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November 11 – December 23, 2023

It's the season for giving – but how to do it ethically and sustainably?

A spoiler-filled review of the show's 60th anniversary special The Star Beast

Around the world, art foundations are formed for a variety of reasons. Beyond the tax advantages that may accrue to an individual, a family, or a corporation may lie a desire to preserve a collection, to promote particular values, or to keep a collector’s memory alive. Whatever the reasons, members of the public are the ultimate beneficiaries, as the artworks in private hands become accessible to all.

It stands to reason that France, a country with a deep and rich art history and some of the most dedicated collectors in the world, would also host some of the greatest art foundations. Here, we introduce you to 15 of them.

A fly that a Tuscan boy named Giotto may have painted, once, set the Italian Renaissance abuzz. It was so true to life, according to the art historical legend that trails Giotto to this day, that Cimabue, the master painter he was apprenticed to, believed it was an actual pest. “Returning to his work, he tried more than once to drive it away with his hand, thinking it was real,” wrote art historian Giorgio Vasari in his influential book, Lives ofthe Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550).

The fly may have looked convincing in this charming story, but the tale itself was probably a complete fiction, along with much else that Vasari wrote about early-14th-century painter Giotto di Bondone. The artist may or may not have been born near Florence in the village of Vespignano, and he probably wasn’t discovered by painter Cimabue while tending a flock of sheep and drawing on rocks. What does hold true, though, is that Giotto helped revive naturalism in painting, bringing empathy and humanity, along with piercing observation, to his figures and illustrations of biblical stories.

Giotto is hailed as the father of the Italian Renaissance, and his name is used to brand colorful markers for emerging (child-aged) artists to this day. He was fêted even in his lifetime. Humanist writer Giovanni Boccaccio, a contemporary of Giotto, wrote in his Decameron (1353) that “so faithful did he remain to nature . . . that whatever he depicted had the appearance, not of a reproduction, but of the thing itself.” Giotto’s reputation lived on, with sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti writing around 1450 that “Giotto saw in art what others did not put into it. He brought forth naturalistic art and gracefulness.”

When Giotto died in 1337 at around the age of 70 (his year of birth is unclear), he was given a ceremonious state funeral in Florence, the first time such an honor was bestowed upon an artist. In his lengthy career he worked across media and subjects, creating large mosaics, altarpieces, painted crucifixes, portraits, and frescoes. There still isn’t scholarly consensus about what works can be firmly attributed to him, although there is widespread agreement that he painted the Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua, the Bardi Chapel frescoes in Santa Croce, and the Ognissanti Madonna.

Historically, the fall marquee New York auctions are measured by fairly specific criteria: they bring important estates to the block and, with them, some of the world’s most coveted artworks, ones that have the potential to set new records. The performance of those works at auction is, in turn, closely watched by the trade for signs of which artists are in demand. The past couple weeks sent clear signals about shifting tides between the blue-chip artists that typically dominate the market and heretofore overlooked ones.

That there were lower price points for the most valuable works this time around, and record prices for artists that had previously been undervalued, is borne out by the difference between the total generated by this year’s sale compared with last year: with roughly the same amount of art for sale, this year, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips made around $1.8 billion, inclusive of fees, versus last year’s $2.6 billion.

In the sales last week, many of the artists who made new auction records were highly respected ones, as opposed to those with scant exhibition histories. The late Agnes Martin is widely recognized as a foremost American artist; the work of Barbara Chase-Riboud, a sculptor in her 80s whose work leans conceptual, is highly respected, yet virtually unseen at auction. Chase-Riboud’s La Musica / Amnesia (1990) sold for “a record-setting $647,7000, more than five times the high estimate ($80,000-$12,000)” and more than double her previous auction record, according to Culture Type. Compare this to the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, when auction houses were setting consecutive records for scores of painters with few shows under their belts.

Correspondingly, this November’s sales focused less on younger artists. In Phillips 20th Century and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 50 percent of the lots were appearing in the auction market for the first time, down 30 percent from its equivalent sale this past May. Reset auction records for established women artists and artists of color, among them—Martin and Barkley Hendricks, at $18.7 million and $8.4 million, respectively—reflected a greater equity that’s already been established on the private market for those artists, advisers said. (My colleague Daniel Cassady writes that the Martin result exemplifies the trend this season toward “a consistent showing by collectors looking for blue chip beauty.”)

Numerous folks in the trade chalk up the shift away from untested talent to recent dramatic change in interest rates. Allan Schwartzman, a New York art adviser and former Sotheby’s executive, said that during the pandemic and for some time after, lower interest rates propelled the speculative bidding seen for works by newly emerging artists, a dynamic that has now dampened as rates have risen. Last year, he said, “There was a noticeable number of collectors at the emerging level who were perhaps buying more liberally and depending upon low interest rates to do so.”

There might not have been quite so much material on the market this season had it not been for the appearance of a couple high-profile estates, like those of Emily Fisher Landau and Chara Schreyer, both of whom passed away earlier this year. Robert Manley, Phillip’s co-chairman, said that the heightened availability of works shifted this set of sales into a more diffuse terrain, making it less straightforward to orchestrate the kind of bidding intensity that raises prices to unforeseen levels—a trend that dominated auctions in the past two years. “It was harder to create bidding wars,” he said.

Schwartzman echoed this, adding that this month’s sales mark a return to a more “sober” environment in the trade, where prices are fair and bidding doesn’t climb to stunning heights—especially for little-known artists.

That’s good news for some. Serious collectors often leverage such a “softer” auction environment as an opportunity to access works previously beyond their reach, said New York art adviser Megan Fox Kelly. She emphasized that a more tempered marketplace can put some buyers at a strategic advantage when they’re calculating acquisitions with mind-bending values. “It’s a buyer’s market,” she said.

Of course, little is left to chance these days. $1.25 billion worth of artworks were brought to the block this season with financial backing through the use of guarantees: deals that auction houses arrange to off-set financial risks for sellers. For the highest-value artworks, auction houses work behind the scenes to establish benchmarks, and there is knowledge that only a select few buyers possess the capacity to compete at such elevated levels. These negotiations shape the landscape, predefining some of the sales’ outcomes. Last week, for example, figures for canonical artists stayed high relative to previous years: $129 million for Picasso at Sotheby’s and $34 million for a Richter at Phillips—the results were the top second and fourth prices for their respective artists. Some of the week’s most expensive lots, ones by Ed Ruscha, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Claude Monet followed a typical course, hammering below their low estimates. At Christie’s, Monet’s Le Bassin aux nymphéas (1917-19) went for $74 million during a 20th-century evening sale. “Whoever bought that painting, the guarantor, bought it really well,” said Kelly. “It could have been a whole lot more.”

So, where is the market right now? Advisers downplayed the significance of short-term drops in overall auction sales as a metric for assessing the trade’s health. Compared to the 2008 recession, for instance, there is a far more global spread of buyers, said Kelly, meaning that the market’s recovery time from any given slowdown is now significantly shorter. The bottom line: “I think there is still a lot of discretionary money out there,” Kelly said.

Wanda Nanibush is no longer the curator of Indigenous art at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto.

The museum confirmed that Nanibush had recently departed her position at the museum after “seven incredibly productive years” but did not provide a reason to ARTnews.

“Incorporating historical narratives that have been long excluded in institutions like the AGO is very hard work,” AGO director and CEO Stephan Jost said in a statement emailed to ARTnews. “In coming to this mutual decision with Wanda, we acknowledge her monumental leadership and vision and are deeply grateful for everything she accomplished.”

Last week, Jost emailed AGO staff a memo, which has been circulating online, about Nanibush leaving the museum, calling her work invaluable and acknowledging their frank discussions. “One of the many things I always heard from Wanda was her honesty, which at times resulted in difficult conversations, including in the last few weeks,” Jost wrote. “Incorporating historical narratives that have been long excluded in institutions like the AGO is very hard work, but she unswervingly inserted Indigenous art and artists, with grace, honesty and pride – which has changed our sense of history and our collective future at the museum.”

A report from The Globe and Mail, which first reported the news of Nanibush’s departure, described the exit as a mutual decision after “years of outspokenness that caused friction with some at the gallery and in the arts community – which came to a head with the Israel-Hamas war.”

New York stalwart Cheim & Read will close its doors next month after 26 years in business, the gallery said in an email announcement on Tuesday night. Its current exhibition dedicated to artist Kathe Burkhart, which opened on November 9, will be the gallery’s final public exhibition, closing on December 23.

In its email, the gallery said, “Cheim & Read has had the privilege of working with an exceptional group of artists, mounting important exhibitions, and producing scholarly catalogues over the past twenty six years.”

The gallery was founded in 1997 by John Cheim and Howard Read, who had previously been directors at the iconic Robert Miller Gallery. The duo quickly became known for mounting major exhibitions by artists like Louise Bourgeois, Lynda Benglis, Diane Arbus, Ron Gorchov, and Joan Mitchell, whose foundation departed the gallery in 2018 for David Zwirner.

Later same year, Cheim & Read announced that it would leave its longtime home of Chelsea for the Upper East Side and transition to “private practice, concentrating on the secondary market, ​sculpture​ commissions​ and special projects,” according to an email announcement it sent out. The new location would be helmed by Maria Bueno, a partner at the gallery. The Upper East Side space opened in September 2019 with a show dedicated to Gorchov.

But then in May 2021, Cheim & Read returned to its Chelsea space, with an exhibition of Matthew Wong, whose estate it had begun representing. Earlier this year, the gallery mounted a solo show of the self-taught artist who uses the moniker Cumwizard69420, whose “work reflects the chaotic topography of the internet, with subject matter that leans heavily on the scatalogical, the sexual, and the pop cultural,” as ARTnews reported.

A judicial ruling dismissed a lawsuit over the proposed sale of three major paintings from the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University in Indiana last month, reported the Art Newspaper. The sale of the artworks would help raise up to $10 million for improvements to the school’s freshman dormitories.

Porter County superior court judge Jeffery Thode ruled that the lawsuit trying to stop the university’s planned sale of the works could not continue because the plaintiffs Richard Brauer and Philipp Brockington lacked the standing to bring the action, as they are not directly connected to the trust that originally gifted the paintings to the university museum in 1953.

Richard Brauer was the founding director of the Valparaiso University Art Museum, which was renamed in his honor in 1996, and Philipp Brockington, who passed away on November 5, was a retired professor emeritus of law at the university and a benefactor of a fund that was set up to endow the museum.

During the court proceedings, the paintings in question—Georgia O’Keeffe’s Rust Red Hills (1930), Frederic E. Church’s Mountain Landscape (1865), and Childe Hassam’s The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate (1914)—were moved by the university to a secure, off-site location. The collective sale price of the works is estimated to be as high as $10 million.

In 1953, the donor trust agreement made between collector Percy H. Sloan, who donated nearly 400 works to the university including 276 by his father artist Junius Sloan, and Valparaiso University stipulated that “the collection shall be open to the public generally during … reasonable hours…; it being the intention of the parties to make the benefits of this collection available to all persons.” Though it required pieces from Sloan’s collection to be on view in a dedicated space, it made no clear provisions on the future sale of any of the artworks in the gift.

In photos, a glimpse at the lauded artists and rising stars to join the renowned collection.

The Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, a Germany-based exhibition of contemporary photography has been cancelled after one of the curators posted content to social media that the German cities of Mannheim, Ludwigshafen and Heidelberg, where the event was set to take place, described it as “antisemitic”. The event was set to open March 2024.

As first reported in the Art Newspaper, the Bangladeshi photojournalist and event co-curator Shahidul Alam posted “content that can be read as antisemitic and antisemitic content,” according to officials, including posts compared Israel’s assault on Northern Gaza to the Holocaust and accused Israel of genocide against the Palestinian people.

Authorities in the three German cities said in a statement that their “relationship of trust” with Alam “has been severely damaged” after his posts.

According to the Art Newspaper, organizers from the host cities approached Alam, as well as his two co-curators, Tanzim Wahab and Munem Wasif, to discuss the social media posts “in order to sensitize the curators to Germany’s special historical responsibility for the state of Israel and its right to exist.” Alam continued to share his views on social media. “[He] sees himself as an activist and demands freedom of expression,” the organizers said. For their part, Wahab and Wasif refused to work on the biennial if Alam was barred from participating.

“The consequences of the cancellation for the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie and the organizing team are far-reaching,” the organizers said. “They jeopardize the future of the entire event. In the time ahead, we will do everything in our power to maintain the Biennale as one of the largest and most important photography events in Germany and Europe in the long term.”

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