London’s National Gallery is contesting a claim that one of its premier Matisse paintings is former Nazi loot.  Portrait of Greta Moll passed through several hands before purchase in 1979, at a time when provenance was not nearly as closely monitored or considered during acquisitions.  The museum is calling for dismissal of the case over “jurisdictional issues.”  (more…)

The Baltimore Museum of Art will organize the U.S. pavilion at the Venice Biennale next year, presenting the work of artist Mark Bradford.  “Without question, this is the greatest honor accorded in the contemporary art world,” says director Christopher Bedford said. “This is so prestigious, so deeply and totally global that it instantly plants the BMA in the international spotlight.” (more…)

Carrie Mae Weems is profiled in the New York Times this week, as the artist prepares to open a show of new works at Jack Shainman Gallery, and frames her recent work around modern television.  “I decided to go and stand in spaces where I think significant transformations are taking place in television as a way of pointing, trying to understand the role of black actors,”she says. “Directors like Lee Daniels and Shonda Rhimes are laying the foundation for what can be imagined within the context of American culture. Most people go for their programming to paid television, so there’s an economic shift. Network television has been left to poor people.” (more…)

Donald A Moore, the chair of Morgan Stanley Group Europe, will take over as the chair of the ICA London’s council.  “I am looking forward to working with Donald, so that together we can make the ICA simply one of the most relevant and innovative contemporary arts organizations in the world today,” said recently hired museum director Stefan Kalmár. “Historically our outspoken program is what has made us ‘the’ ICA, but that ‘the’ ICA still exists at all, is due to the dedication and leadership of Alison and Gregor [Muir]—for this we can’t thank them enough.” (more…)

Lawrence Abu Hamdan has won the 2016 Nam June Paik Prize, given each year by the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany.  Abu Hamdan’s work investigated the shooting of Palestinian teenagers by the Israeli army, and the attempts by soldiers to cover up the noise of the killings.  “In his installation [earshot] he has created an open space in which we can focus with precision on his subject, its means of representation and on our own role as viewers,” the jury wrote in a statement. “The topic of the representation of violence is of great contemporary relevance, and the artist encourages us to debate key moral issues in a different way.” (more…)

The New York Times visits Mark di Suvero in his Astoria studio complex for a tour of the expansive location, which includes gallery spaces, several studios, and even several living spaces for artists to stay.  The article also profiles the artist’s ongoing engagement with the neighborhood around his complex, which he built and developed with the help of neighborhood residents.   (more…)

Mary Boone is fighting back in her feud with Alec Baldwin this week, accusing the actor of attempted tax fraud in the purchase of a Ross Bleckner piece.  Baldwin had previously had the work shipped to California upon purchase, before sending it back to his New York apartment, a move Boone describes as an attempt to avoid New York sales tax.  “I respectfully submit that Baldwin cannot connive an elaborate scheme to evade sales taxes and yet claim that there are any circumstances under which he is entitled to punitive or exemplary damages in connection with the same transaction,” she said in a sworn affidavit. (more…)

Herzog de Meuron has won the contract to design Berlin’s Museum of the 20th Century with a low, squat design that many have likened to a train station or farmers’ market.  “A riding school? A station? A depot? All these associations are correct,” says the architect Jacques Herzog, emphasizing the space’s shared intent as a site for activity and community. (more…)

Mike Nelson, Tools that See (Installation view), All images via the artist and neugerriemschneider.

Mike Nelson’s Tools That See (Possessions of a Thief) 1986-2005, on view at neugerriemschneider is a material chronicle of the tools the artist has used over the past 30 years. Immediately recognizable as an homage to the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, Nelson’s pieces carry the same force of reality-bending humor as earlier iterations of found object art and the readymade.  The familiar items, ones a viewer may see strewn around a site of construction, are rendered as images withdrawn from their tactile elements, contained in glass frames and elevated on dense wooden pedestals. (more…)

London mayor Sadiq Khan is pushing for more affordable studio space for artists in the city’s increasingly expensive real estate market, and establishing the “Creative Land Trust” to provide loans to artists looking to secure space.  “Culture is in the DNA of the capital but we cannot be complacent,” Khan says. “As property prices rise and new areas of the city grow, artists are finding themselves unable to put down roots here. I am committed to improving access to dedicated, affordable workspace so that the next generation of creatives are given the extra support they require to flourish.” (more…)

The New York Times takes a deeper exploration of the Frans Haals forgery that had convinced experts at the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum, and which was recently discovered as a falsely attributed canvas.  “The ones who have researched it until now are good researchers, but they’re not familiar with the handwriting of Frans Hals, so to speak, so that’s an extra reason to be careful,” says Martin Bijl, a Dutch Masters restoration professional. (more…)

The Art Newspaper reports on the damage done last year to the British Museum’s Townley Venus, one of its most treasured holdings.  The statue had its thumb knocked off by caterers last December, but was subject to an extensive restoration before going back on view.  “We have taken steps to ensure it does not happen again. Any staff who are involved in managing or invigilating events have gone through retraining on the protection of objects before and during events,” the museum said in a statement. (more…)

Billionaire David M. Rubenstein will head the Smithsonian Institution board, the Washington Post reports.  “I love the museums, and I love the learning. It keeps me young,” Rubenstein says.  “I don’t play golf. I don’t drink alcohol, so I’m not going to bars.  At this point in my life, I only do the things I want to do. This isn’t work. This is pleasurable.” (more…)

A group of protestors were arrested outside Art Institute of Chicago on Monday after blockading Michigan Avenue in protest over one trustee’s alleged complicity in cuts to higher education funding.  The activity called on trustee Kenneth Griffin to “push for free, fully funded public higher education, funded by taxes on corporations and the rich.” (more…)

Artist Derrick Adams has won this year’s Studio Museum Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, a $50,000 award.  The award is given each year since since 2006, to “an African-American artist of great innovation and promise.” (more…)

Maria Lassnig, Woman Power (1979), all images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Already a celebrated artist during the late ‘60s in her native Austria, Maria Lassnig left Paris and moved to New York, an unfamiliar city she considered vastly different from Europe, where the power dynamics of the art world were sharply drawn and where patriarchal discourses prevailed.  In addition to ‘body awareness,’ the term she coined to define her painting style in which she exclusively depicted body parts she felt during her painting process, Lassnig had already earned recognition for her surreal and experimental method of employing color to convey corporeality.  Not preoccupied by aesthetic standards defining the human form, Lassnig’s exploration of subliminal complexities as regards the body ultimately offered her compositions a vivid figurative potency.

Maria Lassing, Selbstporträt als Indianergirl (1973),

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Pedro Reyes, Doomocracy (Installation View), via Art Observed

Doomocracy, the long-anticipated collaboration between Pedro Reyes and Creative Time, has opened at the Brooklyn Army Teminal in Sunset Park, bringing a timely “house of horrors” to a city preparing for both the thrills and chills of the Halloween season, and an election cycle that has been often been fraught with a similar sense of doom and gloom.

The Voting Booth installation, courtesy Will Star Shooting Stars for Creative Time

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Pipilotti Rist speaks to Artforum this week, as the artist’s opens her New Museum survey, Pixel Forest.  “Pixel Forest is, in a way, reconciling daily and nightly lights with our synapses and inner feelings; I try to bring a poetic order,” she says. “It’s a very emotional, intuitive work that converges both the technological and the biological.” (more…)

The New York Times has a lengthy piece on Miri Regev, Israel’s Culture Minister, and the rift she has created between the state and its left-leaning creative class.  “There’s a new group on the right that says: We’re unwilling to bow our heads any longer,” she says. “We’re unwilling to let the left decide for us if we’re in charge.” (more…)

One of the top museum officials in the Italian city of Turin has resigned following a public spat with the city’s mayor.  Patrizia Asproni, the head of the Turin Museum Foundation, stepped down after the city’s populist mayor, Chiara Appendino, publicly criticized her over the failure to secure a Manet exhibition.  The feud underscores growing uncertainty over support for the arts in the city, as Appendino’s stance towards the city’s institutions continues to garner criticism.  “It is a terrible thing that the mayor wants to decide which exhibitions go to museums,” Asproni says. “I think this [calling for my resignation] was a political move because of course I arrived with the previous mayor and he asked me to build the culture of the town and I said: ‘Yes, of course, why not?’” (more…)

Ulay is interviewed in The Observer this week, discussing his 1976 piece There’s a Criminal Touch to Art, in which he entered New National Gallery in Berlin and stole a painting by Carl Spitzweg.  “I made a statement that this was a demonstrative action, not a theft in the traditional sense,” he says, referring to the work as a “protest action, first of all against the institutionalization of art, secondarily about discrimination against foreign workers.” (more…)

A 1963 piece by Gerhard Richter, said to be from the collection of Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, is set to sell at Phillips‘s New York Contemporary Evening Sale next month, estimated to reach upwards of $35 million.  “This is a defining early Richter,” says Jean-Paul Engelen, worldwide co-head of 20th century and contemporary art at Phillips. “The painting has this extreme power that’s seductive but on the other hand is also threatening.” (more…)

Miami-Dade College has been legally ordered to pay the legal fees for art dealer Gary Nader following litigation over Nader’s failed attempts to build a cultural center at the school’s campus.  Nader alleged that the school had conspired with another bidder in the attempt to redevelop a parking lot in downtown Miami that resulted in his failed attempt to build a museum. (more…)

The Walton Family has offered a challenge grant of up to $900,000 to the Smithsonian to fund the digitization of the museum archives.  “The task of digitizing the archives’ vast collections for broad accessibility requires a dedicated team of experts and time,” director Kate Haw said. “This challenge grant from the distinguished Walton Family Foundation allows us to expand both our technical and staff capacities to ramp up our pace beyond what we could have imagined.” (more…)