Cargoes or skinnies – the trouser styles dividing Gen Z and millennials

A potential heir to the legal successor of Adolf Lieser has emerged and claimed ownership of the Gustav Klimt portrait sold for $32 million in a buzzy auction in Vienna, per Der Standard. The individual, a Munich-based architect, is not a relative of the Leiser family, but lodged a claim after learning last week that the painting missing for a century had resurfaced at im Kinksy auction house.

Titled Portrait of Fräulein Lieser (1917), the work was purchased by an anonymous Hong Kong dealer for its low estimate (but still an art auction record for Austria). The work is unfinished, but Klimt rarely underperforms on the block; bidders, perhaps, were afraid of this very situation, an ownership challenge supported by gaps in the portrait’s provenance. 

According to Der Standard, the restitution settlement reached by the auction house only involved the seller and the heirs of Adolf Lieser and his sister-in-law Lilly Lieser. Typically, heirs declare that their decision—in this case, to give the painting to the auction house—represents the will of all possible legal heirs. When contacted for comment, the lawyers of both parties told the German news outlet that the situation was under review by the clients. 

According to im Kinsky, the painting, one of Klimt’s last works, resurfaced in the private collection of an Austrian citizen. “A painting of such rarity, artistic significance and value has not been available on the art market in Central Europe for decades,” the auction house said in a press statement on its website. 

Catalogs of Klimt’s works (2007 and 2012) identify the subject of the portrait as an 18-year-old Margarethe Constance Lieser (b. 1899), the daughter of the industrial magnate Adolf Lieser. Klimt likely began painting the portrait in 1917, only a year before his death from a stroke. The painting—barring a few unfinished spots—was later given to the Lieser family. 

Dani Levinas, an art collector who gained a following for interviewing other collectors, has died at 75. The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., where he formerly served as board chair, announced his death on Wednesday.

“Dani Levinas’s passion and enthusiasm for art by living artists will have an enduring impact on The Phillips Collection,” said current board chair John Despres in a statement. “We will truly miss his inspiration and guidance.”

With his late wife, Mirella, Levinas bought a significant grouping of works by Latin American artists, acquiring pieces by Jose Dávila, Cildo Meireles, Gabriel de la Mora, Iván Navarro, Jorge Pardo, and others. His collection also came to include works by artists based outside the region, among them Anish Kapoor and Amalia Pica.

“I love to help artists, but I also enjoy living with the pieces,” he told the New York Times in 2020.

His most lasting legacy within the art world, however, is not his collection, but his conversations with his colleagues, from the late Rosa de la Cruz to the collecting couple Don and Mera Rubell. He published these interviews in a 2023 book called The Guardians of Art: Conversations with Major Collectors and as articles in El País, where he served as a columnist. “I don’t just collect art, I collect collectors,” he said in the Times interview.

Works from the art collection of Iowa business leader and philanthropist John Pappajohn and his wife Mary will be offered as a group of highlights during Christie’s Spring sales in New York next month, the auction house announced Friday. 

The Pappajohns were a mainstay of ARTnews’s Top 200 collector list from 1998 to 2014. John passed away last year on April 26 at 94. Mary, aged 88, died in 2022.

The collection, which is comprised of works by post-war and contemporary luminaries including  Bruce Nauman, Agnes Martin, and Ad Reinhardt, will be led by Jasper Johns’s 1961 work 0 through 9 (estimate $5 million – $7 million) which debuted that same year at the artist’s first European show at Galerie Rive Droite in Paris.     

Johanna Flaum, Christie’s vice chairman of 20th and 21st century art, described the Pappajohns’s collection as “richly reflective of post-war and contemporary art in America” and “best in class,” and praised the couple, who began collecting art in the 1960s, for acquiring works that at the time “challenged accepted norms and pushed boundaries, proposing new concepts and ideas of what art could be.”

Also notable among the collection is Agnes Martin’s acrylic and graphite canvas Untitled #7 from 1996 (estimate $3 million – $5 million) and Bruce Nauman’s sexually charged Hanged Man (1985, estimate $4 million – $6 million).

Various Russian publications reported on Friday that Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art was being searched by local police, potentially in connection to LGBTQ+ literature that is thought to be housed at the institution.

On the social media platform Telegram, Ostorozhno Novosti, a local news channel, said that police officers were at a building that holds the Garage Museum’s archives. The museum’s leaders and curators were reportedly being kept from using their phones and were being held until the search ended.

The reasons for the search were not clear, but Ostorozhno Novosti speculated that it was related to the LGBTQ+ literature archived by the museum. Earlier this month, works put out by the left-wing publishing house Directio Liberia and tomes released by Moloko Plus, an alternative publisher that promises to provide “journalism that no longer exists,” were removed from Garage Museum’s bookstore, according to Ostorozhno Novosti.

Adding further confusion to the mix was a Telegram post from Podyom, which reported that employees at the museum denied that the search was still active earlier today.

A spokesperson for the museum did not immediately respond to ARTnews’s request for comment.

In 1924 the French poet and critic André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto. The 4,000-word document marked both the birth of the eponymous movement and the moment when its dogmas were codified, effectively laying the groundwork for the countless derivations of the form that would follow—in the 15 years before World War II, certainly, but also after, up to, and including today. The Surrealist movement may have waned, but its ideas have not.

Now, exactly one century removed from the genesis of this art form, we find ourselves contending with the emergence of another: art made by artificial intelligence, or AI. In all kinds of little ways, the latter feels eerily evocative of the former. Like Surrealism, AI art is automatic and disembodied, at home in the space between language and image. Its schemes are described as dreams, and one of its prominent programs is named after Salvador Dalí. Even the idea of an invisible electronic apparatus that transforms ones and zeros into bizarro images sounds like something a Surrealist would cook up.

It is an imperfect analogy, but it may also be an instructive one, particularly as we wade through the moral and legal repercussions of AI and the ambient anxiety that it will replace art as we know it. Can looking at the past reveal something about where the future of this form is headed?

In Colombian artist Carlos Motta’s 2013 video, Nefandus, an indigenous man and a Spanish man travel down Colombia’s Don Diego River telling stories of the violent sodomization against natives by the Spanish during the conquest in Latin America. “The landscape does not confess what it has witnessed; the images are out of time and veil the actions that have taken place there,” the narrator explains.

This question of colonial violence against the land and the passage of time is at the center of Nefandus and Part II of “El Dorado: Myths of Gold,” the exhibition in which it is currently being shown. On view until May 18, the exhibition at Americas Society in New York features over 100 objects and artworks from 60 artists linked by El Dorado, the mythical city of gold believed to be in the deep jungles of Colombia.

“From at least the sixteenth century onward, the myth of El Dorado was a central force in establishing the Americas as a “utopian” place, a venue of desire and a land ripe for conquest and plunder,” Edward Sullivan, co-curator of the exhibition and a ​professor of art history at New York University, told ARTnews.

The works in the exhibition collectively show the consequences of this deep-seated myth, which penetrated the minds of colonizers and spurred the extraction, excavation, and brutal transformation of the Americas.

(Part I of the exhibition, which closed in December, displayed 16th century maps that attempted to place El Dorado, alongside contemporary maps by artists who engaged with topics of extraction and colonization.)

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THE HEADLINES

NEW KLIMT CLAIM. A potential heir to the legal successor of Adolf Lieser came forward with a claim they own the Gustav Klimt portrait of Fraulein Lieser, right before it sold at auction for a low estimate of $32 million, according to Der Standard. The potential heir, a Munich-based architect who is not a relative of the Lieser family, learned last week about the sale of the 1917 painting that had gone missing for a century, and lodged his claim the day before it was sold to an anonymous Hong Kong collector, on behalf of the Lieser family that commissioned the painting and its owner at the time. What does this mean for the painting’s fate, which fetched a low price (relative to Klimt’s market) at least in part out of fear something like this might happen? Patti Wong, owner of the Hong Kong–based art advisory that bid for the anonymous buyer said, “We have been assured that the seller and all Lieser heirs are covered [by the contract between the auction house and the consignor],” reports the South China Morning Post.

BRONZE RETURN. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced it is returning a bronze head of a young man to Turkey, more than a decade after the country requested it. The news came following an investigation indicating the illegal 1960s excavation of the head, dated 100 BCE–100 CE, that had been detached from an unidentified life-size figure. “In light of new information recently provided by Matthew Bogdanos and the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office … we agreed that the object needed to be returned to Türkiye,” said museum leadership in a press release.

THE DIGEST

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.

The French polymath Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) was never content to work in one mode—and was ostracized for it. His retrospective at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice is titled “The Juggler’s Revenge”: it makes a case for this versatility, showing a cohesive spirit across works in film, sculpture, collage, drawing, literature, and jewelry.

No bother, Cocteau was unperturbed, impressively juggling this range of media. He inflected even his most commercial films with avant-garde impulses. An excerpt from his 1930 Surrealist film Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet) features a handsome shirtless man communing with an anthropomorphic armless Classical sculpture. At one point, the man finds a pair of animate lips on his palm, which he then transfers to the sculpture. The sculpture, now equipped with a mouth, instructs the man to go through the looking glass, so he positions himself along its frame and presses his body against it. Suddenly, he splashes through, as if into a swimming pool, and falls into the abyss.

By 1953, Cocteau served as the jury president for the Cannes Film Festival, a post he held two years in a row. But André Breton, Surrealism’s self-appointed gatekeeper, “despised Cocteau,” the catalog reveals—not on the quality of his work, but on the simple fact that Breton was a raging homophobe, describing himself as “completely disgusted” by male homosexuality.

The show positions Cocteau as a brave forerunner for generations of queer artists who would follow. It opens with a piece not by Cocteau, but by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The gesture, from curator and art historian Kenneth E. Silver, highlights Cocteau’s influence on younger generations (but only in this first room: the other works in this 150-plus-object show are by Cocteau or related ephemera). Made in 1991, the year that Ross Laycock, Gonzalez-Torres’s partner died, “Untitled” (Orpheus Twice) features two side-by-side full-length mirrors that recall the Orpheus myth—a long-standing motif in Cocteau’s work. While mourning and with his premature death looming, Gonzalez-Torres seemingly felt like Orpheus: separated from his lover, the twinned mirrors served as a kind of connection to Ross. Next to the mirrors, we see a clip from Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée, which also uses that metaphor of the mirror as a portal—this time, one that takes the protagonist to Hades, where Orpheus seeks to save Eurydice.

John Cage’s 1952 work 4′33″ has proven a touchstone for artists, composers, and thinkers of all kinds, spawning conceptual artworks, experimental gestures, and even an iPhone app. But even as almost everyone agrees on its importance, misunderstandings about the work proliferate.

For one, 4′33″ is sometimes affectionately known as Cage’s “silent piece,” since the work calls for its enactor to stop using their instrument for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Cage himself used that terminology to describe the work, then would go on to contradict it, claiming that 4′33″ was not silent.

This week’s big art-related discourse—on social media, anyway—centered around a botched interpretation of the work. In a New York Times op-ed, Columbia University professor John McWhorter claimed that he had been trying to teach his music humanities students about the Cage piece when he was interrupted by pro-Palestine protesters shouting “From the river to the sea.”

“I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building,” McWhorter wrote.

This comment spurred one X user to respond: “‘the protests are robbing my Columbia students of listening to John Cage’s 4’33, the piece of music that is explicitly designed to force you to listen to…what’s around you.’ absolutely perfect.” At the time this article was published, the tweet had 38,000 likes.

When I took my mother back to Paris for her first visit in nearly five decades, there was no question we would go to the Louvre. I was more surprised that she wanted to stand in the long line to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503) for the few seconds we would get to take pictures and selfies with the famous painting.

This experience is often annoying and disappointing for tourists, with one recent analysis of 18,000 reviews deeming the Renaissance portrait “the world’s most disappointing masterpiece.”

Da Vinci’s iconic image of an almost-smiling woman is protected by bullet-proof, anti-reflective glass, along with tightly-controlled temperature and humidity settings to ensure the painting’s conservation.

In an effort to remedy this situation, the Mona Lisa may be moved to an underground chamber, according to a report in The Telegraph Tuesday.

Louvre director Laurence des Cars recently suggested the relocation of the popular artwork to a dedicated room constructed in the institution’s basement.

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