| | The First Art Newspaper on the Net |   | Established in 1996 | Monday, May 17, 2021 |
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| | John Stephan, The Tiger's Eye | |
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The American painter John Stephan was brought up in Chicago where he attended the University of Illinois along with studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. These works mark the culmination of an unwavering, lifelong commitment to art and make an indisputably significant contribution to American painting of the twentieth century.
NEW YORK, NY.- The American painter John Stephan was brought up in Chicago where he attended the University of Illinois along with studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. During the Depression he worked for the Work Progress Administration or WPA, creating many mosaics and designs for numerous buildings in Chicago and the surrounding areas. After the war he married the poet Ruth Walgreen, the Walgreen drug store heiress and moved to New York City where he became an early member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Settling in New York during the 1940s enabled John and Ruth to become acquainted with the entire first-generation of Abstract Expressionists. He had close relationships with Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman from the 1940s onward developing a lifelong friendship with Still. Stephan was also represented by the Betty Parsons Gallery where he exhibited along with his contemporaries such as Still, Rothko, Newman, Kelly, Rauschenberg and Johns. ... More |
The Best Photos of the Day Installation view 'Tråd varsomt' by Ask Bjørlo, 2021.
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| Pace exhibits recent works and several major ongoing projects by Nina Katchadourian | | Artist Carlito Carvalhosa dies at age 59 | | A scratched hint of ancient ties stirs national furies in Europe | 
Nina Katchadourian, Window Seat Suprematism 3, 2013. Etching and aquatint, 19-1/2" à 15" (49.5 cm à 38.1 cm) Edition 4 of 10. Edition of 10 + 1 AP + 2 PP. © Nina Katchadourian, courtesy Pace Gallery.
NEW YORK, NY.- Pace Gallery is presenting Cumulus, a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Nina Katchadourian featuring recent works and several major ongoing projects that have not been shown in New York since their first iteration. Known for her widely varied practice, which includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, and photography, Katchadourian presents four of her landmark projects: Paranormal Postcards; The Genealogy of the Supermarket; Sorted Books, featuring new installments to the series; and Accent Elimination, which was exhibited in the 2015 Venice Biennial as part of the Armenian Pavilion, winner of the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. The exhibition also debuts a suite of printmaking projects, including Lucys Sampler, an homage to Katchadourians Armenian adoptive ... More | | 
Carlito Carvalhosa, Sum of Days, MoMA, 2011.
RIO DE JANEIRO.- Nara Roesler announced the passing of artist Carlito Carvalhosa (1961-2021), who leaves behind an immense and significant body of work. Carvalhosa was born in 1961, in São Paulo. In the early 1980s, he took on, with his colleagues from the Casa 7 Group, the great task of embracing another renewal of painting as a genre. It was up to this generation to reinvent the possibility of art after the sublime exhaustion undertaken by the previous generation. Carvalhosa attributed profound eloquence to the materiality of the support, while also transcending in addressing broader issues, such as the transformations of space and time. Carlito's work involved painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. In his practice, we encounter tensions between form and matter, made explicit in dialogues between the visible, the subtle, the tactile. In the 1990s, he dedicated himself to the production of sculptures with an organic and ... More | | 
Petr Dressler, a Czech scholar, in Brno, Czech Republic on April 24, 2021. Akos Stiller/The New York Times.
by Andrew Higgins
LANY (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- In a region long fought over by rival ethnic and linguistic groups, archaeologists in the Czech Republic have discovered something unusual in these turbulent parts: evidence that peoples locked in hostility for much of the modern era got along in centuries past. A few yards from a Czech army pillbox built as a defense against Nazi Germany, the archaeologists discovered a cattle bone that they say bears inscriptions dating from the sixth century that suggest that different peoples speaking different languages mingled and exchanged ideas at that time. Perhaps fitting for a such a fractious region, the find has set off a furious brawl among academics and archaeologists, and nationalists and Europhiles, about what it all means. The bone fragment, identified by DNA ... More |
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| MoMA PS 1 opens the first major exhibition of works by Gregg Bordowitz | | Exhibition of new large-scale works by Zipora Friedon view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. | | What you didn't know about Barkley L. Hendricks | 
Gregg Bordowitz, still from A Cloud in Trousers. 1995. 16mm transferred to video (color, sound). 31 min. Courtesy the artist and Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
LONG ISLAND CITY, NY.- MoMA PS1 presents Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well, the first comprehensive overview of the New York artists prodigious and influential career, on view from May 13 to October 11, 2021. Born in Brooklyn and raised primarily in Queens, Gregg Bordowitz (American, b. 1964) has been living with HIV for more than half of his adult life, and transformed his art practice in the mid-1980s in response to the AIDS public health crisis. Working with New Yorks ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and several video collectives that he co-founded, he organized and documented protests against government inaction, advocating for health education and harm reduction. During this time, Bordowitz created remarkable video portraits of himself and others living with the disease, often using his personal history as a way to tell a story shared by many. I Wanna Be Well surveys 30 years of Bordowitzs practice alongside the ... More | | 
Zipora Friedon, A Terrible and Beautiful Thing, 2021. Colored pencil on archival museum board, 65 x 54 inches, 165.1 x 137.2 cm.
NEW YORK, NY.- Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is presenting a suite of new large-scale works by Zipora Fried, on view May 8 through June 12, 2021. In these monumental compositions, Fried explores the physicality of the drawn gesture and the transformative qualities of color. As both a color and an emotive experience, gradients of blue have featured prominently across Frieds body of work. The dense richness of pigment, built up line by line, creates a luminous expanse both intimate and all-encompassing in its scale and depth. The spectrum of color offers both a visual and temporal experience gleaming sapphire slowly fades to meet a swath of twilight black, as if we are witnessing the skys transformation from day to night. Fields of lush shades of green take the form of landscapes, or light passing over land and sea. Rendered in colored pencil, each mark is distinct and singular, yet subsumed within the larger composition. The abil ... More | | 
Barkley Hendricks: Photography.
by Arthur Lubow
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Barkley L. Hendricks portrayed Black people who exude attitude. In the Black community, you stand out because you declare your own sense of identity beyond your environment, said his longtime friend Richard J. Watson, artist-in-residence at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. When you see yourself shown as a standout and not because you havent eaten in three days and youre a symbol of poverty that gives you respectability. In the style of Manet and Velázquez, Hendricks painted full-length portraits of men and women who, with swagger and brio, project forcefully at a viewer. He typically painted his figures with overlaid washes of thin oil paint and set them against a monochromatic background that he applied in fast-drying acrylics. But Hendricks, who died in 2017, was a photographer as well as a painter. This less celebrated side of his career is receiving deserved attention in a book, Barkley L. Hendricks: ... More |
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| Legendary motorbike ridden by Peter Fonda in Easy Rider comes to auction | | Exhibition presents new and recent works by artist Werner Büttner | | Bob Koester, revered figure in jazz and blues, dies at 88 | 
Along with Captain America, 23 other vehicles from the Gordon Granger Collection will be offered at auction on June 5th.
MIDLAND, TX.- The worlds most iconic motorcycle is going on the auction block in Midland, Texas on June 5th
Captain America from the counterculture classic film, Easy Rider, part of the Gordon Granger Collection, is being offered without reserve by Dan Kruse Classics. It is estimated by the auction house to sell for $300,000 to $500,000. The "Captain America" bike was named for its distinctive American flag colour scheme and known for its sharply-angled long front end. Easy Rider showcased the hippie movement and gave America an insight into the lives of those individuals who wander the highways on the back of a motorcycle and hence the motorcycles themselves became characters in the 1969 film. Designed and built by Cliff Vaughs and Ben Hardy, four former police Harley-Davidson motorcycles were purchased at auction for $500 and rebuilt into two Captain Americas and two Billy Bikes. Easy Rider is a 1969 American road drama film wr ... More | | 
Werner Büttner, Tender Light in a Bar, 2020. Oil on canvas. Framed: 156 x 126 cm (61 3/8 x 49 5/8 in.) Unframed: 150 x 120 cm (59 1/8 x 47 1/4 in.). Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery. © Werner Büttner.
LONDON.- Simon Lee Gallery is presenting No Scene from My Studio, an exhibition of new and recent works by artist Werner Büttner. This is the artists debut exhibition with the gallery, coming ahead of a major retrospective spanning his career since the early 80s at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany later this year. Büttner is renowned for drawing out deeper layers of meaning from day-to-day life which may, at first glance, seem banal. His canvases and collages depict a tragi-comic reality, confronting social norms with both irony and satire, while retaining a firm grip on the history of painting. Driven by this unapologetic philosophy, Büttner, alongside Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, became a reactive voice in Hamburg in the late 1970s. The trio felt that art needed to address the failures of human morality within society. The subversive visual language they shaped, dubbed Bad Painting ... More | | 
Bob Koester at his store Jazz Record Mart in Chicago, May 18, 2009. Sally Ryan/The New York Times.
by Neil Genzlinger
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Bob Koester, who founded the influential Chicago blues and jazz label Delmark Records and was also the proprietor of an equally influential record store where players and fans mingled as they sought out new and vintage sounds, died Wednesday at a care center in Evanston, Illinois, near his home in Chicago. He was 88. His wife, Sue Koester, said the cause was complications of a stroke. Koester was a pivotal figure in Chicago and beyond, releasing early efforts by Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Jimmy Dawkins, Magic Sam and numerous other jazz and blues musicians. He captured the sound of Chicagos vibrant blues scene of the 1960s on records like Hoodoo Man Blues, a much admired album by singer and harmonica player Junior Wells, featuring guitarist Buddy Guy, that was recorded in 1965. Bob told us, Play me a record just like you played last night in the club, Guy recalled in ... More |
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| Yitzhak Arad, who led Holocaust study center in Israel, dies at 94 | | Items signed or inscribed by Lincoln, Newton, Lenin, Einstein & others to be offered at auction | | Forum Gallery opens a group exhibition of American social realism | 
Yitzhak Arad. Yad Vashem via The New York Times.
by Joseph Berger
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Yitzhak Arad, who as an orphaned teenage partisan fought the Germans and their collaborators during World War II, then went on to become an esteemed scholar of the Holocaust and the longtime chairman of the Yad Vashem remembrance and research center in Israel, died May 6 in a hospital in Tel Aviv. He was 94. Yad Vashem announced the death but did not specify the cause. Arad was not even bar mitzvahed when the Germans invaded Poland and what is now part of Lithuania in 1939 and began rounding up and murdering Jews and forcing them into ghettos. His parents and 30 close family members would perish before the war ended in 1945. But he survived, at first as a forced laborer cleaning captured Soviet weapons in a munitions warehouse and then, sensing what fate awaited, by smuggling weapons ... More | | 
The auction features three items relating to Albert Einstein, including a three-page scientific manuscript pertaining to his Unified Field Theory from the 1940s (est. $60,000-$70,000).
WILTON, CONN.- An autograph album from 1862 containing the signature of Abraham Lincoln and 226 members of his administration and Congress, a manuscript penned by Sir Isaac Newton with mathematical notes and calculations relating to Book III of his iconic scientific work Principia, and a one-page typed letter from 1919 signed by Vladimir Lenin as Chairman of the Workers and Peasants Defense Council are a few expected star lots in University Archives online-only auction of rare autographs, manuscripts, artwork and comic art slated for May 26th. The auction, packed with a little more than 400 lots, has a start time of 10:30 am Eastern time. The catalog is up for viewing and bidding now, on the revamped University Archives website, as well as the platforms LiveAuctioneers.com, Invaluable.com and Auctionzip.com. Phone and ... More | | 
Linden Frederick, Traveling Salesmen, 2020 (detail). Oil on linen, 55 x 55 inches.
NEW YORK, NY.- Forum Gallery is presenting a group exhibition of American social realism featuring paintings, drawings, and sculpture dating from the first half of the Twentieth Century to today. Artists working in the years between the world wars and well known for their contributions are shown side by side with contemporary American Artists whose work continues the humanist legacy of social realism. American social realism took shape in the 1920s in the centers of commerce also home to artistic communities, like New York and Chicago. The cultural shift in the United States seen in the art of the social realists bridges the high modernist ideals of Europe and the struggle and very human drama evoked by the Great Depression and the political upheavals of the 1920s and 30s. Works in the current exhibition reflect and record the Nations fragile optimism of this time period. Highly emotional figuration, strong political content ... More |
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Mark Rothko's 'Untitled' - penultimate canvas before artist's untimely death | Christie's
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 Rivertown presents Asian art in auction featuring rarities from ancient dynasties through 20th centuryHOUSTON, TX.- Rivertown Antiques & Estate Services, one of the worlds most trusted sources of Asian fine and decorative art, will present a 230-lot auction on Saturday, May 29 featuring rarities that date from the Shang Dynasty (2nd millennium BC) through the 20th century. Absentee and Internet live bidding is available through LiveAuctioneers. The carefully curated connoisseurs selection includes long-held estate and family items from the United States, Great Britain and Continental Europe. Sources include the Marshall Coyne collection, the estate of Robert Edwards, the Robin George collection, property from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Johnson, and property from the Charles George collection. No reserve will apply to any of the lots. Rivertown spokesperson Rafael Leite explained: We are absolutely confident that the artworks and antiques chosen for this sale, ... More  Berry Campbell now representing Nanette CarterNEW YORK, NY.- An artist who has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions since the mid-1970s, Nanette Carter creates abstract collages expressive of her sensitivity to injustice and humanity in the context of contemporary life and her responses to the drama of nature. Her shaped works, produced in multimedia on Mylar since 1997, are evocative of concepts in the history of abstract art and reflect the African American abstract art tradition, exemplified in the works of Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliam, William T. Williams, Howardina Pindell, Romare Bearden, and Alvin Loving Jr. In fact, Loving (19352005) was Carters mentor. A close friend, he inspired her in his view of invention in art as the result of process, in a manner akin to how jazz musicians create something new by riffing off of a melody. In her art, Carter combines ... More  How microsbusinesses within the art & antiques dealing community are getting into the digital fastlaneLONDON.- Companies with extensive support structures in IT, human resources, administration, and other specialist departments face challenges like any other business, but at least they have the back-up to deal with them. The international art and antiques market is overwhelmingly made up of micro businesses comprising just one or two people or, at most, a small team of less than half a dozen. So what do they do when it comes to developing opportunities, promoting their brand and meeting an ever-increasing and more complex set of compliance requirements? Lets face it, in theory technology is there to serve us, but all too often it can become our master. This has been one of the most important considerations for Ronati in developing new eCommerce tools and programs for art and antiques dealers. Its not the technology itself that is important, it is the user. And if the user is short ... More  Ask Bjørlo's first solo with OSL contemporary on view in OsloOSLO.- We hang from a thin thread and that thread is spun by the shadow of chance, Lars Saabye Christensen writes in his novel The Half Brother. Our language is full of these and similar textile metaphors. Life can be both entwined and interwoven with that of others. We can weave a web of lies or follow a thread of communication, and we can tie up loose ends to make a whole. It is also telling that the word, text, is so closely related to textile. Both come from the Latin textere, which means to weave: the text with words, textiles with thread. The fact that we so often use textile metaphors to describe the outside world says something about the close relationship we have with textiles as humans. From time immemorial, people have produced cloth for use and ornament. They bear witness to changing standards of life and habits, but stitches can just as well hold anger and rebellion, dreams ... More  New Britain Museum of American Art opens 'NEW/NOW Jennifer Wen Ma: An Inward Sea'NEW BRITAIN, CONN.- The New Britain Museum of American Art is presenting the solo exhibition, Jennifer Wen Ma: An Inward Sea, from May 13 through October 24, 2021, as part of the Museums NEW/NOW series featuring contemporary artists. Ma has explored themes of utopia, dystopia, and the human condition in recent immersive and participatory exhibitions, and in an installation opera that traveled worldwide. An Inward Sea continues this exploration while reflecting deeply on the events of the last yearincluding the COVID-19 pandemic, extensive lockdowns, and subsequent racial justice uprising in the U.S.and how they have impacted the lives of residents of New Britain and beyond. An Inward Sea is also one of eight groundbreaking exhibitions selected for the 2020/20+ WOMEN @ NBMAA initiative celebrating the impact of female-identifying artists throughout ... More  Auction Life announces 2-day, 2-session auction, May 18-19 in FloridaWEST PALM BEACH, FLA.- Auction Life will follow up a successful Whimsical Worldly Wonders Winter Auction in February with a two-day, two session auction slated for Tuesday and Wednesday, May 18th and 19th. The May 18th session is titled Antiques, Oddities, Artifacts, Objects & Décor; the May 19th sale is titled Perfumemania, Miscentllaneous, Bottle & Factice. The auction is mostly online, but with limited live seating available in the West Palm Beach area gallery (RSVP required). An exhibition period will be announced, and gallery previews will be appointment only, with COVID protocols in place. Online bidding is via LiveAuctioneers.com, Invaluable.com and Auctionzip.com. Telephone and absentee (or left) bids will also be accepted. Were trying something new for this follow-up to the February auction, said Tarek Eljabaly, the owner of Auction Life. After successfully ... More  Abell Auction Co. hosts Important Fine Art, Antiques, 20th Century Design and Jewelry Sale LOS ANGELES, CA.- Abell Auction Co. will present an exquisite array of fine art, antiques, 20th Century design and fine jewelry from prominent Southern California estates at its online-only quarterly auction on Sunday, May 23 at 10 a.m. PST. The sale will be highlighted by a spectacular Greene and Greene mahogany couch from the living room of the Robert R. Blacker House. The piece was executed in the workshop of Peter Hall, circa 1914, and comes out of an Arcadia, Calif. estate after being purchased at a lawn sale at the Blacker House in the early 1950s. Other prominent items include a large collection of David Webb fine jewelry from a single owner estate in Bel Air, Calif. Antique and modern furniture includes Greene and Greene mahogany couch from the living room of the Robert R. Blacker House; a collection of 18th and 19th century Spanish, English, French and Italian furniture ... More  Toledo Urban Federal Credit Union partners with Toledo Museum of Art on reinvestment in the communityTOLEDO, OH.- The Toledo Urban Federal Credit Union announced a vibrant new partnership with the Toledo Museum of Art that will generate essential growth, development, and economic investment in the Toledo neighborhoods both institutions call home. The museum recently opened an account at TUFCU, with an initial deposit of $125,000, and seeks to work with the credit union on future strategic lending and borrowing opportunities. In addition, the two organizations will collaborate with neighborhood partners to offer concurrent art education experiences for children and financial literacy opportunities for parents. We look forward to building this dynamic relationship with the Toledo Museum of Art, an anchor institution in this community, which will benefit current and future credit union members while enhancing the vitality of our Junction neighborhood, said Suzette Cowell, CEO, Toledo Urban ... More  The conductor who whipped American orchestras into shapeNEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- For those who grew to musical maturity with the concert life of the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, his name may still have an aura, Halina Rodzinski wrote in her memoirs, almost two decades after the death of her spouse, Polish conductor Artur Rodzinski. For those who are younger, she went on to lament, my husband is a dry reference in a musical encyclopedia or a name on a record cover in the cut-rate rack of a discount store. That was in 1976. And the decades since have not been kind to Rodzinski, leaving him remembered, if at all, for embodying all that a real maestro was supposed to be, a critic once wrote: preening, arbitrary, dictatorial, unpredictable, driven by ambition. Possessing an enormous vocabulary of Polish profanity that he unloaded on musicians, as Time magazine reported, Rodzinski was also rumored to conduct with ... More  Martin Bookspan, cultured voice of Lincoln Center telecasts, dies at 94NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Martin Bookspan, who parlayed a childhood grounding in classical music into a career as the announcer for the Live From Lincoln Center telecasts and the radio broadcasts of the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, died April 29 at his home in Aventura, Florida. He was 94. The cause was congestive heart failure, his daughter Rachel Sobel said. Bookspan started violin lessons when he was 6, but he realized by the time he entered college that he would never be the next Fritz Kreisler or Jascha Heifetz. After an early career behind the scenes at radio stations in Boston and New York, he established himself as a stalwart of Live From Lincoln Center, the PBS program that became Americas premier source of classical music on broadcast television. He joined the program when it went on the air in 1976. Live From Lincoln Center ... More  "Pablo Schlumberger: Nope, my girl is the sea" on view at Drawing Room in HamburgHAMBURG.- The story opens as a maritime experience with a figure made of nine Euro coins, shortly before they fell prey to a theft: In 2017 Pablo Schlumberger went on the Grand Tour, taking along the prototype Euro Manikin he had created, allowing him to take dives in the Fontana dell Nettuno in Naples, and a few more in the Mediterranean. After almost ten years of the Euro Crisis, the artist had made himself a cold little friend built of Euros. A series of photographs in Drawing Rooms current exhibition bear witness to this: the little sculpture was fully in its element in the water, for ultimately money and water are spiritual siblings. If you find a wellspring of money, the money literally flows until you are swimming in it. If someone turns the tap off, however, you are high and dry again. Back from his voyage, the Euro Manikin transformed into a more finely crafted version of himself and sank ... More |
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PhotoGalleries 
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp & Hans Arp: Cooperations â Collaborations 
Future Retrieval 
Clarice Beckett
Flashback On a day like today, Italian painter Sandro Botticelli died May 17, 1510. Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (c. 1445 - May 17, 1510), known as Sandro Botticelli, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later in his Vita of Botticelli as a "golden age". In this image: Alessandro Filipepi, called Sandro Botticelli, The Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist. Tempera, oil and gold on panel / 46.3 x 36.8 cm. Estimate: $5,000,000-7,000,000. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd 2012.
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