This weekend marks the seventh edition of Pinta NY, an international art fair dedicated to Latin American, Spanish, and Portuguese art. Founded in 2007, the fair has moved around the city and taken a few different shapes as it has grown into the can’t miss event it is today. This year, the fair is located at 82MERCER, a “downtown loft-style building located in the heart of SoHo,” and is comprised of two floors and features both contemporary and modern art. Additionally, Pinta has revamped its layout by breaking down exhibitions into platforms, organized by theme and period, and hand-picked by a team of internationally recognized curators. For visitors with limited time, this breakdown will help you find exactly what you’re looking for.

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After several months of deliberation, Berlin officials have announced a new plan for a $174 million museum to house the city’s extensive 20th century art collection.  Located in Potsdamer Platz, the new museum will boast an area of about 9,900 square meters (106,563 square feet), and could open as soon as 2022 if work starts immediately.  It now falls to the German government to approve these plans.  “With a new building, the Nationalgalerie collection could at last be exhibited permanently on a big scale.” German Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said in a statement. (more…)

This spring, Christie’s auction calendar will feature a broad selection of works from the estate of the late Dr. Mona Ackerman, a psychologist and writer who counts works by Giacometti, Picasso, and Arp in her collection, as well as a number of fine antiques and pieces of furniture.  Her wide collection of pieces will be auctioned in the weeks leading up to Christie’s Modern Art Evening Sale on May 8th in New York.  Says Paul Provost, Christie’s Deputy Chairman: “Dr. Ackerman’s collection reveals her exquisite taste and wide interests. Her collection was striking and elegant, emanating the grace and passionate enthusiasm for life, for which Ackerman was well-known.”  (more…)

Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872), via Royal Academy of Arts

London’s Royal Academy of Arts is currently exhibiting an ambitious retrospective of portraiture by iconoclastic French painter Édouard Manet (1832 – 1883), collected from across Europe, Asia and the United States.  This is the first-ever exhibition of work by Manet that focuses on his broad body of portraiture, tracing the artist’s artistic evolution in the format throughout his life, as well as his contributions to modern portraiture in the contemporary era.  While Manet worked across a range of subjects in figurative painting, portraiture makes up about half of his body of work, offering perhaps the strongest evidence of the artist’s creative motivations throughout the course of his life.

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With the two year shut-down of SFMOMA for its major expansion project beginning this June, the institution is gearing up to announce a range of exhibitions and events across the Bay Area.  The museum released a small press announcement on its Facebook recently, welcoming external input, and hinting at events to come.  The construction will span 2013 to 2016, and will cost the museum $555 million. (more…)

Gert and Uwe Tobias at FRAC-Auvergne (Installation View), via FRAC-Auvergne

The work of Romanian brothers Gert and Uwe Tobias operates in a peculiar space between diverse artistic traditions.  Combining watercolor, woodcut prints, sculptures, typewriter drawings and ceramics, the Tobias brothers have created a body of work that combines Art Nouveau with Romanian folk heritage, Paul Klee with Russian Constructivism, and archaic technologies with contemporary art theory.  Using the broad world of contemporary art as their sounding board, the Tobias brothers seek to reevaluate and re-contextualize their native heritage.  (more…)

In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show, the United States Postal Service has announced a series of 12 stamps honoring the early pioneers of modern art.  The Modern Art in America 1913-1931 series includes stamps dedicated to Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O’Keefe, Joseph Stella, and more. (more…)

Two exhibitions will celebrate the seminal Armory Show of 1913 this year, “The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913”, which opens at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey on the exact day of the centennial anniversary; and “The Armory Show at 100”, at the New York Historical Society in the fall. The original show, organized by Walt Kuhn and Arthur B. Davies, was so shocking to American audiences that “…in Chicago, art students felt so threatened that they burned Brancusi and Matisse in effigy, a scene that a German expressionist might have done justice to – except that there was no German expressionism in the show.” (more…)

Will Gompertz, writer, editor, and a director at the Tate, has created a new timeline for Modern Art, using the map of the London Tube as a guide. Gompertz focuses on how Duchamp’s Fountain changed the course of art history forever.

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