February 29 – April 4, 2024

'Britain's Schindler': The man who saved 669 children from the Nazis

The expansive collection of Cuban-born, Miami-based philanthropist and art collector Rosa de la Cruz will be sold at Christie’s over a series of auctions starting this May during the New York evening sales.

De la Cruz, who died last month at 81, was central to Miami’s art scene. With her husband Carlos, she opened a 30,000-square-foot museum in Miami to display their contemporary art collection, which is thought to number 1,000 works.

The artists responsible for those works range from established blue-chippers like Wade Guyton and Albert Oehlen to younger emerging artists like Su Su and Christina Quarles. Their collection earned the de la Cruzes a repeated spot on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list.

Artnet News first reported news of the collection’s sale on Friday. The collection will likely be sold by the auction house over several sales for an estimated total of $30 million, with lots ranging from $5,000 on the low end to $5 million on the high end.

The Miami space the de la Cruzes have run since 2009 is now closed, Artnet reported.

Marian Zazeela, an artist whose abstract drawings and light installations envisioned dream states, died at her home in New York at 83 on Thursday. The MELA Foundation, an organization she cofounded with her partner, the artist La Monte Young, announced her passing on Friday, saying she died of natural causes while sleeping.

Zazeela produced work that did not fit neatly within the confines of any movement, even as it flirted with the aesthetics of Minimalism. By her own admission, she produced “borderline art,” a term she favorited for work that “‘borders’ and challenges the conventional distinction between decorative and fine art by using decorative elements in the fine art tradition,” as she once put it.

She is best-known for Dream House, a sound and light installation conceived in collaboration with Young. First mounted in 1969 and since staged in a variety of forms, the installation features drone music by Young and Light, an installation by Zazeela whose illumination, typically in a single shade of magenta, colors the entire space.

The version of Dream House that is now open for visitation on Church Street in Lower Manhattan is beloved by the general public, with visitors regularly venturing there to recline in the installation for extended periods of time. “It’s a simple concept,” M. H. Miller remarked in a 2020 T: The New York Times Style Magazine profile of Young, “and yet this harmony between sound and light was one of the earliest cohabitations of contemporary music and art.”

Working solo, Zazeela produced drawings composed of intricate calligraphic forms that are by turns hypnotic and dizzying. They are currently the subject of an exhibition at Artists Space in New York that has earned acclaim from critics. In Art in America, Andy Battaglia wrote of the show, “drawings of the kind in ‘Dream Lines’ tell the story of an artist who awakens different states of dreaming on her own.”

Earlier this week, Bravo announced that all six cast members of the rebooted Real Housewives of New York City would return for their second season (the franchise’s 15th), as reported by Variety, bringing rumors about whether the network would add two new members, including one with ties to the art world.

It’s now rumored that that cast member might be Racquel Chevremont, a collector and curator who is also the ex-partner of artist Mickalene Thomas. Chevremont is also a friend of current cast member Jenna Lyons, the former creative director of J. Crew. (Bravo blog Bravo and Cocktails first posted a blind item about the news on March 19; Artnet News’s Wet Paint column picked up the story on Friday.)

Chevremont has amassed a modest collection of around 70 to 80 works by artists such as Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Deborah Roberts, and Toyin Ojih Odutola. She also previously served as a trustee of the Studio Museum in Harlem.

She recently consulted on the art-filled set decoration for the Netflix film Leave the World Behind. Beyond the art world, she has modeled, most recently walking in Batsheva Hay’s New York Fashion Week show in February.

Prior to their spilt, Thomas and Chevremont founded Deux Femmes Noires, which was aimed to raise the profile of artists of color. Together, they mounted exhibitions, including one in 2022, titled “Set It Off,” at the Parrish Art Museum in Watermill, New York. The two also co-produced a performance by artist Kia LaBeija as part of the 2019 Performa Biennial in New York.

California legislators have introduced a bill intended to give Holocaust survivors and their heirs a greater chance of recovering artworks stolen, or sold under duress, during periods of political oppression.

Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino), co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, who has led the legislative effort, told the Los Angeles Times that it was inspired by a ruling this January that determined that Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum could keep a Camille Pissarro painting taken from its Jewish owner by the Nazi party. 

“It immediately made sense to me that this was a unique opportunity to correct a historical injustice and make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again,” Gabriel said. “Respectfully, we think that the 9th Circuit got it wrong, and this law is going to make that crystal clear.” He added that the bill has bipartisan support.

The keenly followed case of the Pissarro, titled Rue Saint Honore, apres midi, effet de pluie (Rue Saint Honore, Afternoon, Rain Effect) and depicting a rainy Paris street, has bounced between California courts for nearly two decades, as the heirs of Lilly Cassirer Neubauer have argued for its recovery. 

Cassirer Neubauer was forced by the Nazi party to sell the painting in 1939 for 900 Reichsmarks (roughly $360 today) in exchange for a visa to escape Germany. According to court documents, she never received payment. The painting was acquired in 1993 by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum from the collector Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. Cassirer Neubauer’s heirs allege in the initial complaint filed in 2005 that the museum knew upon acquiring the work that it had been sold under duress. 

Two men have been sentenced to jail in London for selling more than £2.6 million (around $3.2 million) in fake fine art attributed to Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso.

A six-year money laundering investigation by Sussex Police found Behrad Kazemi and Raj Nasta had sold works by Dalí for £2,000 to £3,000 and works by Picasso for £5,000 to £20,000 each to more than 125 victims between October 2016 and June 2018.

The scheme involved cold calls from a company called Asset Consulting Services and Treasury Asset Group and encouragement to buy artwork instead of traditional investments.

A press statement from Sussex Police noted many of the victims were vulnerable and elderly, with some of them not knowing they had been conned until contacted by police. Some had paid over £150,000 to the scheme and lost their life savings as a result.

Suspicions arose after the victims and their families could not longer contact Asset Consulting Services and Treasury Asset Group. Artist signatures on the artworks were discovered to be false and the actual value of the works sold was between £200 and £300.

Breezing through the 35,000-square-foot home of Materials for the Arts is about as close as you might get to touring Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Earlier this year, the vast warehouse in Queens was chock-full of Christmas fixings, like ornaments, pink artificial evergreens, and Lush soap cartons, alongside perennial aisles of paper and books, envelopes, archival photos, all manner of fabric, buttons, beads, and trim. There are also lab coats from hospitals, furniture from the Javits Center, and vintage typewriters and PC towers, CDs and file folders. Full of castoffs of contemporary New York City life just waiting to be plucked from obscurity, the list goes on. The majority of these wares are in pristine condition, and they are all meticulously organized and labeled.

It’s also accessible, for free, to public school students and teachers, as well as art nonprofits.

As New York’s largest creative-reuse center and a program of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Materials for the Arts collects a boundless array of reusable materials from businesses and individuals that are then made available to nonprofits, schools, and other city agencies, thus diverting some 1.7 million pounds of materials from landfills in 2023.

That 1.7 million pounds is almost quadruple the amount of donated material just three years ago, and today the nearly-50-year-old organization is poised to keep expanding as it continues to evolve to meet the needs of the ever-changing, ever-resourceful but ever-resource-strapped city.

“It’s not just about our organization—it’s about our city,” MFTA executive director Tara Sansone told ARTnews. “As New York grows, so too must our program because our mission remains pivotal to the very essence of New York itself.”

Xue Tan, the curator in charge of a closely watched Hong Kong art center’s acclaimed programming, is set to join the staff of one of Germany’s top museums.

Currently senior curator of the Tai Kwun Contemporary center, Tan is now slated to become chief curator of the Haus der Kunst in Munich starting this June. The post is a highly coveted one, and was previously held by Emma Enderby, whose departure to become artistic director of the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin was announced in October.

Tan has overseen the exhibition program of Tai Kwun Contemporary since it opened in 2018. It is among the few Hong Kong art spaces with an international following, and has under Tan staged shows by Cao Fei, Maria Hassabi, Tino Sehgal, and more, as well as group exhibitions such as a current one about women, Indigenous knowledge, and the natural world.

Director Andrea Lissoni praised Tan for her “deep knowledge and experience on the Asian Region” in a statement.

“After dedicating almost a decade on establishing Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, I am thrilled to join Andrea Lissoni and the team in furthering the vision of art as a complex evolution through inventive and transformative engagements, and impactful programming,” Tan said in a statement. “I look forward to contributing to the transformation of the institution, my network of artists and communities across the globe will be a solid support for our work.”

During the development of a fine arts museum in Vannes, Brittany, in northwestern France, excavations revealed the remains of a medieval castle, according to Heritage Daily. The dig began in the courtyard of an 18th century mansion, the Château Lagorce, which currently operates as a hotel. 

Researchers from France’s national institute for archeological research learned that the castle was built around 1380 by Jean IV, the Duke of Brittany and Count of Montfort from 1345, and the 7th Earl of Richmond from 1372. The structure was known as the Château de l’Hermine and was built to assert the Duke’s authority in the area. 

The archaeologists found a moat and two stories of the fortress-like castle’s outer defensive wall in the courtyard as deep as 13 feet below street level. The stonework suggests that the castle as many as four levels, multiple staircases, latrines, and drainage pipes. The latrine area was filled with everyday objects that date back to the 15th century including jewelry, coins, padlock and several pieces of clothing. 

The team also found the remains of a bridge that stretched over the moat, connecting the castle to the town, and a mill that was built into the castle’s residential area “in a very original way.” The mill’s wheel was powered by a canal that flowed underneath the castle and released into the moat through a grate in the mill room. 

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THE HEADLINES

MOROCCO PAVILION CANCELED. After the surprise, last-minute replacement of Morocco’s exhibitors at what would have been the country’s first Venice Biennale pavilion, Morocco has now fully canceled their participation in the exhibition set to open in April, and it’s unclear why, according to The Art Newspaper . In January, the artists Safaa Erruas, Majida Khattari, and Fatiha Zemmouri, as well as curator Mahi Binebine, learned in what they called a “nightmare” situation, that the artworks they had spent months completing for Venice would no longer be exhibited, and that a new program would replace theirs, helmed by Paris-based Moroccan curator Mouna Mekouar. Erruas has reportedly said the Moroccan government promised to reimburse them for their production costs, and that their works would be exhibited some time in the future.

LAVA TREASURE CONVICTION. A French court in Marseille has convicted two men of smuggling sunken gold treasure found off the west coast of Corsica, from the Golf de Lava. The so-called “Lava treasure saga” began in 1985, when three men discovered a mysterious hoard of rare Roman gold coins from the third century, while fishing. One of them, Félix Biancamaria , was found guilty of trying to sell a golden plate worth several millions, which the court said was from the same stash, and now faces a 12-month suspended prison sentence. His friend Jean-Michel Richaud was handed an eight-month suspended sentence, and both face a 100,000-euro fine. Their lawyers said they were appealing the decision.

THE DIGEST

A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

Growing up, Anu Põder wanted to be a ballerina. But her small body failed to conform to the discipline’s impossible standards, so she turned to art, where misfit physiques soon became her primary preoccupation. The feminine forms that resulted—made of materials including fat, surgical plastic, and found fashion—comprise the Estonian artist’s retrospective “Anu Põder: Space for My Body” at Switzerland’s Muzeum Susch, a picturesque private institution carved into the side of a mountain. The show is curated by Cecilia Alemani, on the heels of the late artist’s inclusion in Alemani’s 2022 Venice Biennale.

Põder’s figurative sculptures can be roughly divided into two camps: porous and plastic. Works of the permeable, penetrable variety include Limsijad (Lickers), 2007—a series of dangling busts made of wire mesh, with holes here and there patched over with aluminum foil. Mostly, the metal is a kind of armature supporting the main event: giant pink satin tongues, flexed and pointed upward. This silly cage-like sculpture feels at once protected and open. It is extremely delicate, but if you touched it, it would hurt you. You’re left unsure whether the viewer or the object has more power to inflict damage. The humor eases this thrilling tension.

Delicacy is similarly pushed to the brink of brutality in porous works Põder made from garments, often excising planes of fabric to leave behind only the seams. Ruum minu keha jaoks (Space for My Body), 1995, overlays just the hems of three shirts—in pink, white, and black—plus some shoulder pads. The lines dangle from a robust wooden hanger that gives them volume. It is easy to envision a torso in the negative space. The harsh contours of this exoskeleton read as protective, like armor or a cage. Yet the soft, torn nature of the fabric exudes an almost pathetic vulnerability.

Põder excised other garments in the ’90s, too: bags, coats, shoes, all found and worn. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, she became fascinated by consumer culture, which was new to her, so she turned to such mass-produced goods. Before that, while working in the Soviet Union, she had preoccupied herself with the various ways that bodies resist conforming to standards of the idealized laborer. It helped that during this time she was not an official artist working for the state: instead, she made her income as a teacher, allowing her some creative freedom. A single mother of three children, she maintained a studio in her state-provided apartment, where she avoided materials she could not lift and transport on her own.

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