Category: visual

“A dreamy canvas of three colors – Mark Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow, from 1961 – shattered all auction records for contemporary art at Christie’s on Tuesday evening, selling for nearly $87 million. It was a stunning moment in an auction that itself brought in the highest total ever in the postwar and contemporary category.”

Arii Matamoe (known in English as The Chief Is Asleep or The Royal End) is “the sort of painting Gauguin had in mind when he wrote to a painter friend … from Papeete, ‘My canvases terrify me – the public will never accept them. They’re ugly in every respect …” Phyllis Tuchman thinks the work is still pretty scary.

“Most unknown sitters are unknown because they were only painted once, and there is no other likeness with which to compare them. So the new programme will most likely only help with portraits of people for whom we already have other portraits.”

“Museum Victoria will cut its 550-strong workforce by 47, hold fewer touring exhibitions and run other shows for longer to reduce costs to meet a projected funding shortfall next financial year.”

“While some aren’t sure whether the clustering of these collections will add up to something greater than the sum of their parts, the consensus is that the Barnes’ relocation to the Parkway marks a tipping point in Philadelphia’s cultural and civic life.”

“For most modern architects, the idea of replicating any building, even one as fine as Paul Cret’s exquisitely proportioned 1920s gallery, is anathema. Some art-world figures were appalled to hear that Barnes’ antiquated, salon-style hanging scheme would also be replicated, although others saw it as crucial to understanding the collector’s intentions. Yet for the Barnes to succeed in its new location, the board understood that the building had to be a serious work of architecture, not a pastiche.”

“A grant of £5.9m from the Heritage Lottery Fund has brought the Ashmolean museum a step closer to owning a painting of a wistful young woman in a shimmering white dress by Édouard Manet.The Oxford museum now needs to raise a further £908,000 by the 7 August deadline.”

“Dating from the second century A.D., the original artifacts in the show were hidden – many of them in secret vaults outside the museum – and protected by museum staff through 30 years of conflict.”

In 1993, after Richard Diebenkorn died, his family went to Knoedler & Company to check out some drawings. “‘They didn’t look quite right, and we said, “The provenance is wacky and the story behind the provenance makes no sense,”‘ said Richard Grant, the artist’s son-in-law and the executive director of the Diebenkorn Foundation. “

“Walter Fredrick Morrison and his girlfriend, Lucile Nay, discovered that flying discs were marketable when a stranger asked to buy the metal cake pan they were flipping through the air on a Santa Monica beach. By 1938, the couple were selling the 5-cent pans for a quarter a piece. Morrison used the proceeds to buy Nay a $35 diamond engagement ring.”