NEW YORK, NY.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today that it has received a landmark gift of more than 500 of the finest guitars from the golden age of American guitar making, spanning the years 1920 to 1970. This new collection of the most important guitars, anchored by a major gift from collector Dirk Ziff, will showcase the profound impact this celebrated instrument has had on popular music, culture, society, politics, and religion in America—and then resonated around the world. The collection displays the diversity of the guitar in all its forms—including electric, acoustic, archtop, bass, resonator, and lap steel—as well as related stringed instruments and amplifiers. “This is truly a trailblazing and transformative gift, positioning the Museum to be the epicenter for the appreciation and study of the American guitar,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “We are immensely grateful to Dirk and his longt ... More
LONDON.- The National Gallery today announces a new national touring project, The National Gallery: Art On Your Doorstep. This project will work with organisations across the UK to help share masterpieces from the nation’s collection with communities beyond Trafalgar Square. For the next three years we will be reaching all four nations of the UK, travelling to a total of 12 partners. The first four exhibition partners from June 2025 to March 2026 are Stoke-on-Trent City Council, Croydon Council, Torbay Council and Derry City & Strabane District Council. The National Gallery will work with these partners to create exhibitions for local communities by choosing up to 30 printed reproductions of masterpieces from the collection. Each painting will be reproduced life-sized, in fine detail and in its frame, allowing visitors the chance to look closely at the brushstrokes and discover hidden details. Outdoors and free to view, these exhibitions will entwine art with the everyday. ... More
One-page letter signed by author J.D. Salinger, addressed to his publishers, Little, Brown, and Company, a month before the publication of Franny and Zooey, disagreeing with the proposed book title. Estimate: $10,000-$15,000.
WILTON, CONN.- A six-volume set of books personally owned and signed by Thomas Jefferson; a Rev. War-dated letter signed twice by George Washington as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army; and an archive of German-language correspondence exchanged between Albert Einstein and an unidentified physics enthusiast are a few of the expected top lots in University Archives’ next online-only auction slated for Wednesday, June 4th, at 10 am EDT. All 525 lots in the Rare Autographs, Books & Space Memorabilia auction are up for viewing and bidding now on the University Archives website – www.UniversityArchives.com – plus the three platforms Invaluable.com, Auctionzip.com and LiveAuctioneers.com. Phone and absentee bids will be accepted. “The June auction features exceptional ... More
LONDON.- Jan Davidsz. De Heem’s luxurious and immaculately preserved still life will be a highlight of Christie’s Old Masters Evening Sale on 1 July, during Classic Week London (estimate: £3,000,000-5,000,000). This tantalising feast is among the finest paintings by the artist to have appeared on the market in recent decades. It will be on view at Christie’s New York until 21 May, followed by Hong Kong from 25 to 28 May, before returning to London for the pre-sale exhibition from 27 June to 1 July. Andrew Fletcher, Christie’s Global Head of the Old Masters Department commented: “This sumptuous work represents the apogee of Dutch Golden Age still-life painting and, in its refined execution, rich yet balanced composition and immaculate condition, it is as perfect an example of the pronk still life as I have come across in many years. We are ... More
PARIS.- Galerie Lelong is presenting a major retrospective devoted to Arnulf Rainer, a leading figure in contemporary art for over 70 years. This exhibition retraces his artistic career, from his first works in the 1950s to his most recent creations, and marks 40 years of collaboration between the gallery and the artist. Arnulf Rainer is internationally renowned for his radical and expressive approach to painting. From the outset, he developed a singular style, marked by violent gestures and successive layers of paint that covered and transformed existing images. His “Übermalungen” (overpaintings) have become his signature, exploring the limits of representation and perception. In these works, Rainer engages in a dialogue with his own photographic self-portraits, as well as with works by artists such as Rembrandt, Goya, Victor Hugo, Van Gogh and Henri Michaux. The exhibition presents a selection of emblematic works, ranging from the first ... More
Desk clock in gold, silver, blue enamel, and pearls by Fabergé, 1907, master goldsmith Henrik Wigström.
GENEVA.- Piguet auction house in Geneva announced the sale of a previously unseen treasure of Russian Imperial craftsmanship: a desk clock in gold, enamel, silver, and pearls, signed by Fabergé and created in 1907 by master goldsmith Henrik Wigström, the renowned craftsman of the illustrious House. Beyond its artistic excellence, this piece stands out for its prestigious provenance, having been presented as a gift during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II and subsequently passed down through the descendants of H.M. Queen Astrid of Belgium to the present day. This remarkable historical artifact will be offered at auction for the very first time during a special sale on Thursday, June 19 in Geneva — both in person and live online! This rectangular desk clock stands out with its gold frame delicately edged with a frieze of heart-shaped motifs (rais- de-cœur) and enhanced by a sumptuous blue guilloché enamel decoration featuring garlands of leaves, alternating with vertical white ... More
Georg Friedrich Kersting, Portrait of Carl August Böttiger, c. 1829, watercolor; Photo: Christoph Müller Foundation / Kilian Beutel.
BERLIN.- A significant gift of over 200 works of art from the Christoph Müller Foundation will go on display starting May 20, 2025, at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Titled "This is all me! The Christoph Müller Donation," the special presentation by the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) celebrates the legacy of Christoph Müller (1938–2024), a renowned art collector and patron often referred to as a "Robin Hood of Art." Müller, who transitioned from a career as a publisher to become a dedicated art collector and patron, was known for his generous support of numerous German museums through gifts and facilitated acquisitions. He maintained a particularly close relationship with the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, where he admired former director Max J. Friedländer and established a prize in his name. This new donation follows a previous gift of over 240 drawings and 130 prints of Dutch art in 2007. The ... More
Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen, Leaning Fork with Meatball & Spaghetti III, 1994. Aluminum cast with polyurethane, ca. 340 x 120 x 100 cm. Estimate: € 600,000 – 800,000.
MUNICH.- Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's spectacular sculpture “Leaning Fork with Meatball & Spaghetti III” is undoubtedly one of the highlights of Ketterer Kunst's June 6 – 7 auction. This humorous yet profound contribution to Pop Art challenges scale, material, and perception. The work is one of the artist's rare “Giant Objects,” and only a few are still available on the international market. No one mastered the interplay of proportion, materiality, realism, and absurdity better than Claes Oldenburg, a native Swede but thoroughbred American. The last great pop artist passed away in 2022. He was one of the few who turned to sculpture in a stroke of genius, simplifying it to its essence. After studying at Yale and the Art Institute of Chicago, he settled in New York in the second half of the 1950s, witnessing the decline of the once spectacular Abstract Expressionism. His colleagues' rather elitist self- ... More
Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978), Marionettes, The Saturday Evening Post cover, October 22, 1932. Oil on canvas, 34 x 28 in.
DALLAS, TX.- On May 16, Heritage Auctions continued to prove its strength in the American Art category with back-to-back, tightly curated events that together netted $12.18 million: The American Art auction, anchored by significant works by Norman Rockwell, Maurice Sendak and Ernie Barnes, saw just over 40 lots go before nearly 500 bidders to land at $5.105 million. Just following it, Heritage’s second session of Property from the BSA Settlement Trust, led by works by Rockwell, Dean Cornwell and Joseph Csatari, saw just over 180 lots hit the block in front of 663 bidders to bring $7.08 million. Both had spectacular sell-through rates, at 97.6% and 99.9% respectively. Friday at Heritage saw new auction records for Charles Wysocki, Auldwin Schomberg, Peter Fillerup, James Lewicki, Bill Morrison and Jeff Segler, and set a new world record for a work by the great Maurice Sendak, for his original and first drawing for 1963’s Where the Wild Things Are which sold for nearly twice Sendak’s p ... More
Jason Fox, Untitled, 2024. Oil, acrylic, and pencil on linen, 55 x 55 x 1 inches (139.7 x 139.7 x 2.5 cm), framed: 56 1/4 x 56 1/4 x 1 7/8 inches (142.9 x 142.9 x 4.8 cm).
LOS ANGELES, CA.- David Kordansky Gallery is presenting Why Are You Sitting In The Dark, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and a sculpture by Jason Fox. The exhibition is on view in Los Angeles at 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., from May 16 through June 28, 2025. Fox makes paintings that are, first and foremost, about painting but inevitably end up being about everything else. The style he has developed over four decades is responsive to many levels of cultural production, indulging in disparate interests such as modernism, minimalism, comic books, and popular music. No two paintings are alike, even or especially those produced as entries in an immediately recognizable series. Joni Mitchell, Alberto Giacometti, a bemused dragon, a melancholic dog, and various skeletons or other “frightening” figures are among the recurring cast of characters who lend their forms to Fox’s inventive, intuitively elaborated ... More
Mazzoleni Milano. Photo: Studio Abbruzzese. Courtesy of Mazzoleni.
MILAN.- Mazzoleni announced the opening of a new gallery in Milan, joining its historic space in Turin and its London location in Mayfair. Situated at Via Senato 20, one of Milan’s most historically and culturally significant districts, the new space will be officially inaugurated in autumn 2025. Ahead of the official opening, the gallery will welcome visitors by appointment throughout the summer. A special exhibition will be on view, celebrating Mazzoleni’s recent history through a selection of publications and exhibitions from the past decade. The presentation will spotlight the extensive scholarly research that has underpinned the gallery’s international cultural programming over the years. Long a hub for leading galleries and artists, Milan has recently seen a notable rise in new exhibition spaces, further cementing its position as a global cultural capital. With its new presence in the city, Mazzoleni is proud to contribute to this dynamic evolution, further strengthening i ... More
Christina Quarles in her studio. Photo: Ilona Szwarc, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London.
JEVNAKER.- For the 2025 season, Kistefos is presenting Living in the Wake, the first major solo exhibition in Norway by acclaimed American artist Christina Quarles (b. 1985). Staged within the architectural landmark The Twist, the exhibition offers a comprehensive survey of Quarles’ work and includes two entirely new paintings created specifically for the show. Quarles is widely celebrated for her fluid, dynamic figuration that grapples with the instability of identity and the complexity of embodiment. Her work challenges the boundaries of legibility and representation, creating spaces where the self can be fragmented, overlapping, and constantly remade. As the artist notes, “There’s these larger overarching narratives of the work about what it is to be in a body, what it is to move through the world in a body, what it is to contend with wanting to have people be able to immediately read you, but then having parts of yourself that contradict that ... More
Nairy Baghramian. Photo by Abigail Enzaldo.
NEW YORK, NY.- Marian Goodman Gallery congratulates Nairy Baghramian and Delcy Morelos for becoming medalists in the Established Artist category of the inaugural Art Basel Awards. These awards serve as an acknowledgement of their influence in shaping the future of art. This award honors visionaries—individuals and organizations—who are defining the direction of contemporary art. Baghramian’s formidable, elaborate sculptures, which often refer to architecture and the human body, have elegantly graced the façade of Metropolitan Museum of Art (2023) and the Sculpture Garden of MoMA, New York (2023), among many others. Her structures offer the possibility of an open and discursive dialogue in response to a site, or a freeing of the assigned relationship between an object and its meaning. In April and May of this year Baghramian was significantly recognized with two major sculptural installations, Privileged Points for Qatar Museums in Doha, and Resting Arms, her inaugural commission in Nor ... More
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Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde presents Apparatus 22: Civis Bloomcraft ROSKILDE.- What happens when you stop thinking through the white cube and start thinking through the city instead? This question lies at the heart of Civis Bloomcraft, a new exhibition protocol created by the transdisciplinary art collective Apparatus 22 based in Brussels, Bucharest and Suprainfinit utopian universe. Civis Bloomcraft is a living script, a set of instructions and conceptual challenges that prompts the Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde to reimagine, rethink and reorganize what we might call standard procedures for curating, commissioning and many other aspects of museum’s activities. It invites the museum to bloom across urban and private spaces into a construct that is tentacular, nomadic and ever-morphing by dissolving institutional boundaries and embracing the complexity of the city as a site of aesthetic, social and political resonance. Excerpt from the protocol: ... More
El Museo del Barrio announces fall 2025 exhibitions NEW YORK, NY.- El Museo del Barrio announced its fall exhibitions: Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island and Jangueando: Recent Acquisitions, 2021-2025. Together, these exhibitions reaffirm El Museo’s commitment to presenting exhibitions that speak to the depth, resilience, and richness of Latinx and Latin American culture. Coco Fusco’s incisive body of work reminds us of the power of art to challenge dominant narratives and amplify stories that are often silenced. At the same time, Jangueando celebrates the collective spirit of our Permanent Collection—a testament to the creative vitality and cultural complexity of the artists we champion. Together, these exhibitions reaffirm El Museo's role as a space for critical dialogue, celebration, and solidarity. El Museo del Barrio will present the first U.S. survey of influential Cuban-American artist, writer, and activist Coco ... More
GALLERIA CONTINUA presents José Antonio Suárez Londoño's third San Gimignano show SAN GIMIGNANO.- GALLERIA CONTINUA is presenting Drawing by Numbers, José Antonio Suárez Londoño’s third solo exhibition in San Gimignano. Featuring 100 drawings and 84 etchings, the exhibition offers an intimate look at the Colombian artist’s evolving practice, rooted in discipline, ritual, and quiet introspection. For Suárez Londoño, drawing is not merely a form of expression but a daily act of devotion. His works emerge from intimate formats, A4 sheets, notebooks, and found materials such as business cards, ticket stubs, teabags, and flower petals. These fragments are transformed into intricate constellations of figures, dancers, animals, surreal forms, and natural elements going from the pure abstract to the most figurative and academic subjects. Each drawing holds personal resonance, yet together they construct a kaleidoscopic universe where repetition, accumulation, ... More
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art opens Liao Fei's most comprehensive institutional solo exhibition to date BEIJING.- UCCA Center for Contemporary Art presents “Liao Fei: Seeing All Forms,” Liao Fei’s (b. 1981, Jingdezhen) most comprehensive institutional solo exhibition to date. Structured around five keywords—matter, site, extension, infinity, and inference—the exhibition surveys the artist’s artistic practice for nearly two decades, from his early works that focus on the relationships and tensions between different physical materials, to recent series including “Chiral Extent”—Liao Fei’s return to figurative sculpture after more than a decade of abstraction—and “One Way Sculpture” and “Partially Obscured Circles,” constructed and completed through a methodology of exhausting formal possibilities. With a rigorous formal language and an experimental way of thinking, ... More
GNYP Gallery Antwerp opens Umut Yasat: from mine to us to yours to mine ANTWERP.- “We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. We never discard our childhood. We never escape it completely. We relive fragments of it through others. We live buried layers through others. We live through others’ projections of the unlived selves.” Anaïs Nin, Diaries, vol. 4 (1944-1947) Most of the things we surround ourselves with will quietly and effortlessly outlive us. It’s a disconcerting thought, one that tends to creep up on us in moments of transition – moving, migration, displacement or death. The objects we’ve gathered over the years, whether accumulated by habit or carefully ... More
M47 restoration fully funded DORSET.- The Tank Museum has reached its fundraising target to restore its M47 Patton tank. Following a public appeal, supporters have helped raise the £50,000 required to get the M47 running, and it is due to make its public debut at TANKFEST 2025. Just under a year ago, in June 2024, The Tank Museum launched a £50,000 fundraising campaign to revive their M47 Patton tank, and they have now announced this target had been reached, thanks to public supporters and generous private donations. The US built M47 is an important part of the Cold War story. It also has a famous fan in Arnold Schwarzenegger, who served in an M47 in the Austrian military, later purchasing the tank he crewed. Museum Director, Chris Price said: “This remarkable achievement is a testament to the passion and commitment of our supporters. We are deeply grateful – your generosity ensures that future generations ... More
Baden bei Wien: The largest outdoor photography festival in Europe will take place from 13 June until 12 October BADEN.- Since its inception, our Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo has been committed to placing nature, which gives us life, at the centre of the exhibitions. Photographic narratives describe the beauty of our planet Earth as well as its environmental problems. In 2025, the Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo is dedicated to the theme of AUSTRALIA & THE NEW WORLD. A gigantic open-air gallery 7 kilometres long, with around 1,500 large-format images in the parks and gardens and the old town of Baden, transforms the city into a city of images for four months for the eighth time. With free admission, over 30 exhibitions, 7 days a week, from midnight to midnight, invite you to linger. Australia, almost a hundred times the size of Austria, has a population of barely ... More
Exhibition offers a journey through the groundbreaking ideas and working methods of Ma Yansong ROTTERDAM.- Ma Yansong: Architecture and Emotion opened last Friday at the Nieuwe Instituut, the Netherlands’ national museum for architecture, design and digital culture in Rotterdam. The exhibition explores the pioneering vision of architect Ma Yansong and his office, MAD Architects, which is active internationally. Time magazine recently named Ma Yansong as one of the 100 most influential people of 2025 on its renowned annual list of leading individuals in culture, design, politics and society. Ma Yansong is currently in the spotlight as the architect of Fenix, Rotterdam’s new art museum focusing on migration, which also opened last week and for which he designed its spectacular rooftop Tornado. The exhibition at the Nieuwe Instituut takes visitors on a journey through Ma’s pioneering ideas and working methods - from his early critiques of modernism to the daring, flowing ... More
New research sheds light on rare 420-million-year-old fossil ALBANY, NY.- A newly published scientific paper is revealing groundbreaking insights into a rare fossil from the Silurian Period, estimated to be around 420 million years old. Part of the New York State Museum’s collection, this specimen of Naraoia bertiensis is one of only two known fossils of its kind ever discovered from this era. The paper, titled “Novel evidence for the youngest Naraoia and a reassessment of naraoiid paleobiogeography,” was co-authored by New York State Paleontologist Dr. Lisa Amati, alongside lead author Dr. Russell Bicknell of the American Museum of Natural History, Ph.D. candidate Aaron Goodman, and Czech paleontologist Dr. Lukas Laibl. Naraoia were small, soft-bodied arthropods that lived on the sea floor. When this creature roamed the Earth, present-day New York was located south of the equator and partially submerged under a shallow tropical sea. Due ... More
Costumes, props donated to Australian Performing Arts Archive MELBOURNE.- For the first time, the Australian Performing Arts Collection will acquire and preserve items from leading circus company, Circa. The initial donation from Australia’s most globally active performing arts company includes intricate costumes, circus props, and a set model. Each object has been selected for its cultural significance to Circa, global circus performance and Australia’s performing arts history. This year the Brisbane-based company are celebrating their 21st anniversary, alongside a triumphant return to Arts Centre Melbourne with the internationally acclaimed Humans 2.0, presenting at the Playhouse until 24 May. Last year Circa delivered over 419 performances across 116 cities and towns in 20 countries. Circa joins Australia’s other great circus companies represented in the Australian Performing Arts Collection, which is dedicated to preserving the extraordinary ... More
'These are portraits of a country' - George Shaw
Flashback
On a day like today, English sculptor Barbara Hepworth died
