale serving as the main event. It did not disappoint.

Joan Miro, Mural I, Mural II, Mural III (1933), price realized: $20,000,000, via Christie’s

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Finland has tapped the Miracle Workers Collective to represent the country at the 2019 Venice Biennale.  “If people have been engaging with the possible and ‘the way the world is today is the result of the possibles that they did’ as Sun Ra said,”the group says of their work in a statement, “then what would be the results of imagining and engaging with the impossible?” (more…)

As the Rockefeller Collection heads to the auction block, the Art Newspaper spotlights the wealthy family, and how they built such a landmark collection, while simultaneously defining the modern market landscape. The piece spotlights the family’s varied tastes, and how each of them left their mark on the collection. (more…)

As auction week prepares to heat up, Bloomberg profiles a group of collectors and dealers, and their perspectives on how to build a collection. “In the art market there are no rules, that’s why it is such a minefield and why it has such opportunities,” says adviser Wendy Goldsmith. “When I start with a new client, half my job is to say no, especially to people from finance who think because they can master one market they can master any market.” (more…)

Printed Matter is opening a new satellite store in the lobby of the new Swiss Institute space on St. Marks, the store announced today.  “We are deeply excited to welcome Printed Matter as part of the new SI building,” says Simon Castets, the Swiss Institute’s executive director. “As a nonprofit dedicated to contemporary forms of expression, SI couldn’t dream of a better partner than Printed Matter: more than just a space, we share a commitment to artists’ voices and strive to amplify them.” (more…)

Amedeo Modigliani, Nu Couché (Sur le Côté Gauche) (1917), via Sotheby’s

With the weather gradually warming, and thoughts turning to the summer months in New York, the art world will once again look to the Big Apple for a last major auction of the spring season.  With a packed week boasting a string of sales spread over 10 days, the week’s offerings will make for a pointed cap to the preceding week at Roosevelt Island, where Frieze New York will has drawn to a close.  With a number of impressive highlights, chief among them the collection of David and Peggy Rockefeller at Christie’s, the spring sales in New York should offer a few impressive exclamation points to add to an already packed month of market offerings. (more…)

David Wojnarowicz’s Science Lesson will look to set the stage for the artist’s emergence into the blue-chip market next week at Christie’s Contemporary Sale in NYC, Art News reports. “Now is the moment to launch him onto an international platform,” says Andy Massad, Christie’s deputy chairman of postwar and contemporary art department. “There’s a lot of education that needs to be done out there, because honestly he’s seen more as a very intense cult figure.” (more…)