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 Monday, July 3.
NEED TO READ
California Universities Fail to Meet Restitution Requirements – A state audit has revealed that in the three decades since a 1990 federal law established a process for the repatriation of Native American remains or cultural heritage, less than half of California’s 21 campuses have complied. Twelve did not take the initial step of reviewing their collections, and just 6 percent had actually restituted any objects to their original tribe. (The Art Newspaper)
American artist John Dugger Has Died – The itinerant artist has died at 72. He travelled extensively and was known for his avant-garde and highly political artworks and interventions. Most notably, he constructed the People’s Participation Pavilion at Documenta 5 in 1972 and founded the Banner Arts Studio in 1976, dedicated to the textile art form that came to define his practice. (Guardian)
A New Book Connects a New York Cult With the Demise of Jackson Pollock? – Alexander Stille, author of a new book that came out last month called The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, has suggested there is a connection between Pollock’s untimely death and the Sullivan Institute, a cult based in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Encouraged by art critic Clement Greenberg to join the group, which was known for encouraging drinking and sexual freedom, Stille suggests Pollock’s membership contributed towards his alcoholism and infidelity to Lee Krasner. He died in a car crash in 1956. (GQ, Daily Mail)
Artist Hsiao Chin Has Died – The Chinese-born pioneer of post-war abstraction in China has died at 88. He lived and worked in Europe for over six decades, fusing Western modernist movements with Eastern spirituality. He died peacefully on June 30 at a hospital in Taiwan, his London gallery confirmed in a press release. (Press release)
MOVERS AND SHAKERS
The First Van Gogh Buyer Gets Her First Solo Show – The Mu.ZEE modern art museum in Ostend, Belgium, is shining a spotlight on Belgian avant-garde artist Anna Boch with the new exhibition “Anna Boch, an Impressionist Journey.” It includes 96 paintings by the artist—the only woman in the Belgian artist group Les Vingt (The Twenty)—including an interior scene in which Boch included one of her two Van Gogh paintings, Peach Trees in Blossom. The Dutch artist infamously sold just one painting—The Red Vineyard—before his death by suicide, and Boch was the buyer. (The Art Newspaper)
More Layoffs in the Art Industry – Amid fears of an art market downturn, there has been a spate of layoffs at a number of prominent companies, including 35 staffers at Artsy—15 percent of its staff. Sotheby’s and LGDR have also reportedly made cuts, and there has been a great deal of staff turnover at online sales platform LiveArt. (The Canvas, ARTnews)
Half of Stolen NFTs Sold Within 3 Hours – A report by blockchain security firm PeckShield found that if you are the victim of an NFT theft, you need to move quickly if you want to reclaim your art, as half of all stolen NFTs are resold within three hours. In more positive news, thieves only made off with $2.27 million worth of NFTs in June 2023, an 85 percent decrease from the high of $16.2 million this February. (Coin Telegraph)
Skarstedt Gallery Hires – New York gallery Skarstedt has made two big hiring moves, snagging LGDR’s Françoise de Saint Phalle as sales director, and Sotheby’s veteran George O’Dell, most recently executive vice president of LiveArt, as senior sales director. (The Canvas)
FOR ARTS SAKE
Murals Celebrate the 125th Birthday Magritte – The city of Brussels is commemorating what would have been Magritte’s 125th birthday on November 21 this year by commissioning eight major murals as part of a new open-air exhibition. These tributes are inspired by the Surrealist’s best-known paintings and are the handiwork of French street artist Julien de Casabianca. (The Brussels Times)
Pedestrians walk in front of a mural reproduction of Rene Magritte’s work painted by artist Julien de Casabianca in Brussels. Photo: NICOLAS MAETERLINCK/BELGA/AFP via Getty Images.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
