Art Photos mixed

Three artists have been chosen this year to move in to Alexander Calder’s former home studio in Saché, in France’s Loire Valley, which the artist designed and built in 1962. The three-month Atelier Calder residencies, organised by the US-based Calder Foundation, provide artists who produce three-dimensional works with a stipend for living expenses, funding and technical support to create new work. “Our mission is to offer the time and space to make work, so although we do open the studio to the public for two days at the end of each artist’s stay, our emphasis is not on exhibiting,” the Calder Foundation’s president, Alexander S.C. Rower, told The Art Newspaper over email.The spring 2017 artist-in-residence is the Tehran-born, Toronto-based artist Abbas Akhavan, whose previous works explore the domestic space and domesticated landscapes, including site-specific ephemeral installations, drawing, video and performance. Akhavan’s exhibitions this year have included the group shows Making Nature: How We See Animals at the Wellcome Collection in London, and But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The fall 2017 artist-in-residence is the Prague-born and based Eva Kot’átková, who showed work at the Parcours sector at Art Basel Miami Beach in June. Other exhibitions include the group show Bedlam: the Asylum and Beyond (until 15 January 2017) at the Wellcome Collection in London and a solo show at the Maccarone gallery in New York. She works in a variety of media, including sculpture, collage, performance, installation and film.
“We do think about which artists are continuing in Calder’s legacy [when choosing the artists-in-residence], but not in an obvious way, of making mobiles, for example,” Rower says. “Calder’s imprint on contemporary art—as a pioneer in performance and experimental art, and art incorporating found materials, sound and light—is quite extensive.” Previous artists-in-residence have included Trisha Donnelly, Monika Sosnowska, Haegue Yang and Haroon Mirza. Rower adds: “It can be more interesting to see who is pushing the boundaries of what is considered art today, or engaging in the quintessential questions of universal existence—two things that Calder did in his own time.”



Calder in his Saché studio, 1968 (Photo: Clovis Prevost. Courtesy Calder Foundation © 2016 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

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Brave soul by A Frenchman In NY

Wooden Bridges by Mevludin Sejmenovic

The Pantheon in Rome may become a ticketed tourist attraction by 2018, Dario Franceschini, the Italian minister of cultural heritage and tourism, announced this week. The ancient monument, which welcomed around 7 million visitors in 2016, is the most-visited archaeological site in Rome and has hitherto offered free entrance.The ministry says that the entry charge will be modest and will help to maintain the site. Twenty percent of the revenue from ticket sales will be used to streamline the management of Rome’s various museums, palazzos and state-run museums.

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Lockwood Kipling with his son Rudyard Kipling (1882). (© National Trust, Charles Thomas)

Hear the name Kipling and you are more likely to think of The Jungle Book than of Indian Arts and Crafts. Yet the lesser-known Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911), father of the English writer and poet Rudyard, was an influential figure in the Arts and Crafts movement in England and a champion of traditional Indian craftsmanship.Having begun his career as a designer, Lockwood Kipling spent almost 30 years teaching and working in the arts in India. In the early 1860s, he joined the South Kensington Museum (as the Victoria and Albert Museum was then known) and “played a significant role in shaping the foundation collection”, according to the museum.

A V&A exhibition opening this month will trace his career, beginning with examples of the Indian objects he encountered at the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, including an enamelled gold bracelet set with diamonds from the museum’s collection. Also on display will be objects that Kipling sent home for the V&A’s collections, many conserved for the exhibition. They include a Buddha bust (around 1st- or 2nd-century) that is being shown for the first time in 60 years. The exhibition was organised with the Bard Graduate Center, New York, and will travel there from 15 September to 4 February 2018.

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Community by WK Cheoh

Robert Devereux, the chairman of Frieze and a collector of “contemporary art connected to the African continent”, as he describes it, is showing part of his collection for the first time in public next month.The exhibition, When the Heavens Meet the Earth, features more than 35 works from his 350-strong collection, which is usually housed in a restored merchant’s house in Lamu, Kenya. It opens at The Heong Gallery at Downing College, Cambridge, where Devereux studied history, on 25 February (until 21 May).

Devereux, who first started collecting art from Africa and the diaspora 15 years ago, says now is a good time to show his collection as he has temporarily stopped buying art following his epic walk through the Rift Valley in East Africa last year. The seven-month trek raised money for Save the Rhino and The African Arts Trust. In 2010, Devereux sold two-thirds of his collection of post-war British art at Sotheby’s, raising £4.73m to establish the trust, which offers grants to arts organisations across East Africa.

“It seems like now is a good time to take stock and work out what to do with the collection,” he says. “If I could find an appropriate recipient I would love to donate a sizeable part of it in the next 20 years.” Devereux says he would like to see his collection end up on the African continent. “Ultimately, however, it would come down to where it would be most effective.”

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In line with the chilly weather, Sotheby’s has revealed the star lot in its contemporary evening sale in London on 8 March: Gerhard Richter’s Eisberg (1982), which carries a hefty estimate of £8m-£12m. The work is widely regarded as one of the German artist’s finest landscapes, and may prove particularly appetising to collectors because it is the largest of only three iceberg paintings he ever made. One is owned by Doris Fisher, who, with her late husband Donald, founded The Gap clothing stores; she has promised it to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The other sold at Sotheby’s London in 2012 for £4.3m (with buyer’s fees), meaning it is arguably unlikely to come back on the market any time soon.This piece has not changed hands since it was bought by the European consigner in 1983 and is going under the hammer without a guarantee. “We are particularly confident in the Richter market and we also haven’t seen a landscape as important as this for sale in recent memory,” says Alex Branczik, the senior director and head of contemporary art for Europe at Sotheby’s. “Landscape as a genre has been one of Richter’s main preoccupations throughout his career, but he made few of them compared with his abstract paintings. It’s interesting because he mostly paints very mundane landscapes, but this one is probably as close as he ever gets to a more Romantic work.”

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The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is addressing the issue of rising tides at the artist’s former compound in Captiva, Florida, where he lived from 1970 until his death in 2008. A report by the company Coastal Risk Consulting found that “the entirety of the property is at high risk of storm surge flooding” and a significant portion is likely to be underwater by 2045. “We may move buildings off the ground, create walkways…we have to look at what is feasible,” says Ann Brady, the director of the foundation’s residency programme.

In keeping with Rauschenberg’s own activism, the foundation is funding a series of films on climate change in partnership with the Sundance Film Festival. It has also hosted climate change-themed residencies to bring artists and scientists together on Captiva.

Monet’s In the Norvégienne (1887) plays on the reflection of the figures in the water © Photo RMN – Hervé Lewandowski

Whenever a new Claude Monet show appears, the question it inevitably prompts is, why? What more can we possibly learn about one of the most exhibited artists in history? In the case of the Fondation Beyeler’s exhibition, marking 20 years of the Swiss gallery, the answer is a great deal.A key aim of the show is to present Monet as a more intellectually curious artist than he is often given credit for. “Monet theoretically is much underrated in comparison to Cézanne, for example,” says the show’s curator, Ulf Küster. “In doubling an image... he makes you think about what an image is.”

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