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Thursday, 18 August 2016 15:28

Point72 Asset Management, the investment firm owned by hedge fund manager/art collector Steve Cohen, has dropped two-thirds of its stock in Sotheby’s. According to a report from the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company’s shares dropped from 3.2 million to 1 million. The firm was previously the auction house’s fifth largest shareholder. The news came weeks after the Chinese insurer, Taikang Life, acquired a 13.5% stake in Sotheby’s, making it the house’s largest shareholder.

Thursday, 18 August 2016 15:27

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. is sending its monumental Yayoi Kusama exhibition on a North American tour. The show, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, will make stops at the Seattle Art Museum, the Broad in Los Angeles, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, after its stint at the Hirshhorn. The exhibition includes six of Kusama’s immersive Infinity Rooms, which are extremely popular among museum-goers. The mirror-lined chambers, which are filled with dazzle LED lights, will be complemented by over sixty paintings and sculptures as well as archival material.

Wednesday, 17 August 2016 14:52

“Stuart Davis has been called one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century and the best American artist of his generation,” notes exhibition co-organizer and Whitney curator Barbara Haskell. “Faced with the choice early in his career between realism and abstraction,”  she adds, “he invented a vocabulary that harnessed the grammar of abstraction to the speed and simultaneity of modern America.” Stuart Davis: In Full Swing features approximately 100 artworks by an artist whose formal brilliance and complexity captured the energy and ebullience of popular culture and modern life.

Wednesday, 17 August 2016 14:50

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has named Lauren Haynes as its new curator of contemporary art. Haynes, who has served as the associate curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem for the past ten years, is an expert in African-American modern and contemporary art. She has organized an array of important exhibitions, including shows dedicated to Alma Thomas and Carrie Mae Weems. Haynes will assume her new post in October.

Wednesday, 17 August 2016 14:49

The Harvard Art Museums have launched a digital resource dedicated to the influential Bauhaus School. The online collection grants users access to over 32,000 objects, including textiles, photographs, paintings, and ephemera by the movement’s most notable figures, such as Josef and Anni Albers, Marcel Breuer, and Wassily Kandinsky. The works were originally assembled by Modernist master and  Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, who later became a professor at Harvard.

Wednesday, 17 August 2016 14:48

On September 14, Sotheby’s New York will offer works from one of the world’s most renowned Asian art collections. Assembled by Roy and Marilyn Papp, the collection includes some of the finest Chinese paintings in the United States, many of which have not been on the market in over two-and-a-half decades. The sale, which features 122 lots, is expected to garner between $10 million and $15 million.

Wednesday, 17 August 2016 14:47

The UK’s National Trust, which is responsible for protecting historic houses and gardens and making them accessible to the public, has acquired an important British miniature by Isaac Oliver. The work, which depicts Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury, was purchased for $2.7 million. The early seventeenth-century miniature will remain on view at the National Trust-owned Powis Castle—a medieval castle, fortress, and country mansion in Wales.

Tuesday, 16 August 2016 11:45

This year marks the three-hundredth birthday of the oldest high-style, brick merchant’s dwelling in America—the Warner House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (Fig. 1). In December 1715, Archibald Macpheadris, a Scots-Irish shipowner and sea captain from Northern Ireland, purchased land on Daniel Street, a short distance from his Piscataqua River wharf. He soon married Sarah Wentworth, the teenage daughter of the Lieutenant Governor, and built her the most stylish dwelling in the Piscataqua River region.

Tuesday, 16 August 2016 11:44

Actor Alec Baldwin is currently at odds with the New York gallerist Mary Boone. Ten years ago, Baldwin fell in love with a large-scale floral painting by Ross Bleckner. He implored Boone to get the collector who owned the work to sell, which they did for $190,000. Now, Baldwin is claiming that the painting is not the work he pined for, but rather a different version of the piece. Boone has disputed the claim.

Tuesday, 16 August 2016 11:43

Maine’s Portland Museum of Art will unveil a new and improved sculpture park to the public in 2017. The project is being funded by a gift from local businessman David Shaw. Prior to the opening, the institution hopes to add more works to the sculpture park, which already features pieces by John Bisbee and Sir Anthony Caro. The sculpture park will be free and open year-round. The space is currently only open during special events.

Tuesday, 16 August 2016 11:42

The Minneapolis Institute of Art is launching a long-term initiative focused on Asian art. The endeavor is being funded by a recent $6 million gift from Alfred P. Gale—the son of the late Richard Gale, a renowned Asian art collector and longtime supporter of the institution. The Gale Asian Art Initiative aims to foster broader understanding and appreciation of Asian art and culture through public programs, exhibitions, and research.

Tuesday, 16 August 2016 11:41

Recent carbon-dating analysis has revealed that the British Museum’s beloved wooden sculpture of the Pacific god A’a is much older than originally thought. Glasgow’s Scottish Universities Environmental Research Center has determined that the work was created 250 years before the arrival of Europeans, not in the early-eighteenth or nineteenth century. The figure has inspired numerous Western artists, including Henry Moore and Pablo Picasso, who both owned casts of the work.

Monday, 15 August 2016 12:17

1. This 1960s beauty is awash in original details.

All mid-century design lovers dream of living in a beautifully preserved home created by one of the twentieth century’s most revered architects. Well, now’s your chance. Designed in 1969 by William Pereira—the Futurist architect responsible for a slew of landmark buildings, including the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco and the Geisel Library in San Diego—this 4,650-square-foot, two-bedroom home in Salt Lake City, Utah, is on the market for the first time and boasts many original details.

Monday, 15 August 2016 12:15

The Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, will restore a small cottage that once belonged to Modernist pioneers Arthur Dove and Helen Torr. Located in Long Island, the Dove/Torr Cottage was acquired by the museum in 1998. The one-room home was added to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios Program in 2002. The Heckscher plans to restore the interior of the building to its earlier state.

Monday, 15 August 2016 12:14

A group of Chilean filmmakers have launched a campaign demanding that the British Museum return a statue they say was stolen from Easter Island. The sacred sculpture was removed from the remote island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean a century ago. The campaign will be chronicled in a new documentary produced by Paula Rossetti and directed by Leo Pakarati, who are urging the Chilean government to make a formal demand for the statue’s return. Easter Island is home to hundreds of monolithic statues that are believed to have been sculpted around the thirteenth century.

Monday, 15 August 2016 12:12

The Menil Collection in Houston is showcasing works from a monumental promised gift of Outsider Art in the exhibition As Essential as Dreams: Self-taught Art from the Collection of Stephanie and John Smither. The bequest, which includes fifty works by such luminaries as Thornton Dial, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Solange Knopf, and Martín Ramírez, comes from the late, Houston-based arts patron and collector Stephanie Smither and her husband, John, who died in 2002.

Monday, 15 August 2016 12:10

Seattle’s Frye Art Museum announced that Joseph Rosa will step in as its new Director beginning on October 1. Rosa, who previously served as the Director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art, will replace Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker. Rosa is a scholar of architecture and architectural photography. He teamed up with Birnie Danzker a few years ago to organize an exhibition highlighting the work of the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi and the Chinese ink painter Qi Baishi, which went on view at both institutions.

Friday, 12 August 2016 10:16

David Rago began selling American art pottery in 1972, entered the auction world in 1982 and founded The Rago Arts and Auction Center in 1996. This fall, the auction house enters its third decade in business with a season defined by strong private owner sales and singular objects. Among the private collections coming to market: In October, the best collection of work by George Nakashima still in private hands; contemporary glass from the Estate Collection of Nancy Connolly; and Jerome Shaw’s collection of decorative arts from Tiffany Studios, Art Nouveau objects, French glass and ceramics.

Friday, 12 August 2016 10:15

Penelope Curtis, the former Director of Tate Britain, will organize TEFAF Curated at the upcoming TEFAF Maastricht fair. Now in its third year, the section highlights contemporary works by artists who are new to the show. Curtis, a sculpture curator and art historian, is currently the Director of Lisbon’s Calouste Gulbenkian Museum. The 2017 iteration of TEFAF Curated, dubbed Between Heaven and Earth, will focus on the use of the recumbent figure in art to convey a range of emotions and themes.

Friday, 12 August 2016 10:14

A long-lost engraving by the Renaissance master, Albrecht Durer, has been discovered at a French flea market. The work, which dates back 500 years, was snapped up by a retired archaeologist and art collector for a fraction of its value. When he noticed a stamp from the Staatsgalerie museum in Stuttgart, Germany, on the back of the work, he decided to return the engraving. The work has been missing from the institution since the end of World War II.

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