A U.S. Court of Appeals decision allows a Spanish museum to keep a Pissarro in a dispute that has lasted nearly two decades.
by Christopher Kuo
NEW YORK, NY.- The heirs of a woman who was forced to surrender a painting to the Nazis were dealt a blow Tuesday in a decades-long legal feud between them and the Spanish museum that now owns the work, when a California appellate court ruled that the museum should retain ownership. The ruling, in one of the longest-running Nazi restitution cases, involves a Camille Pissarro painting titled “Rue Saint-Honoré Aprčs-midi, Effet de Pluie” (“Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon, Effect of Rain”) that is estimated to be worth millions of dollars. The painting was surrendered by a Jewish woman, Lilly Cassirer, to get an exit visa from Germany in 1939. The work was bought by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation, and eventually ended up in a museum owned by the Spanish government. On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that Spanish law, not California law, applies to the case, and that the museum has “prescriptive title” to th ... More
Gigantopithecus blacki, an ape that stood 10 feet tall and went extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago. (Garcia/Joannes-Boyau, Southern Cross University via The New York Times)
by Jack Tamisiea
NEW YORK, NY.- Standing nearly as tall as a basketball hoop and weighing as much as a grizzly bear, Gigantopithecus blacki was the greatest ape to ever live. For more than 1 million years during the Pleistocene, Gigantopithecus roamed southern China. But by the time ancient humans reached the region, Gigantopithecus had vanished. To determine why these prodigious primates died out, a team of scientists recently analyzed clues preserved in Gigantopithecus teeth and cave sediment. Their findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, reveal that these nearly 10-foot-tall apes were most likely doomed by their specialized diet and an inability to adapt to a changing environment. Paleontologists first discovered Gigantopithecus in the mid-1930s in a Hong Kong apothecary where the ape’s unusually large molars ... More
Elton John’s silver leather platform boots, circa 1971, with the red leather letters E and J, $5,000-$10,000, at Christie’s warehouse in Brooklyn on Jan. 9, 2024. (Vincent Tullo/The New York Times)
by Zachary Small
NEW YORK, NY.- Elton John is downsizing — and the superstar’s former penthouse residence in Atlanta has been emptied for a series of auctions at Christie’s starting Feb. 21. The items are expected to bring in an estimated $10 million. Want the Yamaha conservatory grand piano where the Rocketman plunked the keys of his Broadway shows “Billy Elliot” and “Aida?” It will cost roughly triple what similar models sell for online, with a high estimate of $50,000. How about Julian Schnabel’s portrait of the superstar dressed in a gown and ruffled collar? The auction house is seeking $300,000. And the most expensive object, a 2017 Banksy painting of a masked man hurling a bouquet of flowers, secured directly from the anonymous artist, is expected to sell for nearly $1.5 million. John declined to comment ... More
The museum is seeking a new leader to manage the fallout from recent thefts and demands to return contested items. Applicants have two weeks to apply. (Tom Jamieson/The New York Times)
by Alex Marshall
LONDON.- Wanted: Someone to restore trust in one of the world’s most visited museums after an embarrassing scandal, handle restitution claims and raise $1.27 billion for a major refurbishment. Salary: $275,000 a year. The British Museum in London this week began the search for a new director. Four months ago, Hartwig Fischer resigned from that position after the museum announced that one of its curators had looted around 1,500 items from its storerooms, then sold some on eBay. In September, Mark Jones, a former leader of the Victoria and Albert Museum, was appointed to run the British Museum, but only on an interim basis. Applicants for the permanent position must have a “vision for the future of the British Museum and its purpose as a national and a global museum in the 21st century,” the job posting says. But they must ... More
Norma Morgan, Moor Country–Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, 2001. Watercolor on paper, 11 x 15 inches. The Michael K. and Marian E. Butler Collection.
NEW LONDON, CT.-The Lyman Allyn Art Museum opens its first exhibition of 2024 on Saturday, Jan. 13. Norma Morgan in Context celebrates the work of the New Haven, Connecticut-born artist Norma Morgan (1928 – 2017) and considers her dynamic career as a Black female landscape artist and printmaker working at home and abroad. The exhibition, on view through Apr. 7, presents Morgan’s prints and watercolors alongside art by her teachers, colleagues, and other artistic influences, such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Thomas Cole, Stanley William Hayter, Samella Lewis, Richard Howard Hunt, and Robert Blackburn. Morgan’s evocative prints and watercolors depict powerful and expressive landscapes filled with texture and atmosphere, often focusing on geology and rock formations. She spent several years in the United Kingdom, inspired by rugged landscapes and by the history, literature, and art of the British Isles. Landscapes continued to inspire her a ... More
Portrait of Carlos Yam, Vancouver Art Gallery's Newly Appointed Chief Financial Officer. Photo by Vancouver Art Gallery.
VANCOUVER .- The Vancouver Art Gallery recently announced the appointment of Carlos Yam as its new Chief Financial Officer. Yam will officially assume his role on January 15, 2024, bringing with him more than 15 years of experience as a Chief Financial Officer in both public and private sectors. Yam has a solid track record of driving organizational growth and governance through his expertise in financial stewardship and risk management. His extensive background includes a decade-long tenure as CFO of WesternOne Inc., a publicly traded construction and infrastructure services company. During his time at WesternOne Inc., Yam led numerous acquisitions, oversaw capital investments and executed organic growth strategies while managing related financing activities. His contributions also extended to integrating operations for new acquisitions across global operations in Canada, the US and Australia. "We are thrilled to welcome Carlos Yam to th ... More
The Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev looks out from his penthouse in Monte Carlo, Monaco, Sept. 18, 2018. (Benjamin Bechet/The New York Times)
by Colin Moynihan
NEW YORK, NY.- As the opening witness in a civil art fraud trial this week, Mikhail Sazonov testified that his employer, a Russian oligarch, had been tricked to overspend by a Swiss art dealer and that those markups had been boosted by the evaluations of artworks supplied by a Sotheby’s executive. But during cross-examination Wednesday, a lawyer for the auction house barely mentioned that employee, Samuel Valette. Instead, the lawyer, Sara Shudofsky, portrayed Sazonov and his boss, Dmitry Rybolovlev, a billionaire who earned his fortune in the potash industry and the owner of Monaco’s soccer team, as overly credulous and lax in their review of their art transactions. The lawyer began her questioning by running through a litany of claims that the Swiss dealer, Yves Bouvier, had made in emails, all of which she depicted as false and some of which described negotiations ... More
The screenwriter Norma Barzman with her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, in Madrid in 1961.
by Clay Risen
NEW YORK, NY.- Norma Barzman, a screenwriter who moved to Europe in the late 1940s rather than be subject to the congressional investigations and professional ostracism that overtook her industry for a decade, died Dec. 17 at her home in Beverly Hills, California. She was 103 and widely considered to be one of the last surviving victims of the Hollywood blacklist. Her daughter Suzo Barzman confirmed the death. Norma Barzman and her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, were among the hundreds of film industry figures — including screenwriters, actors, directors, stagehands and technicians — who found themselves iced out of Hollywood after World War II because of their unwillingness to discuss their affiliation with the Communist Party or its many associated front groups. The Barzmans were both longtime members ... More
Screen Matched Hero "Red Leader" (Red One) X-wing Starfighter Filming Miniature with Articulating Servo-Controlled Wings and Lights from Star Wars: Episode IV- A New Hope (TCF, 1977).
DALLAS, TX.- Among the many record-setting results achieved by Heritage Auctions in 2023, none looms larger than the one set by the auction house itself. Last year, Heritage reached $1.76 billion in total sales, the highest ever for the 47-year-old company following record-setting years in 2021 and 2022. Heritage experienced an extraordinary 21 percent growth over 2022. Heritage also set dozens of significant auction records spanning many of its more than four dozen categories — from U.S. coins to comic art, Batman to Mickey Mantle, the founding of the United States to the end of the Death Star. Numerous 2023 auctions brimmed with headline-grabbers, including Archie and Edith Bunker’s landmark living room and the Boston bar where everybody knows your name. To all of that, we say: Cheers. “The past year has yet again proven the enduring enthusiasm of collectors and the ever-expanding univers ... More
An archive of unpublished and never-before-seen letters and notes acquired from the descendants of the surgeon who did the autopsy.
PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Raab Collection announced that it has acquired and is offering for sale a newly discovered and important piece of American and presidential history, a treasure never before offered for sale, which documents one of the four presidential assassinations in our nation’s history: the original autopsy report and unpublished medical notes from the assassination of President William McKinley belonging to Dr. Herman Matzinger, who conducted McKinley’s autopsy. This report announced the important news that neither initial infection nor poison had played a role in the president’s death, refuting two theories circulating at the time. Part of a larger archive that documents Dr. Matzinger’s work to determine McKinley’s cause of death, and including his notes, letters, and ephemera, this collection has stayed with the family of the surgeon who conducted McKinley’s autopsy, until now. The archive is value ... More
NEW YORK, NY.-Nicola Vassell has announced their exclusive representation of painter Elizabeth Schwaiger, and her first solo exhibition at the gallery. Opened on January 11, 2024, Now & Now & Now, includes a new series of paintings offering expeditions into unpeopled spaces, unrestrained nature, and uncanny interiors. Submerging herself into physical and psychic depths, she found her subject matter in the art studio—understood both as a historic site to preserve relics of creative ritual, and an expressive place that she can inhabit, at times, more intimately than her own body. Schwaiger renders these ethereal domains with dissonant materials; she applies watercolor, acrylic, ink, and oil to canvas in chromatically harmonious, but thinly veiled layers that bleed, permeate, and blur into overgrown, evanescent sceneries. Shaped by her personal experiences with childbirth and scuba diving—empirically disparate but sensorially analogou ... More
Large metal sculpture of a rooster. Mexican. Unsigned. Welded and painted metal. 100in x 68in. Courtesy of Quinn’s Auction Galleries.
FALLS CHURCH, VA.- Eccentric? Visionary? An American original? All three descriptions apply to the late Peter “Pete” Cecere, a US Foreign Service officer who discovered the quirky beauty and cultural importance of folk art more than 50 years ago. Cecere spent 50 years with the Foreign Service in Latin American nations and Spain, where he presciently amassed a collection that rivals those of even the most prestigious museums. “After I die, there’s no more stories,” Cecere said in a 2018 video documentary about his collection – but the colorful stories that already exist will be told one more time, on January 26 when Quinn’s of Falls Church, Virginia, auctions the first installment of Cecere’s vast holdings. A career foreign service and cultural affairs officer, Cecere’s first exposure to folk and outsider art came during his college days in the 1960s when a State Department scholarship enabled him ... More
Matijcio is leaving his post as director and chief curator at the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston.
KNOXVILLE, TN .-The Knoxville Museum of Art announced today the appointment of Steven Matijcio as the museum’s new executive director following a national search. Matijcio is leaving his post as director and chief curator at the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston. He succeeds David Butler, who retired at the end of December after serving as the KMA’s executive director since 2006. Matijcio comes to the KMA with a wealth of curatorial and administrative experience and a solid track record of significant engagement with contemporary art and artists at a global level. Prior to his position at the Blaffer Museum, Matijcio served as curator at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio (2013-2019) and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (2008-2013). He previously held positions in a number of important galleries and museums including the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg; Powe ... More
Quote All painting is an accident. Francis Bacon
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Alice Parker, composer who heard music in poetry, dies at 98 NEW YORK, NY.- Alice Parker, whose arrangements of hymns, folk songs, and spirituals were used in concert halls and churches across America, and who composed 11 song cycles and four operas, died Dec. 24 at her home in Hawley, Massachusetts. She was 98. Her death was confirmed by two of her children, Molly Stejskal and David Pyle. Parker’s simple renderings of traditional hymns such as “Hark I Hear the Harps Eternal” and spirituals including “You Can Tell the World,” along with Christmas carols and folk songs, made her a trusted partner for choirs all over the country. For two decades she also worked with the most prominent American chorus of her day, the Robert Shaw Chorale, collaborating with Shaw on hundreds of works. Insightful settings of poems by Emily Dickinson and Archibald MacLeish gave her a footing in the world ... More
Over $4 million in grants awarded to 50 arts organizations by The Andy Warhol Foundation RICHMOND, CA.- The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has announced its Fall 2023 grant recipients. 50 arts organizations and museums will receive over $4 million to support artists and nurture creative practice around the country. The grantees are located in 20 states across the US, with one international recipient in Mexico City. “As socio-political tensions, cultural inequities, and environmental crises persist, it is imperative that arts organizations continue to cultivate the expressive capacities of artists,” says Joel Wachs, President, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, “By providing artists with financial, material and intellectual resources, as well as public platforms and engaged audiences, these organizations support the development of works that can offer new entry points to stalemated conversations. ... More
Klaus von Nichtssagend to feature painted wall works by Lizzie Scott and ceramic sculptures by Keiko Narahashi NEW YORK, NY.-Klaus von Nichtssagend is starting a two-person show of works by Keiko Narahashi and Lizzie Scott. The show will feature new painted wall works by Scott and ceramic sculptures by Narahashi. It opens today and will be on view through February 17, 2024. Lizzie Scott’s paintings could be seen as soft sculptures. Her padded, quilt-like forms are constructed from layers of polyester batting, crinoline, fur, and traditional canvas. They suggest the shape of buttons, grates, construction barriers or manhole covers and reflect the everyday objects of the artist’s urban environment. To these substrates, Scott applies thin washes of paint until abutting fields of color achieve a level of balance ... More
A solo exhibition at two venues 'Sonia Gechtoff: Objects on the New Landscape' at Bortolami and Andrew Kreps Galleries NEW YORK, NY.- There is little stillness in the frenzied abstractions of Sonia Gechtoff (Ukrainian American, b. 1926, d. 2018), whose paintings evoke colliding waves, gusts of wind, and falling water. As with other Abstract Expressionists of her era, Gechtoff had a reverence for the sublime and a penchant for dramatic, boundless form. Though she largely eschewed from any objectivity or symbolism, she delved deeply into a mysticism derived from non-Western sources and lineages. Gechtoff was born in Philadelphia to Jewish émigrés from Odessa and Bessarabia. Leonid, a notable landscape painter, died when she was just 15 but left an indelible influence on his daughter. Gechtoff inherited his knowledge of Byzantine ... More
"Heaven 'N' Earth" by Sayre Gomez is second exhibition held by artist at Xavier Hufkens BRUSSELS.- In Heaven ‘N’ Earth, his second exhibition at Xavier Hufkens, the Los Angeles-based artist Sayre Gomez continues traversing the image-worlds of Southern California’s urban space. Gomez devotes his attention to the physical and cultural survival techniques of those left behind in the wake of capitalist development, with a sincere commitment to documenting traces of lived experience in the ruins of deindustrialisation. At the same time, his art acknowledges that any such realist project in the twenty-first century will inevitably be mediated by the hyperreality of technologised spectacle. The works in the show stage a clash between discrepant temporalities and ontological conditions: between products of the culture industry and their appropriation in obscure subcultural codes; between surface and depth; between the time ... More
Latest chapter from exhibition series 'The Man Who Should Be Dead' in NY by Mexican artist Daniel Guzmán NEW YORK, NY.- Daniel Guzmán presents a series of recent works on paper and murals in his upcoming exhibition at kurimanzutto New York titled The man who should be dead. This is the latest iteration, and first in New York, of an ever-evolving series of exhibitions that was most recently shown at the gallery in Mexico City earlier this year. Music criticism, science fiction, narrative literature, essays, and poetry are just a few of the influences shaping Guzmán's works in this series. Throughout each chapter, "The Man Who Should Be Dead" unfolds a narrative universe filled with places, gods, characters, references, and inspirations. Pictorial references, such as Philip Guston's depictions of Nixon as a vociferous and repulsive scrotum, are reimagined by Guzmán as the form of a partially ruined house with hanging ... More
20 looks that did the most at the Golden Globes NEW YORK, NY.- This year’s revamped Golden Globe Awards brought several changes to the program. But it was business as usual on the red carpet, with hundreds of celebrities seemingly relishing the chance to give us something to ogle after last year’s strikes stopped many from posing for cameras at award shows and events. There were ballgowns. There were sequins. There was lots of red — crimson dresses, candy apple heels, oxblood tuxedos — with dashes of “Barbie” pink and the color purple. Aside from maybe Jason Sudeikis, who wore a crewneck sweater that New York Times Styles reporter Jessica Testa said induced “flashbacks to him wearing a hoodie during the awards show-by-Zoom days,” almost everyone looked elegant. The 20 people on this list, however, managed to stand out just a little more than others. ... More
Hundreds of beautiful T206 cards lead off Heritage's first sports event of 2024 DALLAS, TX.- Moments after Heritage’s January 26-27 Winter Sports Card Catalog Auction opened for bidding, icons of The Hobby began crowding the playing field, led by the lone highest-graded blank-back 1916 M101-5 Babe Ruth rookie, a PSA Gem Mint 10 Michael Jordan rookie made by Fleer in 1986 and an uncut sheet of ’86 Fleer featuring all 132 cards from that beloved set. In early December, Sports Collectors Daily also offered a lengthy look at the “stunning” and historic find of sealed wax available in this auction, including a 1970 Topps baseball cello box with 24 unopened packs and a 1968 Topps football cello box with 36 (!) unopened packs. But Heritage’s first major sports event of 2024 is defined as much by its special collections as its singular highlights. Scattered throughout this expansive auction — which ... More
The saxophone master Shabaka Hutchings is on a fresh journey: Flutes LONDON.- As Shabaka Hutchings led a concert tribute to Pharoah Sanders in early December, he returned to a familiar equation: funneling gallons of air through his tenor saxophone, transforming it into a corrosive stream of sound. Hutchings has been an essential figure on a British jazz scene that has experienced an uptick in popularity over the past decade because of its erasure of genre boundaries and its embrace of the art form’s foundational dance music sensibilities. His distinctive tenor has long been the through line of his diverse, widely acclaimed projects, connecting the electronic skronk of the Comet Is Coming to the fire of Sons of Kemet, and lately to the legacy of fellow hard-blowing saxophonists like Sanders. But by the time we met this month, Hutchings, 39, had put down the saxophone, if not for good then certainly for the foreseeable. ... More
On a day like today, Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera was born
September 12, 1591. Jusepe de Ribera (January 12, 1591 - September 2, 1652) was a Spanish Tenebrist painter and printmaker, also known as José de Ribera and Josep de Ribera. He also was called Lo Spagnoletto ("the Little Spaniard") by his contemporaries and early writers. Ribera was a leading painter of the Spanish school, although his mature work was all done in Italy. In this image: Jusepe de Ribera, Saint James the Lesser, ca. 1632.
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