Different artworks with different future of their own

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!

Andy Warhol\’s suburban car crash painting to be his most expensive works

Andy Warhol’s White Disaster (White Car Crash 19 Times) (1963) will headline Sotheby’s New York contemporary evening auction this November with an estimated price tag of at least $80m, one of the largest estimates ever placed on a work by the artist at auction. The work—a 12-ft-tall mixed-media monochrome painting, depicting a suburban car crash reproduced 19 times over—will go on offer on 16 November alongside works by Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Francis Bacon, and Joan Mitchell. White Disaster hails from Warhol’s Death and Disaster series from the 1960s, in which the artist repurposed his famous serialised method of image reproduction to create works related to violence, death, and destruction. The series produced some of the most commercially successful works of Warhol’s career, including Green car crash,­ Green burning car I (1963), which sold for $71.7m at a Christie’s New York in 2007, and Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), which made $105m in 2013—the second most expensive auction price ever achieved by the artist. This sale was the last time a Death and Disaster painting appeared at auction. Read more on Art Newspaper.

A painting, now under restoration has been identified as a long lasting Artemisia Gentileschi

The painting at Beirut’s Sursock Palace was lucky to survive the explosion in August 2020, which killed more than 200 people and left some 300,000 homeless in Lebanon’s capital city. But in the wake of the tragedy, an art historian pulled the canvas from the wreckage. Its artist, like many of the works in the palace, wasn’t named, but he recognized it as the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, Baroque master and one of art history’s most important women artists. Today, the painting, titled Hercules and Omphale, is at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where it is undergoing conservation analysis and treatment. Once work is complete in 2024, the institution will display it alongside another rediscovered masterpiece by the artist, Lucretia, which it acquired for a record-breaking $5.3 million in 2019. “After a devastating explosion that damaged the painting, we are honored to be entrusted with its conservation,” museum director Timothy Potts said in a statement. “Hercules and Omphale is one of the most important recent discoveries within the corpus of Artemisia Gentileschi, demonstrating her ambition for depicting historical subjects, something that was virtually unprecedented for a female artist in her day.” Details on Artnet. 

Putin\’s martial law decree given legal cover to loot art in Ukraine

When Russian president Vladimir Putin declared martial law in the annexed Ukrainian territories on 19 October, he also explicitly “legalised” the looting of the country’s cultural heritage in the name of “preservation”. According to the Ukrainian press, the Russians are currently removing artefacts from the museums in Kherson, the city in southern Ukraine conquered on 2 March, but secret removal of the most valuable museum objects had already started in May when the Russian army faced a possible Ukrainian counterattack. Looting has not been limited to the Shovkunenko Regional Art Museum, with its collection of Ukrainian and Russian fine and decorative arts, and the Kherson Regional Museum, which tells the story of the region from ancient times through its material culture. The occupiers have also dismantled and removed Soviet-era monuments to the Russian imperial heroes General Aleksandr Suvorov and Admiral Fyodor Ushakov, while the fate of the monument to Prince Grigory Potemkin, lover of Empress Catherine the Great, has been more complicated. Erected in 1823, it was exiled in 1917 to the courtyard of the Regional History Museum and then disappeared entirely during the Second World War. The monument that has now been dismantled by the Russians is a replica produced in 2003. Not just the statue has been removed: the prince’s mummified remains in the Cathedral of St Catherine have been exhumed and taken to an unknown location. More on Art Newspaper.