Dutch police have arrested a man accused of trying to sell a counterfeit Van Gogh painting for €15 million, claiming the piece was an early study for the artist’s work The Harvest. Several buyer had expressed interest in the work, which had forged papers claiming authenticity by the Van Gogh Museum. (more…)
The LA Review of Books examines the career Peter Zumthor this week, and the Swiss architect’s plans for the extended design of LACMA, which boasts one of his signature, stark towers and will connect the museum with the existing Broad Contemporary Art Museum, the Resnick Pavilion, the Pavilion for Japanese Art, the Page Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits. (more…)
Banksy, Dismaland (Installation View), via The Guardian
Banksy, the master of grandly executed public projects and sharp jabs at the banality of pop culture, has opened his newest project, Dismaland. The exhibition, which the subtitle a “family theme park unsuitable for children,” is spread out across the Tropicana, an abandoned site in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare, and features a number of contributions from more mainstream contemporary artists, including Damien Hirst and Jenny Holzer. Yet the park is still definitively Banksy, with his trademark irreverence and coy inversions of pop culture formats abounding across the derelict swimming club in the British resort town, and continues his barbs towards the Walt Disney Corporation.
Marketplace has an article on Arthena, the startup aiming to encourage investment in fine art through an equity share purchase of a curated art collection. “I’m part of this generation that they’re trying to reach out to, and I realized that this generation looks at art not only from a cultural perspective, but also a financial perspective,” says founder Madelaine D’Angelo. “And it makes sense, because if you look at how many kids my age have student loans, if you put $10,000 into something, you want to make sure it’ll be worth $10,000 the next day.” (more…)
UK Culture Minister Ed Vaizey has placed an export bar on the 1762 study of Niagara Falls by military artist Capt. Thomas Davies, the first eyewitness artwork depicting the natural wonder. “I hope that the temporary export bar I have put in place will result in a UK buyer coming forward and that the watercolor will be available for all to better understand Britain’s global role in the 18th century,” Vaizey said. (more…)
Four stolen Andrew Wyeth paintings have been recovered from a pawn shop featured on reality TV, NBC reports, worth about $1 million to $2 million each. The paintings were stolen from a home in Maine in 2013, and traveled cross-country before ultimately being sold at the Beverly Hills Pawn Shop, subject of a program on cable channel Reelz. Two paintings from the collection are still outstanding. “I’m optimistic that one day soon the paintings will be returned to their rightful owner and we’ll bring those responsible to justice,” says Vincent B. Lisi, special agent for the FBI’s Boston Division. (more…)
Hank Willis Thomas, The Truth Is I See You (Installation View) at MetroTech Promenade
The Truth Is I See You, the Public Art Fund’s recent collaboration with Brooklyn-based artist Hank Willis Thomas, is on view at MetroTech Promenade through June 3rd, 2016. Dispersed throughout the flush, green common areas of the park, and nestled amongst high rise commercial buildings in downtown Brooklyn, the project addresses issues of communication, individuality and globalism within the frame of Brooklyn, one of the most dynamic urban areas of the United States. Focusing particularly on languages spoken throughout the city, Thomas installed all twenty-two lines of Ryan Alexiev’s Truth Poem in a similar fashion to street signs, each showing a line from this poem in English, while the other side gives its translation in languages including Chinese, Polish, German and Hebrew, accompanied by a pronunciation guide. (more…)
Yoko Ono, Half-A-Room (1967), via Art Observed
It’s easy to lose sight of Yoko Ono. The Japanese artist has consistently shifted forms and formats over the course of her career, working with poetry, painting, performance, choreography, public art, and more, often in subtle actions that belie their often considerable emotional and physical affect. The fluxus-trained artist brings her early work to MoMA this summer with One Woman Show, an in-depth consideration of her practice and evolution as an artist at the intersection of performance, encounter and installation in the early years of her work.
Yoko Ono, Bag Piece (1964), via Art Observed
The exhibition is expansive, to say the least, and despite the considerable amount of space afforded it, still manages to feel close to bursting with the artist’s work. Her textual prompts run the length of the gallery, joined by paintings and drawings that mix participation, meditation and time as complicit elements of the work’s reception. Poetic in its presentation, there remains a trace of the physical throughout, from these calls to action, to works like A Painting in Three Stanzas, a frozen moment in time where a plant stem pierces through a fabric sheet painted in sumi ink. While time and process is suggested by the work, its status as a static work points to another number of timeframes, where the viewer might encounter a seedling, a fully grown vine, or perhaps no plant at all.
Yoko Ono, Painting in Three Stanzas (1961), via Art Observed
It also culls a number of the artist’s early, playful inversions on both Dada and Surrealism, like her classic works Apple and Three Spoons, divergent takes on Magritte’s linguistic subterfuge that maintain a more organic focus on the present object rather than a representation. One could almost consider this work an extension of the surrealist’s work, pushing his semiotic challenge to a natural conclusion. Also on view are a number of the artist’s early performative works, including Bag Piece, a performance for a single dance in which they cover themselves in a black sheet as they traverse a small space. Taken here amongst her other art objects and textual prompts, the minimal space afforded the work makes it all the more surreal.
Yoko Ono, Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961), via Art Observed
The exhibition continues through her work following her marriage to John Lennon, and the pair’s collaborative work in music, art and performance, including their famous Bed-In (in which the pair stayed in a hotel bed for days as a protest for peace), and their massive billboard installation project, War is Over (if You Want It). Video and audio from this period, including a special room set aside for the Plastic Ono Band (her long-running musical endeavor), reflects the power influence that both Lennon and Ono left on each other’s work, and on each other’s lives.
Yoko Ono, Cut Piece (1964), via MoMA
Perhaps what feels most compelling about Ono’s exhibition is her practice’s emphasis on possibility, the open-ended conclusion of her works as activated by the viewer/user. There’s a certain satisfaction, even, to this format, as if the work’s idea remains free from a final determination, and rather allows the viewer their own act of completion, liberated from the restraints of a physical space. Even in rooms so full of her various pieces, ideas and actions, that one can walk away from the show with this sense of completion is a testament to the artist’s practice.
One Woman Show is on view through September 7th.
Yoko Ono, Apple (1966), via Art Observed
— D. Creahan
Read more:
Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971 [Exhibition Site]
“‘Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971’ Review: Performance for a Lifetime” [WSJ]
“Review: In ‘Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971,’ Text Messages From the Edge” [NYT]
“Yoko Ono at MoMA review – a misunderstood artist finally gets her due” [Guardian]
The Kansas City Art Institute, which has trained or employed a number of major artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and Nick Cave, has received an anonymous gift of $25 million to its endowment, one of the largest gifts ever to an American art school. “I hate to use the word ‘transformational,’ because it’s bandied about so much these days,” says interim president Tony Jones said, “but it’s true in this case. It’s literally a make-the-difference gift in terms of scholarships.” (more…)
NPR has an in-depth profile in Paul Durand-Ruel this week, the 19th century Paris art dealer who first fostered the market for Impressionist works, and the story of his rise to success. “One of his artists came in one day with a young French painter, introducing him and saying, ‘This artist will surpass us all’ — and that artist was Claude Monet,” says curator Joe Rishel, who organized a show on the dealer at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (more…)
Forbes has published an eye-opening profile on Elisa Stephens, head of the for-profit Academy of Art University, and her struggles to keep the university’s national chain of schools (which have drawn criticism for poor graduation rates and job placements) afloat. “This industry was the darling of Wall Street,” says Trace Urdan, a research analyst for Credit Suisse. “But you have a federal government that for the last six and a half years has been very hostile to this sector. The re-regulation of this space has depressed valuations.” (more…)
German art historian Eike Schmidt has been appointed director of the Uffizi Gallery, one of seven foreigners heading up some of Italy’s top museums and exhibition spaces, part of a reform program for the nation’s public museums. “The promise held out by autonomy, is that you can do simple things to make the museum more accessible without too much fuss,” James Bradburne, the Canadian-born former director of the Palazzo Strozzi in Milan just appointed as head of Milan’s Brera Gallery. (more…)
Michael Govan has been awarded the Independent Curators International Leo Award for “extraordinary commitment to artists and pioneering contributions to the field of contemporary art.” “It’s an honor to be part of an ICI event,” Govan said. “ICI’s exhibitions and support for independent curators have helped shape the field over many years. And ICI often gives art and artists exposure ahead of the curve.” (more…)
Artist Charles Pétillon has been commissioned to fill London’s Covent Garden market with 100,000 balloons, the first installation the artist has created outside of France. “I want to change people’s point of view, their perspective of a place they see every day and never really look at,” he says. “A swimming pool, a field: if I suddenly put something strange in it like these balloons you will see it differently. I don’t want my works to be seen just as decoration, there is always something they are trying to draw out or question.” (more…)
This year, the Turner Prize is taking to the road in Scotland, with an art gallery on wheels transporting the shortlist exhibition through Scotland. The exhibition also features past winners of the prize, and begins in Edinburgh this Sunday. (more…)
The New York Times looks at the ongoing competition between Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and recent strategy changes that each have taken to gain the upper hand in their decades-long competition. We have been recruiting talent as well as exploring bolder ideas designed to substantially improve our performance in contemporary,” says Sotheby’s CEO and President Tad Smith. (more…)
An article in The Guardian this week looks behind the veneer of Andy Warhol’s New York cool, showing an artist who loved weightlifting, jewelry and his family life. “When we were all together as a family, my mom would sometimes question Uncle Andy about his art,” says nephew James Warhola. “You know, ‘What’s that meant to be?’, or even ‘Why are you wasting your time on this?’ And he would give as good as he got – not in a hostile way, but saying that this was his work, it had value and importance for him. He had studied art and was very knowledgeable.” (more…)
Melva Bucksbaum, the vice chairman of the Whitney Museum, and a trustee of the Aspen Institute, the American friends of the Israel Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, has passed away. Bucksbaum had a reputation for her charitable support of artists and institutions. “They support artists, even new ones. They buy according to their hearts, and they have good ones,” artist Pat Steir said of Bucksbaum and her husband. (more…)
As new information surfaces on the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist, Slate looks at why so many art heists go unsolved, and why recovering these works often proves so difficult, including long storage times for stolen works and the difficulty in keeping trained police to investigate these crimes. “The art crime team still exists—it’s managed by a trained archaeologist, not an FBI agent—but turnover is rampant,” says Robert Wittman, who previously headed up the FBI’s art theft investigations. (more…)
The New York Times notes the challenging path ahead for Berlin’s proposed modern art museum in the Kulturforum neighborhood, where years of negative feedback and divergent plans have made the area highly contentious. “For 30 years in Berlin, this place has been discussed only with bitterness and anger and aggression,” says Manfred Kühne, head of urban development and planning in the city’s Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment. (more…)
John Singer Sargent, The Fountain (1907), All images via Michael Ziga for Art Observed
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition of celebrated American painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Portraits of Artists and Friends, presents a collection of artists, writers, actors, and musicians, colleagues and friends of the painters, that offered Sargent the freedom to create more radical and dynamic works than those made for paying clients. The sitters are often candidly depicted in the act of painting or lounging where others pose comfortably for Sargent. (more…)
Sofia Leiby, An excuse is a polite rejection (after JW) (2014), via Anonymous Gallery
There’s a telling line in the press release for The Negative Hand, a presentation of new works at Mexico City’s Anonymous Gallery, reflecting on the cave paintings as Lascaux: “by defining themselves, artists often define the systems around them as well, and inversely, by defining the systems around them, artist begin to define themselves.” It’s an open-ended prompt, but one that feels particularly resonant in 2015: embracing the aesthetic fusions and detritus of modernity as equally worthy of examination and re-creation as any singular subject. (more…)
Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)
Currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum is Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks, the first major exhibition of the writings and sketches from Jean-Michel-Basquiat’s’ rarely seen personal archives. Without a doubt one of the most influential artists of 1980’s Neo-Expressionism, Basquiat worked with music, poetry, and graffiti before finally arriving at painting. Tagging the walls of downtown New York, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz presented socially conscious graffiti under the tag name SAMO. Straying from the visual attributes of popular graffiti, these tags were often full of sayings, quotes and poems in plain script that replaced graffiti’s showmanship with intellectual thought. Navigating viewers into the personal thoughts of Basquiat with two video documentations and many rarely seen paintings,The Unknown Notebooks is a satisfying mixture of both seeing and reading.
Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)
Basquiat’s cultural plurality and vivid paintings begin with the socially investigative phrases, symbols and thoughts on these carefully curated pages. Each of the 160 pages in the exhibition hold a single composition, with blank pages framing the words to a strong effect. Intent on speaking with political and socio-economic strength, corporate symbols, quotations, crowns, skeletons and teepees hang above words, and at the end of sentences, altering these everyday phrases, while visual techniques, suggesting dichotomies in familiar linguistic comprehension, open more room for unique interpretation.
Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)
Accompanying the notebooks are a series of paintings that possess a freedom and fearlessness directly related to the artist’s graffiti background. Words fill the canvas from top to bottom, transforming text into texture and letters back into gestural marks. Acting as much as a carrier of language as a layer of paint, Basquiat’s words successfully imported graffiti’s aesthetic energy and social awareness into the white cubes of the art world. The anonymous foundations of his early craft embrace this energetic freedom, vandalism, and self-expression that have come to define youth culture. A contributing figure in the impact of the practice in contemporary art proper, Basquiat’s dedicated approach to symbols and lettering transform this anonymous art form into a new format inside his burgeoning artistic repertoire.
Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)
Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)
The Unknown Notebooks reveals the underlying elements that made expression a larger concern for Basquiat than fitting into the previously determined aesthetic standards of high art. The primitive and socially aware foundations that have defined his work, and kept its impact almost thirty years later are here at Brooklyn Museum in an almost elemental form, on display through August 23rd.
— R.Williams
Read more:
“Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” at Brooklyn Museum [Exhibition Site]
“Review: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s ‘Unknown Notebooks’ at the Brooklyn Museum” [New York Times]
“‘Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks’ Gives a Window Into Basquiat’s Mind At Its Most Relaxed” [Forbes]
Tiger Tiger at Salon 94 (Installation View)
Tiger Tiger is the current summer group exhibition at Salon 94 Bowery, on view through August 21, 2015. The fittingly titled show brings together fifteen artists, whose works explore the ease of tropical landscapes, and the seemingly perfect equilibrium of wild life. Works boasting ample color spectrums speak to simple yet ecstatic rhythms of island life, while elsewhere a distinctive composition of flush tropical wilderness wins out. Distinctively foreign to New Yorkers, elements from these tropical destinations blossom into depictions of dazzling animals, plants or landscapes, contrasting the city’s heavily industrialized and overpopulated dynamic just outside the gallery space. (more…)