Last week, ARTnews celebrated the 34th edition of its annual Top 200 Collectors list with a cocktail party at the Waldorf Astoria Residences New York Gallery on Park Avenue.

The co-hosts of the evening were Top 200 Collectors Komal Shah and Josef Vascovitz and Lisa Goodman, in partnership with Lugano Diamonds, HUB International, and The Mascot Wine. Guests were able to mingle while viewing the not-yet-opened Waldorf Astoria and its new residences.

The Waldorf Astoria’s art collection, which will be owned by future residents of the building and is now curated by curator and auctioneer Simon de Pury, includes work by artists from around the world, such as An Te Liu, Benjamin Plé, Minjung Kim, Philippe Decrauzat, Rowan Mersh, James Ryan, Flavie Audi, and Matthew Pillsbury.

Notable attendees included fellow Top 200 Collectors Glenn R. Fuhrman, Jamie and Robert Soros, and newcomers to the list like Gary Steel and Steven Rice. Also in attendance were artists Honor Titus and David Antonio Cruz, adviser Ana Sokoloff, digital strategist JiaJia Fei, National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet, Yale School of Art dean Kymberly N. Pinder, and dealers Stefania Bortolami, Friedrich Petzel, Casey Kaplan, Nicola Vassell, Mathieu Templon, and Tara Downs.

The topic of the evening was philanthropy, a recurring theme throughout this year’s Top 200 Collectors issue (on newsstands October 17, while the list will appear online October 9) and something near and dear to the event’s cohosts as well as partner Lugano Diamonds. (Lugano’s philanthropic endeavors have supported the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Aspen Art Museum, and the Orange County Museum of Art.)

A German museum worker was recently sentenced to prison by a court in Munich for stealing four paintings from the Deutsches Museum and selling three of them through auction houses.

The prison sentence for the 30-year-old thief, whose name cannot be released due to German privacy laws, is one year and nine months. The sentencing on September 11 also included the requirement to pay damages of more than €60,000 (more than $63,500).

The Munich district court said he had been given a lenient sentence because of his lack of prior crimes, his expressed regret, and the fact that the thefts took place several years ago. “He said he acted without reflection,” the court said. “He could no longer explain his behavior to himself.”

The four paintings stolen from the art and science museum’s storage room were Franz von Stuck’s Das Märchen vom Froschkönig (Fairy Tale of the Frog King), Eduard von Grützner’s Die Weinprüfung (Tasting the Wine), Franz von Defregger’s Zwei Mädchen beim Holzsammeln im Gebirge (Two Girls Gathering Wood in the Mountains) and Franz Defregger’s Dirndl.

The von Stuck work was replaced by a forged copy and the original sold to a Swiss gallery for €70,000 ($74,000) through Ketterer Kunst, an auction house in Munich. Its loss was discovered after a provenance researcher noticed that the painting was “quite a clumsy copy,” despite being in the right frame, museum spokeswoman Sabine Pelgjer told the Art Newspaper. Inspection of the institution’s storage depots resulted in the discovery of the three other missing paintings. “Only the frames were left,” she said.

Artist Sin Wai Kin’s practice as a storyteller draws attention to the gaps between the stories we are told and the lives we live, asking who is given the power to tell us these stories and what these stories enforce. The London-based artist’s latest film, Dreaming the End, compounds this thinking. As so often is the case within Wai Kin’s practice, this work looks at our relationships to our bodies, our bodies’ relationship to the world, and how, in the space between these two, our sense of identity manifests.

Commissioned by the Fondazione Memmo in Rome and made on location around the city over the course of a year, the film features characters which regularly populate Wai Kin’s work, The Storyteller and Change, who move through a looping narrative rich with references, cycles, transitions, and the binding of language, taking tropes from various cinematic genres like thriller, noir, and fantasy to bring this to bear.

As we sat in the Fondazione’s courtyard earlier this year, Wai Kin spoke of their connection to the city. “Rome is a city of narrative and of history so that had to be something that was deeply entrenched in the work,” they said. “My practice is so much about storytelling, and what better place to think about the history of storytelling than Rome, where everywhere you turn there is architecture or a monument that is solidifying history—there is an inevitability of this history and truth and power.”

The film is rich with layers and sited in the city’s infamous architecture: the gardens of Villa Medici, the interior of Palazzo Ruspoli, and the spaces of Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (now owned by Fendi). This anchor to the real is what gives the work its potential, makes the abstract tangible. Dreaming the End follows the characters as they move through the winding narrative of talking statues, triangular apples, and endless staircases. There is a surreal edge within the work that is amplified by speculative fictions that course through much of Wai Kin’s oeuvre.

“I was trying to think about all these narratives in this work and create a fantasy that speaks to reality more accurately than most nonfiction,” Wai Kin said.

A new annual initiative aimed at supporting experimental artists around the world is being launched by Tate Modern.

Titled the Infinities Commission, it is intended to to honor artists “working in highly inventive ways, freely crossing a variety of disciplines to create speculative, disruptive, or immersive projects that sit outside conventional artistic categories,” as Catherine Wood, director of programs at Tate Modern, said in a statement. “The Infinities Commission will give that kind of innovative work a home at Tate Modern and allow a broader public to experience it.”

Tate Modern already facilitates another major commission series that sees sizable works debut in its Turbine Hall. The Turbine Hall commissions are closely watched, and the Infinities Commissions are likely to be as well.

The prize will be granted to an artist by a panel of experts. The selected artist will create a new monumental work that will premiere in the Tanks—the museum’s dedicated performance, film, and installation spaces—the following spring. Additionally, three other artists will be selected by the panel to receive £10,000 (roughly $12,215) for the research and development of their work. All recipients will then discuss their practice at a public event.

The inaugural selection panel includes musician and artist Brian Eno, critic and curator Oulimata Gueye, artist Anne Imhof, artistic director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst Andrea Lissoni, and executive director and chief curator of New York’s the Kitchen Legacy Russell.

An Isa Genzken sculpture was withdrawn from a Sotheby’s auction after a strange series of events that involved an appearance on a German equivalent to Antiques Roadshow, scrutiny over the piece’s seller, and a request from the artist’s lawyer.

The Genzken sculpture, a 2011 piece called Weltempfänger (World Receiver), is a concrete block with two antennae sticking out of it. The piece had been given the coveted Lot 1 placement in an online sale held by Sotheby’s Cologne office. The sale had listed the work as coming from “an important private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia,” and placed the estimate at 50,000 euros.

“Sotheby’s has withdrawn the work in agreement with the consignor, and [provides] no further detail at this stage,” a representative for the house said in a statement, adding that the work was “not withdrawn on authenticity grounds.”

Weltempfänger was to be sold as her current survey at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin continues to receive acclaim. (That exhibition even features other “Weltempfänger” sculptures.) But the work never made it to auction as the German and Austrian press speculated over how it came to sale in the first place.

Earlier this month, the German art publication Monopol noted that the sculpture was being sold at Sotheby’s not long after it had appeared on Bares für Rares, a popular TV series aired by ZDF in which participants bring with them an object they believe to be rare and valuable, then are given the opportunity to sell it to experts. The episode with the Genzken sculpture was broadcast on September 6; the Sotheby’s sale began on September 14 and closed bidding on September 21.

The Wolfgang Hahn Prize, one of the world’s biggest art awards, has this year gone to Anna Boghiguian, an artist whose work has been seen widely on the biennial circuit. She will now take home 100,000 euros (about $106,000) and will see her work acquired by Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, which facilitates the award.

Boghiguian, who was born in Egypt and is of Armenian origins, is well-known for work that mines various historical happenings for political meaning, taking up subjects such as the salt trade and Virginia Woolf’s writing. Her work frequently takes the form of vast installations composed of painted figures that are arranged to fill rooms.

In recent years, Boghiguian has risen to international fame thanks to her appearance in many notable biennials. After showing at the 2012 edition of Documenta, she won the Golden Lion for her Armenian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, a jury member for the prize who curated Boghiguian’s work into her editions of Documenta and the Istanbul Biennial, said in a statement, “Her work’s poetry and uniqueness as well as her directness and expressivity fit ideally into the Museum Ludwig’s collection with its strong expressionist positions. Anna Boghiguian has been widely recognized internationally only recently, over the last ten years, so that this award is for a highly topical artist, rather than for a lifetime achievement. She is totally contemporary in her themes and in the connections she draws through her readings, travels and internet searches, between historical stories and political and aesthetic discussions of our present world.”

Next month, Boghiguian will be the subject of a solo show at the Power Plant in Toronto, where she is set to show recent works dealing with the concept of democracy as well as older books made while she lived in cities in Canada.

In mid-September, I was standing in Times Square, the Disney Store on one side of me and a Sephora on the other, watching a collaborative performance by the noise artists Dis Fig and SOUR VISION. At first, the scene was surreal. But, as it went on, it began to make more sense. What neighborhood is more overwhelming than Times Square? What music is more abrasive than noise?

The juxtaposition was exciting; it was two opposite, yet equally extreme, poles of New York City culture coming together. The performance was was part of PUNK SHOW, a free one-day festival organized by Times Square Arts and NEW INC, a creative incubator founded in 2014 by the New Museum.

For Salome Asega, the director of NEW INC and a Las Vegas native, the pairing felt natural. “It’s a little taste of home, for sure,” she said early in the night about the sensory overload of Times Square. “It’s also just a dynamic part of the city where worlds collide.”

Helping worlds collide is at the heart of NEW INC, whose mission is to support creative practitioners working across a wide variety of mediums, from art and design to technology, science, and architecture. Now in its tenth year, the cultural incubator was the first of its kind when it was founded.

“I like to say it’s a home for the misfits, for the people who don’t neatly fit into any one discipline,” Asega said.

Recent floods in Libya have uncovered long-buried archaeological structures in an ancient Greek settlement outside the devastated city of Derna. The magnitude of the catastrophe, however, is impeding preservation efforts.

Local authorities discovered the structure while surveying the damage to Cyrene, a Greek city founded in 631 BCE. Cyrene thrived in the fourth century BCE as a center for agricultural and commercial activity, and holds several ancient landmarks such as a  temples dedicated to Zeus and Apollo, respectively.

But Cyrene is now in dire need of aid after an aging dam burst earlier this month near Derna, unleashing a torrent of water across eastern Libya. Per the New York Times, more than 4,000 people have been reported dead while 8,000 others are missing.

The floods near Derna started after the country was hit on September 10 by Storm Daniel, a devastating storm system that also wreaked havoc on Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria. The storm caused strong winds, flash floods, and set a new rainfall record for Libya, according to the World Meterological Organization.

While damage was extensive in all the affected countries, in Libya, the storm came into contact with two aging dams, built in the 1970s from clay, rocks, and earth. While there have long been warnings about the condition of the dams, dating back to the late ’90s, corruption under the government of Colonel Muammar Al Qaddafi and then political instability since he was toppled in 2011 have prevented the needed maintainence.

Christie’s announced Thursday that it will offer Claude Monet’s painting Le bassin aux nymphéas (1917-1919) at its 20th Century evening sale in New York this November. The painting, which will sell with a guarantee, carries an estimate of $65 million.

The painting of Monet’s Giverny gardens, two meters wide by one meter tall, was in Monet’s estate when he died in 1926. It has been in the same private collection since 1972, according to the auction house.

“As far as we can tell, it has never been seen publicly, which also means it is in great condition,” Max Carter, Christie’s vice chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art, Americas, told the Financial Times.

Monet’s auction record was last set in May 2019 when Sotheby’s sold the artist’s 1890 landscape Meules (Haystacks) for $110.7 million, more than double the work’s $55 million estimate. At the time, the work was the highest price ever fetched for a work of Impressionism and had previously been sold at Christie’s New York in May 1986 for $2.53 million.

In 2018,  Nymphéas en fleur (1914–17), similarly a painting of the artist’s gardens, sold for $84.7 million at Christie’s New York from the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller. That price was the previous record for the artist until the selling of the haystacks painting.

12 min read

The first Jewish settlements in the United Kingdom

Before the Norman Conquest of 1066, Jewish people lived in England, but not as part of organised communities. The first Jewish settlement of 1070 was comprised of Jewish financiers from Rouen, in the northern region of France, who were invited in by William the Conqueror (William I) to establish themselves in England and Wales in the hopes that they could prop up the administration of his government and consolidate his position as the King of England.

In order to achieve this William I was required to borrow large sums of money. However, he was impeded by Catholic doctrine, which considered lending money for interest, also known as usury, a sin, forbidding Christians from participating in the practice.  As Judaism permits loans with interest between Jews and non-Jews, this obstacle was circumvented, and Jewish people were encouraged and sometimes forced to engage in this practice. Once they arrived in England and Wales, Jewish people became the collective property of the Crown, and, while they were granted a Charter of Liberties which meant that they could rely on the Crown for protection, they were also taxed onerously. The privilege to lend money at interest was exploited by English rulers and, although business dealings prospered between Jews and Christians, as the former grew wealthier, the Jewish community became more and more relied upon as a source of funds, not only for the monarchy, but also for the wider Christian population. Increasing amounts of debt to Jewish creditors, alongside the perceived image of Jews as being on the side of rulers, stoked the growing antisemitic sentiment plaguing Europe at the time. This was also propagated by the beginning of the Crusades in 1096 and fabricated allegations of Jews taking part in a ritual called ‘blood libel’, which involved the abduction and sacrifice of Christian children. The Crown did not protect the Jewish community from persecution and supposedly sometimes conflict was even encouraged by rulers such as William II (William Rufus), the son and successor of William I, who would orchestrate public debates on theological topics between the two parties. All of this came to a head on the coronation of King Richard I in September of 1189, when many Christian and Jewish subjects alike came to Westminster Abbey in London to pay homage to their new ruler. However, Christian holding religious superstitions regarding the presence of Jews at the holy event, flogged them and threw them out of the coronation banquet. After this incident, rumour spread like wildfire throughout England that the king had ordered the murder of Jews, which led to multiple instances of mob-led anti-Jewish violence in London, East Anglia, Lincolnshire and York. Indeed, it was in York that the bloodiest pogrom took place on the 16th and 17th of March, 1190, where 150 Jews were massacred, which completely eradicated the local Jewish community. What set this particular attack apart from the rest is that it was led by the noblemen Richard Malebisse, William Percy, Marmaduke Darell, and Philip de Fauconberg, who took advantage of growing anti-semitic sentiment to erase large amounts of debt accrued from Jewish moneylenders. It was this attack that prompted King Richard I to develop a new system where records of loans were to be kept in archae (chests) in each Jewish settlement, to avoid record destruction.

The Expulsion of Jews of 1290

Subsequent rulers, such as King John (1199-1216) forced the Jewish community to pay ever increasing amounts of money as taxes. In 1210, as a result of his debt accrued from a failed campaign against France, he summoned Jewish leaders from across England to Bristol, where they were imprisoned and tortured, because he believed that they had concealed their assets from him in 1207. They were threatened with continued imprisonment, torture and expulsion if they did not pay him 66,000 marks (approximately the equivalent of £1,000,000 today). They were unable to pay this sum, which resulted in many arrests and jail sentences. In 1215, King John signed the Magna Carta, which contained two clauses pertaining to Jewish moneylending:

‘10. If anyone has taken a loan from Jews, great or small, and dies before the debt is paid, the debt is not to incur interest for as long as the heir is under age, whoever he may hold from. And if the debt comes into our hands, we will take only the principal recorded in the charter.

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