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The Headlines
AUCTION LOTS. A Peter Paul Rubens painting, Portrait of a Lady (1620–25), will hit the block at DESA Unicum in Warsaw, Poland, next month, with a high estimate of 24 million zlotys (about $6.04 million), the Associated Press reports. The house says it could sell for one of the top art prices ever achieved at auction in Central or Eastern European. Over in New York, a sale of 100 Ansel Adams photographs from the collection of David H. Arrington— detailed in the Guardian—brought about $3.81 million. And from London, the Financial Times, has a preview of upcoming auction offerings , like “the third largest piece of Mars on Earth” (with a low estimate of $500,000 at Christie’s, online through February 23) and a 1933 Derby Bentley automobile (with an estimate of $400,000 at Bonhams on March 3). Ready your budgets now!
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RINGGOLD ROUNDUP. Artist Faith Ringgold just opened a survey at the New Museum in New York, and the press is coming in hot. In ARTnews, Alex Greenberger has a look at six of the 91-year-old’s key works. In the New York Times, critic Holland Cotter notes that she took “a career path of maximum resistance.” And Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar have features. Older cuts: In 2020 in ARTnews, the trailblazing artist took part in a conversation with painter Jordan Casteel, and in 2016, she was profiled.
The Digest
In India, volunteers are working to track down the thousands of religious idols that have been stolen from “temples and sold to museums and wealthy collectors via a flourishing international gray market,” Gerry Shih reports. [The Washington Post]
Belgium has provided the Democratic Republic of Congo with a partial inventory of its Africa Museum in Tervuren as part of talks to repatriate material looted during the colonial era. [The Times of London and The Brussels Times]
The World Photography Organisation, the firm behind Photofairs Shanghai, has snapped up a 25 percent stake in the Photo London fair. [Ocula]
Dealer Polina Berlin, a veteran of the Paula Cooper and Kasmin galleries, has opened a 2,000-square-foot space on the parlor floor of a townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. [T: The New York Times Style Magazine]
The Kicker
TOUGH TALK. The New Yorker’s art editor, Françoise Mouly, chatted with David Hockney at his home in the Normandy region of France, and the artist was in characteristically fine form. When they get on the topic of abstraction, he really hits his stride. Here’s Hockney: “Giacometti said abstract art was the “art of the handkerchief”—which I like. [Laughs .] But I think now abstraction has had its say. You must now depict, but it must be done in a new way. How? That’s the real problem today.” He has, of course, offered up plenty of solutions through his work, and when Mouly visited, he was embarking on a new series of portraits. [The New Yorker]
Source: artnews.com