It could be straight from an episode of Poirot. This smoking room, Les Palmiers (1930-36), designed by Jean Dunand for the Parisian apartment of Mademoiselle Collette Aboucaya on rue de Monceau, is the height of Art Deco decadence. And, though we are now in the age of vaping not smoking, it is now coming up for sale at…
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Archaeologists have discovered a four-wheeled ceremonial chariot near the ancient city of Pompeii, which has been hailed as a “unique find”. The vehicle was unearthed in near-perfect condition from the ruins of the Civita Giuliana, a suburban Roman villa northwest of Pompeii, which was buried by volcanic ash in 79AD spewing from Mount Vesuvius. Last…
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When Carol Bove was first asked by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to create sculptures for the niches along its Fifth Avenue façade, she faced a bit of a conundrum: she felt she had to consider “every inch” of the architecture, even as she realised that she would have to challenge its Beaux-Arts forms. “In…
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The former British prime minister Winston Churchill was a keen amateur painter and his landscapes frequently come up at auction. But his works do not sell for the sort of sums that might have persuaded him to give up the day job. Until tonight. No tonight, Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque (1943)—the only painting done…
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A tapestry depicting Picasso’s epic painting Guernica, which for 35 years had hung outside the entrance to the Security Council at the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York, has been removed and returned to its owners, the Rockefeller family. The work was commissioned in 1955 by the diplomat and philanthropist Nelson A. Rockefeller, who requested…
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The Czech playwright Karel Čapek coined the expression for artificial men in 1921. Now they are far more than science fiction “Listen Josef,” said the Czech playwright Karel Čapek to his brother. “I have an idea for a play.” Josef, an artist of some renown, was painting furiously and unimpressed by his brother’s intrusion. “What…
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The jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran was wrapping up three days of recording in Brooklyn when an angry mob of Trump supporters ambushed the U.S. Capitol. He put his phone down after reading the news and decided to get his project out immediately as a way to help the nation heal from its divisiveness….
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Even as the pandemic takes its toll on tourism, immersive museums and experiential art centers are expanding to new cities and wooing investors willing to gamble on the future of the emerging industry. Fotografiska wanted to introduce New Yorkers to a different type of museum when it opened in December 2019 in Manhattan, welcoming visitors…
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“We are at our most inventive when we are falling.” This lesson from Liz Lerman, a choreographer and one of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ senior fellows, has stuck with me over this past year. Artists and the cultural sector have fallen harder in the past year than we could have ever imagined. The…
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The new English translation of Rudolf Zwirner’s autobiography traces the seeds of today’s big money. In 1960, after only a year in business, Rudolf Zwirner’s fledgling gallery in Essen, Germany, was in serious debt. In a panic he turned to the dealer Hein Stünke, whose gallery in Cologne, Der Spiegel, had become a gathering place…
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