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The Headlines
THE WAR IN UKRAINE. A wave of missile strikes by Russia against Ukraine on Monday damaged arts institutions, according to Ukraine’s culture minister, Oleksandr Tkachenko. In a Facebook post noted by NPR, the minister said that, in the capital of Kyiv, the National Philharmonic and two national museums—the Taras Shevchenko Museum and the Khanenko Museum —had sustained damage. The extent of any damage is not yet clear. Officials in Ukraine have alleged that, amid the war, Russian forces have taken objects from almost 40 museums in Ukraine and caused hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage to cultural sites, the Associated Press has reported.
Related Articles
ARTIST UPDATES. Painter Amy Sherald, who is opening a show of her lucid portraits at Hauser & Wirth in London tomorrow, is in the Guardian. “For me, Black lives matter historically within the American art canon, [and] Black lives matter in our history,” she said. Painter Adrian Ghenie, who’s about to open an exhibition of his brash abstracted figurative work at Thaddaeus Ropac in London (also tomorrow), is in Artnet News. “Because I was a poster boy for the commercial system for so many years,” he said, “I think that kind of blocked any discussion about my work in a more objective way.” And Town & Country has an excerpt of journalist Graham Boynton’s new book, Wild: The Life of Peter Beard , a biography of that larger-than-life photographer and artist, who died in 2020 at 82. One tidbit: At age 11, Beard wrote a note to himself that reads, “Get adventure and riches. Make yourself famous. PS All prisons empty.”
The Digest
The Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy, have slapped the Jean Paul Gaultier fashion house with a lawsuit, alleging that it used images of Sandro Botticelli‘s Birth of Venus (1485–86), which is in its collection, on a variety products without permission. The firm has not commented. [The Guardian]
The Founders Museum in Barre, Massachusetts, will return some 150 sacred objects to the Sioux peoples, including clothing and pipes. Some of the items have been linked to the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. “This is not our history of Barre,” the museum’s president, Ann Meilus, said. “This is the Lakota Sioux’s history.” [The Associated Press]
LA SERENISSIMA. About a month and a half remains to catch this year’s Venice Biennale. Speaking with the Los Angeles Times about a notable Surrealist element in her show, the Biennale’s director, Cecilia Alemani, proposed that one “could say that maybe we’re living in a similar time to the one in which Surrealism came about, because Surrealism was founded in 1924 in Paris in the ashes of the first World War in between two wars in a very conservative kind of right-wing global atmosphere and political situation.” While we are on the topic of Venice, the Associated Press has a thorough history of the spritz, the beloved beverage long tied to the city.
Angus Trumble, who led the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Australia, from 2014 to 2018, has died at 58. Trumble’s career also included serving as a curator at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, and writing the book A Brief History of the Smile (2004), “which began as a talk he gave at a conference of dentists,” Helen Musa writes. [CBR City News]
A DOUBLEHEADER. Artist Jacolby Satterwhite is on a tear, creating a video piece that for 18 months will grace the remodeled David Geffen Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center (Nina Chanel Abney has a stunner of a work there, too), the New York Times reports, and crafting visuals for a Highsnobiety story about actress Julia Fox.
In London for Frieze and looking for some real estate? A seven-story, 45-room mansion on Hyde Park was recently listed for £200 million (about $221 million). That is a bargain, of sorts: less than the £210 million it went for in 2020. Its seller is reportedly the family of Hui Ka Yan, the chairman of the beleaguered China Evergrande Group. [Architectural Digest and Bloomberg]
The Kicker
ART CAN CHANGE LIVES. It has been a quarter-century since the shock-filled “Sensation” exhibition opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, filled with works by young guns like Tracey Emin, Chris Ofili, and so many more, and in the New York Times, journalist Scott Reyburntook a look back at that moment. Reyburn talked to artists who were in the show, but he also spoke with a schoolteacher who visited at age 11, Arthur Hobhouse. “I felt like everything forbidden to me—sex, death, gore—was suddenly not only on show but being honored,” Hobhouse said. What higher praise could there be? [The New York Times]