June 2018 Art News

This July, Sotheby’s will offer an outstanding bronze by the foremost sculptor of 16th -century Florence, Giambologna (1529-1608). The Dresden Mars was created as a personal gift for the Elector Christian I of Saxony (1560-1591). It is one of very few bronzes firmly documented during his lifetime, and one of a handful of works by Giambologna ever likely to come to market.

Fluxus was a network of artists who thought anything could be art, and anyone could be an artist. This video explores the food-related work of George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, and Alison Knowles, et al.

Pinpoint a figure staring directly out at you in an early Renaissance painting and chances are it’s a surreptitious self-portrait, slipped into a crowded scene. It took time for artists to feel comfortable devoting entire canvases to their own likenesses, and longer for masters such as Rembrandt van Rijn to return to self-portraiture over and over. But with the invention of photography in 1839, things changed. Artists could quickly and cheaply craft self-images that were divorced from their work, playing with their personas without wielding paintbrushes or chisels.

Lubaina Himid’s paintings and installations explore ideas around black British representation and identity.

In this film we visit Turner Prize winning artist Lubaina Himid in her studio in Preston. She shows us around her recent exhibition at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery and tells us how her mother’s job in costume design was an early influence on her own.

Now showing at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C. is the latest installment of the museum’s ongoing Women to Watch Series. Heavy Metal includes over 50 works from 20 contemporary artists, covering the huge breadth of techniques, materials, and artworks that encompass contemporary metal work. Seeking to defy the conventional association with metal work as a male-dominated art form, the exhibition shows all that woman are accomplishing in this diverse range of materials.

Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters is the first major international exhibition to assemble works by England’s nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with the medieval and Renaissance masterpieces that inspired them.

June 27th was another record-breaking evening in the art auction world. Bidding was fierce at Phillips’ 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale in London, which made 41% more than last year. One of the top achieving works, Francis Bacon’s Interior of a room (1935), was a highlight of the sale, going for $3,748,158.

This summer, the Yale Center for British Art will present an exhibition devoted to one of the earliest forms of photography and a British invention. Salt and Silver: Early Photography, 1840–1860 will explore the dissemination of salt prints across early centers of photographic production in Europe and North America.

Trevor Paglen blurs the lines between art, science, and investigative journalism to construct unfamiliar and at times unsettling ways to see and interpret the world around us. Inspired by the landscape tradition, he captures the same horizon seen by American photographers Timothy O’Sullivan in the nineteenth century and Ansel Adams in the twentieth.

Dr. Christopher D.M. Atkins, Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture before 1900, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Dr. Beth Harris discuss Rogier van der Weyden's The Crucifixion, with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist Mourning  (c. 1460, oil on panel, left panel 180.3 × 92.2 cm, right panel 180.3 × 92.5 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art).