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The Headlines
THE BIG-TICKET MAY AUCTIONS IN NEW YORK ARE NEARING, and news of key lots is trickling out. One highlight of the action: a 1932 Pablo Picasso portrait of his then-lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, which will appear at Christie’s on May 11 with a $55 million high estimate, ARTnews reports. The auction house has retooled is annual spring modern and contemporary sales. This time, one will focus on 20th-century art, the other on material from 1980 to today. In other auction news, the collection of artist and patron Yvonne de Chavigny Segerstrom, which includes Claire Falkenstein, Barbara Hepworth, and Fairfield Porter, will be sold by Bonhams at sales in New York and Los Angeles this year, Penta says. And Phillips is set to open its new space in Midtown Manhattan, a glowing glass cube designed by studioMDA’s Markus Dochantschi, in June, according to 6sqft. Its auction room will be visible from the street.
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ART MUSEUM COLLECTIONS ARE ON THE MOVE. In Italy, the Uffizi is sending some of its art to neighboring towns through its Uffizi Diffusi program, aiming to spread around tourists euros and reduce crowding at its Florence home. In France, the Centre Pompidou has said it will hopes to partner with other art institutions in the country to show its holdings when it closes in 2023 for a three-year renovation, ARTnews reported last week. Now the MMCA Art Bank, which is a subsidiary of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in South Korea, is readying a show of its work that will visit four cities in the nation this year, the Korea Herald reports. The Art Bank was founded in 2005 to provide art for display in public and private places through various arrangements. It currently holds nearly 4,000 pieces.
The Digest
Bennington College in Vermont has received a gift of 500 works from the estate of the collector and philanthropist Melva Bucksbaum, who was a major supporter of contemporary artists. About half of the works will go into a teaching collection, while the other half will be offered in a single-owner auction at Stair in Hudson, New York, to raise scholarship funds. [Press Release/Vermont Business Magazine]
Writer Adam Gopnik has filed on Alexander Nemerov’s new book, Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York. It is “one of those books . . . in which a distinguished scholar says, in effect, to hell with being a distinguished scholar—I’m going to write like a human being,” Gopnik argues. [The New Yorker]
Meanwhile, Adam Gopnik’s brother, the art critic and biographer Blake Gopnik, has an essay criticizing a recent U.S. appeals court ruling that a 1984 Andy Warhol portrait of the musician Prince was not protected by fair use, and had infringed on the copyright of the photographer whose work it was based on. [The New York Times]
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss got the profile treatment, and went into how they are building their Nifty Gateway and Gemini blockchain platforms as places to store and trade everything from property to video game characters. “You want to pick that niche where there’s real market uptake,” Cameron said. “You don’t want to boil the ocean.” [Forbes]
Glenn Adamson, the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, has written a 400-year history of craft in America. “I encourage people not to take art-craft opposition as natural,” he said in an interview. “The only reason we think that in the first place is because of a power dynamic.” [The New York Times]
Hilde Lyn Helphenstein, the artist and curator who runs the popular art world-skewering Instagram account Jerry Gogosian, discussed her meme-making. [Observer]
The Kicker
ALAS, THERE IS NOT ROOM IN THIS NEWSLETTER for every celebrity NFT drop (apologies to the The Weeknd), but an exception must be made for musician and artist M.I.A. The “Paper Planes” rapper is set to release NFTs or digital works through the Foundation platform, Pitchfork reports. She apparently made one, titled KALA COYN, back in 1996. She seems pretty excited about the project, saying in a statement that the works are “a living, breathing, psycho-spectral canvas that crystalizes this moment in time for me. Visually, it’s a mind fuck and embodies everything I’ve loved about the digital art arena. It’s only now that the appropriate gallery for my work finally exists.” The first one will be release for sale on Thursday. [Pitchfork]
Thank you for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.
Source: artnews.com