Plus: the uncertain market for Old Masters, the Cambridge colleges that have turned to wood, the artists who have taken young women seriously, and reviews of Guido Reni, Edward Hopper and the new museum at the Bibliothèque nationale
CBS Sunday Morning – Preston Singletary, a member of the Tlingit tribe of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, uses a very untraditional medium when fashioning indigenous art: glass.
He talks with correspondent Lilia Luciano about his traveling exhibition, “Raven and the Box of Daylight” (now at the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.), which tells a Native American folktale about the origins of the world entirely through glass.
The story Raven and the Box of Daylight, which tells how Raven transformed the world and brought light to the people by releasing the stars, moon, and sun, holds great significance to the Tlingit people of the North Pacific Coast. A new body of work by artist Preston Singletary immerses readers in Tlingit traditions by telling this story through his monumental glass works and installations. Primarily known for his celebration of Tlingit art and design, Singletary explores new ways of working with glass inspired by Tlingit design principles. This book includes texts that place Singletary’s work within the histories of both glass art and Native arts traditions—especially the art of spoken-word storytelling. Also included are a biography and an interview with the artist. Co-authored by Miranda Belarde-Lewis and John Drury.
Bodies of water act as both borders and conjunctions, where societies are delineated and defined. Further contradictory meanings bubble through to the surface as Blissett’s imagined landscapes become psychological spaces for meditation where the river is an obstacle to be crossed and considered.
In Rubicon, Blissett’s upland rivers are framed by bridges that run perpendicular to the body of water. The artist’s central placement of the bridges, Roman architectural embellishments in linear perspective, and urge to repetitively revisit similar yet increasingly foreboding environments reveals an attempt to organize or frame the scene. Yet, this organization is a fiction as from this positioning, the bridges cannot encompass the swell, the rugged topography, and the cloud-blemished skies. While bridges connect lands and cultures, from this frontal viewpoint, the ends of the arches depicted in Blissett’s paintings are rendered inaccessible
January 20, 2023: Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in Tokyo are the subject of a legal claim in the US relating to Nazi loot.
The Art Newspaper’s London correspondent and resident Van Gogh expert Martin Bailey tells us why Sunflowers (1888-89) is at the centre of the dispute, 35 years after it was sold for a record price at auction, and why the heirs of the German Jewish banker Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who owned it until the 1930s, now value it at a staggering $250m.
Our editor-at-large Georgina Adam has just returned from Singapore, where the first Art SG art fair took place last week. How successful was this new event in the art market calendar, and what does it tell us about Singapore’s ambitions to become an art hub?
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Portraits in a Chinese Studio, a photographic work by the artist Grace Lau. In the project, which marks Chinese New Year, Lau is subverting the tradition of colonial 19th-century portrait studios in a shopping centre in Southampton on the south coast of the UK.Grace Lau: Portraits in a Chinese Studio, Marlands Shopping Centre, Southampton, UK, 21 January-12 February
January 13, 2023: In the first episode of the year, we look ahead at the next 12 months. Anny Shaw, the acting art market editor at The Art Newspaper, peers into her crystal ball and tries to predict the fortunes of the art market this year.
Then, Jane Morris, one of our editors-at-large, José da Silva, our exhibitions editor, and host Ben Luke select the museum projects, biennales and exhibitions that they are most looking forward to in 2023.Events discussed:
The Grand Egyptian Museum: no confirmed opening date.
\The National Portrait Gallery reopens on 22 June.
Factory International, Manchester, also opens in June.
Yayoi Kusama’s You Me and the Balloons opens there on 29 June, as does the Manchester International Festival.
The Sharjah Biennial: Thinking Historically in the Present opens on 7 February.
The Gwangju Biennial: Soft and Weak Like Water opens on 7 April.
Celebration Picasso 1973-2023
Vermeer opens at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, on 10 February.
Matisse in the 1930s features a collection of the legendary artist’s work during a decade of artistic exploration—from experimentation, to failure, to renewal—with Philadelphia as a backdrop.
By 1930, Henri Matisse had achieved significant international renown, yet he found himself in a deep creative slump. The turning point came with a commission to decorate the main gallery of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The resulting monumental mural, The Dance (1930–33), turned Matisse’s artistic practice around.
The photographs in Mary Ellen Bartley’s series Morandi’s Books – meditative still life compositions in muted colors transformed by collage elements – are gently disorienting despite their formal precision.
Cover of Twenty-five Years Ago, by Joan Lyons (Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1998)
In the January/February issue of frieze, Terence Trouillot profiles artist Henry Taylor ahead of shows at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Plus, one year after Russia declared war on Ukraine, artists and writer respond to the crisis in a dossier, including: a personal essay by painter and writer Kateryna Aliinyk; Adam Mazur profiles Taras Gembik, an artist and performer organising picnics to raise money for Ukraine in Warsaw, Poland; Nikita Kadan on what art can mean in a time of war; editor-in-chief Andrew Durbin interviews Olha Honchar, the director of Territory of Terror Museum, which documents war crimes, and the coordinator for the Museum Crisis Center, an organization helping Ukrainian museums rescue their holdings from occupied zones.
Profile: Henry Taylor “I became the observer because I was trying to understand my own life and that’s why I started making pictures. I just like looking at people.” Terence Trouillot considers how Henry Taylors oeuvre goes far beyond the canvas.