May 10 – August 27, 2023

From Top Boy and Sex Education to The Other Black Girl

How And Just Like That series two inspired conflicted emotions in viewers

From Dumb Money and Saw X to My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3

The 14th season of Doctor Who begins streaming in November

How the creativity and heritage of the war-torn country are being supported

Why director Ridley Scott's comments about the French leader have caused anger

Why politicians are claiming viral hit is a new 'anthem'

Why Enter the Dragon remains awe-inspiring 50 years on

Live-action canine revenge comedy Strays is 'pleasant' but 'unsurprising'

An auctioneer who pleaded guilty to helping produce a group of faked Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings has avoided jail time, instead receiving a sentence of probation and community service from a Los Angeles court on Friday.

The case was related to the saga surrounding a 2022 exhibition about Basquiat held at the Orlando Museum of Art in Florida. That show touched off an FBI raid, the firing of the museum’s director, and legal action that is still ongoing.

Included in the show were a group of works that the museum’s director at the time, Aaron De Groft, claimed had been produced in 1982 while the artist lived in Los Angeles. He said that after that, they were left in a storage unit, then forgotten. De Groft claimed they were major rediscoveries.

But doubt started to emerge after the New York Times ran an investigation that questioned these works’ authenticity. One expert on branding seized on the FedEx typeface that appeared in one of these paintings. He said the shipping company hadn’t started to use that typeface until 1994, more than a decade after these works were allegedly produced.

After the FBI investigated the 25 paintings, seizing them in a dramatic raid that made headlines around the world, Michael Barzman, the auctioneer who today was sentenced to probation, was interviewed by federal agents. Speaking to them in 2022, he claimed he had no role in the production of the works.

The public mural Banksy painted about domestic violence, titled Valentine’s Day Mascara, is being sold back to members of the public for $153 (£120) a share.

The London-based Red Eight Galleries is brokering the deal between the owner of the townhouse property in the British city of Margate where the mural was painted, and Showpiece, a fractional ownership platform.

The mural has an estimated value of $7.64 million (£6 million) through an evaluation by Robin Barton of Bankrobber gallery. The fractional ownership sale of Valentine’s Day Mascara will take place on August 22 with a total of 27,000 shares.

“Realistically, we are looking to achieve between £1m and £1.5m,” Usher told the Art Newspaper, which first reported the news of the sale.

The mural features a 1950s-style housewife with a swollen, black eye, a bruised cheek, a swollen lower lip, and a knocked-out tooth. She wears a bright blue gingham dress, an apron, and yellow latex gloves, and has her arms out.

Walking out on Picasso, as Françoise Gilot did in 1953, could not eliminate his impact on her own art and life. The ambiguity is right there in the final lines of what remains her most notable creation, the best-selling 1964 book Life with Picasso, coauthored with Carlton Lake: when she left Picasso, “he burned all the bridges that connected me to the past I had shared with him. But in doing so he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive. I shall never cease being grateful to him for that.”

It’s a peculiar statement that accords her rejected lover the motivating agency in her own self-discovery. And it’s unsupported by any careful reading of the rest of the book, which paints a clear-eyed picture of the world’s most renowned artist at the height of his fame, but also a vivid self-portrait of an inexperienced young woman from a privileged background—she was just 21 when she met the Spanish painter, who was 40 years her elder—who nonetheless had the sharpness of perception and toughness of spirit to enter an inherently unequal relationship without sacrificing her identity to it. I suspect that Gilot’s survival instinct was just as inherent as her sense of self. And survive she did: when she died this past June, she was 101.

Early on, Gilot experimented with abstraction but then seems to have accepted Picasso’s dismissal of abstract painting as merely a “kind of invertebrate, unformulated interior dream.” In any case, her paintings up through the 1960s are primarily representational—and, as with many French painters of her generation, they show the strong imprint of Picasso’s influence.

Later she began to alternate between imagistic and nonobjective modes, though she always attributed autobiographical content to her abstract works. In writing about her 1979–80 composition The Hawthorne, Garden of Another Time, a luminous arrangement of flat, clearly demarcated color forms, she described it as embodying “the recollection of looking toward my paternal grandmother’s garden in Neuilly”—the affluent Paris suburb where she was born in 1921—“through the red stained-glass windows of the billiard room on the second floor.” Distilling her memories and perceptions into abstract form, she often secreted fragments of imagery within her works, blurring the distinction. Still, it can be argued that it was in her efforts toward abstraction that Gilot achieved her true independence as an artist. There, she was free to use color, as she said, “to exaggerate, to go beyond, to pursue the extreme limit of what is suggested by the pictorial imagination.”

She also achieved double-barreled success, as both a painter and a writer: Though academic attention to her career has been scarce, her exhibitions were legion, and in 2021 a couple of her paintings sold for $1.3 million each through Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Her book Life with Picasso sold millions of copies worldwide and was succeeded by Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art (1990) and the autobiographical Interface: The Painter and the Mask (1983).

Fans and prospective visitors of Anish Kapoor’s massive Cloud Gate sculpture won’t be able to see the public artwork until next year due to construction at Millennium Park.

The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events posted an alert on its website about construction on Grainger Plaza that started this week, limiting public access and views of Cloud Gate, more often known as the Bean, until spring 2024.

“This necessary maintenance by the City of Chicago will replace pavers and make other repairs and accessibility upgrades to the Plaza—to enhance the nearly 20-year-old Park’s appearance, visitor experience, and position as the #1 attraction in the Midwest,” the department wrote.

Cloud Gate (2006) is 33 feet high, 42 feet wide, and 66 feet long, making it one of world’s largest public art installations. The $23 million sculpture is comprised of 168 stainless steel plates welded together and then polished to a mirror finish, making it extremely popular for selfies and other photographs.

In 2017, the British-Indian artist told ARTnews about his complicated feelings about the sculpture’s popularity and its ability to incite strong opinions.

Two battling lawsuits that stem from the sale of an Alexander Calder sculpture are being waged in New York, with an art adviser alleging that the transaction was illegal and a prominent dealer claiming that she is attempting to keep him from doing business.

The legal action, first reported on Friday by the Daily Beast, began in January, when Lea Lee, the adviser, filed suit against French dealer and self-described “art detective” Elisabeth Royer-Grimblat, New York dealer Edward Tyler Nahem, and others.

Lee is the granddaughter of the architect Oscar Nitzschké, whom she described as a “close friend” of Calder. Prior to her death in 2017, her mother had owned the Calder work in question, which Nahem’s gallery exhibited at its Art Basel booth in Switzerland in 2018.

The parties disagree on how Nahem obtained the work. (The work’s title changes over the many documents submitted: Lee labeled it Mobile de Bretagne, while the defendants sometimes called it La Roche jaune, or The Yellow Rock, and dated it to around 1950.) Lee said she was unaware that the work was removed from her mother’s estate, which her sisters, Rose and Julie Groen, both defendants in that lawsuit, had been “feasting on,” according to Lee.

Writing in the present tense in an affidavit, Lee claimed that Royer-Grimblat “smuggles” the work out of her mother’s estate in 2017, and that when she raised concerns about the work in 2021, the sisters and Royer-Grimblat “commenced a slander campaign against me, aimed at destroying my professional reputation as an art advisor that seriously and negatively impacted my business both in New York and elsewhere.”

A large advertisement for the superhero movie Blue Beetle is currently installed on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where a famed sculpture of the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa is sited. Since going on view, many, including a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, have decried the ad, claiming that it is an eyesore.

Though the ad is only slated to be there for seven days, the large vinyl stickers are plastered across all 72 of the famous steps climbed by Rocky Balboa in the 1976 film Rocky.

CBS News spoke to a range of locals who disliked the advertisment, with one visitor from Dallas saying, “I think it’s tacky to put an ad like this on such an old prestigious place.”

Others seemed more nonplussed. “It gives color, it gives emotions. It’s cool, it’s fine,” Italian tourist Diletta Dinalle told CBS News.

The ad was approved by the Philadelphia Parks & Recreation department, which maintains the museum and the stairs. A parks department spokesperson told CBS that the city will receive $28,000 for the seven-day installation.

Gallery workers, art dealers, and market insiders have spent the summer buzzing about the dissolution of LDGR, the powerhouse New York consortium founded by dealers Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, Amalia Dayan, and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. Now, one of the founders has departed the business, with Greenberg Rohatyn set to leave the quartet and reopen her former gallery, Salon 94.

The four plan to continue to work together despite Greenberg Rohatyn reclaiming 3 East 89th Street, the once and future home of Salon 94, where LGDR held shows for artists like Marilyn Minter and Zhang Zipiao. Salon 94 Design, the design-focused branch of that gallery, has always been, and will continue to be, housed in the building.

LGDR, under its new moniker Lévy Gorvy Dayan, will continue to operate out of their headquarters on 64th Street. In September, the gallery will open a survey of Pierre Soulages, the famed French painter who died earlier last year at 102.

“We have more similarities than differences,” Greenberg Rohatyn told ARTnews. “It’s just that the differences have always been more public.” 

When it was first formed, in 2021, LGDR had the aim of being more than a traditional gallery. In addition to representing artists, it set out to advise collectors and facilitate sales to auction houses.

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The Headlines

PHOTOGRAPHER ROLAND F. FREEMAN, who devoted his practice to chronicling Black culture in the United States, documenting the lives and work of quilt makers, musicians, vendors, woodworkers, and other artists and creators, died on August 7 in Washington, D.C. at the age of 87, Brian Murphy reports in the Washington Post. Freeman, who usually shot in black and white, took up the discipline after seeing photos of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, which he had attended, in his Baltimore neighborhood. He later became a quilt designer, applying his photos to fabric. “I’m interested in traditional folklife practices,” he said in an interview quoted by the Post. “And in a lot of places in the South, a lot of those folklife practices are closer to what they were 50 to 100 years ago than in a lot of other places.”

OWNERSHIP DISPUTES. New York dealer Edward Tyler Nahem has filed suit in New York, seeking a declaration that his gallery owns a $8.7 million Alexander Calder mobile that he acquired from dealer French dealer Elizabeth Royer-Grimblat, the Daily Beast reports. Photographer Lea Lee, the daughter of the Calder’s prior owner, has claimed in legal actions that her sisters sold the piece to Royer-Grimblat without the permission of their mother. Nahem alleges that Lee has harassed him at art fairs and filed a criminal action against him in France. A judge previously dismissed a lawsuit from Lee; she appealed. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that there is a rather more low-stakes duel ongoing between the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Treasury Department over who owns a 143-year-old painting of Hugh McCulloch, who led those entities at different points. For now, Treasury holds it.

The Digest

Federal prosecutors have filed documents seeking the forfeiture of additional artworks, more than 30 diamonds, and $2 million in the ongoing case against art collector Nazem Said Ahmad.

US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Pace and US Attorney Claire S. Kedeshian filed a three-page Bill of Particulars for the forfeiture of a JP Morgan Chase bank account with a balance of more than $2 million, two artworks by Dan McCarthy, three paintings and two sculptures by Alex Brewer (also known as Hense), four sculptures by Mark Whalen, a sculpture by Joankim Ojanen, a 2.4-carat “green diamond cushion modified brilliant cut ring,” and 34 other diamonds.

The items, which would only be subject to forfeiture if Said Ahmad were convicted, were all owned by companies mentioned in the nine-count indictment unsealed earlier this year in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The document also includes various allegations against Said Ahmad, accusing him of conspiring to defraud the United States and other governments, evading customs laws, and money laundering for the benefit of Lebanon-based terrorist group Hezbollah.

Ahmad has been sanctioned by the US government since 2019 for his role as a major financial donor to Hezbollah through money laundering activities, as well as for personally providing funds to the organization’s secretary-general. He was barred from conducting business—such as collecting and selling “high-value art,” real estate, and diamonds—with US entities and persons.

The indictment further alleged that Ahmad and his associates obtained artwork worth more than $1.2 million from the US after he was sanctioned in 2019, but noted that amount did not account for the tax evasion from foreign governments. By comparison, the indictment said the total weight and value of the diamonds, which had allegedly passed through Ahmad’s businesses after the sanctions had been imposed in 2019, were graded at approximately 1,546 carats and were worth more than $91 million.

If you couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to watch Charlotte York sell a piece of art, now you have your chance: the newest episode of the TV series And Just Like That … features a scene in which she peddles a painting by Alex Israel, the artist whose airbrushed images of himself and California skies have proven a hit with the market.

This latest episode, which premiered on Thursday, features Charlotte at work, newly returned to the world of art dealing after a decades-long hiatus spent building a home. There she is at the fictional Kasabian Gallery, surrounded by Israel paintings when the pop star Sam Smith, playing themselves, walks in.

“This Alex Israel,” Charlotte says, motioning Smith over to an Israel self-portrait, “it has the Pop sensibility that we talked about. And, like you, he uses his identity in his art.”

“I really like it,” Smith says.

“Do you!” Charlotte exclaims, as fashion designer Jeffrey C. Williams, Smith’s real-life friend who is here also playing themselves, nods in endorsement. It’s a match, and Charlotte makes the sale for $100,000—which, all things considered, seems to be about average for a work by Israel, whose art once sold for more than $1 million at auction.