Art news around the world

A SUMMARY OF THE MOST EXCITING ART NEWS FROM AROUND THE GLOBE

While we focus on Indian art, we can’t obviously function in a vacuum. It’s a small world and everything is connected, especially on the web. So, let’s train our spotlight across the world map to see what’s going on — from art trends to socio-political issues to everything that affects the great aesthetic global consciousness. Or, let’s just travel the world and have some fun!

Lost Fernand Leger painting reappears

A lost Fernand Léger painting has reappeared after more than a century of being hidden behind another canvas. The work, an unnamed piece from the “Smoke over the Rooftops” series (1911–12), was discovered on the flip side of Léger’s Bastille Day, painted later that year, per the Agence France-Presse. The finding was announced by the Hague-based Studio Redivivus, which also conducted the picture’s restoration. Experts in the Hague believe the newly found work belongs to a formative series in which Léger painted the view from his studio of the Paris skyline towards Notre-Dame, laboring over the smoking chimneys. Only seven works from the series were previously known to exist. Art News tells us more.

Marc Chagall\’s house for sale

A real estate agent in upstate New York is listing the two-bedroom, one-bath “hillside cottage” in Ulster County where Chagall lived and worked between 1946 and 1948. The light gray shingled house on a half-acre in High Falls is on the market for $240,000. Chagall shared the house with his much-younger lover, Virginia Haggard McNeil, an artist and British diplomat’s daughter who had been his housekeeper when he lived in New York City. It was a time of sadness and rejuvenation for the artist, who had lost his wife Bella to an infection just a few years before. Haggard, who was married at the time to another man, was pregnant with Chagall’s son, David, when they moved to High Falls. Art net news reports.

Art expert gets fired after underestimating the value of a chinese vase

An unidentified art expert has been fired in France after grossly undervaluing a Chinese vase at 4,000 times less than its sale price. Yet, it is still unclear what drove the price so high. The vase in question, which was originally estimated at €2,000 ($2,000), sold for €9 million ($8,980,000) at French Osenat auction in Fontainebleau house last week. The original estimate of €1,500 and €2,000 reflected the expert’s view that it was a 20th-century decorative piece. Buyers, however, suspected that it might date back further to the 18th-century. “The expert made a mistake. One person alone against 300 interested Chinese buyers cannot be right,” auction house president Jean-Pierre Osenat told the Guardian last week. “He was working for us. He no longer works for us. It was, after all, a serious mistake.” Art news explores the whole incident