Art Industry News: Uplifting Street Artist JR Will Get a Major Survey at the Brooklyn Museum This Fall + Other Stories

Art Industry News is normally a daily digest of the most
consequential developments coming out of the art world and art
market. Here’s what you need to know this Friday, August
2.

NEED-TO-READ

Beijing’s Blockbuster Picasso Show
Nearly Didn’t Open – France has
lent 103 works from the Musée Picasso in Paris for a blockbuster
show in Beijing. Although the exhibition at the UCCA Center for
Contemporary Art had the blessing of Presidents Xi Jinping
and Emmanuel Macron, it nearly didn’t open. The problem was not
censorship, the director of the Ullens, Philip Tinari, revealed—“It
was that the works are so valuable.” Chinese customs treated the
loans as if they were being sold, and insisted on a deposit of $225
million. It took the late intervention of France’s foreign minister
to scrap the fee, so the show could go
ahead. (New York Times)

Family Learn Their 18th-Century
Portrait Is Worth $600,000 – A
portrait long thought to be by a female artist—and worth
£8,000 ($9,000)—has been
reattributed as an early work by leading Georgian-era portraitist
Thomas Lawrence with a value around £500,000 ($606,000), according
to research by BBC TV’s art detective
program Fake or Fortune? The painting of the
aristocrat Peniston Lamb has been in England’s Cecil family for
several generations, who always thought it was by the
English-Italian artist Maria Cosway. Now, Peter Furnell, a former
curator at the National Portrait Gallery, says it was a “very fine
example of Lawrence’s early work.” (Daily Mail)

JR Is Getting a Major Museum Survey – The Brooklyn Museum will present the French
street artist and photographer’s largest solo museum exhibition so
far in the fall. The exhibition will feature JR’s monumental
mural The Chronicles of
New York City, which
features more than 1,000 people photographed and interviewed in the
Big Apple during the summer of 2018. The exhibition, called “JR:
Chronicles,” will fill 20,000 square feet of the museum’s Great
Hall and range from the artist’s politically engaged
projects in Berlin and on the US-Mexico border to early
works like Expo 2
Rue, where he documented
fellow graffiti artists in action and pasted photocopies of the
images in the streets of Paris. The museum’s curator of photography, Drew
Sawyer, says: “Over the past two decades, JR has emerged as one of
the most powerful storytellers of our time.” (Press release)

James Turrell’s “Skyspace” Goes Back on View at MoMA PS1
– The Queens museum is
once again letting visitors bask in  the meditative calm of
Turrell’s beloved Meeting installation, which has been closed since
January because the view at the heart of the
piece—a quadrilateral aperture cut into the ceiling of its
gallery—was interrupted by a hoist being used in nearby
construction on luxury apartments. (NYT)

ART MARKET

Another Gallery Opens in Mary
Boone’s Old Space – Yares
Art, which specializes in Color Field painting, is moving into
the disgraced art dealer Mary
Boone’s old gallery in Midtown Manhattan. Dealer Dennis Yares
has leased a space across the hall since 2016. (ARTnews)

Investment Funds Are Hoarding Art
as Loan Collateral – Art
Lending Fund in Westwood, Los Angeles, has a high-security,
climate-controlled warehouse full of its clients’ works of art,
including a Rothko. The art is collateral in exchange for loans
from the fund run by Alan Snyder, who jokingly describes his
business as “a high-end pawn shop.” His target market is gallery
owners who need financing, and collectors wanting a cash
injection. (Los Angeles Times)

Andy Warhol’s Lenin Heads to
Phillips – Phillips will hold a
selling exhibition this fall of Andy Warhol’s “Lenin” series, which
was the artist’s final group of works. The 1986 collaboration with
Bernd Klüser, who was Warhol’s publisher and gallerist in Munich,
is based on a little-known photograph of the young revolutionary;
the works are coming from the archive of Galerie Klüser.
(Press release)

COMINGS & GOINGS

Jerry Saltz Is Curating an
Exhibition on Paper – The
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York magazine critic will be the juror for an
exhibition in print, to be published in New American Paintings’ “Northeast Issue” on the occasion of its 25th
birthday. Saltz will select works from artist-applicants working in
the region for the magazine, which will be released in early 2020.
(Press
release) 

John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Acquires Major Trove – Lewis
Greenblatt, the owner of the estate of artist Eugene Von
Bruenchenhein, has gifted the arts center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin,
more than 8,300 artworks by the self-taught artist. The artworks
join 6,000 existing Von Bruenchenheins in the collection, and the
full trove will be displayed in a replica of the environment the
artist created at his home in West Allis. The installation will be
a highlight of the arts center’s new Art Preserve opening in fall
2020. (Art Daily)

Mary Ann Carter Is the New Chairman
of the NEA – The
Trump-appointed acting chair of the
National Endowment for the Arts was officially confirmed by the US Senate
yesterday. Carter has been in the role since June last year,
championing arts therapy programs for veterans together with a
number of national initiatives. (Artforum)

The High Museum Appoints Robin
Howell Board Chair – The
Atlanta museum has named Robin Howell to succeed Charles Abney II
as board chair for the next two years. New board members Farideh
Azadi, Watt Boone, Will Powell, and Mark Preisinger, have also been
welcomed into the fold. (Artforum)

FOR ART’S SAKE

Can AR Enrich Viewing Art? –
Inspired by Pokémon Go to begin
experimenting with augmented reality, the artist Lucas Blalock has
created AR billboards for the Whitney Biennial and has become an
advocate for the art form. But while artists  are increasingly
intrigued by the young technology, Blalock thinks its principle is
not that far off from what artists have always been doing, telling
the FT, “If you think about it, a painting on a wall is
the original augmented reality.” (Financial Times)

Glasgow Museum Veggie for Linda
McCartney – The café at the
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow is going meat-free on
Mondays in honor of Linda McCartney, who is the subject of a
photography retrospective at the museum. If it proves a
success, the vegan and vegetarian menu might be extended beyond the
show’s six month run. (Evening Times)

Nancy Holt’s Dark Star Is
Aligned – The Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden and Arlington Public Art are celebrating the
35th anniversary of Nancy Holt’s Dark Star Park
(1979-1984) in Arlington, Virginia. Visitors gathered at 9:32 a.m.
yesterday to watch the yearly occurrence of the summer sun hitting
the spheres in just the right way to create shadows that align with
metal shapes in the ground. The museum in DC is also screening
Holt’s film The Making of
Dark Star Park (1988) in
honor of the occasion. (dcist)

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Get a Major Survey at the Brooklyn Museum This Fall + Other
Stories appeared first on artnet News.