The last major auction of assets belonging to Johnson Publishing Co., a sale of the company’s impressive art collection, including a series of works by Carrie Mae Weems, will take place later this month. “The collection represents the stature and history of Johnson Publishing,” said Nigel Freeman, director of the African-American Fine Art department at Swann Auction Galleries in New York. “And it’s never been seen before by the public.” (more…)

A piece in Arts Professional this week notes a distinct drop-off in direct funding to artists, as it studies the impact of lottery funds on the art world and the artists benefitting from its program. (more…)

John Baldessari

Artist John Baldessari, who pioneered a uniquely humorous and challenging approach to painting and conceptual art making over the past half century, has passed away at the age of 88.  A leading voice in the development of conceptualism, his interest in ideas and their functioning over the image itself would make him an influential and dynamic voice for post-war art. (more…)

Art News has a piece on modern art works that entered the public domain this year, among them Joan Miró’s Head of a Catalan Peasan, Madonna with Begonia by Emil Nolde, and Portrait of the Art Dealer Johanna Ey by Otto Dix. (more…)

Russian collectors Igor and Olga Toporovsky, have been arrested on suspicion of fraud and money laundering. “The Toporovskys were arrested early last month by the Belgian federal police after a criminal complaint deposited 18 months ago by our clients. Both are held in custody; the criminal court prolonged their arrest for one month on Friday 20 December,” says lawyer Geert Lenssens. (more…)

Calvin Marcus, City Pig/Wild Boar (2019), via David Kordansky

Opening his second exhibition at David Kordansky in Los Angeles this winter, painter Calvin Marcus returns to his enigmatic, always challenging body of work, turning his approach towards painterly composition towards increasingly complex, and increasingly nuanced compositions. Titled GO HANG A SALAMI IM A LASAGNA HOG, the show features four bodies of work—including paintings, sculpture, and photography across its three exhibition spaces. (more…)

Researchers think they have uncovered the story behind the strange orb in Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, noting that the object would be a hollow glass ball. “Our experiments show that an optically accurate rendering qualitatively matching that of the painting is indeed possible using materials, light sources, and scientific knowledge available to Leonardo da Vinci circa 1500,” the report reads. (more…)

Officials at St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice want to build flood-proof perspex barriers for the walls of the Cathedral, warning that the structure cannot take another damaging flood like the one last year in the city. A statement from the Prosecutoria states it hopes the plan “will have the support of everyone—Venetians, Italians and the whole world—to whom the great cultural and spiritual heritage of St Mark’s basilica belongs.” (more…)

Collectors Sandy and Louis Grotta are featured in NYT’s ‘Show Us Your Wall’ section, spotlighting their collection of furniture and sculpture. “When the pieces all have the same vocabulary, you can move something from room to room, and as long the scale’s right, it’ll work,” Mr. Grotta says of showing his works in his home. “And things tell you if they don’t belong. We’ve given a lot of thought to having a foreground, middle ground and background, too. If we had Mount Fuji outside, then we’d be perfect.” (more…)

A young man, Shakeel Ryan Massey, has been arrested for allegedly ripping a £20 million Pablo Picasso, Bust of a Woman this past week at the Tate Modern. (more…)

Roger Brown, Runaway (1968), via Venus Over Manhattan

Counted among the ranks of the Chicago Imagists, Roger Brown possessed a unique sense of figuration and composition. Celebrated for their use of imagery, figuration, narrative, and patterning, this group of artists pulled from idiosyncratic sources to produce deeply personal and visually diverse work, shirking the cool, stylistic orthodoxies that dominated on the coasts in favor of a fluid, colorful style that mixed together disparate styles and techniques. (more…)

Art News has a piece on the late Donald Marron, a passionate art collector who spent his life befriending artists. “I’m not a scholar,” he once said. “I can’t explain art. It was the power of the composition, and the feeling that you were seeing something that hadn’t existed before.” (more…)

The LA Times has a piece on Assembly Bill 1482, a new law that may provide relief for artists seeking to protect rents at spaces like the Santa Fe Artist Colony.  “The city deemed us eligible for 1482 at the old rent, and they told the owner that,” says Sylvia Tidwell, the head of the Santa Fe Art Colony Tenants Assn. “The tenants need to be prepared for a fight.” (more…)

Yinka Shonibare is planning an artist residency at two sites in Nigeria, split between Lagos and Ijebu in Ogun state.  “Unfortunately, there aren’t many opportunities for artists to develop spaces in Africa,” he says. “Artists want to share ideas and have galleries and studios. But if that’s not provided, it’s left to the artists to fill that gap and take that [responsibility] upon themselves.” (more…)

A piece in Art News charts the last ten years in the art market, and how the landscape has shifted towards a broadened collector base and more distributed competition for works.  (more…)

Three modernist works, including Barbara Hepworth’s Orpheus I have been gifted to the British Nation, The Guardian reports.  “We are thrilled that Wakefield’s art collection will receive this generous philanthropic gift.” says Simon Wallis, the director of the Hepworth Wakefield. “These are three major works of art that will find a perfect home for wide public appreciation and benefit at the Hepworth Wakefield.” (more…)

Francesco Clemente, India I (2019), via Vito Schnabel Projects

Artist Francesco Clemente opens a show of work at Vito Schnabel’s New York exhibition space, highlighting the artist’s famed nomadism and his embrace of varied geographies spread over the full expanse of the globe. Moving between Italy, the United States, India and elsewhere, Clemente has long embraced the practice of moving across sites, and allowing his aesthetic interests it follows. Clemente’s work traverses time and recorded history to probe the mysteries, ecstasies, incongruities, and, ultimately, the gravitas of the human condition, working through the metaphysics of spirituality, mysticism, identity, and the self, too render a body of work in a variety of mediums that is often charged with eroticism and intimacy, rich in references, and expansive in its openness to interpretation. (more…)

A piece in the NYT this week compiles a selection of “our favorite arts photographs” for 2019, looking at a range of documentary and art photos. (more…)

A piece in Frieze this week asks if the art world can kick its addiction to air travel as the climate crisis intensifies.  “We are all implicated in making travel aspirational, for accepting the idea that living ‘between’ places is more  cosmopolitan, more creative, than settling in just one and staying there,” writes critic Kyle Chayka. “We keep choosing to leave every few weeks, constantly advertising for subletters on Facebook, melting the Arctic ice, because movement is so pleasurable.” (more…)

The restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral has entered a new stage, in which the scaffolding structure on the roof of the building, fused by intense heat, must be removed.  The process will involve a delicate stabilizing process before the scaffolding can be removed. (more…)

William Kentridge returns to the Metrpolitan Opera this season, opening a production of Wozzeck which features his stage designs. “It’s a radical opera, also, in the sense that it feels, as you say, connected to colonialism,” he says. “It takes the private, rather than the prince or the doctor or the captain, as the central figure. Its perspective is very much from the periphery.” (more…)

Matthew Wong, Starry Night (2019), via Karma

Passing away at the untimely age of 35, artist Matthew Wong left behind an impressive body of painted canvases, pieces that moved through a dynamic and compelling emotional range exploring light and shadow, space and bodies as shifting value systems rarely lingering in easy relief for any prolonged period. Opening just a few weeks after the artist’s passing, his current exhibition at Karma, Blue, continues this practice.

Matthew Wong, Blue (Installation View), via Karma

Wong casts the landscapes and interiors of his exhibition under the glowing spaces between light and shadow, the transitional states where light passes to dark, and day might fade slowly into the early hours of night. The works here, dusky and nocturnal, were intended as the coda, or sundown, to a previous series of day-lit oil and gouache paintings, exploring a watery, fluid treatment of both space and the light that bounds it. Delving in particular into the color blue, Wong was primarily fascinated with the idea of the color as a fluid ground upon which light and space could play out.

Matthew Wong, Solitude (2018), via Karma

Matthew Wong, Blue (Installation View), via Karma

Wong concerned himself with the “blueness of blue”: its fluidity, its affect, and its uncanny ability to “activate nostalgia, both personal and collective,” according to the show’s press release, and his interest in subject matter that drifts into the personal sphere is underscored by the scenes themselves. Meditative and bucolic, they move between improvisation and memory, taking on characteristics where space and time are just as hazy as the light that floats into the picture plane. The images here were witnessed in Sicily, often on walks while traveling with his mother, the result being a time frame in which the artist both looks back on his past, and seems to delve into it more deeply to seek out elements and ideas either initially hidden, or emergent with the inclusion of new sensations. Wong’s rendering of light is dappled, corpuscular: a contrast to the smooth gradations of his interiors, and occasionally feature spotlights, cascading from a door or window left ajar. These moments and symbols, often implying a space just out of site, contributes to the allure and mystery of these works, and the sense of sadness that seeps forth when considering a talent gone too early.

The show closes January 5th.

Matthew Wong, Autumn Nocturne (2018), via Karma

— D. Creahan

Read more:
Matthew Wong: “Blue” at Karma [Exhibition Site]

Performance artist Ulay will open an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, one of the first new shows under new director Rein Wolfs.  “Ulay, also during his collaborative years with Marina Abramović, has been a prominent figure in performance and body art since the nineteen seventies,” says Wolfs. “He used his identity and body as his medium.” (more…)

A piece in The Daily Beast this week outlines how former Parks Commissioner Robert Moses upended the status quo at The Met.  “The arrogance and conceit of those people were phenomenal,” he once said. “They really felt they were the lords of creation and that nobody had the right even to question what they did.” (more…)