Art Industry News: Hollywood Legend Eve Babitz Recalls the Genesis of Her Iconic Nude Photo With Duchamp + Other Stories

Art Industry News is a daily digest of the most
consequential developments coming out of the art world and art
market. Here’s what you need to know on this Thursday, October
10.

NEED-TO-READ

The Naked Woman Who Played Chess
with Duchamp – In 1963, the
young curator Walter Hopps
left Los Angeles’s Ferus Gallery to become the director of the
Pasadena Art Museum. To make a splash, he sweet-talked Marcel
Duchamp into doing his first West Coast retrospective. The
legendary memoirist and Hollywood paramour Eve Babitz, whose nude
chess match in the museum with the (besuited) Duchamp became the
subject of an iconic photograph, recalls those heady days, and how
the show’s defining image came about. The concept wasn’t Hopps’s—it
came courtesy of Time magazine photographer Julian
Wasser. Initially hesitant, Babitz realized that “this large,
too-LA surfer girl with an extremely tiny old man in a French suit”
would make a great visual contrast. (Literary Hub)

The Bank of England Reveals Its
Artistic £20 Note – England’s
new £20 ($24) bill features a self-portrait of the artist J.M.W.
Turner and a reproduction of his famous painting
The Fighting
Temeraire, becoming
Britain’s first-ever banknote to feature an artist.
The polymer note, which the bank
says is very difficult to counterfeit, is due to being circulating
in early 2020. In 2016, Turner was selected from a long list
of 590 painters, sculptors, designers, photographers, and actors
put forward by the public. (Guardian)

Nan Goldin Protests Against the
Sackler Settlement Deal – The
activist artist and her anti-opioid group P.A.I.N. are stepping up
their campaign against a possible Sackler settlement deal,
with Nan
Goldin due to join a protest
outside a courthouse in upstate New York
today. Campaigners are
upset at the Sackler-owned company Purdue Pharma’s attempt to
circumvent dozens of state lawsuits through the courts. The
Sacklers’ lawyers have said if they lose this latest
legal battle, the family may
withdraw the $3 billion they pledged as part of the controversial
settlement. (Press release)

Has Macau Overtaken the Louvre?
– The organizers of this
summer’s inaugural Art Macau estimate that the festival attracted
16 million visitors. The six-month-long program of exhibitions and
events included a monumental work by KAWS in the Melco Resorts
casino compound as well as artists’ tributes to Grace Kelly. The
success of the festival, marking the 20th anniversary of the establishment of
the Macao Special Administrative Region, prompted the Macau
Daily Times to breathlessly compare it to the annual
attendance of the Louvre in Paris of “only” 10 million
visitors. (Macau Daily Times)

ART MARKET

The Guggenheim’s Loss Is Norway’s
Gain – When Ludwig
Kirchner’s Das
Soldatenbad sold for
$19.2 million at Sotheby’s in 2018, a Norwegian bank was behind the
winning bid for the canvas, which had previously been restituted by
the Guggenheim. The Norwegian Sparebankstiftelsen’s chief
curator, Oda Wildhagen
Gjessing, says that the bank’s foundation has focused on
acquisitions of German Expressionist art to fill gaps in Norway’s
national collection, spending around €400 million ($441 million) on
culture over the past two decades. (FAZ)

Ex-Tate Curator Opens a Gallery
– The new gallery, called Upstone Soho, is due to launch on November 14
with an exhibition of fresh works by the British artist Keith
Coventry. The gallery is a collaboration between Robert Upstone,
the Tate’s former head of British art, and the artist and curator
Graham Snow. (Press
release)

COMINGS & GOINGS

Banksy Collector Looks Offshore to Open a Street Art Museum
– After failing to reach an
agreement with the local government in the Welsh town of Port
Talbot, where Banksy left a
headline-grabbing surprise Christmas mural last year, the
work’s buyer is looking to the Isle of Wight to build the UK’s
first Street Art Museum. Essex-based art dealer John Brandler is
looking for partners on the island to work with him on his
institution. (Isle of Wight)

The British Museum Showcases the World’s First Travel Guide
– This week, the museum is
displaying the 1486 Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctum by
Bernhard von Breydenbach, a rare illustrated travel guide that
illustrates some of Europe and the Middle East’s most important
cities as of a half-millennium ago. It’s on view as part of an
exhibition charting Europe’s interest in the Middle East in the
15th century. (Art Daily)

The Founder of Prison Arts Program Has Died –
William Buzz Alexander, who founded
the Prison Creative Arts Project in Michigan, has died. He was aged
80. (Art
Daily)

FOR ART’S SAKE

V&A Chief Starts Flame War With British Museum Over Gift
Shops – Nicholas Coleridge, the
chair of the V&A in London, has dissed the British Museum’s
gift shop, saying it’s full of tourist rubbish. Coleridge says he
is “deeply satisfied” that his museum’s shop overtook its rival in
sales last year, helped by its Frida Kahlo blockbuster, although
the source of his data is unclear. (Times)

Brian Calvin Paints Matthew Wong – The painter Brian Calvin has paid tribute to
Matthew Wong on canvas,
sharing two portraits of the late artist, who tragically died this
week at the age of 35, on Instagram, titled Twilight Traveler, and The Other Side (for Matthew
Wong). (artnet
News)

The post Art Industry News: Hollywood Legend Eve Babitz
Recalls the Genesis of Her Iconic Nude Photo With Duchamp + Other
Stories appeared first on artnet News.