Inspiration

Using artificial intelligence, researchers may have identified the previously unknown subject of a sketch by Northern Renaissance artist Hans Holbein, and reidentified the sitter for a related Holbein drawing. The study, carried out by Karen L. Davies and Hassan Ugail, was published in the journal npj Heritage Science. Both of the artworks in question—known as Anne Boleyn and An unidentified woman—are part of the Royal Collection Trust, which owns some 85 drawings by Holbein. Only 30 of these drawings, the study points out, are related to paintings whose subjects are clearly identified. To address this discrepancy, Hassan “looked at the entire collection [of Holbein drawings] and compared one image against another to create a huge matrix,” he told The Guardian. “It clustered paintings that were close to each other,” which led the researchers to their conclusion. Davies, for her part, was clear that she didn’t intend to make any definitive statement—yet. “I hope that there’s a debate about reassessment more widely,” she told The Guardian.

MAY MARQUEE MASS. The spring auction season is an upon us, and ARTnews has done some sleuthing into who’s selling what. For one, there’s Jean-Michel Basquiat’s monumental panting Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown), from 1983, set for Sotheby’s contemporary art sale on May 14, estimated at $45 million. According to sources, the consignor is Joahn Sayegh-Belchatowski. And if you’re wondering who’s behind the mystery collection dubbed “A Matter of Seeing: Property from a Distinguished Collection” in a Christie’s postwar and contemporary art day sale, that would be none other than Ronald Lauder. Meanwhile, in other auction news, ARTnews reports that Lévy Gorvy Dayan is betting on a new auction-gallery hybrid selling model, in the hopes of bringing new energy to a slower-paced primary market, where deals stretch out over time. “There’s no urgency,” Brett Gorvy said. Lastly, as the Art Newspaper reported last week, British billionaire Joe Lewis is returning to Sotheby’s in June to sell another $200 million in art from his collection, following a $48 million sale in March. ORTIZ OUSTED FROM MAMBO. Martha Ortiz has left the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá following accusations that she ha

Leon Botstein, who has led Bard College since 1975 and shaped it into one of the art world’s most influential liberal arts institutions, announced Friday that he will retire, after an independent report found he had not been “fully accurate” in his public accounts of his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the New York Times reported. Botstein’s retirement is a consequential moment for the art world: Bard is home to the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), one of the most prominent graduate programs in curatorial practice in the United States, and its affiliated CCS Hessel Museum of Art. Botstein’s five-decade tenure had made the school a fixture in art-world institutional life.

Chanel is teaming up with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation on a new curatorial fellowship that will move between New York and Venice, tying one of the art world’s biggest institutions more closely to one of its busiest international stages—and to a growing network of cultural initiatives backed by the fashion house. The announcement will come at the very start of the Venice Biennale. Beginning in 2027, the Chanel Culture Fund Fellowship will be a one-year program is for MA- and PhD-level scholars focused on collection studies and curatorial research. Each fellow will begin at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York before continuing at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, working across both museums’ archives and exhibitions. The open call for fellows will begin this fall. For Chanel, the fellowship is less a one-off than part of a broader strategy. “What we’re trying to do is build an ecosystem of support—of infrastructure, of scholarship, of long-term investment in human intelligence,” said Yana Peel, the company’s president of arts, culture, and heritage. “Culture is made by artists, of course, but not by artists alone. It’s also the curators, the researchers, the

Iran has dropped out of the Venice Biennale, the world’s most important recurring art exhibition, as the United States and Israel’s war continues on. The Biennale did not state why Iran would no longer mount a pavilion. On the exhibition’s website, Iran is the only nation listed without any artist representatives. Aydin Mahdizadeh Tehrani is listed as the pavilion’s commissioner. Meanwhile, Israel and Russia’s pavilions have generated widespread controversy, with politicians, artists, and even participants in Koyo Kouoh’s main exhibition urging the Biennale to exclude both nations from the show. The Biennale has claimed it does not have the power to remove a country recognized as a state within Italy.

The exhibition “Christo: Air,” opening May 21 and running through August 21, will feature rare works by Christo as well as Air Package on a Ceiling, a work that Christo and Jeanne-Claude planned for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia but never mounted due to technical limitations. Described in the gallery’s press release for the exhibition as a “vast, internally illuminated and suspended form,” the work will measure around 32 by 52 feet and hangs just over the heads of viewers in the gallery.

The 15-foot bronze sculpture, which rises to about 22 feet with its pedestal, was finished with gold leaf after the artist, Ohio-based sculptor Alan Cottrill, proposed the upgrade. “It [was] like pitching ice water to a man dying of thirst,” Cottrill told the Daily Beast.  The two sides eventually agreed on an additional fee for that use, the artist said, but the payments stopped when he was still owed approximately $90,000 for the balance of the usage fee plus additional costs. Cottrill then refused to release the statue, keeping it in an undisclosed location until he was paid in full.  The statue has also drawn wider attention online, with some critics comparing its scale, pose, and gold finish to monuments associated with authoritarian leaders, including North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, while supporters have praised it as a tribute. 

When does something become a work of art? A canvas once it’s been painted? A block of marble once it’s been carved? For Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), the answer was much more direct and far more radical: Anything—indeed, everything—could be art if an artist deemed it so. “An ordinary object,” he said, can be “elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.” This notion, which found expression in his iconic Readymades, would prove to be the most revolutionary innovation of 20th-century art. Duchamp’s Readymades—realized between 1913 and 1923, the year he claimed to have quit making art—were mass-produced goods plucked from the everyday, either alone or in combination. Duchamp’s very first Readymade was an example of the latter: the front fork of a bicycle bolted upright onto a four-legged stool, allowing the attached wheel to spin freely. That object was joined in 1914 by another when Duchamp went to the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, the legendary Parisian department store, and brought home a towerlike metal bottle-drying rack festooned with prongs, known as a hérisson (“hedgehog”) due to its spiky appearance. Still, Duchamp didn’t treat either as art. Initially

Every two years, Venice is activated with more art than is possible to see in a week. While much attention this year will be on “In Minor Keys,” the central show curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, as well as a slew of intriguing—and controversial—pavilions in the Arsenale and Giardini, Venice will also have on view a number of exhibitions elsewhere in the city that are worth checking out. Some will be held at the city’s main art institutions, like the San Marco Art Centre and Gallerie dell’Accademia, while others will be on view at the Venetian outposts of collector-founded venues, like the Fondazione Prada, the Pinault Collection, Berggruen Arts & Culture, and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Plus, other venues will be activated via official collateral events, or even a three-night-only performance at the Teatro Goldoni. The San Marco Art Centre, or SMAC Venice for short, is host to a major survey of Lee Ufan’s work, courtesy of the Dia Art Foundation in New York. Curated by Dia director Jessica Morgan, the exhibition will survey Lee’s career and present around 20 works, both historical paintings and sculptures as well as new site-specific commissions across eight of the museu

It’s springtime in the art world, and that can mean only one thing. Not the Venice Biennale, though that is no doubt where many dealers, collectors, and artists are this week. No, we’re talking about the May marquee sales. This year’s sales arrive, as always, at something of an inflection point for the market. Following two years of sales declines, the global art market returned to modest growth of 4 percent last year, according to the most recent Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report. The total sales figure of $59.6 billion was buoyed not by collectors piling back into contemporary art but by a surge of high-quality consignments in the November sales, namely that of Leonard Lauder’s collection at Sotheby’s, which was headlined by a $236.4 million Klimt. Christie’s will be offering 16 lots from the estate of S. I. Newhouse, topped by a Constantin Brâncuși sculpture, Danaïde (ca. 1913), and a Jackson Pollock painting, Number 7A, 1948, which are estimated at $100 million each. The house is also offering three lots from the collection of former Museum of Modern Art board president Agnes Gund, the most expensive of which is a 1964 Mark Rothko work No. 15 (Two [...]

German conceptual artist Timm Ulrichs has died at the age of 86. His death on April 29 in Berlin was announced by the art association Kunstverein Hannover, of which he was the oldest member. Born in Berlin in 1940, Ulrichs studied architecture at the Technical University of Hanover from 1959–1966. In 1961, inspired by the “Merzkunst” (Merz art) of Hanoverian artist Kurt Schwitters, he declared himself a “total artist,” renaming his living space and studio the Werbezentrale für Totalkunst & Banalismus (Advertising agency for total art, banalism, and extemporism). “Total Art,” he once stated, “knows no boundaries as regards to genre and encompasses diverse disciplines that serve to get to the bottom of human existence.” In keeping with this philosophy, Ulrichs’s activities included putting himself on display inside a glass case as “the first living work of art” (1961), running naked through thunderstorms holding a lightning rod (1963, 1972, 1977), spending 10 hours inside a hollowed-out boulder (1981), collecting tattoos, writing concrete poetry, and making pioneering computer and copy art. Though his reputation was often eclipsed by those of contemporaries, Ulrichs’s works regularly

Georg Baselitz, a preeminent painter of postwar Germany and an engine of the 1980s Neo-Expressionist movement that rebuked Minimalism, and who would later come under fire for his comments about women artists, has died at 88. His death was announced in a press release by Thaddaeus Ropac, one of the galleries that represented the artist.  Baselitz exploded into the German art consciousness in the 1960s with a formal grit matched by tormented subject matter: his breakout “Heroes” series (1965–66) features bloated, blocky figures balancing on ruined buildings and toppled flags. Through his eyes, postwar German society appeared raw and taut as an exposed muscle. Next came his “Fracture” series, which sees axemen and prey alike torn into strips and stitched back into mythic Germanic forests—“wounded landscapes,” as he described them.  He “taps into one of German art’s oldest themes – the omnipresence of death and inevitability of decay,”  critic Jonathan Jones wrote in the Guardian in 2016. “Just as Renaissance artists saw the skull stare back at them from the mirror, so this modern master faces human decline and sees a strange beauty in it.” By the 1980s, Baselitz’s profile began to exp

The untimely passing of curator Koyo Kouoh, the artistic director of the 2026 Venice Biennale, has been deeply felt throughout the art world for the past year. Now, artist Derrick Adams will pay tribute to Kouoh via a monumental installation in Venice this week. After Kouoh’s passing, Bonami conducted a studio visit with Adams, who was working “on a series of drawings dedicated to major Black figures in art, culture, politics, and music who had passed away,” Bonami said. “I suggested that we create something in Venice as a tribute to Koyo. Although Derrick had only met her briefly, we both revisited interviews where she spoke about celebrating joy in relation to Black painting and art. From there, the project developed almost as an improvised intervention.” The Biennale begins its professional previews this week, ahead of its public opening on May 9, and the art world will soon get a chance to see Kouoh’s final exhibition. Her untimely passing, Bonami said, “is a tragic and unprecedented turn of events. Yet, she had a spirit and strength that seem to endure beyond her physical presence. When ideas are powerful, they survive beyond the limits and tragedies of life. I hope people [..

Last month, Faustin Linyekula stood at the edge of the lagoon beside the Arsenale, looking out over the water. He bent down and ran his hand along the moss that clings to the concrete docks, then began to sing. His voice carried across the basin, past the bell towers and into the empty military warehouses, the sound echoing through spaces that, in a matter of weeks, would be filled with art and people. For now, though, Venice was quiet. Three weeks before the Venice Biennale opens to press and invited guests on May 5, much of the city’s exhibition infrastructure remained off-limits or unfinished. The Giardini, the public gardens that houses many of the national pavilions, was closed. Access to parts of the Arsenale, which serves as a site of the curated section of the Biennale as well as some pavilions, required special permission and an escort. What will soon be one of the most crowded stages in the art world feels, in late April, more like a construction site than a cultural capital. What does it take to build an art event here? At times, it begins to feel less like installing an exhibition than digging trenches. Venice is [...]