| | The First Art Newspaper on the Net |   | Established in 1996 | Wednesday, June 3, 2020 |
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| | ARTBnk to Provide Free Fine Art Valuations to Support Nonprofits | |
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ARTBnk uses Artificial Intelligence, image recognition, and repeat sales regression analysis to provide transparent and objective valuations for fine art in real time.
NEW YORK, NY.- Starting immediately, ARTBnk will provide free accounts - including one year of unlimited access to ARTBnk Valuations - to qualifying not-for-profit institutions, most of which have been impacted by the economic effects of COVID-19. ARTBnk uses Artificial Intelligence, image recognition, and repeat sales regression analysis to provide transparent and objective valuations for fine art in real time. The ARTBnk platform also hosts the only vetted and normalized database of auction sales data, as well as other powerful tools that allow individuals and institutions to make informed financial decisions regarding their collections. Currently, museums are not receiving revenue from admissions or retail sales. New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Art alone is projecting a budget shortfall of at least $150 million this year. Academic institutions are fac ... More |
The Best Photos of the Day Artemis Gallery will hold an important one-day auction featuring museum-worthy examples of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Etruscan, Near Eastern, Far East / Asian, Pre-Columbian, African / Tribal, Oceanic, Native American, Spanish Colonial, Russian, Fossils, Ancient Jewelry, Fine Art. In this image: Rare Egyptian Ptolemaic Papyrus Scrolls, Demotic Script. Estimate $4,000 - $6,000.
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 | | Hitler's birthplace to be 'neutralised' with redesign | | Holy smoke! Israelites used weed in ancient rituals | | Hunt for Red O'Donnell: does Spain chapel house Irish rebel remains? | 
Journalists take pictures of a screen showing the chosen plan for the architectural redesign of Adolf Hitler's birth house, during a press conference at the Interior ministry in Vienna, Austria on June 2, 2020. An Austrian architect firm has been awarded to turn the birth house of Adolf Hilter into a police station to "neutralise" the controversial premise and focus on the future, Austrian officials said on June 2, 2020. JOE KLAMAR / AFP.
VIENNA (AFP).- Austrian officials unveiled Tuesday plans to "neutralise" Adolf Hitler's birth house by turning it into a police station, with the building receiving some cosmetic changes in the process. The yellow corner house in the northern Austrian town of Braunau on the border with Germany, where Hitler was born on April 20 1889, was taken into government control in 2016. The building's fate was the subject of a lengthy legal battle with the house's owner, which only ended last year. Austrian architecture firm Marte.Marte, run by two brothers, has been chosen from among 12 candidates to carry out the modifications to the property. The government expects the work to cost some 5 million euros ($5.6 million) and be completed by early 2023. "A new chapter will be opened for the future from the birth house of a dictator and mass murderer," Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said ... More | | 
This undated photo provided by the Israeli Antiquities Authority on June 2, 2020 shows an ancient altar on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Israeli archaeologists said residues of cannabis and animal dung have been found on the artefacts from a 2,700-year-old altar at an ancient temple in Tel Arad in the Negev Desert in southern Israel. Laura Lachman / Israeli Antiquities Authority / AFP.
JERUSALEM (AFP).- It's highly likely that ancient Israelites got high on cannabis in religious rituals, say researchers who have found traces of the drug at a religious site in Israel. Archaeologists made the dope discovery at the eighth-century Tel Arad pilgrimage site in the Negev desert, south of the occupied West Bank. "The presence of cannabis at Arad testifies to the use of mind-altering substances as part of cultic rituals in Judah," they said. Writing in a journal article published by Tel Aviv University's Institute of Archaeology, they said the find was "the earliest evidence for the use of cannabis in the Ancient Near East". The kingdom of Judah lasted from around 940 to 586 BC and centred on Jerusalem. It was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. "It seems likely that cannabis was used at Arad as a deliberate psychoactive, to stimulate ecstasy as part of cultic ceremonies," the researchers said. The discovery ... More | | 
An archaeologist works in an excavation carried out by the Hispano-Irish Association in a ruined chapel in Valladolid, that expects to identify the remains of the Irish lord rebel "Red" Hugh O'Donnell, on May 28, 2020. Forensic experts will begin testing 15 skeletons uncovered at an ancient Spanish chapel this week to see if any belong to 16th-century Irish rebel chief Red Hugh O'Donnell. Known as Red Hugh, the young Irishman led a rebellion that nearly ousted Elizabeth I's English troops from Ireland, sparking a nine-year war which the rebels ultimately lost, despite help from the Spanish crown. CESAR MANSO / AFP.
MADRID (AFP).- Forensic experts will begin testing 15 skeletons uncovered at an ancient Spanish chapel this week to see if any belong to 16th-century Irish rebel chief Red Hugh O'Donnell. The discovery of the chapel in the northwestern town of Valladolid where O'Donnell was buried with full honours in 1602 has sparked a wave of interest among historians in Spain, Ireland and beyond. Known as Red Hugh, the young Irishman led a rebellion that nearly ousted Elizabeth I's English troops from Ireland, sparking a nine-year war which the rebels ultimately lost, despite help from the Spanish crown. Just 29 at the time, O'Donnell quickly sailed to Spain to seek further support for their cause but died en route to Valladolid, the capital ... More |
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| | Christo's billowy visions, fleeting but unforgettable | | Hauser & Wirth opens online exhibition 'Annie Leibovitz. Still Life' | | Kiasma reopens exhibiting an excellent selection of Finnish paintings from the first decades of the 2000s | 
Stretching for nearly two miles, The Floating Piers project by artist Christo, that connects two small islands in Lake Iseo in Pilzone, Italy, June 16, 2016. Alessandro Grassani/The New York Times.
by Michael Kimmelman
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Im sorry I never got to ask Christo about Gabrovo, the Bulgarian city where he was born in 1935. He died this weekend, at 84, a dreamer with a cultish following to rival the Grateful Deads and a legacy that has always seemed a wry, humane retort to the cultural diktats of the Soviet bloc. Back in February 2005, I drove with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, his wife and collaborator, at zero hour, when an army of paid helpers wearing matching gray smocks and deployed along 23 miles of footpaths unfurled The Gates in Central Park all 7,500 of them, made from 5,390 tons of steel and more than 1 million square feet of saffron-colored vinyl. The operation cost millions of dollars. As with all of their public works, the tab was paid by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, including the cost of clearing ... More | | 
Annie Leibovitz, Emily Dickinson's herbarium, 2010 (detail). Archival pigment print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP, 63.5 x 58.7 cm / 25 x 23 1/8 in (unframed). © Annie Leibovitz. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
LONDON.- Celebrated American photographer Annie Leibovitz will present a new print in an edition of 100 on the occasion of her forthcoming online exhibition Still Life opening on 5 June. 100% of proceeds of sales of Upstate (2020), a work created while in quarantine, will go to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization as part of Hauser & Wirths #artforbetter initiative. Still Life includes ten photographic works and explores the importance of our sense of place in light of the current global moment. The exhibition features personal images of Leibovitzs own surroundings alongside a series of intimate scenes from the homes of historical figures from Charles Darwin and Emily Dickinson to John Muir and Georgia OKeeffe. The exhibition showcases the artists singular ability to combine portraiture and photojournalism with profound humanism and sly wit. The ... More | | 
Robin Lindqvist (1979), 70 Shadesof Green, 2010. Oil on canvas, 211,8 x 175,8 x 4,0 cm. Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Kirsi Halkola.
HELSINKI.- In 2017 the Helsinki-based collector Seppo Fränti donated his extensive collection to Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. The exhibition Mad Love takes a deep dive into Fräntis collection and the passion that brought it into being. The Seppo Fränti Collection consists mostly of contemporary Finnish art, with a focus on recent painting. Fränti has remained true to his vision and trusted his intuition: for him, art is not an investment but a passion. His collection spans a wide spectrum of styles from powerful expressionism to subtle minimalism. The collection comprises around 250 paintings, close to 400 works on paper, some sculptures, photographs, installations and small objects. It makes an excellent addition to Kiasmas prior collection of Finnish paintings from the first decades of the 2000s. It holds extensive selections of work by artists such as Olli Marttila (b. 1948), Henry Wuorila-Stenberg (b. 1949), Jussi Goman (b. ... More |
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| | Stedelijk Museum store offers limited edition face masks by Carlos Amorales | | The sacrosanct endowment? Not anymore for some arts groups | | Elsa Dorfman, who made art with giant Polaroids, dies at 83 | 
Dorelia Schraven, Blikopener peer educator at the museum. Photo: Iris Duvekot.
AMSTERDAM.- After having been closed due to the coronavirus, the Stedelijk reopened yesterday. On this occasion there is a new item on sale in the museum shop: a special edition face mask designed by the Mexican artist Carlos Amorales, who is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Stedelijk. The large black butterfly on the face mask is a reference to his work Black Cloud, the most popular piece in the exhibition. The moment the corona crisis hit Mexico, Carlos Amorales, supported by his gallery and collectors, launched an initiative to have a local garment workshop in Mexico City produce face masks for the most vulnerable street vendors: cobblers, cleaners, magazine sellers, musicians and sex workers, who ply their trade on the street without protection against corona, and whose income is dramatically declining. The Stedelijk has also commissioned the artist to produce face masks, made in the same workshop, ... More | | 
Lauren Lovette in her debut of Odette-Odile in "Swan Lake" at the David H. Koch Theater in New York on Feb. 21, 2020. Some cultural organizations, staggered by the financial upheaval caused by the coronavirus pandemic, are dipping heavily into their endowments. Andrea Mohin/The New York Times.
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Endowments have long been viewed as the bedrock upon which the long term financial health of arts organizations are built money that was painstakingly accumulated and protected over decades to finance the future. They are not rainy day funds, or pots of gold to be casually raided to cover some unforeseen expense. A manager who dipped into theirs excessively, taking out more than the widely embraced standard of 5%, could put themselves at risk of being cast as shortsighted, or worse, a spendthrift. But the coronavirus pandemic has challenged that orthodoxy because so many largely dormant museums, orchestras and ballet troupes are facing unmatched financial ... More | | 
Elsa Dorfman, a photographer who uses a 20-by-24-inch Polaroid camera, one of only five originally made by the company, at her frame shop in Cambridge, Mass., Dec. 22, 2015. Gretchen Ertl/The New York Times.
by Randy Kennedy
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- In 1980, a little-known Boston photographer named Elsa Dorfman got a chance to use a rare Polaroid camera that weighed 200 pounds and produced prints 2 feet high, a Godzilla of a device that dwarfed her. It could not have been more different from the small cameras she used to shoot friends and poets like Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. But she was smitten with the Polaroids power to render a paintingsize image so rapidly that she and her subject could watch the likeness materialize together before their eyes. I was in love, she said. Polaroid deployed the cameras as public relations tools, often reserving them for famous photographers. But Dorfman ... More |
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| | Tunisia seeks to block online auction of royal artefacts | | Creative studio AllRightsReserved curates Sotheby's charity auction | | Hindman Auctions announces inaugural Antiquities & Islamic Art auction | 
The items are due to go under the hammer in an online June 11 sale organised by the Paris-based Coutau-Bégarie auction house.
TUNIS (AFP).- The head of Tunisia's National Heritage Institute urged authorities Tuesday to block the sale of royal artefacts at an auction in France, saying they were spirited out of the country. More than 100 objects "of huge historical value were taken out of the country without any official authorisation in the second half of March, in the midst of the (coronavirus) lockdown", Faouzi Mahfoudh said. "They don't belong to any state museum. It's private property," the head of the National Heritage Institute told AFP. They include an ancient Koran which belonged to Mohamed el-Moncef Bey, one of the last representatives of the Husseinite monarchy that ruled Tunisia from 1705 until its independence from France in 1957, Mahfoudh said. Also in the lot is the original copy of a reference book on the Husseinite monarchy written by 19th century Tunisian historian and politician ... More | | 
Florentijn Hofman, Rubber Duck HK Tour Sculpture, 2013, Fiberglass, 120 x 120 x 160 cm, Est. HK$28,000 48,000. Courtesy Sotheby's.
HONG KONG.- Sothebys will present Contemporary Showcase: MEET AllRightsReserved, a charity online auction curated in collaboration with Hong Kong-based creative studio AllRightsReserved, featuring an exciting assemblage of limited-edition collectibles and unique works by some of the most sought-after artists and designers of our generation. Highlights include a one-of-its-kind sculpture of Dutch artist Florentijn Hofmans yellow rubber duck, which was exclusively displayed in the public art exhibition of Rubber Duck Project: HK Tour in 2013 when its colossal counterpart floated in Hong Kongs famed Victoria Harbour; alongside limited-edition collectibles and original artwork by KAWS, VERDY, Yu Nagaba, David Shrigley and more. Established in 2003, AllRightsReserved has designed and organized iconic projects across Asia for leading artists ... More | | 
A Greek Bronze Kouros, Laconian, Circa Mid-to-Late 7th Century B.C. Height 6 1/2 inches. Estimate: $20,000.00 - $25,000.00.
CHICAGO, IL.- Hindman announces its inaugural Antiquities & Islamic Art auction on June 16, offering novice and experienced collectors the rare opportunity to acquire carefully vetted objects outside of the New York or London market from some of the worlds earliest civilizations. While Hindman regularly offers a limited number of works of art from this category, it is the firms first auction dedicated exclusively to ancient art. The sale comprises more than 250 lots of Greek pottery, Egyptian objects, glass, bronze and marble sculpture from Rome and other cultures of the Mediterranean world. Arts of the Islamic world followed by Pre-Columbian Central and South America will be included in the latter portion of the auction. Ancient art speaks to everyone, says Corbin Horn of Hindman, whether your interior style is modern or traditional. Leading interior designers love to incorpo ... More |
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ArtBytes for Kids: Joan Miró
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 A London home goes from Georgian to Modern, with a detourLONDON (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- When Heather Kane was scouring her favorite London neighborhoods two years ago for an apartment to buy, she discovered a promising candidate on the first floor of an 18th-century townhouse on Harley Street, in the Marylebone area of the city center. I loved it, recalled Kane, a 42-year-old technology executive turned design entrepreneur, who was born in Los Angeles and has lived in London since 2015. Most of the apartments Id seen had beautiful, original facades but were too pared back inside. This one was huge with high windows and ceilings, original plaster moldings and an amazing terrace. I love Londons historic architecture and wanted to preserve as much of the period detailing as possible. I thought it would be an easy conversion, but it turned out to be 10 times harder than anything Id done ... More These times call for Stephen Petronio's coiled energyNEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Oh, the thrill of a world premiere by a major choreographer. You take your seat at the appointed time and wait in anticipation for the big new vision. And then it comes: a four-minute video of people dancing in their homes. Thats where we are now in dance. And as is generally true these days, we should be grateful for what we have. On Friday evening, a day after Mark Morris debuted four short video dances over YouTube and Zoom, Stephen Petronio took to YouTube to present the premiere of #GimmeShelter, a dance film as long as the Rolling Stones song to which it is set. That film wasnt all there was to the online event, titled #LoveSpreadsFaster (accessible through Friday). Petronio also broadcast new footage of Jaqlin Medlock, a dancer in his company, performing the final solo from Full Half ... More How 'Phantom of the Opera' survived the pandemicNEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- The Phantom of the Opera has garnered plenty of superlatives over the years, including the longest-running show in Broadway history. But in recent months, it has also laid claim to a more unlikely title: pathbreaking musical of the COVID-19 era. As theaters around the globe were abruptly shuttered by the pandemic, with no clear path to reopening in sight, the world tour of Phantom has been soldiering on in Seoul, South Korea, playing eight shows a week. And it has been drawing robust audiences to its 1,600-seat theater, even after an outbreak in the ensemble led to a mandatory three-week shutdown in April. The musical, with its 126-member company and hundreds of costumes and props, is believed to be the only large-scale English-language production running anywhere in the world. ... More Nailya Alexander Gallery opens an online exhibition of works by Angel Albarrán and Anna Cabrera NEW YORK, NY.- Nailya Alexander Gallery is presenting Albarrán Cabrera: There was never a time when we didnt exist, the gallery's second solo show for the Barcelona-based artists Angel Albarrán (b. 1969, Barcelona) and Anna Cabrera (b. 1969, Sevilla), on view online Monday 1 June - Saturday 27 June 2020. The exhibition celebrates the beauty and timelessness of nature, which connects all of us in a continuous cycle of renewal. For Albarrán Cabrera, a profound awareness of the natural world is integral to all aspects of existence; they write, Being conscious of our surroundings isnt just an important part of life our surroundings and how we interpret them is life as we know it. Drawing inspiration from a range of sources and philosophies, from William Blake and Jorge Luis Borges to Hinduism and Japanese thought, the artists use photo ... More Missoula Art Park exhibit showcases large sculptures from salvaged materialsMISSOULA, MONT.- Missoula Art Museum invites the public to experience Jay Laber: Reborn Rez Wrecks in the Missoula Art Park. Jay Laber (Amskapi Pikuni/Blackfeet, 19612019), passed away last year and left a strong legacy of public artwork. When he was three years old, Labers family left Montana after the devastating flood of 1964. When Laber returned to Montana in the late 1990s, he enrolled at Salish Kootenai College in Pablo to study forestry. After taking art classes on the side, he began making sculptures of warriors, dancers, and wildlife out of discarded car parts. Labers innovative sculptures depict traditional Native culture using found and salvaged metal. Its a new twist on an old tradition
to make things out of whatever was handy, and that was handy, Laber said. Laber settled on Post Creek outside of St. Ignatius and launched ... More Christie's announces online sale 'Face Time: People in Art Through the Ages'LONDON.- Christies announces the online sale Face Time: People in Art through the Ages, a themed auction which looks at portraiture and the representation of people in art, whilst tracing the evolution of the human image from the Renaissance through to the early 20th century. Comprising 51 lots, including paintings, drawings, sculpture and portrait miniatures, works range in estimates from £600 to £40,000. The sale not only considers portraits through time, but also across cultures. From 16th Century Italian portraiture through to album depicting minorities in China, figurative art has been a method of exploring and contrasting how people have viewed themselves and others throughout history. In the West the tradition of portraiture stretches back to the sculpture of the Greek and Roman empires. With the fall of Rome centuries followed in which figurative ... More Arc de Triomphe to get posthumous Christo wrap in 2021PARIS (AFP).- Even after his death, artist Christo's dream project of wrapping up Paris' Arc de Triomphe in silvery-blue recyclable fabric will go ahead next year in line with his wishes, organisers said on Tuesday. From Paris's oldest bridge to Berlin's Reichstag, the Bulgarian-born artist spent decades wrapping landmarks and creating improbable structures around the world. And his death in New York on Sunday at the age of 84 is not going to stop the realisation of a major project Christo first imagined back in 1961, when he used to gaze at the monument from his small bedroom in the French capital. "Even before his wife Jeanne-Claude's death in 2009, Christo had said that he wanted the project to be carried out if they were to die," said Laure Martin, the head of the project "L'Arc de Triomphe: Wrapped". The world-famous war memorial was originally due ... More Turner Auctions + Appraisals announces a sale of maps, books & illustrationsSAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Turner Auctions + Appraisals will present Maps, Books & Illustrations on Saturday, June 13, 2020, featuring over 210 printed works from the 16th-20th centuries. Sourced primarily from two California collectors, the auction offers maps from the 16th-19th centuries, mostly from Europe, plus one from Monterey, California. A wide range of individual books and multiple-volume sets on diverse subjects includes antique, vintage or first edition works in English, French and other languages. Among the sale's authors are Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Jack London, James Jones (signed), Raymond Chandler, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Louis Stevenson, Victor Hugo, Pierre Corneille, Voltaire, William Shakespeare and many others. The illustrations feature 19th-century engravings of birds, landscapes, vedute ... More Summer exhibition 'Textiles from Egypt' opens at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden LEIDEN.- For the first time in almost 25 years, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden (the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities) shows a beautiful selection of textiles from Egypt most of which are over 1,000 years old. This summer, the colourful exhibition 'Textiles from Egypt' focuses on fanciful canvases, fragments of garments and interior textiles from the first millennium AD, in stories about fabrics, styles, weaving techniques, materials, motifs and symbolism. In the hot desert sand of Egypt, these textiles have been exceptionally well preserved for centuries. Nowadays, the material is very fragile and is therefore rarely exhibited. Modern textile art by thirteen artists of textile group QS2, inspired by the museums collection, is displayed alongside the centuries-old fabrics. 'Textiles from Egypt' can only be visited for a few months due to the fragility ... More Federico Acerri, who answered students' questions, dies at 81NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Before there was Google there was Federico Acerri. As an information specialist in the Michigan school system, where he worked for decades, he took on every imaginable query from staff members and students, culling dictionaries, microfilm and databases to find an answer. He was also a prolific artist, drawing under the name Mad Monk. Acerri died April 12 at the Ascension St. John Hospital in Detroit of complications of the coronavirus, his sister, Mary Ann Tschiggfrey, said. He was 81. Federico Urbano Acerri, who was known as Fred, was born on July 20, 1938, in Detroit. His father, Raniero, an Italian immigrant, worked for the city electric utility; his mother, Stella (Bonacci) Acerri, was a homemaker. Federico Acerri graduated from Nativity High School, where he was a star lineman on the football team. After graduating ... More Robb Forman Dew, novelist who wrote of families, dies at 73NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Robb Forman Dew, whose carefully etched novels of family life made her, as one critic put it, one of our premier chroniclers of the everyday, died May 22 in Springfield, Massachusetts. She was 73. Her son John said the cause was complications of endocarditis, a disease that affects the heart. Dew made a splash in 1981 with her first novel, Dale Loves Sophie to Death, about a woman who returns each summer with her children to her hometown in Ohio. Katha Pollitt, reviewing it in The New York Times, acknowledged that some readers might be put off by its unhurried pace. In a way, though, she wrote, I respect Mrs. Dew all the more for risking our impatience in order to tell her story her own way, and for forcing us, by her own considerable talent, to listen and admire. It takes a certain artistic courage ... More |
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Flashback On a day like today, French painter Raoul Dufy was born June 03, 1877. Raoul Dufy (3 June 1877 - 23 March 1953) was a French Fauvist painter, brother of Jean Dufy. He developed a colorful, decorative style that became fashionable for designs of ceramics and textiles, as well as decorative schemes for public buildings. He is noted for scenes of open-air social events. He was also a draftsman, printmaker, book illustrator, scenic designer, a designer of furniture, and a planner of public spaces. In this image: A woman looks at artworks by late French painter Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) exhibited at the Beaux-Arts museum of Nice, on June 18, 2015, as part of the cultural event "Nice 2015. Promenade(s) des Anglais". AFP PHOTO / JEAN CHRISTOPHE MAGNENET.
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