COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SKARSTEDT GALLERY
Trump Doesn’t Want You to See These Pictures
The artists who’ve made portraits—albeit unflattering ones—of Donald Trump include Peter Saul, Deborah Kass, and Marcel Dzama. Now add to the mix Eric Fischl, who recently debuted a painting at Skarstedt Gallery in London that includes an image of the American president donning a red clown nose. For Fischl, Trump’s presidency has been a “last ditch effort of white male power to assert itself.” [The Art Newspaper]
Meanwhile, Jerry Saltz provides his take on Peter Saul’s painting of Trump, currently on view at the ADAA Art Show in New York, at the booth of Michael Werner, which brought it to the fair in collaboration with Mary Boone Gallery. [Vulture]
Fake News?
The Richard Avedon Foundation has released a list of 200 errors made in an unauthorized biography written by Norma Stevens and Steven M. L. Aronson. And that only covers one third of the book, the foundation says. [The Art Newspaper]
The photographer Wolfgang Tillmans writes on What Is Different?, his new book about our post-truth era that combines text, MRI scans, and his own pictures. “I hope the book raises such uncomfortable questions as: What do I not want to learn about myself? What do I not want to know?” he writes. [The Guardian]
A Very Expensive Picasso
At Sotheby’s in London, Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Femme au béret et à la robe quadrillée (Marie-Thérèse Walter) was bought for £49.8 million, or about $69.2 million. And while that may not seem like much compared to a record-breaking 1955 canvas that was bought for $179 million in 2015, the painting is now one of the most expensive Picasso works ever sold at auction. [Bloomberg]
The Critics
Hilton Als muses on Sally Mann’s pictures of the American South, writing that “she asks in these images of family members, roads, rivers, churches, and the effects of blackness on whiteness and whiteness on itself: Abide with me. And it all does—voices, sounds, the invisible things that Mann’s haunted and haunting photographs allow us to see.” [The New Yorker]
Jason Farago reviews the Museum of Sex’s survey of Nobuyoshi Araki, the Japanese photographer whose X-rated pictures of changing sexual mores in his home country have shocked—and turned on—viewers around the world. While Farago wishes for a more scholarly show, he, too, can’t helped but feel wrapped up in Araki’s imagery. [The New York Times]
Museums
Following a gift from Charles M. Diker, the Guggenheim Museum in New York will rename one of its tower galleries the Diker Family Gallery. Diker is the founder of the Cantel Medical Corporation and a trustee at the museum. [Press Release]
“Is Isamu Noguchi’s Akari the most ubiquitous sculpture in the world?” Architectural Digest asks. Click for an answer, as well as information about the Noguchi Museum’s current exhibition about the work. [Architectural Digest]