Art News. Vasari Codex

article culture schedule Mar 19, 2026 visibility 30 link 6 artists, 1 gallery

vet sothebys gagosian book history art market

Valentina Castellani, a veteran of Sotheby’s and Gagosian, is releasing a new book titled 'Trading Beauty: Art Market Histories from the Altar to the Gallery'. The publication aims to fill a pedagogical gap Castellani discovered while teaching at New York University, providing a comprehensive chronological overview of the art market from the Renaissance to the post-pandemic era. Published by Gagosian and distributed by Rizzoli, the book features a cover by Maurizio Cattelan and an introduction by Massimiliano Gioni.

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article culture schedule Dec 24, 2025 visibility 18 link 31 artists, 6 galleries

best artworks 2025

Artnet News editors and journalists compiled their annual roundup of the best artworks seen in 2025, highlighting standout pieces from around the world. Among the featured works are Richard Serra's monumental steel sculpture "East-West/West-East" (2014) in the Qatari desert, Emma Ferrer's painting "You Will Return the Evil to Its Steppe (Homage to Josefa de Óbidos)" (2024) shown at New York's Sapar Contemporary, and Kerry James Marshall's "The White Queens of Africa: Colette" (2025) from his retrospective at the Royal Academy of Art. Each artwork is accompanied by a personal reflection from the journalist who encountered it.

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article culture schedule Dec 5, 2025 visibility 25 link 18 artists, 5 galleries

art world acronyms

The article provides a comprehensive guide to essential acronyms used in the art world, explaining what each abbreviation stands for and its significance. It covers organizations like AAM (American Alliance of Museums), AAMD (Association of Art Museum Directors), and ADAA (Art Dealers Association of America), as well as art fairs such as ABMB (Art Basel Miami Beach) and ARCO (Arte Contemporáneo in Madrid). It also includes advisories like AIG (Art Intelligence Global), historical galleries like AIR (Artists in Residence), and defunct fairs like FIAC (Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain), offering context on their origins and current relevance.

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article culture schedule Sep 12, 2025 visibility 16 link 9 artists, 1 gallery

yasmina reza art play putting a higher price on it

The article examines the revival of Yasmina Reza's play "Art" on Broadway, which centers on three men arguing over a seemingly blank canvas purchased for a high price. The new production updates the painting's cost from 200,000 francs (about $60,000) to $300,000, reflecting today's inflated art market. The play's themes of aesthetics versus market value resonate with current debates about speculative hype and irrational pricing in contemporary art.

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trending_up market schedule Jul 3, 2025 visibility 17 link 21 artists, 1 gallery

signed book hov jay z auction

A signed, limited-edition book titled *The Book of HOV: A Tribute to JAY-Z*, created in collaboration between Jay-Z's Roc Nation, French publisher Assouline, and artist Daniel Arsham, is being auctioned at Christie's. Only five copies exist, and the book is estimated to sell for $100,000 to $150,000, with a portion of proceeds benefiting the Brooklyn Public Library. The auction, part of a contemporary editions sale running from July 7 to July 22, follows a 2023 exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library that attracted 600,000 visitors.

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trending_up market schedule May 1, 2025 visibility 22 link 13 artists, 3 galleries

the venice biennale spotlights the market for latin american art

The Venice Biennale, often called the 'Olympics of the art world,' is spotlighting Latin American art in its 2024 edition. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, director of the São Paulo Museum of Art and the first South American and openly queer person to hold the role, the exhibition titled 'Foreigners Everywhere' features over 330 artists, with more than 80 having ties to Latin America—about 24 percent of the show, up from 11 percent in 2022. The article examines the market for Latin American art, noting that while auction records exist (e.g., Frida Kahlo's $34.9 million painting), total auction volume for Latin American artists has declined from $388.3 million in 2015 to $245.5 million last year, reflecting a specialized market dominated by a few internationally recognized figures.

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trending_up market schedule May 18, 2026 visibility 14 link 29 artists, 4 galleries

The 16 Most Expensive Artworks Ever Sold at Auction

ARTnews published an updated list of the 16 most expensive artworks ever sold at auction, highlighting recent record-breaking sales such as Gustav Klimt's *Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer* (1914–16), which fetched over $236.4 million at Sotheby's, and Jackson Pollock's *Number 7A, 1948*, which sold for well above its $100 million estimate at Christie's in May 2026 from the S. I. Newhouse collection. The article traces the history of top auction prices, including Vincent van Gogh's *Orchard with Cypresses* (1888), which sold for $117 million during the Paul Allen sale at Christie's in November 2022, part of a record $1.5 billion single-evening auction.

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museum exhibitions schedule Apr 14, 2026 visibility 68 link 19 artists, 4 galleries

Duchamp in New York

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has launched a major solo exhibition dedicated to Marcel Duchamp, marking the artist's first comprehensive survey in New York City in over 50 years. The exhibition explores Duchamp’s revolutionary impact on modern art, featuring iconic works and archival materials that trace his history from the 1913 Armory Show to his later years in New York. The opening is complemented by a broader "Duchamp spring" in the city, including a forthcoming exhibition of his readymades at Gagosian.

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trending_up market schedule Feb 9, 2026 visibility 16 link 26 artists, 1 gallery

klimt record sothebys london

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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gavel restitution schedule Jan 30, 2026 visibility 28 link 18 artists, 1 gallery

leon black art collection revealed jeffrey epstein file

A 51-page document released as part of the Jeffrey Epstein files appears to catalog the extensive private art collection of billionaire collector and former MoMA board chair Leon Black. The document, which lists works by masters from Michelangelo to Picasso under corporate entities linked to Black, reveals valuations and details of a collection largely kept from public view, including works held as promised gifts to major museums like MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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trending_up market schedule Jan 23, 2026 visibility 19 link 5 artists, 4 galleries

nicolas partys new miniature paintings are a hit will they reset his struggling auction market

Nicolas Party's exhibition "Dead Fish" at Karma gallery in Chelsea, New York, features approximately 40 postcard-sized oil-on-copper works and a mural of three dead fish, a departure from his usual large-scale pastel paintings. Only 10 of the works were for sale, priced between $165,000 and $205,000, and all sold quickly. The show includes replicas of his earlier compositions, described as a "retrospective in miniature," with many pieces drawn from his archive and not available for purchase.

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trending_up market schedule Jan 20, 2026 visibility 12 link 8 artists, 1 gallery

hans baldung auction

A previously unknown Renaissance portrait attributed to Hans Baldung Grien, executed in silverpoint in 1517 and depicting Susanna Pfeffinger, is expected to sell for up to $3.5 million at a Paris auction on March 23. The drawing, which measures just four by six inches, has remained in the Pfeffinger family for 500 years and was only recently discovered by Old Master drawings expert Patrick de Bayser. It is being offered by French auction house Beaussant Lefèvre and Associés and Paris gallery Cabinet de Bayser at Hôtel Drouot.

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trending_up market schedule Jan 7, 2026 visibility 23 link 7 artists, 2 galleries

top lots jean michel basquiat

Artnet News examines the top five auction results for Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose meteoric rise and tragic death at age 27 fueled a legendary market. The list includes works such as "Versus Medici" (1982), which sold for $50.82 million at Sotheby's in 2021; "El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile)" (1983), which fetched $67.1 million at Christie's in 2023; and "Untitled" (1982), which reached $85 million at Phillips in 2022. The article highlights the artist's synthesis of graffiti and Renaissance aesthetics, his relationships with figures like Andy Warhol, and the explosive growth of his market over the past decade.

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article culture schedule Dec 1, 2025 visibility 15 link 8 artists, 1 gallery

re air uncovering the louvres hidden stories

Artnet News re-airs a podcast episode exploring the hidden stories of the Louvre, prompted by a recent daylight heist in which thieves stole eight pieces of royal jewelry from the Paris museum. The episode features Elaine Sciolino, a former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, who discusses her book *Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum*, based on unprecedented access to the museum's guards, curators, and hidden rooms.

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trending_up market schedule Nov 18, 2025 visibility 18 link 2 artists, 1 gallery

jeffrey epstein emails leon black picasso gagosian

Newly released emails from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein reveal that he discussed a plan by billionaire art collector Leon Black to purchase a Picasso painting from Gagosian gallery for $100 million. In a 2015 email to Melanie Spinella, a representative for Black, Epstein questioned the lack of a written contract for the overseas transfer, calling it 'fishy.' The emails also show Epstein advising Black on broader art purchasing strategies, including assigning agreements to family members, and offering opinions on Artspace, the online art marketplace acquired by Black's publishing house Phaidon.

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museum exhibitions schedule Jul 11, 2025 visibility 18 link 11 artists, 1 gallery

jenny saville national portrait gallery

British artist Jenny Saville has received her first major solo exhibition at a London museum, titled "Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting" at the National Portrait Gallery. The show spans three decades of her practice across some 50 paintings and drawings, tracing her evolution from a Young British Artist (YBA) known for vast, sensitive paintings of women's bodies to her recent digital-era heads. The exhibition will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas in October. The article also highlights Saville's record-breaking 2018 sale of *Propped* for $12.4 million at Sotheby's London, which made her the highest-selling living female painter at the time, and notes recent auction results including *Juncture* selling for $7.3 million.

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article culture schedule Jun 12, 2025 visibility 17 link 5 artists, 1 gallery

gerbil art museum london

Filippo Lorenzin, an independent curator at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, and artist Marianna Benetti built a miniature art museum for their pet gerbils, Pandoro and Tiramisu, during lockdown. The couple spent four hours constructing the tiny gallery from cardboard, paper, and wood, featuring rodent-themed parodies of famous artworks including Gustav Klimt's *The Kiss*, Johannes Vermeer's *The Girl With the Pearl Earring*, Leonardo da Vinci's *Mona Lisa*, and Edvard Munch's *The Scream*. They filmed the gerbils exploring the space and shared the footage on Reddit, where it quickly went viral.

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trending_up market schedule May 1, 2025 visibility 27 link 33 artists, 3 galleries

state of the art market old masters and neo old masters

Artnet News, in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, analyzed auction data from the Artnet Price Database to assess the state of the European Old Master market since 2018. The investigation explores how efforts to contemporize Old Masters—through juxtapositions at art fairs like TEFAF and Masterpiece London, and gallery shows such as David Zwirner's 'Endless Enigma'—have correlated with market trends for Contemporary and Ultra-Contemporary artists whose work is visibly influenced by classical European art. The report also examines the impact of living artists inspired by Old Masters, suggesting that restricting analysis to historical works alone may underestimate their ongoing influence on the art market.

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trending_up market schedule May 1, 2025 visibility 23 link 15 artists, 4 galleries

a tale of four cities

Artnet News and Morgan Stanley have released a report analyzing the global art auction market across four major cities—London, Paris, Hong Kong, and New York—over the period from 2013 to 2023. Total auction sales for the first half of 2024 fell to $5.05 billion, down from $7.17 billion in the same period of 2023. The report highlights a dramatic 49 percent decline in London's auction sales following the 2016 Brexit vote, while New York has maintained its dominant position, driven by blockbuster collections like those of Peggy and David Rockefeller and Paul G. Allen. Hong Kong saw growth until the Chinese property crisis in 2022, and Paris has gained ground post-Brexit, with sales up 30 percent over 2013.

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candle obituary schedule Jan 12, 2026 visibility 22 link 7 artists, 1 gallery

beatriz gonzalez painter dead

Beatriz González, a pioneering Colombian painter and one of the most important Latin American artists of the 20th century, died on Friday at her home in Bogotá at age 93. Her Zurich-based representative, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, announced her passing but did not specify a cause. González first gained fame in the 1960s by remaking art historical masterpieces by Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci in a deliberately garish color palette, later pivoting in the 1980s to explicitly political works critiquing government violence in Colombia. Her career included major exhibitions at Documenta 14 in 2017, the Museum of Modern Art's 2019 rehang, and a retrospective that premiered at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo and will travel to the Barbican Centre in London and the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo.

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article news schedule May 6, 2026 visibility 23 link 6 artists, 1 gallery

New Louvre Chief Christophe Leribault Reveals His Vision for the Museum Post-Heist

Christophe Leribault, the new director of the Louvre, has outlined his vision for the museum following a $100 million heist in October 2025. The Apollo Gallery, where the theft occurred, will reopen in July with a redesigned display that removes mineral cases to highlight its Romantic wall paintings, inspired by Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors. Empress Eugénie’s diamond-and-emerald crown, crushed by the thieves, is being restored and will become a new highlight. Security upgrades include window bars, 100 new cameras by 2026, a mobile police station, and a new security coordinator. The heist led to the resignation of former director Laurence des Cars in February.

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article news schedule Dec 18, 2025 visibility 15 link 7 artists, 1 gallery

laurence des cars louvre hearing

Laurence des Cars, president of the Louvre, is under pressure to resign after a tense Senate hearing on Wednesday, October 2025, following the theft of $102 million worth of imperial jewels. Lawmakers questioned her failure to act on security warnings from audits commissioned in 2017 and 2018 by her predecessor, Jean-Luc Martinez. Des Cars claimed she was unaware of those audits until after the theft. In response, she has accelerated a $92 million security plan, including 100 additional cameras, a new security coordination hire, and a 20% budget increase for staff training. She also announced a new internal audit on information sharing within the museum's bureaucracy, which she described as disorganized.

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article culture schedule Apr 17, 2026 visibility 42 link 19 artists, 7 galleries

8 Artists to Follow If You Like Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp’s legacy continues to shape contemporary art through his pioneering use of readymades, conceptual rigor, and institutional critique. This analysis identifies eight modern and contemporary artists whose practices echo Duchamp’s subversion of traditional aesthetics, ranging from his early experiments with found objects to his later explorations of gender and mechanical desire.

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article news schedule May 18, 2026 source 2 sources visibility 8 link 5 artists, 2 galleries

Louvre Reveals Architects for $1 Billion Expansion

The Louvre has announced an international team of architects—New York's Selldorf Architects and Studios Architecture Paris—to lead its "Nouvelle Renaissance" expansion, a project estimated to cost over €1 billion ($1.2 billion). The plan, first announced by French President Emmanuel Macron in early 2025, includes a new entrance to accommodate three million additional visitors annually and a dedicated 33,000-square-foot exhibition space for Leonardo da Vinci's *Mona Lisa*. The museum's new director, Christophe Leribault, is moving forward with the project despite significant budget uncertainty, with cost estimates ranging from €270 million to €1.1 billion.

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article culture schedule Jan 29, 2026 visibility 20 link 14 artists

an infamous rembrandt makes a cameo in the new knives out

A reproduction of Rembrandt's stolen masterpiece, *Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee* (1633), appears in the new Netflix film *Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man*. The painting, one of 13 works stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, is seen briefly in a character's study. The museum confirmed the use was not a collaboration, noting the image was used without permission.

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trending_up market schedule Dec 19, 2025 visibility 21 link 24 artists, 2 galleries

top auction moments of 2025

Artnet News rounds up the standout auction moments of 2025, highlighting both triumphs and disappointments. M.F. Husain's *Untitled (Gram Yatra)* (1954) smashed expectations at Christie's, selling for $13.8 million—more than double the artist's previous record and the first South Asian Modern work to exceed $10 million. In contrast, Piet Mondrian's *Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue* (1922) fell short of its $50 million estimate at Christie's, missing the artist's auction record, while Alberto Giacometti's *Grande tête mince* (1955) failed to sell at Sotheby's despite a $70 million asking price, underscoring market volatility.

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trending_up market schedule Nov 19, 2025 visibility 14 link 16 artists

november marquee auction sales midpoint analysis

Christie's and Sotheby's November marquee auctions in New York generated a combined $1.4 billion, with Sotheby's achieving a record $706 million from a double-header sale. The highlight was Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer" (1914–16), sold for $236.4 million from the collection of late cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder, becoming the most expensive modern artwork ever sold at auction. Christie's Monday sale brought in $690 million, falling short of its $731.5 million high estimate but still marking a 42% increase over its equivalent sale last November.

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museum exhibitions schedule Jul 24, 2025 visibility 24 link 28 artists

copyists exhibition centre pompidou metz louvre

Over 100 contemporary artists, including Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Julie Mehretu, Camille Henrot, Claire Tabouret, and Julien Creuzet, were invited to create copies of masterpieces from the Louvre's collection. Their works are now on view in the exhibition "Copyists" at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, a satellite of the Pompidou in northeastern France. The show features reinterpretations of iconic paintings such as Eugène Delacroix's *Liberty Leading the People* (1830), Giovanni Bellini's *Portrait of a Man* (ca. 1475–1500), and Théodore Géricault's *The Raft of Medusa* (1818–19), among others. Co-curators Donatien Grau and Chiara Parisi emphasize that the exhibition is about the act of copying itself, not just the resulting copies, and that it creates a dialogue between contemporary artists and historical masters.

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article culture schedule May 16, 2025 visibility 16 link 9 artists

yayoi kusama georgia okeeffe pen pals

The article reveals the little-known friendship and correspondence between Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and American modernist Georgia O'Keeffe. In 1955, a 26-year-old Kusama, inspired by O'Keeffe's work, wrote to her from Japan seeking guidance. O'Keeffe replied within 20 days, offering advice and encouragement, including urging Kusama to move to the United States and show her art widely. Their decades-long correspondence helped Kusama make her career-defining move to America, though the two met only once, in New York, six years after their first exchange.

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article news schedule Nov 18, 2025 visibility 13 link 4 artists, 1 gallery

louvre closes offices gallery structural concerns

The Louvre has temporarily closed employee offices and the Campana Gallery in the southern Sully wing due to structural concerns identified in a November 14 building assessment report, which warned of fragile floor beams. The closure affects 65 staff members and a nine-room gallery of ancient Greek ceramics. The museum has launched an investigation and plans repairs, following a year of challenges including a staff walkout in June and a dramatic theft of imperial jewels from the Gallery of Apollo in October.

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