Art Photos mixed

The painting Retrato de niña o Joven Inmaculada (Portrait of girl or Young Immaculate) is attracting the attention of experts at the Spanish auction house Abalarte in Madrid, where it has been billed as a potential early work work by Velázquez due to be auctioned on 25 April. The 57cm x 44cm oil on canvas was discovered by chance by Richard de Willermin, a specialist in 17th- and 18th-century Italian, Flemish and Spanish art who consults as an expert for Abalarte.



Retrato de niña o Joven Inmaculada (Portrait of girl or Young Immaculate) is due to be auctioned on 25 April at Abalarte in Madrid



An x-ray of the portrait has revealed that a crown of stars is hidden by overpaint

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When we hear the name Albers, we tend to think of Josef and his Homage to the Square series of paintings. But Anni Albers (1899-1994), his wife and fellow Bauhaus refugee, is at the forefront of two forthcoming exhibitions, including a full-scale survey of her work planned for 2018 at Tate Modern. The show, which will travel to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, is preceded by a smaller survey, Anni Albers: Touching Vision, which is due to open this autumn at the Guggenheim Bilbao (6 October-14 January 2018).



Anni Albers’s Study for Camino Real (1967) (© 2017 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

Nicholas Fox Weber, the director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, which is supporting both exhibitions, says: "During her lifetime, she got quite a bit of attention, but in a slower world than Josef did," he says. In 1949, she became the first textile artist to have a solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which was organised by Philip Johnson.

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Thomas Struth, The Consolandi Family, Mailand, 1996 (2014). (© Thomas Struth)

Although Katarzyna Kobro and Wladyslaw Strzeminski worked primarily in different media—sculpture and painting, respectively—the married couple’s relationship was of “crucial importance” to their artistic theories and work, says Jaros

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The US artist and architect Vito Acconci, known for his radical conceptual works such as Seedbed (1972), has died age 77. The Bronx-born artist turned poet and architect, who is considered a Body Art trailblazer, arguably paved the way for a later generation of artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Matthew Barney and Paul McCarthy.

Acconci received his BA with a major in literature from Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1962. After publishing a magazine called 0 to 9 from 1967 to 1969, he turned to photography, documenting passers-by that he followed on the street for the work Following Piece (1969).

The work explores “his body’s occupancy of public space through the execution of preconceived actions or activities”, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which owns photographs from the series. For Seedbed, he spent hours masturbating beneath a ramp at the Sonnabend gallery in New York while whispering aloud his fantasies about visitors.



Vito Acconci, Step Piece (1970). Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

From the late 1970s, he began making experimental sculptures, furniture and public art pieces, including Birth of the Car/Birth of the Boat (1988) located in Pittsburgh, Name Calling Chair (1990) and Flying Floors at Philadelphia International Airport which was unveiled in 1988. The same year, he established his own architecture practice, Acconci Studio, which is based in Brooklyn.

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Laure de Beauvau-Craon, who led Sotheby’s France for almost 15 years, died on Saturday, 29 April in Anjou, in the Loire valley, aged 74. Born Laure de Rougemont, she became a princess when she married Marc de Beauveau-Craon, the heir of a noble house tied to the duchy of Lorraine. Her royal title did not stop her from waging—and winning—a war on another ancient order, France’s “commissaires-priseurs”.

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The 2017 Turner Prize shortlist, announced today, 3 May, immediately reflected the Tate’s recent decision to lift the age limit of the shortlisted artists. Since 1991, artists over 50 have been excluded from the prize, but this year’s shortlist includes the painter Hurvin Anderson, 52, and another painter and multimedia artist, Lubaina Himid, who is 62. Announcing the shortlist, Alex Farquharson, Tate Britain’s director, says: “The upper age limit originally helped the prize define itself as an award for a breakthrough moment in a more emerging artist’s career. But now this remit is so well established, I think we can safely acknowledge that artists can experience a breakthrough at any age, without any risk of the prize becoming a lifetime achievement award.”

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The Irish-born photographer Richard Mosse has won the Prix Pictet award, for his series of black-and-white images entitled Heat Maps (2016-17). Now based in Leeds, Mosse used a military-grade thermal camera that detects body heat to depict sites on the journeys faced by migrants in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Regarded as a conceptual documentary photographer, his work was shown earlier this year in the Barbican Centre’s Curve gallery.

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A reward of $25,000 has been offered for information leading to the whereabouts of a ship spinnaker designed by the late Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. The vessel sailed in the 1995 Americas Cup in San Diego, California; its hull, which is decorated with Lichtensteins mermaid motif, features in a show opening this month at Middlebury College Museum of Art in Vermont (Young America: Roy Lichtenstein and the America's Cup; 26 May-13 August). Anyone with information on the missing sail should contact Kevin Mahaney, the ships skipper in 1995 who spearheaded the exhibition.


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Freud’s Trip to Orvieto, by Nicholas Fox Weber, Bellevue Literary Press, $26.99 (hb)

In the small Italian town of Orvieto in 1897, Sigmund Freud had a revelation. In the town’s cathedral, before a depiction of the Last Judgement by the Renaissance painter Luca Signorelli, the 41-year-old psychoanalyst felt he had found “the greatest” depiction of the theme he had ever seen.

The intense and violent fresco, which carries an odd sexual energy, was seared into his mind. Yet upon his departure, “to his immense frustration, Freud could not recall the name of the artist,” writes Nicholas Fox Weber, in his new book, Freud’s Trip to Orvieto (Bellevue Literary Press).Through 48 short, sharp chapters (some are only a page and a half), Weber traces the psychoanalyst’s memory loss and his attempt to recall Signorelli’s name.

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OGOLO (1987) by Ben Enwonwu. Photo courtesy of Sotheby's.

London
Sotheby’s
16 May: Modern and Contemporary African Art OGOLO (1987) by Ben Enwonwu (est. £60,000-£80,000)

One of seven works by the late Nigerian Modernist in the auction house’s inaugural sale of Modern and Contemporary African art, this painting is one of the first of some 50 Ogolo-themed works that the Goldsmiths-trained painter and sculptor produced over the final decade of his career.

The work, executed in gouache, pen and ink on cardboard, depicts a funerary rite enacted at his brother’s burial by masked performers representing the Agbogho, Mmuo and Ogolo spirits according to traditional beliefs of the Igbo, as Nigeria’s indigenous people are known. According to Enwonwu’s biographer Sylvester Okwunodo Ogbechie, the spectre of the Ogolo left a lasting impression, and the artist’s preoccupation with the subject thereafter “is suggestive of his confrontation with his own mortality”. Another of Enwonwu’s Ogolo works, dating from 1992, brought £67,000 with premium at Bonhams in 2014; the higher estimate here is reflective of rising interest in his oeuvre.



Métamorphoses (1936) by Joan Miró. Photo courtesy of Christie's.

New York
Christie’s
16 May: Impressionist and Modern Art Works on Paper Métamorphoses (1936) by Joan Miró
(est. $300,000-$500,000)

This collage-drawing, made up of watercolour, cut paper, decals, India ink and charcoal on paper, is from a series that the Spanish artist created from clippings of children’s books and kitschy postcards and advertisements. In this work, which dates from a hinge period in Miró’s practice between representation and abstraction, the artist “juxtaposes bold splashes of watercolour with precisely rendered personages and stencilled numbers and letters to create a whimsical, surreal environment”, says Vanessa Fusco, a specialist in the house’s Impressionist and Modern Art department. Offered at auction for the first time, the work was first owned by Miró’s primary American dealer, Pierre Matisse (the son of the artist Henri Matisse), who passed the work down to his son, Pierre-Noël Matisse, whose wife, Jacqueline Miller Matisse, is selling the work. In a market cluttered with Miró fakes, “its fresh provenance is particularly desirable”, adds Fusco.

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