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The Headlines
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A BRITISH DISPATCH. Police in Brussels recovered four paintings that were stolen earlier this year from the official residence of the British ambassador to NATO in the Belgian capital, the Spectator’s gossip columnist says. The Foreign Office did not comment. The works reportedly recovered, on loan from the Government Art Collection, are by Henry Marvell Carr, Derek Clarke, Frederick Gore, and Claude Maurice Roger. Meanwhile, the inimitable Melvyn Bragg, aka Baron Bragg, CH, HonFRS, FRSL, FBA, devoted the latest episode of his BBC discussion show In Our Time to the pioneering Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, and was joined by art scholars Tamar Garb, Lois Oliver, and Claire Moran. Next spring, the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London will present what is being billed as the first major U.K. show on Morisot.
ARTIST UPDATE, BLOCKBUSTER EDITION. It is an absolutely huge day for artist profiles. The wily Marcel Dzama, who has an exhibition at David Zwirner in London on deck, is in the Guardian. Narsiso Martinez, who now has a show at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, is in the New York Times. Torkwase Dyson, who has a new show at Pace in New York, is in the Times, too. Hernan Bas, who opens an exhibition next week at Victoria Miro in London, is in Apollo. Sterling Ruby just opened a show with Gagosian in New York, and took Wallpaper around his 110,000-square-foot Los Angeles studio. And Jaume Plensa—with work now on view at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in England and the Picasso Museum in Antibes, France—is in the South China Morning Post. “I think beauty is the soul of art,” he said.
The Digest
The Peabody Museum at Harvard University apologized for keeping in its collections hair samples taken from some 700 Native American children who were forced to attend government boarding schools in the 1930s. It said it would return the hair to family members of the children or their tribes. [The New York Times]
The J. Paul Getty Trust has given $1 million to help preserve museums, libraries, and other cultural sites in Ukraine, partnering with the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas, which has committed $3 million to such efforts. [The Art Newspaper]
ArtBinder, the tech startup whose software for managing art inventories is used by many leading galleries, has been acquired by Volaris Group, which is part of the Canadian giant Constellation Software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. [Artnet News]
Police arrested a man for allegedly throwing soup on a painting at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Ireland, on Thursday evening. A museum official said that the damage to the work, which has not been identified, was minimal. The suspect’s possible motivations are not yet known. [The Irish Times]
Golden State Warriors star Andre Iguodala and his wife, Christina, have filled their home in the San Francisco Bay Area with art by artists like Odili Donald Odita, Sadie Barnette, Isaac Julien, Hebru Brantley, and Elisa Gomez. [Architectural Digest]
In case you missed it: Art once owned by the late billionaire tech legend Paul Allen sold on Wednesday at Christie’s in New York for $1.5 billion, the largest auction total in history. New records were set for a whopping 20 artists, including Gustav Klimt and Andrew Wyeth. Angelica Villa and Daniel Cassady have a full report. [ARTnews]
The Kicker
DESIRE. Letters that musician, painter, and Nobel laureate Bob Dylan wrote to his high-school sweetheart in the late 1950s will be offered at RR Auction with an opening bid of $250,000, the Associated Press reports. At one point in the material, the then-Robert “Bob” Zimmerman apparently mulls changing his name to Little Willie or Elston. (Not quite as catchy!) He also says he wants to sell one million records. As the AP points out, he ended up being quite a bit more successful, with sales now totaling 125 million. [The Associated Press]
Source: artnews.com