The Battersea Arts Center has received a £1 million grant from the United Kingdom following a massive fire at the South London institution that destroyed its Grand Hall.  “The arts center is having to divert all its available resources into dealing with the aftermath and so I am pleased to be able to confirm that the government will provide £1 million towards the ongoing redevelopment work to help get this south London venue back on track,” says Culture secretary Sajid Javid. (more…)

New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has launched an investigation into the financial decision-making at Cooper Union in New York, where protests and lawsuits erupted following the school’s decision to charge tuition after nearly two hundred years of offering free college education to admitted students.  (more…)

John Baldessari is featured on Vogue this week, discussing the formal and thematic concerns he reads in Philip Guston’s Stationary Figure, part of The Met’s new series featuring contemporary artists discussing their favorite works from the museum collection.  “He’s almost a dumb artist, and I’m using dumb in a good way,” Baldessari says.  “It’s seemingly clumsy but very sophisticated brushwork.  I guess it comes out of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of old boots: you don’t need to paint a cathedral, you just need to be an interesting painter.” (more…)

The design for the Serpentine’s annual summer pavilion has been announced for 2015, a colorful, cocoon-like structure by the architectural collaborative Selgas Cano that celebrates the program’s 15th anniversary.  Selgas Cano “sought a way to allow the public to experience architecture through simple elements, [a] journey through the space, characterized by color, light and irregular shapes with surprising volumes.” (more…)

The New York Times notes the city of Malaga’s recent push to become a new hotspot for art in Spain, as the city opens its arms to out of country spaces run by the Centre Pompidou and the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg.  “One of the cancers of Spain is that culture is seen as a public good that can’t somehow generate real revenues and be turned into a profit center,” said Salomón Castiel, the director of La Térmica, an arts center in the city. (more…)

An El Greco from the collection of industrialist Julius Priester, and seized by the Gestapo during WWII, has been returned to its rightful owners.  Portrait of a Gentleman has traveled widely since its confiscation in 1944, turning up in galleries in Stockholm, New York and London before a European Commission for Looted Art claim led to its return.  “The story of the seizure and trade of this painting shows how much the art trade has been involved in the disposal of Nazi-looted art and how difficult it is for those who have been dispossessed to find and recover their property,” says Anne Webber, co-chair of the Commission. (more…)

A painting recently authenticated as the work of Peter Paul Rubens is set to go on view at the Rubenshuis Museum in Antwerp.  The work, Portrait of a Young Girl, was purchased $626,500 in 2013, and was confirmed as authentic shortly after.   (more…)

The continued instability of Ukraine has led to cancellation of the second Kiev Biennale, the New York Times reports.  The 2014 edition had been postponed due to conflict, and the ongoing military confrontation in the eastern portion of the country has ultimately led to the event’s cancellation.  “Due to the fact that the armed conflict in the East of Ukraine does not stop,” a release from the organization says, the event has become “absolutely impossible.”  (more…)

An article in The Atlantic this past week acknowledges the 25th anniversary of the notorious Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft in Boston, and examines the public fascination with art heists, examining this phenomenon against the difficulty in unloading stolen works of such cultural prestige.  “The true art isn’t the stealing, it’s the selling,” says Robert Wittman, founder of the FBI’s Art Crimes division. (more…)

Roy Lichtenstein’s The Ring (Engagement) will be one of the top prizes at Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Sale this May in New York, the Wall Street Journal reports, with initial estimates placing the work’s sale price at about $50 million.  That figure nearly matches Lichtenstein’s $56.1 million record set in 2013.  “I think it’s so sexy how he takes this quiet moment of a proposal and turns it into an exciting crash,” says Chicago plastics magnate Stefan Edlis, the work’s current owner. “Clearly, the woman accepted.” (more…)

Sotheby’s has announced a partnership with Drake, welcoming the rapper to partner with the auction house during an exhibition and private sale of works by black artists in the coming months.  The artist will select music to play during the exhibition, part of Sotheby’s increased focus on private sales. (more…)

Following up on the claims for serious market contention made by new chief Edward Dolman, Phillips has landed a major private collection for sale in the coming months, valued at nearly $35 million.  The works, which include a Brice Marden estimated at $8 million to $12 million, and a Ed Ruscha valued at $2 to $3 million, will be sold at the auction house’s Contemporary Evening sale in May, with some others being reserved for a special photography sale.  “They were interested in art of their time,” says advisor Allan Schwartzman, who helped build the collection. “There is a lot of abstract work and work where the imaging is involved with the natural world.” (more…)

A recent 13D filing from Mark McGwire’s Marcato Capital in the past week states that the hedge fund now holds stocks in three Sotheby’s funds amounting to about 9.5%, equivalent to Daniel Loeb’s Third Point, and requests that the company release previously withheld information around the company’s recent dealings.  “The redacted material goes to the very heart of the parties’ dispute in this litigation – the conduct and competence of Sotheby’s board of directors in adopting a poison pill,” Marcato states in its filing. (more…)

Pierre Le Guennec, the electrician accused of stealing over 200 Picasso pieces from the artist years ago, has been handed a suspended two year sentence for his possession of the works, and has been ordered to return the works by a Parisian court.   (more…)

303 Gallery has announced plans for its own publishing imprint, appointing former Fulton Ryder director Fabiola Alondra as the head of the wing. which will feature “limited edition artist’s books, ephemera, and all manner of printed materials in collaboration with gallery artists,” according to the gallery. (more…)

The art collection of late film executive Samuel Goldwyn will go to auction at Sotheby’s in the next few months, spread across nine sales in New York (including May’s Impressionist and Modern Evening Sale) and estimated at a total value of $25 million to $30 million.  “To me, these film pioneers and these artists had the same spirit and energy,” says Sotheby’s Simon Shaw. “The art had to be bold, I suppose, to hold its own in that house.” (more…)

A number of works which were damaged during a massive fire in Berlin’s Friedrichshain bunker, including pieces by Caravaggio, Rubens and Donatello, are on view at the Bode Museum in Berlin, showcasing the immense restorations done on some works while exploring the ethical and historical implications of their damage.  “We will be showing a number of horrendous-looking pieces—works that are so badly damaged that they haven’t been displayed in generations,” says Julien Chapuis, the museum’s deputy director and show curator. “We want to be brutally honest about the condition of these works so that we can start a dialogue as to how they can be presented in the future.” (more…)

LACMA has published an editorial on its blog this week, calling for renewed efforts in preserving the Nevada region of desert called Basin and Range, where artist Michael Heizer is working to complete his monumental City project.  “As the possibility for protecting Basin and Range comes close to a reality, LACMA and other museums around the country are hoping to bring attention to the positive cultural impact protecting this land would have,” the article states. (more…)

Gabriele Finaldi, the deputy director of the Prado museum in Madrid, will take over for Nicholas Penny as the head of the UK’s National Gallery this August.  “I feel deeply honored to take on the directorship of the National Gallery after Nicholas Penny,” Finaldi, who formerly worked as a curator at the museum from 1992 to 2002, says.  “This is a world-class collection in a world-class city and I eagerly look forward to working with trustees and the staff to strengthen the gallery’s bond with the public and its international standing.” (more…)

Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Sales in New York this May will be lead by a series of works from the art collection of the late John Whitehead, former chairman of Goldman Sachs.  Whitehead built a museum-quality collection over the course of his career, and will offer works from Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Amedeo Modigliani and Pierre Bonnard, among others, anticipated to bring over $40 million.  “I remained enough of a financier that I took an interest in the prices, and I tried to predict what price an individual piece would go for at auction,” he wrote in his biography. (more…)

The annual study by The UK’s Association of Leading Visitor Attractions shows a 7% increase in museum visits by the British in 2014, topped by The British Museum (6.7 million visitors) and National Gallery (6.4 million).  The news comes in the middle of an election season in which many have called for an end to austerity measures affecting British arts institutions. (more…)

The New York Post details the intrigue and deception surrounding dealer Yves Bouvier’s arrest this past month in Monaco.  Bouvier recently sold an Amedeo Modigliani, Nude on a Blue Cushion, for hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen to Dmitry Rybolovlev, allegedly charging the Russian $118 million when Cohen had only received $93.5 million from the sale, sparking an investigation that ultimately led to his arrest.   (more…)

MoMA has acquired the iconic Jasper Johns’s work Painted Bronze, a work that has sat in the Philadelphia Museum of Art for three decades, and which was purchased recently by collectors Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis.  Kravis, who serves as MoMA’s Board President, gifted the work shortly after purchase directly from the artist’s personal collection.  “It’s not easy to convince someone who’s kept something for himself for more than 50 years,” says dealer Matthew Marks. “It’s a big deal for him, emotionally. And one can imagine all the people over all the years who have asked, all the institutions, all the collectors who have been told no, since I was a kid.”

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Sotheby’s has named Tad Smith as its new company CEO, taking over from William Ruprecht.  Smith, formerly the CEO of Madison Square Garden and a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, will look to calm some of the turbulence at the company between stockholders and its board. (more…)