Art Photos mixed

Nitsch ‘deeply hurt’ over cancelled show in Mexico City

Museo Jumex gives no explanation but use of animal carcasses could be a reason

By Laurie Rojas and Julia Michalska. Web only
Published online: 03 February 2015



Hermann Nitsch in a 2009 performance. Photo by Daniel Feyerl © Atelier Hermann Nitsch

Hermann Nitsch, a founding member of the Vienna Actionists, is “deeply hurt” that his exhibition at Museo Jumex in Mexico City has been cancelled. The artist, who is best known for his violent performances involving animal cadavers, is no stranger to controversy, but this is the first time that one of his shows has been called off, he said in a statement.

On 30 January, a few weeks before the exhibition was scheduled to open, the Jumex Foundation announced the cancellation in a statement giving no explanation. In the Mexican press the move was linked to a petition posted on change.org, which urged the museum to cancel the show because Nitsch’s works feature “the mutilation, beheading, murder and display of the bodies of sentient animals”. The petition attracted around 5,000 signatures, but, according to the news site Animal Politico, staff from the Mexican museum denied the petition was behind the cancellation.The museum was not immediately available to answer our requests for comment.

The Hermann Nitsch Foundation told The Art Newspaper that the “unpleasant reactions” to the show were due to “the current social and political situation in Mexico.”

Cuauhtémoc Medina, a leading Mexican curator, condemned the museum’s decision, posting on Twitter that the museum “should have shown Hermann Nitsch, and allowed the debates to take place”.

Nitsch defended his use of animal parts and gallons of blood in his works, saying that that he generally uses carcasses from butchers for his performances. “Everybody who knows me,” he said in a statement, “knows that I am an animal protector. From my point of view, factory farming is the biggest crime in our society.” Since 1998 no animal has been slaughtered in any of his pieces, Nitsch said, and even then, “this was performed by a professional butcher under surveillance of a veterinarian with the authorisation of the government.”

At least 40 of the artist’s black paintings are in Mexico City “waiting to be installed,” Nitsch said.



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Louisa Buck: The Buck stopped here—this week’s must see shows

Christian Marclay, White Cube, until 12 April

Christian Marclay’s compelling and globally-acclaimed 24-hour film The Clock—featuring film clips of clocks and people telling the time, all synchronised to the real time in the real world—was always going to be a near impossible act to follow. But his latest show at White Cube is a worthy successor.

The expansive gallery spaces clink and chink to the sound of Pub Crawl, 11 projections ranged down the central thoroughfare which feature the artist using the discarded cans, bottles and glasses that litter the streets around his East London home as impromptu percussion instruments; while the relationship between sound and vision is given further exploration in multifarious media, including paintings, a live performance programme and even an entire vinyl pressing plant.

But the standout work is Surround Sounds, an immersive video installation that presents an all-encompassing, orchestrated assault by animated, onomatopoeic cartoon words: POPs explode like bubbles, SWOOSHs undulate in nausea-inducing waves, there are shuddering RUMBLEs, THUD repeatedly drops from floor to ceiling and at intervals the walls are completely covered in SSSSSHHHs. There may be no actual sound but it’s the noisiest room in the show.



Christian Marclay, Actions: Froosh Sploosh Wooosh Sskuusshh Splat Blortch (No.2), 2014. Photo: George Darrell



Dahn Vo, Untitled, 2015

“Dahn Vo: Homo Sapiens”, Marian Goodman Gallery, until 21 February

The man who has scattered facsimile fragments of the Statue of Liberty in galleries throughout the world—and who himself escaped from Vietnam as a small child in a boat built by his father, was rescued by a tanker and grew up in Denmark—here continues to mediate on the shifting nature of empires, civilisations and belief systems. Sliced fragments of ancient Roman and Medieval sculpture are fused with a tender brutality into unholy but also disquietingly poetic alliances with each other or cut with forensic precision to fit into battered old wooden crates. In the upper galleries, the cardboard boxes that contained the manufactured staples of contemporary American life—from Kleenex to Colgate, Budwieser to Tidy Cat litter—have been flattened and hang like heraldic banners from the ceiling, the logos and brands of their former contents meticulously picked out in gold leaf. Dangling amidst this gilded consumer glut are a multitude of rusty agricultural implements—spades, hoes, saws, hinges, pulleys—sculptural forms that in turn shaped an earlier America.



Luc Tuymans, The Shore, 2014

“Luc Tuymans: the Shore”, David Zwirner, until 2 April

There was a time—not so long ago—when every degree show was full of Luc Tuymans wannabes, and he is still one of the most influential painters working today. His show of new paintings at David Zwirner confirm that the Antwerp-based artist has lost none of his ability to conjure up a sense of foreboding and dread with the utmost restraint and lightness of touch, bleaching out his palette and blurring his images almost to the point of oblivion. Tuymans has always worked from pre-existing images and here they are largely sourced from the internet and the artist’s own iPhone, but whether he is depicting cropped portraits of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, the cannibal student Issei Sagawa, a detail of hotel wallpaper or the light fitting in his bedroom, these enigmatic paintings are infused with a stifling sense of foreboding and dread. Nowhere is this more evident than in The Shore, the massive painting that gives the show its title, and which marks a new departure into almost monochrome blackness. Here a small strip of tiny figures emerges from the dark murk and it doesn’t matter whether or not you know the direct source (“A Twist of Sand”, a Colonially inspired adventure film from the 1960s) the feeling that an atrocity is about to take place is almost unbearable.


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Long-lost sculpture resurfaces in Gauguin show

Work reportedly sold for $300m is also included

Paul Gauguin's resurfaced Therese, 1902. Image courtesy of Lefevre

The ambitious Paul Gauguin retrospective, which opens at the Fondation Beyeler on Sunday (until 28 June), will include an exciting rediscovery. Thérèse, 1902, a carved figure of a stylised Polynesian woman, disappeared around 1980, and has since been hidden away in a private London collection.

Sam Keller, the Beyeler’s director, spotted the work at Frieze Masters last October, on the stand of the London gallery Lefevre Fine Art, which is lending the sculpture for the show. The haunting figure of the woman is said to depict a servant of the Marquesan Catholic bishop, Joseph Martin, who Gauguin believed had sexual relations with his employees. Sadly, the pendant sculpture of the bishop, Père Paillard (Father Lechery), 1902, now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, is not being borrowed, so the bishop and the servant will not be reunited.

Gauguin’s sculptures are often overlooked. But his ceramics and carved wood sculptures are highly inventive, revealing a different side to his work. They had a powerful influence on such 20th-century artists as Pablo Picasso. Raphaël Bouvier, the Beyeler show’s co-curator, says: “It was Gauguin’s sculptures, their expressive power and their archaic air, that left their mark on Picasso’s first essays in the medium.”

The Beyeler exhibition is being billed as the greatest show of Gauguin’s work since “Gauguin: Tahiti” was held at the Grand Palais in Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (MFA) in 2003-04. After six years of work, the Basel museum has secured the loan of 50 paintings and sculptures from 13 countries. Although the show is covering the artist’s full career, it will concentrate on his period in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, from 1891 until his death in 1903. It was there that he did his greatest work.

The most important loan will be the monumental (nearly four metres wide) Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897-98, which is being lent by the MFA and which very rarely travels. In return, the Beyeler is offering a group of important Picasso loans to the MFA.

Another highlight will be Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?), which according to The New York Times and the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, was recently acquired by a Qatari buyer for $300m, one of the highest prices ever paid for a work of art.
The Fondation Beyeler is the only venue for the show, since securing the major loans for a second institution would have proved too difficult. The museum is expecting around 300.000 visitors, which is likely to make it Switzerland’s most popular exhibition of the year. “Paul Gauguin” is supported by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis.

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The Other Art Fair turns to Turk



Gavin Turk

A new art fair on the horizon will no doubt prompt groans and grumbles from aficionados suffering from "fairtigue". But the Other Art fair is rather different, giving artists the opportunity to sell directly to the public (dealers are a no show). This summer, an offshoot of the artist-led fair will launch in Bristol at the Arnolfini (5-7 June). Two London-based editions, meanwhile, complement the West of England addition; this spring, the Other Art Fair opens in a swanky new Bloomsbury venue, Victoria House (23-26 April), while the October edition continues at the Old Truman Brewery in the East of the capital. The UK artist Gavin Turk, the man behind the child-friendly House of Fairy Tales project (HOFT), will make his presence felt at the fair in London this April. Gavin (and HOFT) will produce two specially commissioned editions for the event, sales of which will support educational work. The hirsute artist is also on the fair's selection committee along with Stephanie Buck, curator of drawings at the Courtauld Gallery.

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Lost painting attributed to Leonardo seized from Swiss bank vault

The portrait of Isabella d’Este, which Italian police have been trying to track down for over a year, was about to be sold for €120m

By Ermanno Rivetti. Web only
Published online: 10 February 2015



A portrait sketch of Isabella d’Este by Leonardo now in the Louvre, left, and the painting recovered from a Lugano bank vault

Swiss federal police, working with the Italian Carabinieri and financial police, have seized a long-lost painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci from the bank vault of a Lugano-based trust. The portrait of Isabella d’Este, the marchesa of Mantua and a leading patron of the Italian Renaissance, was due to be sold privately for €120m.

“We cannot release the names of any of those involved, nor that of the trust, because investigations are still ongoing,” says Antonino Raimondo, a colonel from the Pesaro financial police unit in the Marche region, where the investigation began, “but it has been a very timely operation thanks to the speed of response from the Swiss authorities. We recovered the work just in time: the transaction was in its final stages.”

The Italian authorities believe the work was illegally exported from Italy, although it is unclear when exactly. Italy has strict laws preventing the export of works of art more than 50 years old. It is being held by Swiss authorities and is due to be returned to Italy once its ownership is established.

The painting, missing for almost a year, was rediscovered by a stroke of luck. It was first discovered in August 2013, when Italy’s financial police received a tip-off that an unnamed lawyer in Pesaro was asked to sell the work for €95m. But when the police tried to recover it from the Swiss bank where it was being held, it had been moved and could not be traced. By coincidence, last summer, an insurance fraud investigation lead the authorities to learn further details about the painting, and it was tracked down to another bank vault in Lugano.

The work’s recovery will likely reignite the debate over its authenticity. The only other known portrait of Isabella d’Este is an almost identical sketch by Leonardo that now hangs in the Louvre, but scholars were never sure if a painted version existed. Isabella, the wife of Francesco Gonzaga II of Mantua, commissioned works by some of Italy’s greatest artists, including Titian, Raphael, Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo Da Vinci.

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More post-war than contemporary, but London has a second week of strong auctions

International participation grows as African bidders now add to the mix



Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild, 1986, sold for a record £30.4m at Sotheby's on Tuesday

Post-war European painters dominated the salerooms at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London this week, feeding a contemporary market that is showing no signs of slowing despite a dismal global economic forecast. Sotheby’s reported bidding from 42 countries and double the participation from Latin America; while Christie’s says it had registered bidders from 40 countries, with 25% of lots selling to Asians compared with around 20% to Americans. African bidders were also noted at Christie’s.

For the first time since June 2013, Sotheby’s London total (£123.5m) beat Christie’s (£116.8m), but the latter sold more by lot: 92% compared with 86% at Sotheby’s. The results are Sotheby’s highest in Europe for a contemporary auction and represent a 40% increase on last year’s sale. (Sotheby’s buyers’ premium is currently slightly higher than Christie’s, adding around £1m to its total.) Both auction houses’ evening sale results fell within estimate.

At Sotheby’s on Tuesday evening, one of Gerhard Richter’s largest abstract paintings sold for a record £30.4m (est £14m-£20m). Cheyenne Westphal, the house’s co-head of contemporary art, took the winning telephone bid on behalf of an American buyer. The 1986 painting last appeared at auction at Sotheby’s New York in 1999, when it sold for a then record of $607,500.

Italian artists contributed £13.6m to Sotheby’s total. Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1965, from the Hoglund collection in Sweden set a new record for a slash painting at £8.4m (est £5m-£7m). Although often photographed, the canvas, which has 23 slashes, had never been exhibited in public.

While painting triumphed, a strong group of figurative sculptures that were new to auction struggled. Thomas Schütte’s bronze of a reclining female figure from 1998 went for £1.3m to the Cologne dealer Rafael Jablonka (est £1.2m-£1.8m), while one of two Juan Muñoz sculptures went unsold.

European painters also lead the charge at Christie’s the following evening. Richter’s monochrome photo-realist painting Lake Lucerne, 1969, sold for £15.8m (estimate around £10m), while a red squeegee painting by the German artist went to the art adviser Judith Hess for £9.6m (est £9m-£14m). Two paintings by Jean Dubuffet went for around the £2.5m mark, pushing or exceeding their upper estimates.
However, it was the American painter Cy Twombly who took the top spot with one of his “blackboard” paintings, which sold for £19.7m (estimate around £16m). This was one of eight very distinct—and differently priced—Twomblys on the block at Christie’s and Sotheby’s this week. Francis Outred, Christie's head of post-war and contemporary art, Europe, said the record $69.6m achieved for a Twombly “blackboard” at Christie’s New York in November “showed pent up demand for works of this quality from the artist”.

Meanwhile, sculpture takes centre stage at Phillips tonight, 12 February, where Ai Weiwei’s Chinese zodiac animal heads are poised to set a record for the artist. The 12-piece gold-plated series is estimated to sell for between £2m and £3m.

Phillips is also offering a giant sculpture by Urs Fischer of a chair wrapped around a cigarette packet (est £600,000-£800,000), which is installed outside on the auction house’s fifth-floor terrace. There are plans to display future large-scale consignments in the garden at Berkeley Square.

Note: Results include buyers’ premium; estimates do not. Sotheby’s buyers’ premium rates in London are 25% for the first £100,000 (previously up to £50,000); 20% between £100,000 and £1.8m (previously between £50,000 and £1m) and 12% above this. Christie’s rates are at Sotheby’s previous levels.

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Work in Helmut Newton photographs could be looted masterpiece

German museum investigates whether work used as a prop is a missing painting by Arnold Böcklin



Arnold Böcklin's Triton Family, 1880-81. © Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg. We were refused permission to reproduce the photographer’s Jenny Kapitan, Pension Dorian, Berlin, 1977

Is a painting in the background of two photographs by Helmut Newton a missing masterpiece by Arnold Böcklin? Tritonenfamilie (Triton family), 1880-81, which the work in the photographs resembles, was looted from the collection of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum (now the Kulturhistorisches Museum) in Magdeburg, central Germany, at the end of the Second World War. The work is among the most important of the 400 paintings that the institution lost towards the end of the war.

A photograph taken by Newton in 1977—Jenny Kapitan, Pension Dorian, Berlin—depicts his favourite model in a Berlin boarding house. She is naked, with a bandaged leg and a neck brace, and leans on a stick; a version of Tritonenfamilie hangs above a bed. The painting probably belonged to the hotel, and was used by Newton as a prop.

The second photograph, of the Playboy model Yvonne Honsa, was taken in Newton’s apartment in Monte Carlo in 1999, where what appears to be the same painting is in the background. Andrea Linnebach, a Böcklin specialist from the University of Kassel in Germany, noticed Tritonenfamilie in the two photographs a few years after Newton’s death in 2004.

The hunt continues
The Magdeburg museum became aware of Linnebach’s discovery in 2008. Successive directors, with the backing of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, have been making unpublicised efforts to get information from the photographer’s widow, June Newton, who is now aged 91.

Tritonenfamilie was bought by the museum in 1907. The institution’s paintings were moved to salt mines in Stassfurt in 1943, to protect them from British bombing raids. A fire broke out in the huge mining complex within hours of the arrival of US troops in April 1945, and three months later, the area was taken over by Soviet troops. It is possible that Tritonenfamilie was moved from the salt mine to a bank vault in Magdeburg before the end of the war. This bank was also looted: a few pictures that had been deposited there were later recovered from the Soviet Union.

Painting “probably survives”

Tobias von Elsner, a historian at the museum, says that the work could have been looted by US or Soviet troops, German civilians or Dutch or Polish forced labourers from a secret aircraft factory deep in the mine. It is also possible that the painting was destroyed in the fire. However, Von Elsner believes that the piece “probably survives”.

But is the painting that features in Newton’s photographs the original work or a copy? Böcklin does not seem to have made full-size replicas of his paintings, and there is no record of another version of the work measuring 99cm by 140cm. It could be a copy by another artist, but this would have been difficult to produce after the war, because there are no colour photographs of the original work.
Matthias Harder, the curator of the Berlin-based Helmut Newton Foundation, says: “We don’t know anything exactly about this painting [the one used in Newton’s photographs], but we know that it cannot be the original Böcklin.” The foundation would not elaborate further.
If the Newton-owned Tritonenfamilie is the original, it increases the chances that other missing paintings from the museum survive. These might even include one of the greatest artistic losses of the war: Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Tarascon Road, 1888.

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Hermitage library employee arrested over missing illustrations

Pages with historic engravings and prints were allegedly cut out of books and offered for sale at antiquarian shops



The Hermitage's collection includes the library of Nicholas II, the last Russian tsar

An employee of the State Hermitage Museum’s research library has been arrested in connection to the suspected theft of historic illustrations, engravings and photographs from its collection. The images were allegedly cut out from from books in the library and offered for sale at antiquarian bookshops.

According to a statement posted on the museum’s website on 13 February, the employee, who was not identified by name, was caught in a joint operation by Hermitage security and the Federal Security Service (FSB, the successor agency of the KGB). The missing pages were discovered last month during a check of the collection by library staff but thanks to the operation “further acts of vandalism and theft at the Hermitage research library were stopped”, the museum says, and items of historical and cultural value were recovered.
Dmitry Kochetkov, a spokesman for the regional FSB office, told the Tass news agency that “a large number of engravings, lithographs, photographs and antique 17th- to 19th-century books” were found in the home of the library employee and “his close female friend, as well as in a number of St Petersburg antiques shops”.

In 2006, more than 200 works of art and jewellery from the Hermitage’s collection were found to be missing during an internal audit, with the thefts linked to a former curator who died at her desk the year before. Only around 30 of these works were recovered.


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Not on Will's watch

The BBC's arts editor, Will Gompertz, has cleverly dissected visitor figures for Tate and the National Gallery, pointing out that recent government statistics reveal a fall in UK visitor numbers to both institutions (the official data trumpets that a record 49 million visits were made to the 16 government-sponsored museums and galleries in 2013-14). "Look beneath the surface and a slightly different picture emerges. Much of the boom in attendance is actually being driven by overseas tourists, with domestic visitors generally growing at a much slower rate. And, in the case of The National Gallery and The Tate Galleries, UK visits have actually dropped by a conspicuous 20% since 2008/09," writes Gompertz on his blog. So Tate was apparently powering ahead pre 2010 when a certain bigwig ran its communications department who (just so happened) to go by the name of... Will Gompertz. The sprightly arts commentator joined the BBC late 2009—and has not looked back since.

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Granddaughter of French dealer whose collection was confiscated by Nazis opens New York gallery

Marianne Rosenberg says she plans to continue the family legacy of working with contemporary artists, as well as show the Modern art her ancestor promoted




Pablo Picasso, Invitation, 1919

The granddaughter of one of the world’s leading dealers of Modern and Impressionist art, whose collection was looted by the Nazis, is launching her own gallery on New York’s Upper East Side.

Marianne Rosenberg, a partner at Squire Sanders law firm in New York, has signed a lease on a space measuring around 1,500 sq. ft in the ground floor of a townhouse on East 66th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenue, in what was formerly the home of the Dickinson Gallery. The gallery, Rosenberg & Co, is scheduled to open on 7 March and will focus on the secondary Modern market, and also work with contemporary artists.

The first exhibition, “Inspired by History”, will include a range of works referring to the family’s personal history and cultural influence. “My family established their businesses in Paris in the early 20th century and thereafter forged exclusive relationships with artists such as Pablo Picasso—whom my grandfather Paul Rosenberg represented for over two decades—Braque, Matisse, many prominent Cubist artists, Giacomo Manzù, Peter Kinley, just to name a few,” Marianne Rosenberg says. “The inaugural exhibition will celebrate the works and artists from those early periods onwards to the 1980s, and will showcase pieces that are directly part of the history.” The exhibition runs until 25 April.

Many of the paintings, sculptures and works on paper in the exhibition will be for sale, except those with sentimental value for the family such as Still Life with Knife, Glass, and Fruit, 1919, a drawing that the artist Juan Gris dedicated to Léonce Rosenberg, Marianne’s great-uncle, or an invitation to her grandfather’s gallery, which was designed by Pablo Picasso in 1919.
Marianne’s grandfather Paul Rosenberg was part of an art-dealing dynasty that included his father, Alexandre, and brother, Léonce. He was known for promoting Modern art after the First World War.

But, with the Second World War on the horizon in the 1930s, Paul made plans to relocate his collection and leave Paris. He opened a gallery in New York in 1940, but was unsuccessful in getting his entire collection to safety: the Nazis confiscated around 400 works for Hitler’s planned Führermuseum in Austria. The family has been tireless in its efforts to find the missing works, and it is estimated that they have recouped around 340 pieces. None of the works in the show are among those confiscated by the Nazis.

“By opening Rosenberg & Co. I have a great opportunity to honour my family’s heritage and their legacy in the history of art dealers,” Marianne Rosenberg says. “I look forward to beginning a new chapter in my family’s tradition of supporting contemporary artists.”

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