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The Headlines
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DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN. Once more, activists have targeted a well-known artwork in a climate protest, Karen K. Ho reports in ARTnews. This time it was at the National Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, where a pair of protesters smeared red paint onto the glass covering Claude Monet’s The Artist’s Garden at Giverny (1900) and then glued their hands to it. They were arrested. The Monet was on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris for a show titled “The Garden – Six Centuries of Art and Nature.” The museum said it is examining the work for damage. The two protesters were wearing shirts for the group Återställ Våtmarker (Restore Wetlands), which took credit for the action, telling the AFP that “gorgeous gardens like those in Monet’s painting will soon be a distant memory.” For the full story, head to ARTnews.
SHOWTIME. Good news for Damien Hirst fans. Munich’s Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art will stage a survey of the artist—his first in Germany—in October. It will be titled “The Weight of Things,” and feature 40 works from the past 40 years. One intriguing bit: “Hirst said a giant outdoor spot painting would also be visible from all over the city,” Sam Gaskin reports in Ocula. Given the size and value of some Hirsts, staging an overview is not always straightforward. A plan to travel his 2012 Tate Modern retrospective to the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A. was put “on indefinite hold because the show is so expensive,” the Economist reported. (MOCA was working to recover from financial trouble at the time.) The Munich show arrives October 26.
The Digest
Former U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown said that Steve McQueen’s acclaimed video work Grenfell “should now be seen by every politician to consider what happens next.” McQueen made the piece in response to the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower in London, in which 72 people died. [@GordonBrown/Twitter and The Art Newspaper]
In Peru’s capital city of Lima, archaeologists said that they had unearthed a 3,000-year-old mummy, probably of the Manchay culture, whose presence was in some way connected to the construction of nearby temples. [Reuters]
The canny painter Calvin Marcus spoke about how music—and sound—shapes his life and art practice. Lately he’s been listening to Radiohead and Brian Wilson, he said, and the piece he has with Clearing at Art Basel was influenced by the “sound of soft wind going through branches of plants and trees and grass.” [Cultured]
After about 13 years at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California, Irene Georgia Tsatsos is stepping down as its chief curator and director of exhibition programs. [Pasadena Now]
Drawings that King Charles—then Prince Charles—made of his parents, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, in the 1950s, when he was around 5, are going up for auction at the U.K.’s Hansons Auctioneers. Their top estimate: £10,000 (about $12,600). [Robb Report]
At the higher end of the market: Later this month, Sotheby’s will offer a 1918 Gustav Klimt portrait with an estimate of £65 million (about $82.3 million), which could break the record for a painting at auction in Europe. That distinction currently belongs to a Claude Monet “Water Lilly” that made $80.4 million in 2008. A question for stats fans: What is most expensive artwork ever sold at auction in Europe? The answer is at the end of this newsletter. [The Associated Press]
The Kicker
BEHIND THE SCENES. In the Guardian, photog Christopher Makostalked about a shot he took of his old friend Andy Warhol in Aspen, Colorado, in 1977. It’s a winner, with the Pop king appearing to sit inside an experimental airplane owned by—wait for it!—singer-songwriter John Denver. (Spoiler: It was apparently difficult to hop into the pilot’s chair, so Makos just made it look like Warhol was inside.) While the artist was notorious for giving monosyllabic answers in public, things were different in private, Makos said. “He could talk about anything, all day long. He was a fantastic conversationalist, especially at a dinner party.” You can see Makos’s work—and get more of a sense of Warhol—in “Andy Warhol’s Insiders” at the London Gagosian Shop. [The Guardian]
The answer to the quiz question above: Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture Walking Man I (1961)has held the record for the priciest artwork ever sold at auction in Europe since 2010, when Sotheby’s moved it for a cool $104.3 million in London.
Source: artnews.com