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August 14, 2022 at 6:55pm

New York Law Will Require Museums to Disclose Works Looted by Nazis

New York governor Kathy Hochul on August 10 signed legislation that will require museums in the state to publicly acknowledge whether a displayed work has passed through Nazi hands. The signing ceremony took place at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. According to the new law, any exhibited artwork that “changed hands due to theft, seizure, confiscation, forced sale, or other involuntary means” during World War II and the run-up to that conflict must be accompanied by a wall label or placard detailing its history. New York law already requires works of this nature to be recorded in the

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August 12, 2022 at 4:52pm

Natalia LL (1937–2022)

Polish Conceptual artist Natalia LL, whose pathbreaking works of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s critiqued consumerism, advertising, and the subjugating representation of women in pornography, died August 12 at the age of eighty-five, according to her Instagram account. “Blending irony with meditation, she questioned not only the intrinsic value of female sensuality and beauty, but also the perception that art created by women artists is lyrical or nonconfrontational,” wrote Marek Bartelek in a 1994 issue of Artforum. Often brash and provocative, Natalia LL’s art was on numerous occasions subject to

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August 11, 2022 at 3:08pm

Warhol’s Art-School Works Head to Auction

Multiple sources report that the family of Andy Warhol is planning to bring to sale a group of ten paintings the artist made between 1945 and 1949 while studying at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) in his native Pittsburgh. Among the works are abstractions, which the artist would soon abandon, and Nosepicker 1, 1948, thought to be Warhol’s first self-portrait. The works, which Warhol left at his parents’ house when he moved out of Pittsburgh in 1949, are mainly tempera on board, with the exception of the watercolor-on-paper Living Room, 1947, and the oil-on-board

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August 11, 2022 at 10:57am

Caroline Campbell to Lead National Gallery of Ireland

The National Gallery of Ireland has announced that Caroline Campbell will be its next director. The Belfast–born Campbell will be the first woman to helm the Dublin institution since its founding in 1864. Since 2018 the chief of collections and research at the National Gallery in London, where she is also curator of Italian paintings before 1500, Campbell will in November take the reins from Sean Rainbird, who has led the National Gallery of Ireland for the past decade.
“We are thrilled to have a person of Caroline’s caliber join the Gallery team and look forward to welcoming her later this year,”

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August 10, 2022 at 4:22pm

Brazilian Police Find Tarsila do Amaral Masterwork Under Thief’s Bed

Brazilian police earlier this week discovered a masterpiece by renowned Brazilian modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral under the mattress of a thief whose Rio de Janeiro home they were tossing. Amaral’s famous 1929 Sol poente (Setting Sun), valued at roughly 300 reais ($59 million), was found stashed alongside a trove of other highly valuable works beneath the bed of Gabriel Nicolau Traslaviña Hafliger, one of three people suspected of bilking an elderly widow out of the pieces at the behest of her daughter, who hired the trio to pose as Candomblé spiritual workers.
The total value of the cache

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August 10, 2022 at 3:07pm

Penn Museum Moves to Bury Skulls of Enslaved People

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum) is petitioning the Philadelphia Orphans’ Court for permission to bury thirteen skulls at the city’s historically Black Eden Cemetery. The remains arrived to the museum in 1966 as part of the collection of nineteenth-century physician Samuel George Morton, whose racist theories regarding intellect profoundly influenced twentieth-century eugenics. The skulls—which were most likely excavated from unmarked graves beneath the Blocksley Almshouse, a charity hospital that once stood on the grounds now occupied by the

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August 09, 2022 at 4:31pm

Issey Miyake (1938–2022)

Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, whose voluminous deconstructed clothes both defined the 1980s and stood in contrast to the excess that characterized the decade, died of liver cancer on August 5 in Tokyo at the age of eighty-four. Miyake’s clothes veered from the wildly inventive, as evidenced by the minuscule knife-edge pleats that characterized many of his garments, to the starkly classic, as embodied by the black turtleneck that would for decades serve as the trademark attire of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. An early proponent of the concept of fashion design as both a form of art and

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August 09, 2022 at 3:28pm

Lubaina Himid Wins Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize

The Contemporary Austin has named cultural activist and multimedia artist Lubaina Himid as the recipient of the 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize. Himid will receive an unrestricted award of $200,000 and a solo exhibition of her work that will appear at the Texas institution in 2024 before traveling to FLAG Art Foundation in New York. The prize, established by collectors Suzanne Deal Booth and Glenn Fuhrman, is one of the largest and most prestigious in the United States.
“As a British artist, you don’t expect to win an American prize,” Himid told Artnews in an interview. “I

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August 08, 2022 at 3:09pm

Canada Moves to Alter Copyright Law to the Benefit of Artists

Canadian innovation minister François-Philippe Champagne and heritage minister Pablo Rodriguez are collaborating to draft a reform to the country’s copyright laws that would allow artists to profit when their work is resold, the Canadian daily Globe and Mail reports. The effort is meant to assist Canada’s roughly 21,000 artists, many of whom regularly work below the poverty line. Inuit artists in particular stand to benefit: Because such artists typically live and work in remote areas and sell their work there, they miss out when the galleries who purchase their works resell them.
“Artists are

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August 08, 2022 at 3:00pm

Zoe Kahr to Lead Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art board of trustees announced Zoe Kahr as the institution’s next director beginning on November 1. Kahr will leave the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where she has served as deputy director in charge of curatorial and planning since 2010. In her new role, Kahr will oversee the museum’s move from its longtime home in the city’s Overton Park neighborhood to its brand-new $150 million downtown waterfront digs, designed by Herzog & de Meuron.
“I’m joining the Brooks Museum and the greater Memphis arts community at a uniquely thrilling time,” acknowledged

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August 04, 2022 at 12:12pm

Met Director Max Hollein to Add Role of CEO

Max Hollein, since 2018 the director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, will additionally assume the role of the institution’s CEO in July 2023. The post is being vacated by Daniel Weiss, who earlier this year announced he would step down in June 2023 after six years in the position (Weiss has been president of the museum since 2015; he took on the added role of CEO in 2017). The Met board decision to appoint Hollein to the role followed an exploration by a subcommittee of Hollein’s achievements to date and of his suitability for the role.
“We are delighted to appoint Max to lead the Met

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August 03, 2022 at 4:05pm

New Lawsuit Filed Over Rights to Henry Darger Estate

A new lawsuit, filed July 27 in US District Court in Chicago, alleges that the estate of Henry Darger is illegally in the hands of his former landlord. The suit, brought by a distant relative of Darger and Darger’s estate, accuses Kiyoko Lerner, who with her now-deceased husband Nathan rented the artist an apartment in their Chicago building for decades, of illegally profiting from the sale of Darger’s work.
The Lerners beginning in the 1930s served as landlords to Darger, a recluse who worked as a hospital janitor, during which time he created numerous works of art, most famously writing and

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