documenta institute to be located in Kassel
The planned €24 million ($26.7 million) documenta institute is in its final stages as Kassel’s city council agrees on a location. The 50,000-square-foot building is to provide a workspace for 25-30 staffers and scholars, and to house a newly created documenta professorship.
The new institute hopes to attract international scholars, curators, artists, and other cultural figures in between the show’s five year cycles with a number of talks and events. Organizers hope the institute will promote further academic research and interest in the interdisciplinary research used in previous editions. According to local newspaper HNA, Kassel’s political representatives unanimously approved the proposition, deciding in favor of a location adjacent to the University of Kassel. Details via artnet news.
Kandinsky breaks record — twice — at Sotheby’s in London
Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art sale in London yesterday, June 21, saw the record for a Wassily Kandinsky painting broken twice in less than an hour. The first, Murnau – Landschaft mit grünem Haus (1909) from the Werner and Gabrielle Merzbacher Collection in Switzerland, sold within estimate for a record £21 million ($26 million). The second, Bild mit weissen Linien (1913), sold six lots later for £33 million ($41.6 million) to a phone bidder from Asia. Kandinsky’s previous auction record was $23.3 million, sold at Christie’s New York in 2016 for Rigide et Courbe (1935).
The sale totalled £149 million ($187.7 million) including buyer’s premium, well within the pre-sale estimate of £130–170.5 million. Details via Sotheby’s
Bild mit weissen Linien (Painting with White Lines) (1913) | Murnau – Landschaft mit grünem Haus (Murnau – Landscape with Green House) (1909)
Art UK to catalogue British public sculpture online
Art UK has announced a major three year project to catalogue its national sculpture collection. The aim is to produce an online catalogue of every publicly-owned sculpture in Britain made in the last thousand years by 2020. The initiative — partly made possible by a £2.8 million grant by the Heritage Lottery Fund — will see some 170,000 sculptures in museums, galleries, universities, hospitals and other public buildings across the country digitized and added to the Art UK website for learning and research purposes.
Sculpture photography testing at York Art Gallery during the HLF-funded project development phase, 2015, Photo credit/ Katey Goodwin | Richard James Wyatt, Nymph Removing a Thorn from a Greyhound’s Foot (detail) (1848)
Sylvie Patry to deputy direct Paris’ d’Orsay
Sylvie Patry, chief curator of The Barnes Foundation, will return to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, as deputy director for curatorial affairs and collections.
Prior to joining Barnes in January 2016, Patry served as chief curator of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings at the Musée d’Orsay for more than a decade. Patry will continue to collaborate as a consulting curator at the Barnes Foundation until 2019, oversee a roster of exhibitions. The d’Orsay’s “Beyond the Stars. The Mystical Landscape from Monet to Kandinsky” exhibition will close this weekend, June 25.
Sylvie Patry © Alessandro di Marco
London’s White Rainbow closes
White Rainbow Gallery in Mayfair, London, has announced the closure of its exhibition programme and gallery space. The gallery’s last show closed on June 10, “Minimalist Anyway”, which featured artists Lydia Okumura, Kazuko Miyamoto.
