News

October 23, 2020 at 4:03pm

Kunstmuseen Krefeld Sued by Heirs for Return of Mondrian Paintings

German institution Kunstmuseum Krefeld is facing a lawsuit filed in US District Court by the heirs of Piet Mondrian demanding restitution of four of the artist’s paintings loaned to the museum in 1929 as well as financial remuneration for four additional works that are alleged to have been sold sometime in the 1950s to pay for acquisitions of new works by Braque, Chagall, Matisse, and Picasso.
The suit was filed by trustees of the Elizabeth McManus Holtzman Irrevocable Trust on behalf of the children of Elizabeth McManus Holtzman and Harry Holtzman, an American abstract artist who brought Mondrian

Read more
October 23, 2020 at 1:24pm

Artist Collective Claims Responsibility for Stolen Beuys Sculpture

German artist collective Frankfurter Hauptschule has announced that its members are responsible for stealing a Joseph Beuys sculpture from an exhibition in Oberhausen, Germany, and delivering it to the Iringa Boma regional museum and cultural center in Tanzania as a “symbolic act of restitution to the former German colony,” Artnews reports.
The group has posted to YouTube a video titled “Bad Beuys Go Africa” that allegedly shows the heist taking place and the sculpture being delivered to the Tanzanian institution, a repurposed military hospital, all to the strains of a choral cover of Toto’s 1982

Read more
October 22, 2020 at 1:49pm

Marian Goodman Gallery to Shutter London Outpost, Launch New Programming Model

Marian Goodman Gallery will close its London venue by the end of the year and implement a different exhibition model in the city, the gallery announced today.
Named Marian Goodman Projects, the new initiative will stage events throughout London in settings intended to complement artists’ individual practices. The enterprise will be helmed by Philipp Kaiser, the gallery’s chief executive director of artists and programs, with its first project opening next autumn. After expanding from her flagship New York location to Paris in 1995, Goodman opened the London outpost—a David Adjaye–renovated

Read more
October 22, 2020 at 12:58pm

Sackler Family Members Settle Purdue Pharma Suit for $225 Million

The US Department of Justice yesterday announced that Sackler family members associated with Purdue Pharma will pay $225 million in civil penalties to settle a federal suit that saw the Stamford, Connecticut–based drug maker charged with aggressively marketing OxyContin and providing kickbacks to doctors who prescribed the powerful opioid, while downplaying the its addictive qualities, resulting in rampant overprescription and an accompanying surge of related addictions and deaths.
The money represents a fraction of the total $8.3 billion settlement, the largest ever involving a pharmaceutical

Read more
October 22, 2020 at 11:29am

Deana Lawson Wins 2020 Hugo Boss Prize

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Hugo Boss today announced Deana Lawson as the winner of the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize. Lawson is the first photographer to win the biennial prize since it was established in 1996 to recognize extraordinary achievements in the field of contemporary art. She will receive $100,000 and a solo show at the Guggenheim in spring 2021.
Known for her highly staged formalist photographs focusing on family, intimacy, sexuality, spirituality, and Black subjectivity, Lawson in college abandoned plans to earn a business degree in order to pursue photography. She has described

Read more
October 21, 2020 at 5:10pm

Three Berlin Museums Targeted in Vandalism Attack

Sixty-three artifacts were damaged in a vandalism spree taking place across three institutions on Berlin’s Museum Island earlier this month, as reported yesterday by German daily Die Zeit and broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. Berlin police have determined that an attacker, or attackers, sprayed an oily substance on objects at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Neues Museum, and Pergamon sometime during 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on October 3, while the institutions were open. Information on the attack was withheld from the public while officials contacted those who had purchased tickets to the three targeted museums

Read more
October 21, 2020 at 1:43pm

Jacob Lawrence Work Missing Since 1960 Discovered by Met Visitor

A painting from Jacob Lawrence’s thirty-panel 1954–56 series “Struggle: From the History of the American People” has been located by a visitor to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Times reported today. A woman attending the Met’s exhibition “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle” noted that five panels were missing from the series and realized that her elderly neighbors might well be the possessors of one of them.
The visitor was correct: The couple, who live on New York’s Upper West Side, within walking distance of the museum, purchased the missing painting, a 1956 work depicting

Read more
October 20, 2020 at 6:50pm

Baltimore Museum of Art Faces Multiple Calls to Cancel Artwork Sale

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has come under fire from a host of critics demanding the institution cancel its imminent sale of three major works in an attempt to raise money to support curatorial and staff salaries and to purchase supplies to be used in the care of the museum’s holdings. Slated to be deaccessioned on October 28 through Sotheby’s are Brice Marden’s 3, 1987; Clyfford Still’s 1957-G, painted during the eponymous year; and Andy Warhol’s The Last Supper, 1986. Together, the works are expected to fetch some $65 million.
Among critics’ allegations are that the museum secretly sold

Read more
October 20, 2020 at 1:07pm

Kapwani Kiwanga Wins 2020 Prix Marcel Duchamp

Canadian-born multidisciplinary artist Kapwani Kiwanga has won the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp for her sculptural series “Flowers for Africa,” which addresses African independence. The $41,000 prize, France’s top art honor, is awarded by the Association for the International Dissemination of French Art (ADIAF).
Kiwanga, who lives in Paris, studied anthropology, and often brings her training in this field to bear on her work, which among other media encompasses photography, film, installation, and sculpture, often in the service of amplifying the legacies of colonialism. “Flowers for Africa,”

Read more
October 19, 2020 at 4:14pm

April Freely Appointed Executive Director of Fire Island Artist Residency

April Freely has been named the new executive director of the Fire Island Artist Residency, the New York organization founded in 2011 as the first residency to provide resources exclusively to emerging lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer-identifying artists and poets. Previously the program coordinator at the Vermont Studio Center, the largest arts residency in the US, Freely will succeed cofounder Chris Bogia, who will transition to the board of directors.
“In this time of transformation, I am excited to learn and grow with this organization, building upon the impressive legacy FIAR

Read more
October 19, 2020 at 3:37pm

Enzo Mari (1932–2020)

Firebrand Italian designer Enzo Mari has died today at the age of eighty-eight, in Milan’s San Raffale hospital. A towering and radical figure in the design world, Mari was as well known for his volatile temper as for his sleek, functional objects, which included furniture, ceramics, kitchen utensils, and games for such storied manufacturers as Alessi, Danese, Magis, and Zanotta.
Born the son of an artisan in Navara, Italy, Mari forwent high school and college entirely, working instead as a street peddler. In 1952, he enrolled at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied painting and

Read more
October 17, 2020 at 11:50am

Marianne Wex (1937–2020)

Marianne Wex, whose short career as an artist yielded enduring contributions to women’s and gender studies as well as the field of conceptual photography, has died at age eighty-three in her native Germany.
Born in Hamburg in 1937, Wex studied at the Academies of Art Hamburg and Mexico City, originally focusing on painting. She became most known for her installation and book Let’s Take Back Our Space, a vast but rigorously organized taxonomy that collated hundreds of rephotographed images from mass media alongside thousands of her own street photographs—all shot with a Mamiya camera and intended

Read more

1 2 3 4 5 > >>