Art News. Vasari Codex

trending_up market schedule May 1, 2026 visibility 49 link 17 artists, 1 gallery

The Marcel Duchamps That Got Away: On Collecting His Work and the Sprawling MoMA Show

The article recounts the author's personal experience as a collector who passed up the opportunity to buy a complete set of Marcel Duchamp's readymades at a 2002 Phillips de Pury and Luxembourg auction. The set, editioned by dealer Arturo Schwartz in 1964, included iconic works like *Fountain* and *Bicycle Wheel*, but the sale was a financial failure, with many pieces bought-in or selling for far below expectations. The author later acquired some of the unsold works privately. The piece is framed around the concurrent Duchamp exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and Gagosian.

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trending_up market schedule May 1, 2026 visibility 51 link 36 artists, 1 gallery

The 20 Most Expensive Artworks Hitting the Auction Block This Season

The May 2026 New York auctions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips will feature 20 high-value lots priced at $30 million or more, including works by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter, and others. The sales are staggered around the Venice Biennale and Frieze New York, with Sotheby’s holding its contemporary evening auction on May 14 and Christie’s its 20th-century sale on May 18. Notable consignments come from the estates of S.I. Newhouse, former MoMA board president Agnes Gund, and dealer Marian Goodman.

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trending_up market schedule Oct 31, 2025 visibility 17 link 4 artists, 2 galleries

maurizio cattelan golden toilet sothebys auction 1234759561

Sotheby's is auctioning Maurizio Cattelan's solid gold toilet, titled "America" (2016), during its November evening sale at the Breuer Building in New York. The 18-karat, 100-kilogram functional toilet will be on view from November 8, though visitors will not be allowed to use it. The starting bid will be determined by the work's weight in gold, estimated around $10 million. The piece was previously exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in 2016, where over 100,000 visitors used it, and at Blenheim Palace in the UK, where it was infamously stolen in a smash-and-grab heist and never recovered. Sotheby's will accept cryptocurrency for the sale, following the precedent set by Cattelan's banana artwork last year.

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article culture schedule May 16, 2025 visibility 18 link 20 artists, 1 gallery

modern contemporary art 2639749

The article explores the distinction between Modern and contemporary art, explaining that Modern art emerged in the late 19th century as a reaction to classical art and the Industrial Revolution, with movements like Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, and Surrealism redefining painting in response to photography. Contemporary art, by contrast, is a reaction to Modern art, with its start debated between World War II and the 1960s-70s consumerist era, encompassing diverse mediums such as sculpture, street art, and performance art, exemplified by artists like Jeff Koons, Banksy, and Yoko Ono.

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article news schedule Jan 29, 2026 visibility 24 link 18 artists, 2 galleries

art sg jd museum sothebys singapore 2741222

The Asia-Pacific art scene saw significant activity across multiple sectors. Art SG reported increased attendance and sales, while the SAM Art SG Fund acquired works for the Singapore Art Museum. JD.com announced plans for a major new museum in Shenzhen, and several appointments and award winners were named across the region. Auction houses Bonhams Hong Kong and Sotheby's Singapore posted strong sales results, with the latter setting new artist records.

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trending_up market schedule Nov 25, 2025 visibility 26 link 10 artists, 5 galleries

kohler announces 2026 residency industry moves 1234762363

The ARTnews industry moves column for November 19, 2025 reports several gallery and institutional changes: Ortuzar partners with the Claire Falkenstein Foundation for a multi-year initiative including a booth at Art Basel Miami Beach and a 2026 exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art; Jessica Silverman now co-represents GaHee Park with Perrotin; Gurr Johns appoints Robert Goff as president of private sales and Tabor Story as director of private sales; Tara Downs adds Diné/Tlingit artist Nizhonniya Austin to its roster; Kohler Arts/Industry announces its 2026 residency cohort of 12 artists; Upsilon Gallery names Camilla Previ managing director in Milan. The column also highlights the record-breaking $236.4 million sale of Gustav Klimt's 'Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer' at Sotheby's, the highest price for any modern artwork at auction.

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museum exhibitions schedule May 6, 2026 visibility 12 link 4 artists, 1 gallery

Niklaus Stoecklin at Hauser & Wirth, Basel

Hauser & Wirth Basel is presenting a focused exhibition of works by Swiss artist Niklaus Stoecklin (1896–1982), featuring paintings and drawings spanning from the 1920s to the 1970s. The show includes several rarely seen pieces, highlighting Stoecklin's distinctive approach to depicting life—people, animals, trees, stones, and space—as he described it.

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gavel restitution schedule Mar 30, 2026 source 8 sources visibility 21 link 4 artists

Works by Renoir, Cézanne, and Matisse Snatched in Major Italian Art Heist

Four hooded thieves stole three valuable paintings from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation in Parma, Italy, in a swift nighttime heist. The stolen works include Paul Cézanne's 'Still Life with Cherries,' Henri Matisse's 'Odalisque on the Terrace, 1922,' and Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 'Les Poissons (Fish), 1917,' collectively worth millions of euros. The operation, described as highly structured and organized, took less than three minutes.

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museum exhibitions schedule Apr 8, 2026 visibility 16 link 11 artists, 1 gallery

art duchamp jill magid cory arcangel maya man darren bader

Marcel Duchamp remains one of the most influential figures in contemporary art, a century after his readymades like *Fountain* (1917) challenged definitions of art. MoMA is opening a major retrospective on April 9, co-organized by Ann Temkin and Michelle Kuo, exploring Duchamp's conceptual legacy. The article profiles four contemporary artists—including Cory Arcangel—who are extending Duchamp's ideas into digital and conceptual realms, such as Arcangel's modified Nintendo game *Super Mario Clouds* (2002).

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trending_up market schedule Nov 14, 2025 visibility 14 link 17 artists, 1 gallery

gust klimt 100 million club 284649

Sotheby's is offering Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer" (1914-1916) from the estate of the late collector and philanthropist Leonard Lauder with an asking price exceeding $150 million. The consignment also includes two Attersee landscapes valued at over $70 million and $80 million respectively, potentially generating over $300 million from just three lots. This sale follows Ronald Lauder's record-setting $135 million private purchase of Klimt's "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" in 2006, and is guaranteed to set a new auction record for the artist, surpassing the current $108.8 million benchmark.

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museum exhibitions schedule Jan 30, 2026 visibility 34 link 30 artists, 4 galleries

15 of the Most Anticipated Museum Exhibitions Around the World in 2026

Major museums worldwide have announced their flagship exhibitions for 2026, featuring a diverse array of artists and historical periods. Highlights include a Frida Kahlo retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, exploring her rise to icon status; a survey of Ovid's influence on art from Caravaggio to Louise Bourgeois at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum; a centennial exhibition for Mary Cassatt at the National Gallery of Art; and the largest career survey to date for Tracey Emin at Tate Modern. Other key shows feature Carol Bove at the Guggenheim Museum, Korean national treasures at the Art Institute of Chicago, and exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Louvre.

newspaper Galerie Magazine open_in_new Read original

candle obituary schedule Apr 29, 2026 visibility 29 link 17 artists, 1 gallery

Remembering Raghu Rai, Jack Thornell, and Jarvis Rockwell

Hyperallergic's weekly 'In Memoriam' column honors eight recently deceased figures from the art world, including Indian photojournalist Raghu Rai (1942–2026), Argentine abstract painter Ides Kihlen (1917–2026), Israeli painter and activist Yair Garbuz (1945–2026), British photographer Mark Gerson (1921–2026), Japanese art collector Kurt Gitter (1937–2026), Danish antiquities dealer Ittai Gradel (1965–2026), indigo textile artist Leigh Magar (1968–2026), and Kenyan muralist Patrick Mukabi (1967–2026). Each entry summarizes their life, career highlights, and contributions to visual art and photography.

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trending_up market schedule Nov 13, 2025 visibility 17 link 6 artists, 2 galleries

The art world's most infamous toilet is heading to New York auction for US$10m – and the starting bid moves with gold

Maurizio Cattelan's solid-gold toilet sculpture, *America* (2016), will be auctioned at Sotheby's New York on 18 November 2025 as part of the Now & Contemporary Evening Auction. The work, weighing 223 pounds of 18-karat gold, has a raw material value of around US$10.2 million based on current gold prices. In a first for auction history, the starting bid will fluctuate with live gold prices until bidding begins. The sculpture was previously installed at the Guggenheim Museum, where over 100,000 visitors used it, and later made headlines when the Guggenheim offered it to the Trump White House as a loan alternative to a Van Gogh painting. One edition was stolen and never recovered, making this the only surviving example.

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article culture schedule Apr 21, 2026 visibility 30 link 14 artists

13 Nudes That Changed Western Art History

The article presents a curated list of 13 seminal Western artworks featuring the nude form, highlighting how each piece shifted artistic conventions and cultural perceptions. It begins with the Paleolithic Venus of Willendorf and moves chronologically through works by artists including Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Lavinia Fontana, and Édouard Manet, analyzing their groundbreaking approaches to depicting the human body.

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trending_up market schedule Mar 25, 2026 visibility 25 link 4 artists, 1 gallery

Newly Authenticated Modigliani Heads to Sale at Art Basel Hong Kong via Pace with a $13.3 M. Price Tag

A newly authenticated painting by Amedeo Modigliani, "Jeune femme brune" (1917–18), is being offered for sale by Pace gallery at Art Basel Hong Kong with a price tag of €11.5 million ($13.3 million). The work, the highest-priced piece at the fair, was only recently included in art historian Marc Restellini's forthcoming Modigliani catalogue raisonné after decades of authentication disputes and legal battles.

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trending_up market schedule Feb 9, 2026 visibility 14 link 22 artists

klimt record sothebys london 2328580

Gustav Klimt's final portrait, 'Dame mit Fächer (Lady With a Fan),' sold for £85.3 million ($108.4 million) at Sotheby's London, setting a new record for the most expensive work of art ever auctioned in Europe. The painting, which was still on Klimt's easel when he died in 1918, surpassed its pre-sale estimate of over £65 million after a ten-minute bidding war.

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trending_up market schedule Nov 19, 2025 visibility 12 link 4 artists

leonard lauders klimt painting fetches sothebys 2713549

A Gustav Klimt painting, *Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer* (1914), sold for $236.4 million at Sotheby’s in New York, setting a new auction record for the artist and becoming the most expensive work ever sold at Sotheby’s as well as the most expensive Modern artwork at auction. The work was part of a sale dedicated to the collection of the late art patron Leonard Lauder, who died in June at age 92. The bidding lasted about 20 minutes, with Sotheby’s auctioneer Oliver Barker opening at $130 million; the winning bid of $205 million came from Sotheby’s staffer Julian Dawes, representing a phone client. The sale included two dozen works from Lauder’s trove, which also featured three Klimt paintings and six Henri Matisse bronzes.

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trending_up market schedule Sep 15, 2025 visibility 17 link 13 artists

leonard lauder sothebys klimt matisse 1234751922

Sotheby's has secured a major consignment of approximately $400 million in art from the collection of the late Leonard Lauder, who died in July at age 92. The highlight is Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer" (1914–16), expected to fetch over $150 million, potentially shattering Klimt's auction record. The sale also includes two other Klimt landscapes, six bronzes by Henri Matisse, a $20 million Edvard Munch painting, and an Agnes Martin work, totaling 55 artworks. The auction will inaugurate Sotheby's new space in the former Whitney Museum building, designed by Marcel Breuer.

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trending_up market schedule Sep 8, 2025 visibility 21 link 17 artists

john pritzker donates 188 dada surrealist works to the metropolitan museum of art new york 1234751101

John Pritzker, a Top 200 collector and Metropolitan Museum of Art trustee, has donated 188 Dada and Surrealist works by 37 avant-garde artists to the Met. The Bluff Collection includes pieces by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, and others, spanning collages, paintings, photographs, objects, and rare publications. Many works will feature in the museum's upcoming exhibition “Man Ray: When Objects Dream,” opening September 14, which includes 35 Man Ray pieces from the collection. The gift also establishes a research program funded by the John Pritzker Family Fund.

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article culture schedule Jul 25, 2025 visibility 12 link 7 artists

pierre bonnard louvre bonnarding 2632237

French Post-Impressionist artist Pierre Bonnard was known for his compulsive habit of retouching his paintings long after they were considered finished, even allegedly sneaking into museums and collectors' homes with a hidden palette and brush to make adjustments. According to the article, Bonnard would enlist friends like fellow artist Édouard Vuillard to distract guards while he worked, and the poet Jane Hirschfield coined the term "bonnarding" to describe this obsessive practice. The article recounts a persistent rumor that Bonnard was once arrested in the Louvre while retouching his own work, though this is likely a myth.

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trending_up market schedule Jul 16, 2025 visibility 17 link 6 artists

crystal bridges tiffany stained glass window acquisition 1234743149

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, has acquired a monumental stained-glass window by Tiffany Studios, titled *Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window)* (1917). Measuring approximately nine feet by seven feet, the window was commissioned by the fraternal organization Woodmen of the World as a memorial to its founder, Joseph Cullen Root. Its design is attributed to Agnes F. Northrop, a lead designer at Tiffany Studios for half a century. The window was originally installed in Omaha, Nebraska, moved to San Antonio, Texas in 1931 for a tuberculosis hospital chapel, and later stewarded by the Sunset Ridge Church of Christ. The acquisition, facilitated by stained-glass restorer Bryant J. Stanton, took about a year to finalize.

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museum exhibitions schedule Jul 8, 2025 visibility 19 link 6 artists

marcel duchamp retrospective 2026 moma philadelphia museum 1234745333

The United States will host its first major Marcel Duchamp retrospective in over 50 years, opening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on April 16, 2026, before traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in fall 2026 and then to the Grand Palais in Paris in 2027. Organized by MoMA’s Ann Temkin and Michelle Kuo and the Philadelphia Museum’s Matthew Affron, the exhibition features nearly 300 objects spanning Duchamp’s entire career, including iconic works such as *Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2* (1912) and *Fountain* (1917). The show aims to reveal lesser-known aspects of Duchamp’s practice, emphasizing his transatlantic life between France and the United States.

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museum exhibitions schedule Jun 10, 2025 visibility 9 link 6 artists

female muses klimt schiele kokoschka 348536

An exhibition titled “The Women of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka” has opened at the Belvedere Palace & Museum in Vienna, running from October 22, 2015 to February 28, 2016. The show examines how Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka depicted women, highlighting the artists' obsessive focus on female subjects against the backdrop of Vienna's changing society and the early 20th-century revolution in gender politics and sexuality.

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article culture schedule Jun 9, 2025 visibility 11 link 4 artists

rodins the thinker history 2649667

Auguste Rodin's iconic sculpture *The Thinker* was originally conceived in 1880 as part of a larger project—a decorative doorway for a planned Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Palais d'Orsay in Paris. Rodin later exhibited the figure independently, and after his wife Rose Beuret died in 1917, he placed a bronze cast on her grave in Meudon, where he was buried months later. The article reveals lesser-known facts about the work, including that the first cast (1884, now at the National Gallery of Victoria) originally wore a Florentine cap identifying it as the poet Dante Alighieri, and that the plaster version of *The Gates of Hell* now sits at the Musée d'Orsay, the very site where the doorway was originally intended.

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museum exhibitions schedule May 27, 2025 visibility 13 link 7 artists

tiffany window crystal bridges museum 2648343

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, has acquired a monumental Tiffany stained-glass window titled "Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window)," created by Tiffany Studios in 1917 and designed by Agnes Northrup. The 9-foot-tall, 8-foot-wide window, which depicts a cascading waterfall and mountains, was previously installed for 94 years at the Sunset Ridge Church and Collective in San Antonio, Texas. It is only the second Tiffany work in the museum's collection, joining a wisteria lamp donated in 2022.

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article culture schedule May 19, 2025 visibility 14 link 14 artists

art bites marcel duchamp dentist check 2617453

Marcel Duchamp paid his dentist, Daniel Tzanck, with a hand-painted forged check in 1919, titled *Tzanck Check*. The work mimics a real bank check made out for $115, drawn on the fictitious “The Teeth’s Loan & Trust Company Consolidated.” Duchamp meticulously painted each letter to look printed, and the dentist—who was also a major art collector—never cashed it, recognizing its artistic value. The check is now a promised gift to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, with a 1938 reproduction held by M+ museum in Hong Kong.

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gavel restitution schedule May 8, 2025 visibility 9 link 7 artists

32 million klimt sale falls through 2637831

The record-setting $32 million sale of Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of Fräulein Lieser" (1917) has fallen through after a restitution settlement failed to resolve gaps in its provenance. The painting, discovered in early 2024 and sold at Im Kinsky auction house in Vienna to an anonymous Hong Kong buyer in April, was mired in controversy over its history during the Nazi era. The work's whereabouts between 1925 and 1961 were unknown, a period including Austria's annexation by Nazi Germany. The auction house proposed the work was commissioned by Henriette Lieser, who was deported and murdered at Auschwitz, but conflicting theories about the sitter's identity and the painting's path through a Nazi party member's family complicated restitution efforts. A new potential legal heir emerged after the sale, and the buyer ultimately pulled out.

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gavel restitution schedule May 7, 2025 visibility 14 link 4 artists

emergency stay art institute of chicago schiele restitution case 2640195

The Art Institute of Chicago has been granted an emergency stay by an appellate judge, pausing the restitution of Egon Schiele's drawing "Russian War Prisoner" (1916) to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish cabaret performer and art collector who died in a Nazi concentration camp. The museum is appealing a New York Supreme Court judge's April 23 order to surrender the artwork, which has been off view since September 2023 when it was seized by the Manhattan District Attorney's office. The museum disputes that the work was looted, citing evidence that Grünbaum's sister-in-law recovered the collection after the war and sold it to a dealer.

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gavel restitution schedule May 6, 2025 visibility 13 link 6 artists

nazi looted egon schiele art return 366428

A Manhattan judge has blocked London-based art dealer Richard Nagy from selling or transporting two watercolors by Egon Schiele, which were on display at his booth during the Salon of Art + Design fair at the Park Avenue Armory. The works—Woman in a Black Pinafore and Woman Hiding Her Face—are claimed by the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish Holocaust victim and cabaret performer who died at Dachau. The heirs, Timothy Reif and David Fraenkel, filed suit in Manhattan Supreme Court, alleging the paintings were among 400 artworks surrendered to the Nazis by Grünbaum's wife. Nagy disputes the claim, arguing the works were sold legally by Grünbaum's sister-in-law in 1956 and that previous arbitration boards found no evidence of Nazi looting.

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article culture schedule May 5, 2025 visibility 10 link 6 artists

art bites frank lloyd wright imperial hotel lincoln logs 2630005

Lincoln Logs, the iconic wooden construction toy that has entertained American children for over a century, was designed by John Lloyd Wright, the second-eldest son of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright. John conceived the toy while in Japan with his father between 1916 and 1917, inspired by the interlocking wooden foundation Frank Lloyd Wright designed for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo to make it earthquake-resistant. The toy, named after Abraham Lincoln, went on to become a classic, inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 1999.

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