2:03pm
Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, along with eight other of his manuscripts sold for €3.2m at Sotheby’s in Paris last night. Commentators have turned decidedly lyrical describing the ghost of Breton floating around the auction room and having the last laugh at the huge sum that his anti-bourgeois text fetched. Also noted was the relief that will be felt by critics of the sale who were concerned that the documents would be split up and headed out of France – in fact they have been acquired by Gérard Lhéritier, founder of the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts, a private institution in...
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1:43pm
The news that Roman Abramovich has bought Bacon’s Triptych, 1976, and Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995 – for just under a cool $120 million – rather makes the buyer the star of this three-part story. Both purchases smashed records at auction last week – Freud became the most expensive living artist ($33.6m), eclipsing the previous record-holder Jeff Koons, and the Bacon made the highest auction price ever for a post-war work of art ($86.3m). But it is Abramovich, apparently a new entrant to the art market, who has created the biggest stir. Commentators on the sales have remarked on the...
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10:08am
An interesting schism among art critics has revealed itself following news of Robert Rauschenberg’s death last week. Tributes abounded to the avant-garde Pop artist – The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones saluted Rauschenberg as the ‘man who first made him want to write about art’; The New York Times describes the artist as having ‘time and again reshaped art in the 20th century’; and the Wall Street Journal claimed Rauschenberg as ‘the biggest innovator in art after Jackson Pollock.’ High praise indeed – but not by any means unchallenged. The New Republic argued that Rauschenberg’s work has been protected ‘by a sort...
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1:05pm
‘Philosophy of the Overlooked: Collecting’ kicked off the summer talks at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. The panel was made up of John Sellars, academic and book collector, art collector Anita Zabludowicz, and Mike Presdee, senior lecturer in Criminology at the University of Kent. A short film by Martin Hampton called ‘Possessed’ about four obsessive hoarders was screened first, presumably intended to prompt comparisons between their mental (ill) health and the sanity of serious art collectors. I’m not sure it convinced (Hampton’s moving film is nevertheless worth seeing as a piece on its own) but the speakers entertainingly...
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10:12am
At the opening of Philip Gurrey's first UK solo show at Madder 139 last night, he told me that the impressive collection of 20 paintings had been put together in just six months, with this gallery space in mind. Asked if there were any surplus paintings to allow for curatorial selection, the prolific 24 year-old said that he had painted an additional six that weren't on show. Three were in storage with the gallery, but the others had already been sold in America at NEXT, Chicago's art fair in April, and at PULSE art fair in New York in March.
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The Lower East Side, once home to immigrants and aspiring artists, is no receiving the uptown treatment.
The National Trust's plans to acquire Seaton Delaval Hall are a tribute to a genius who has inspired writers and artists for centuries.
The Fitzwilliam Museum is celebrating the centenary of the directorship of Sydney Carlyle Cockerell with an exhibition that makes clear that he was in many ways the first modern museum director.
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