The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Friday, April 5, 2024



 
Marlborough Gallery to wind down operations beginning June 2024

Marlborough was founded in London in 1946 by Frank Lloyd, a Jewish immigrant who had fled his native Austria in 1938 and served in the British Army during the war, in partnership with Harry Fischer, an expatriate Austrian rare books dealer whom Lloyd had met in the military. Image courtesy: Marlborough Gallery.

NEW YORK, NY..- The Board of Trustees of Marlborough Gallery, the enterprise that helped define the international landscape of post-war art by establishing itself on two continents and showcasing dozens of the contemporary era’s most influential artists, today announced that it is bringing the institution’s 78-year history to its culmination, winding down operations at the galleries in New York City, London, Madrid, and Barcelona. As of early June 2024, Marlborough will no longer present exhibitions or represent artists and estates in the primary art market. The Marlborough inventory, assembled over decades by the gallery’s leaders through personal relationships nurtured with dozens of major artists, will be dispersed over the coming months and years. A portion of the proceeds from these sales will be donated to not-for-profit cultural institutions that support contemporary artists. Franz Plutschow, a member of the Board ... More


The Best Photos of the Day
Best Photos of the Day
Chiho Aoshima, Emptinesses, March 16- April 6, 2024 at Perrotin Paris.






A rising star of Italian violin making is a 32-year-old from South Korea   Eli Noyes, animator who turned clay and sand into art, dies at 81   Big diamonds and bigger names make a splash in Heritage's Spring Fine Jewelry Auction


South Korean luthier Ayoung An, a rising star in the violin-making world, at her studio in Cremona, Italy, on Feb. 26, 2024. (Sasha Arutyunova/The New York Times)

NEW YORK, NY.- When Ayoung An was 8, her parents bought her a violin. She slept with the instrument on the pillow next to her every night. Two years later, a shop selling musical instruments opened in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, her hometown, and An became a fixture there, pelting the owner with questions. “I think I bothered him a lot,” An, now 32, said. As a teenager, she decided she would become a violin maker. Eventually, a journey with twists and turns took her to Cremona in northern Italy — a famed hub for violin makers, including masters like Antonio Stradivari, since the 16th century. There, An, a rising star in the violin-making world with international awards under her belt, runs her own workshop. Set on a quiet cobblestone street, An’s studio is bathed in natural light and filled with books and piles of wood chunks that must air dry for five to 10 years before becoming instruments or risk warping. She shares the two-room studio with her husband, Wangsoo Han, who’s als ... More
 


The filmmaker Eli Noyes in 2018 in a photo provided by his wife, the artist Augusta Talbot. (Augusta Talbot via The New York Times)

NEW YORK, NY.- Eli Noyes, a filmmaker whose use of clay and sand in stop-motion animation garnered an Oscar nomination and shaped the aesthetic of Nickelodeon and MTV during the early days of cable television, died March 23 at his home in San Francisco. He was 81. His wife, artist Augusta Talbot, said the cause was prostate cancer. Noyes made his first film, “Clay or the Origin of Species,” in 1965 as an undergraduate student at Harvard University. To the accompaniment of a jazz quartet, clay model animals whimsically portray evolution in the movie, which lasts just under nine minutes. Although stop-motion filmmaking had existed for decades and clay was used in the 1950s to create animated characters like Gumby, directors and cinephiles credited Noyes’ rookie effort with reviving interest in the technique at a time when hand-drawn characters were more popular. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated short subject. “This recognition served as a tremendous boos ... More
 


Diamond, Gold Ring, GIA Type IIa.

DALLAS, TX.- Diamonds have long been revered for their strength and beauty. Fittingly, the same could be said for Heritage’s Fine Jewelry auctions. The company’s May 6 Spring Fine Jewelry Signature® Auction is especially strong, featuring a bounty of big, beautiful diamonds. “We have the greatest number of 5.00-carat — and larger — diamonds that we’ve ever brought to auction in a single sale,” says Jill Burgum, Heritage’s Executive Director of Fine Jewelry. “There is a shape for every taste and enough sparkle to light up a room.” Among the standouts is a 5.01-carat flawless, colorless Type IIa oval-shaped diamond set atop an 18k gold ring. Less than 2 percent of diamonds are classified as Type IIa, making this gem among the rarest diamonds on the planet. Type IIa diamonds are also the most chemically pure diamonds known to exist. “It doesn’t get much better than this,” Burgum says. “ ... More


Patrick Nagel's 1981 portrait of Playboy playmate Terri Welles hits the block for the first time at Heritage on April 23   Massive lunar meteorite will touch down in Heritage's Nature & Science Auction days after total eclipse   She's shaking up classical music while confronting illness


Patrick Nagel (American, 1945-1984), Terri Welles, Playmate of the Year, Playboy, 1981 Acrylic on board, 34 x 24 in.

DALLAS, TX.- It’s a time-honored tradition: When a famous artist captures the likeness of a celebrity, the art world celebrates. Recent history was made when Andy Warhol screenprinted Jackie O., when Kehinde Wiley painted Barack Obama, when Annie Leibovitz photographed John & Yoko. And in 1981, the artist and illustrator Patrick Nagel, whose name and images are synonymous with the 1980s, teamed up with Terri Welles to create an indelible portrait: The 1981 Playmate of the Year is a drop-dead gorgeous woman with gaze that slayed millions, and Nagel’s painting of her captures an entire era that generations of collectors understand and appreciate. That Nagel’s original portrait of Welles has never been editioned, reproduced or offered to the public only adds to its power and rarity. Nagel’s work was ubiquitous at the time — in magazines and ad campaigns, on album covers — but this particular painting has remained in the private possession of Welles until now. On April 23, ... More
 


NWA 13119 Lunar Meteorite End Cut Lunar (feldspathic breccia) Mauritania. Found: 2019.

DALLAS, TX.- People across several states are gearing up for a solar eclipse in early April, an event in which the moon passes directly between the sun and Earth, creating a shadow over the fiery orb and darkening the sky, as if it is dawn or dusk. Barring cloud cover, it should be viewable April 8 from anywhere in North America, but most places will experience only a partial blackout of the sun. The “path of totality,” in which the moon is positioned so perfectly that it blocks out the entire sun, will cut a swath from Mexico into Texas, throughout parts of the Midwest and into New England and parts of eastern Canada. A handful of solar eclipses actually occur each year ... but the majority take place over water. So while the actual circumstance is not exactly rare, opportunities for people to view them are. They repeat in the same location once every 366 years; the next opportunity to see one from anywhere in contiguous United States will be in 2044. While people across the continent wi ... More
 


The pianist Alice Sara Ott at Steinway Hall in New York, April 1, 2024.

NEW YORK, NY.- The pianist Alice Sara Ott, barefoot and wearing a silver bracelet, was smiling and singing to herself the other day as she practiced a jazzy passage of Ravel at Steinway Hall in Midtown Manhattan. A Nintendo Switch, which she uses to warm up her hands, was by her side (another favored tool is a Rubik’s Cube). A shot of espresso sat untouched on the floor. “I feel I have finally found my voice,” Ott said during a break. “I feel I can finally be myself.” Ott, 35, who makes her New York Philharmonic debut this week, has built a global career, recording more than a dozen albums and appearing with top ensembles. She has become a force for change in classical music, embracing new approaches (playing Chopin on beat-up pianos in Iceland) and railing against stuffy concert culture (she performs without shoes, finding it more comfortable). And Ott, who lives in Munich and has roots in Germany and Japan, has done so while grappling with illness. In 2019, when she wa ... More



Dallas Art Fair and Dallas Museum of Art announce eighth annual acquisition program selections   Orlando Museum of Art receives transformational gift   Caryatids: Multimedia exhibition of Nataša Prosenc Stearns opens March 21 at Mauro Café on Melrose


Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Interval I, 2023. Jacquard tapestry, cotton, wool, silk, Lurex. 116.1 x 155.9 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

DALLAS, TX.- The Dallas Art Fair and the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) today announced that three artworks from this year’s fair will join the museum’s permanent collection. The acquisitions were funded by the Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program, an annual gift from the Dallas Art Fair Foundation that places works from the fair into the DMA’s collection. Yesterday, the DMA’s Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, the Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art Dr. Vivian Li, the Nancy and Tim and Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art Ade Omotosho, and Eugene McDermott Director Agustín Arteaga, and a group of fund donors previewed the fair, selecting artworks by Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, JooYoung Choi, and Thania Petersen for the museum’s permanent collection. “This year’s acquisitions are some of the most ambitious acquired through the fund to date,” sa ... More
 


Robert Mapplethorpe, Untitled #, 19. Silkscreen on canvas, 40 x 55 in. Gift of Dr. James Cottrell and Mr. Joseph Lovett, Orlando Museum of Art Collection.

ORLANDO, FL.- The Orlando Museum of Art (OMA) is pleased to announce a major gift from Dr. James Cottrell and Mr. Joseph Lovett, longtime art patrons, social activists, and Manhattan residents. The gift includes over 300 artworks from their extensive collection of downtown New York City and international artists from the past 50 years. This collection will enable the museum to share a diverse range of artistic perspectives with the community, researchers, educators, and students. “We are elated to have received this truly wonderful gift from longtime advocates and dedicated supporters,” notes Cathryn Mattson, Executive Director and CEO of the Orlando Museum of Art. “The collection will allow our curatorial and education teams to showcase underrepresented voices and foster connections with diverse communities, as well as global artists.” The Orlando Museum of Art has been a long-term steward of the Cottrell-Lovett Collection, having ... More
 


Nataša Prosenc Stearns, Caryatids - Grateful for Whoever Comes, 2023, Gislée print on pearl paper, 19” X 32” (framed 27" X 40"). Image courtesy: SEEfest, Nataša Prosenc Stearns.

LOS ANGELES, CA.- Slovenian-born visual artist and filmmaker, Nataša Prosenc Stearns, will present her latest works, Caryatids, a collection of large prints featuring architectural columns which take the form of the standing female figures. The exhibition, now running through June 16, at Mauro Café, 8112 Melrose Avenue, is organized in collaboration with SEEfest, the South East European Film and Cultural Festival. Taking the motifs from ancient Greece, and Acropolis of Athens, Caryatids represent the power and endurance of women. This project brings the idea of caryatids into our time with silhouettes of women layered with elements of contemporary Los Angeles architecture. "I am excited to share these images with L.A. audiences," says Nataša Prosenc Stearns. "Once immobile female pillars now beam with turbulence, wind in their hair and clothes. Confirming their significance in today’s changing gender landscape, they resist the confineme ... More


National Gallery of Art appoints Lena Stringari as chief of conservation   For Len Cariou, dying onstage each night has been 'Invigorating'   When Latin America became the seat of modernity


Lena Stringari. Image courtesy: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

WASHINGTON, DC.- The National Gallery of Art announced that Lena Stringari will join the museum as chief of conservation. Stringari comes to the National Gallery following a long career at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where she has served most recently as deputy director and Andrew W. Mellon Chief Conservator. When she begins her tenure on July 14, Stringari will lead one of the largest and most comprehensive conservation divisions among the world’s art museums. Heading six conservation departments, a scientific research department, and an administrative office, she will work to preserve the National Gallery’s growing collection, currently comprising some 160,000 objects, sustainably and in service of the nation. In addition to preserving the nation’s art collection, the conservation division conducts innovative scientific research in collaboration with colleagues worldwide. It also works closely with museum curators, of ... More
 


The veteran Broadway actor Len Cariou, at St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan, where he is starring in a production of “Tuesdays With Morrie,” on March 25, 2024. Cariou, 84, says he was eager to tackle “a rich role in a show that asks, ‘What if despair and death are not the end?’” (Lila Barth/The New York Times)

NEW YORK, NY.- Chris Domig was ready to throw in the towel. After a year-and-a-half-long search, a church chapel in Gramercy Park was the only affordable space Domig, the artistic director of the off-off-Broadway company Sea Dog Theater, had been able to find to mount a production of “Tuesdays With Morrie.” Chairs would have to be arranged on a set of risers on the altar. The props would be a piano, a couple of chairs, a walker and a wheelchair. The company also had almost no advertising budget. But it did have Len Cariou, an elder statesman of the theater who in 1979 won a Tony Award for originating the role of Sweeney Todd on Broadway. He would play Morrie, a former sociology professor who, after receiving a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, re-connects with one of his students in what becomes a series of weekly meetings. ... More
 


A chair by Martin Eisler on display in “Crafting Modernity,” a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, March 28, 2024.

NEW YORK, NY.- Lina Bo Bardi, the great Italian Brazilian architect, liked to say we all invent architecture just by climbing a stair, crossing a room, opening a door or sitting down in a chair. All of “these little gestures,” she said, along with the objects they involve, are richly endowed with meaning and memory. Design is life. Life is design. We are its designers. Bo Bardi, of course, was hardly alone in thinking this way, as “Crafting Modernity,” a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, makes plain. The show is a gem. It focuses on domestic design from six countries (Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Venezuela), produced between 1940 and 1980. Latin America had entered a period of transformation, industrial expansion and creativity. Across the region, design was becoming institutionalized as a profession, opening up new avenues, especially for women. Modernism was the aesthetic throughline. ... More




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Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph just want you to like them
NEW YORK, NY.- Sometimes Maya Rudolph will watch a movie and marvel at how miserable an actor looks. “They’re covered in fake blood and broken glass, and they’re crying the whole time,” she said. “I don’t know how people do that for work! That looks so hard and stressful.” “And how do you get all of that glass off your skin?” her friend and former colleague Kristen Wiig said. “Listen,” Rudolph said, “glass seems tough.” This was on an afternoon in late March, and Wiig and Rudolph, who specialize in lighter, glass-free fare, were perched high over New York in the penthouse suite of a luxury hotel with a zillion-dollar view — rooftops, rivers, the Statue of Liberty in the distance. They were dressed in natural fabrics and neutrals, a far and elegant cry from the demented spandex and polyester they so often wore during their years on “Saturday Night Live.” Acquaintances since their early days in the comedy scene (they met at ... More


How beagles and a fever dream made Rebel Wilson a star
NEW YORK, NY.- About five years ago, when she was 39, the actress Rebel Wilson faced a dilemma. She had just had a string of successes, having made $20 million for her comic roles in “Pitch Perfect 3,” “Isn’t It Romantic” and “The Hustle.” But a visit to a fertility doctor had filled her with self-doubt. Her weight — then 225 pounds — could make it harder to retrieve viable eggs, the doctor suggested. After the appointment, she was devastated and called her talent agent and said she planned to get healthier. Her agent was not thrilled. “The agency liked me fat because they got hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission for each film where I played the fat funny girl,” she writes in her new memoir, “Rebel Rising.” Losing weight, she worried, could jeopardize her “multimillion-dollar pigeonhole.” In “Rebel Rising,” which Simon & Schuster released Tuesday, Wilson details her struggles with food addictio ... More


Alice Randall made country history. Black women are helping tell hers.
NASHVILLE, TENN.- Country singer Rissi Palmer could not understand why Alice Randall was emailing her. By fall 2020, when Palmer received the message, Randall was a Nashville institution, not only the first Black woman to write a chart-topping country hit but also a novelist whose books undermined entrenched racial hierarchies. Palmer herself was no slouch: “Country Girl,” her 2007 anthem of rural camaraderie, had been the first song by a Black woman to infiltrate country’s charts in two decades. She had just started “Color Me Country,” a podcast exploring the genre’s nonwhite roots and branches. But 11 years earlier, Palmer had fled Nashville, hamstrung by contract disputes, with “my tail between my legs,” she recalled recently in a video interview from her North Carolina kitchen. Randall, however, was very interested in Palmer — and her history. Working as a writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University, she had urged the school’s Heard Libraries to acq ... More


#MeToo stalled in France. This actress might be changing things.
PARIS.- Judith Godrèche did not set out to relaunch the #MeToo movement in France’s movie industry. She came back to Paris from Los Angeles in 2022 to work on “Icon of French Cinema,” a TV series she wrote, directed and starred in — a satirical poke at her acting career that also recounts how, at the age of 14, she entered into an abusive relationship with a film director 25 years older. Then, a week after the show aired, in late December, a viewer’s message alerted her to a 2011 documentary that she says made her throw up and start shaking as if she were “naked in the snow.” There was the same film director, admitting that their relationship had been a “transgression” but arguing that “making films is a kind of cover” for forms of “illicit traffic.” She went to the police unit specialized in crimes against children — its waiting room was filled with toys and a gia ... More


Julia Stiles wanted to be just like Kat Stratford, too
NEW YORK, NY.- Julia Stiles starts lunch with a disclaimer: “I’m kind of like a bundle of emotions, because I have a 5-month-old baby and I went into directing my first movie.” Maybe you didn’t know Stiles had gotten into directing. Her feature, “Wish You Were Here,” doesn’t yet have a release date and has only been lightly covered. You definitely didn’t know about the baby, because Stiles declined to do the standard-issue celebrity-birth promotion (post an announcement on Instagram to get aggregated by People magazine). She’s been in the business for nearly three decades. It’s not that she doesn’t know the norms. But participating in the norms just because they’re the norms has never been her thing. “I didn’t really talk about it,” she said of her latest pregnancy, though she was excited to talk about it now, about how being a parent (her older sons are 6 and 2) nourishes her work. “I think that actually being a mom is r ... More


Christopher Durang, playwright who mixed high art and low humor, dies at 75
NEW YORK, NY.- Christopher Durang, a Tony Award-winning playwright and a master satirist, died Tuesday night at his home in Pipersville, Pennsylvania, in Bucks County. He was 75. His agent, Patrick Herold, said the cause was complications of aphasia. In 2016, Durang was found to have a rare form of dementia, logopenic primary progressive aphasia. The diagnosis was made public in 2022. An acid, impish writer, Durang never met a classic (“The Brothers Karamazov,” “The Glass Menagerie,” “Snow White”) that he couldn’t skewer. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he established himself as a hyperliterate jester and an anarchic clown. Regarding subject and theme, he pogoed from sex to metaphysics to serial killers to psychology, and he had a way of collapsing high art and jokes that aimed much lower. “He’s so scaldingly funny,” actress Sigourney Weaver, a friend and collaborator since she met Durang at the Yale School of Drama, said in an interview. ... More


From one leaning tower to another, tips to stop the tilt
BOLOGNA.- Leaning for centuries at a worrisome tilt, the Garisenda Tower in Bologna has endured insults and trauma. Dickens called it “sufficiently unsightly,” if extraordinary, while Goethe said it was “a spectacle that disgusts.” And then there were the earthquakes, the Allied bombing raids of the city during World War II and urbanization that doomed other towers. The Garisenda has stood through it all, a beloved symbol of this medieval city, a reminder of a past when important families or communities would erect towers to remind others of their status, and for defense. But now, the Garisenda is in trouble. After sensors attached to the monument, which leans at a 3.6-degree angle, picked up “anomalous movements” last year, alarmed experts issued what one called an “engineering code red.” ... More


Christopher Durang, the surrealist of snark
NEW YORK, NY.- Pickpocketing Anton Chekhov for dramatic capital is almost a rite of passage among playwrights, but only Christopher Durang invested the loot in beefcake. In his play “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” Vanya and Sonia are more-or-less familiar transplants from the Russian hinterlands to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, dithering so much about the purpose of life that they neglect to have one. Masha, though a movie star, is a Chekhov type, too: endlessly fascinating, especially to herself. But you will not find Spike anywhere in the canon; a jovial, amoral, ab-tastic himbo, he is apparently unfamiliar with the function of clothes. They keep coming off. Durang, who died Tuesday night at 75, was likewise a stripper, peeling the pants off serious theater, both to admire and ridicule what it was packing beneath. When “Vanya” won the Tony Award for best play in 2013, it was the culmination of a writing life spent remaking the respectable prece ... More



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Flashback
On a day like today, German painter Franz Pforr was born
April 05, 1788. Franz Pforr (5 April 1788 - 16 June 1812) was a painter of the German Nazarene movement. Pforr did not live long enough to see his art acknowledged. He died of tuberculosis in Albano Laziale, Rome at age 24. In this image: Portrait by Johann Friedrich Overbeck, 1810.

  
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