Christie’s big 20th and 21st century art sales in London this year will be led by two landscapes: a dynamic and passionate Francis Bacon and a wistful Monet, both of which have not been seen at auction in quite some time.

The Bacon, Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963), is estimated at £15 million-£20 million. It was painted as a tribute to Peter Lacy, with whom the artist had a years-long passionate, and often abusive, relationship. 

Bacon made the painting in London, just one year after Lacy died tragically in Tangiers at 46. The painting has remained in the same collection for more than 20 years. When it last sold at auction, at Sotheby’s New York for $517,000 in 1985, it became the most expensive Bacon ever sold. (Today, Bacon’s auction record is for the 1969 picture Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which sold at Christie’s New York for $142.4 million in 2013.)

The Bacon painting was originally sold by Marlborough Gallery in 1963 and, according to Christie’s, has been on view in 32 exhibitions across 27 cities worldwide, including the 1971–72 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris and the Royal Academy of Arts’s “Francis Bacon: Man and Beast” in 2022.

Monet’s Matinée sur la Seine, temps net (1897) is among the 21 pictures that make up the artist’s “Mornings on the Seine” series. Each work in it focuses of the same section of the famous river at different times of the day. 

The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA), an arts hub in Hong Kong which operates the M+ museum and the Hong Kong Palace Museum, will run out of funding next March and may need to acquire additional loans if a new finance plan is not approved by the city’s government.

That was the warning from WKCDA CEO Betty Fung on February 14 in regard to the status of the hub’s HK$21.6 billion (approximately USD$2.75 billion) funding, endowed by the city’s legislature in 2008.

Fung told local media outlets that the WKCDA had recorded over 4 million visits in the 2022–23 year, with M+ drawing 2.7 million visitors and the Hong Kong Palace Museum attracting 1.25 million people.

She said she was confident that an increase in special exhibitions would boost visitor attendance this year, according to the Hong Kong Free Press. Revenue from ticket sales at the two museums covered nearly half of expenses, “on par or even exceeding internationally renowned museums,” she said. But it left the WKCDA to pay for the remainder of costs for exhibitions, insurance, transportation, electricity, management, and salaries.

“Currently, the district relies on borrowing loans,” Fung said, according to the Standard. “The worst-case scenario for the authority would be to continue relying on borrowed funds.”

The Portland Museum of Art (PMA) in Maine is cutting 13 positions due to the lingering finance impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, local news outlets report. 

The layoffs will include salaried and part-time employees, as museum management is seeking to reduce the nearly 70 percent of its operating budget dedicated to wages. 

“The museum was fortunate to receive ERC credits and PPP loans to maintain staffing and programmatic growth during unprecedented times, but the multi-year positive impact of this support will soon expire,” the PMA said in a statement. “As expenses continue to remain high and unpredictable, the real and persisting negative effects of this historic moment have necessitated changes in the PMA’s operations.”

The announcement follows two years of contentious relations between the museum and its employees over wages and job security. Last month, gallery ambassadors and security workers unionized, marking the second second successful union campaign at the museum, following the 70 or so employees who joined United Auto Workers Local 2110, the Technical, Office and Professional Union in 2021. Unionized employees will be not be affected by the layoffs. 

The museum reported that attendance numbers have dropped by 35 percent since the 2020, raising concerns for the sustainability of its programming. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced on Thursday its co-chairs for the 2024 Met Gala. 

Jennifer Lopez, Zendaya, Bad Bunny and Chris Hemsworth will join Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour as co-chairs for this year’s Costume Institute Benefit, which will have “The Garden of Time” as its theme.   

The theme is inspired by the upcoming “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” spring exhibition, which will open to the public on May 10. As previously reported by WWD, this year’s exhibition will feature 250 pieces that can no longer be dressed on mannequins due to their fragility. The pieces are part of the Costume Institute’s collection of 33,000-plus items.

“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” will also feature artificial intelligence, video animation, light projection and diverse technologies to create a sensorial experience. 

Jennifer Lopez, Zendaya and Bad Bunny have attended the Met Gala multiple times before. Zendaya famously dressed up as Cinderella for the 2019 edition of the event, posing with stylist Law Roach as her fairy godmother on the red carpet.

6 min read

The first mention of an ‘Oxford Sauce’

When it comes to describing what ‘Oxford Sauce’ is, many would likely differ in their answers, if they were aware of its existence at all. Some seasoned foodies might point to Georges Auguste Escoffier’s Oxford Sauce, mentioned in the last book he ever wrote himself, titled Ma Cuisine (1934). Escoffier is widely celebrated for his contributions as a chef, known amongst French media as the ’king of chefs and chef of kings’. He popularised and modernised the French haute cuisine style of cooking and brought it with him to London, where he lived for 32 years. He began his apprenticeship in the kitchen at the young age of 14 and by 27 he was already chef de cuisine in the Parisian restaurant Le Petit Moulin Rouge.

A few years later he began to work with the famous hotelier Cesar Ritz at the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo. From 1890 to 1898 the pair both worked at the Savoy hotel in London, until dismissed for ‘gross negligence and breaches of duty and mismanagement’.

However, the duo had already established the Ritz Hotel development Company, which went on to open Paris’ Ritz Hotel in 1898 and London’s new Carlton Hotel the following year.

 Ma Cuisine (1934), written post World War II, when high dining and haute cuisine were in decline, focused more on recipes developed in modest kitchens using local ingredients and became a staple for French family cooking. In this book Oxford Sauce is described as a cold table sauce, based on fruit, similar to Cumberland sauce, but eliminating citrus peel. According to him it is: ‘A British sauce of red currant jelly dissolved with port and flavoured with shallots, orange zest and mustard; usually served with game.’

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