Julianne Moore to star in TV series about Leonardo’s “Salvator Mundi.” https://ift.tt/eGO1Ur4

Julianne Moore will star and executive produce a television series inspired by the 2021 documentary, The Lost Leonardo, according to Deadline. The series will dramatize the rediscovery and subsequent controversies surrounding Salvator Mundi, a Renaissance-era painting now attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. This work, depicting Christ, became the world’s most expensive painting after it sold at Christie’s in New York for $450 million in 2017. The final buyer has never been officially identified. However, several reports claim it was Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The upcoming series will explore the myriad narrative twists and turns that surrounded the painting before and after the sale. Moore will play Dianne Modestini, the renowned art restorer who was pivotal in the painting’s restoration and authentication. Modestini was the first to identify characteristics that would hint at its authenticity as a work by da Vinci, comparing its technique to that of the Mona Lisa (1503). Yet the painting’s provenance and Modestini’s restoration ignited years of speculation and controversy.

Art dealers Alexander Parrish and Robert Simon initially came across the work at an estate sale in New Orleans, purchasing it for around $1,500 and identifying it as “after Leanardo.” The duo hired Modestini to restore the painting, which was significantly damaged at the time, sparking a controversy, where critics attributed most of the painting’s final work to Modestini. In responser, the art restorer retorted: “I can’t paint like Leonardo,”in the original documentary.

This series is in production with Studiocanal, the Picture Company, Entertainment 360, and Requa and Ficara’s Zaftig Films.

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Why This London Gallery Is Opening a New Outpost in Ibiza https://ift.tt/MaLKGqz

Situated on the more serene northern side of Ibiza, the fluorescent pink bar stools and breast-shaped chandeliers on the patio of Gathering’s new space, designed by British artist Tai Shani, is part of its on-site restaurant, named Mira after founder Alex Flick’s daughter, and is an apt calling card for the London-born gallery’s experimental approach to programming.

Just two years after Gathering opened in London in 2022, Flick made the choice to expand to Ibiza after seeing the island’s potential as a contemporary art hotspot, something that will be given extra momentum with the opening of the CAN art fair this week. The Ibiza gallery opened last month with the group show “Substance,” which features kristian kragelund’s geometric abstract works made from fiberglass and resin, the frenetic paintings of Rannva Kunoy, and Jennifer Tee’s tulip-based collages and accompanying piezographic prints. The show is a testament to Flick’s affinity for experimental artists, a consistent theme of his gallery’s identity.

“I like radical practices. That’s what I’ve boiled it down to,” Flick added. Gathering was born from Flick’s desire to bring more conceptual or experimental art to the forefront. From 2015 to 2019, the gallerist operated a small project space in East London called UNIT9. Following a series of COVID lockdowns in the city, Flick was inspired to create a space where people could come together and view radical art.

“Gathering came from that solitary existence that we had at that time,” said Flick. “It was the thing we missed the most was meeting with people, so [the] ‘Gathering’ concept was born during COVID.”

In 2022, Gathering debuted in the heart of Soho in Central London, making an immediate splash with its first show of works by Shani, who won the Turner Prize in 2019 together with the three other nominees. Her show “Your Arms Outstretched Above Your Head, Coding With The Angels” featured a hallucinatory CGI film, mausoleum-like sculptures, and watercolor paintings, framing the gallery’s approach to platforming the cutting-edge of emerging art.

Flick credits the gallery’s initial success to the buzzy artists who took a chance to work with him, from Shani to American Indigenous artist Wendy Red Star, whose solo show “In the Shadow of Paper Mountains” is on view in the London gallery until September 1st. In 2023, Gathering dedicated part of its gallery to a project space, Glasshouse, designed to foster early career talent alongside its main exhibition schedule. This summer, the project space is showing Christian Franzen’s debuted U.K. exhibition titled “Partial Truth.” For Flick, all aspects of his gallery’s growing program can be attributed to an overall approach of open-mindedness.

The Neon Hieroglyph: Astrolatrous Communes IV, 2022
Tai Shani
Gathering

archive lack, 2024
Emanuel de Carvalho
Gathering

“The work has to speak to me on an emotional and cerebral level,” he said. “It doesn’t matter where you’re from, which part of the world, or what gender, those are secondary considerations. The consideration is how pertinent is the practice to expressing the contemporary world, and that in a way that is out of the norm.”

Today, the roster at Gathering includes an impressive cadre of buzzworthy artists such as Portuguese Canadian artist Emmanuel de Carvalho, Georgian painter Tamara K.E., Peruvian artist Wynnie Mynerva, Paris-based performance and multimedia artist Ndayé Kouagou, and Shani.

Now, as the island prepares for CAN Ibiza on June 26th, Gathering is gearing up for an intergenerational two-person exhibition with works from conceptual artists 49-year-old Stefan Brüggemann and 82-year-old Bruce Nauman, “Painting Not Painting.” The exhibition encompasses the two artist’s wide-ranging practices, featuring a selection of paintings, sculptures, and prints inside the two floors of the gallery.

The gallery’s expansion also comes at a time when Ibiza’s art scene itself is poised to flourish, thanks in part to the CAN art fair. “I was surprised, if I’m honest, that no one had done it before,” Flick said of the fair. During the second lockdown in the U.K., Flick and his teenage daughter spent six weeks in Ibiza. And though the island had everything you could ask for—restaurants, beaches, resorts, nightclubs—he felt an international art presence was missing.

“I couldn’t understand why—because in Menorca with Hauser and in Switzerland in these ski resorts—these very small communities—or even slightly bigger in Palm Springs—have that offering, and they didn’t have it here [in Ibiza], and it felt that’s also been a very strong reaction from people, they’ve [said], “Hey, we really needed this. This has really been missing,’” Flick said. “It actually was born at a similar time to Gathering London, but we needed to find the right moment.”

In stepping into Ibiza, Gathering mirrors its knack for spotting and nurturing emerging talent in the art world. This expansion is emblematic of the young gallery’s broader approach to identifying emerging artists whose eclectic practices meet the needs of its growing audience. “I like for an audience to have an experience, an immersive experience—those are the practices that I think are most in line with our society at large,” said Flick.

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Claude Monet’s paintings of the Thames finally head to London. https://ift.tt/7uZtOmR

This fall, Courtauld Gallery will present “Monet and London: Views of the Thames,” an exhibition featuring Claude Monet’s paintings from his visits to the city between 1899 and 1901. This showcase marks the first U.K. exhibition dedicated to these works, finally fulfilling the artist’s dream to have them shown in London. The exhibition will open on September 27, 2024, and will run until January 19, 2025, just 300 meters from where Monet painted many of these works, at the Savoy Hotel.

Monet’s most famous paintings come from his time in the French countryside. However, in recent years, his London series has gained prominence. Monet’s portrayal of the Thames River and the London skyscrapers include famous views such as Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge, and the Houses of Parliament, depicted at different times of day to showcase the changing light and mood of the city, in typical Impressionist style.

In 1904, Monet unveiled 37 of these works in Paris at Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie. He planned to show the paintings the following year but postponed the show at the last minute, believing that the works were not yet ready. Now, 120 years later, 19 of the 37 original paintings will be on view to the public.

Many of these works highlight the increasing historical significance of this work, the painting Le Parlement, soleil couchant (1900–03) achieved $76 million at a Christie’s auction in 2022, smashing its $60 million high estimate. This work was one of the original works shown in Paris and will be on view at Courtauld Gallery this fall.

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Trailblazing Gallerist Jonathan Carver Moore Shines a Light on LGBTQ+ Artists https://ift.tt/aBPRATQ

Jonathan Carver Moore often walks his dog by his eponymous gallery on Market Street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, pausing to listen to how passersby react to the artwork in the giant glass windows. It might seem like a simple eavesdropping exercise, but for Moore, it’s fueled by a serious commitment to considering the opinions of his local community.

“I know what it feels like to be an outsider,” Moore told Artsy. As the first openly gay Black male gallerist in San Franscisco, Moore opened his gallery based on the belief that the art world should be accessible. Moore has lived in the Tenderloin neighborhood since he moved to the Bay Area nine years ago, and founded his gallery in 2023 with a program centered around BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and women artists. “How can we make sure that we’re really hearing from them and doing so in a space or a gallery that understands what they’re going through?” the gallerist said of his approach.

Barely a year after breaking ground, Jonathan Carver Moore has not only become a notable presence in the Bay Area art world, but has also made waves elsewhere. He’s already participated in five art fairs, including EXPO Chicago, Investec Cape Town Art Fair, and Untitled Miami, and has found time to launch a residency program before the gallery’s first anniversary, taking over an empty 2,600-square-foot space next door. The first artist to take part in the seven-week program Ghanaian painter Aplerh-Doku Borlabi, has just wrapped a solo show at the gallery, “BOLD,” which closed on June 15th.

This meteoric success is nearly unprecedented for a relative newcomer to the commercial art world. Raised in a military family, Moore pursued studies in sociology and women’s studies, followed by a master’s in public relations at George Washington University. An engagement with art was a fixture of Moore’s childhood, and he fondly recalls visiting museums such as the Louvre, the Hirshorn, the National Gallery of Art, and the Met with his mother as a child—an experience he credits with embedding the arts as a key part of his life from an early age.

Emancipation, 2024
Aplerh-Doku Borlabi
Jonathan Carver Moore

Ngcamisa I , 2022
Sipho Nuse
Jonathan Carver Moore

Moore began his career in the nonprofit sector with roles at United Way Worldwide and Out & Equal before joining the Rosenberg Foundation, a nonprofit that works towards racial and economic justice in California. While at Rosenberg, he had the chance to dive into the Bay Area art scene, proposing that he curate a selection of local artists, such as Lucky Rapp and Lena Gustafson, at the foundation’s headquarters.

In 2020, Moore set up the online journal ARTUCATED to share art and stories from BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and women artists from around the world, and by 2021, he took a leap of faith to fully enter the art world and joined the Institute of Contemporary Art in San Francisco. Still, Moore found that the institutional world often lacked the agility needed to address social issues promptly. “Unfortunately, you’re not always able to move as fast as one would like to when it comes to responding to what’s happening to us or what’s happening around us,” he said. Fueled by this realization, he decided to open his own gallery, a space designed to rapidly adapt and engage with the evolving cultural landscape.

Cradle My Pain, 2023
Kacy Jung
Jonathan Carver Moore

The gallery’s inaugural show featured Kacy Jung, a Taiwanese immigrant whose work discusses themes of identity and cultural assimilation—a poignant choice that underpinned Moore’s commitment to giving a platform to voices that resonate deeply with personal and collective narratives. After coming across her work at Root Division, a San Francisco–based nonprofit focused on arts education where Moore is a board member, he realized how closely her work aligned with his personal vision. This exhibition set the stage for the gallery, highlighting its focus on bringing marginalized voices to the forefront.

Moore emphasizes the need for a careful balance between commercial considerations and boundary-pushing. This thoughtful, realistic approach allows the gallerist time to take risks on new artists while prioritizing security for his gallery and the artists he exhibits.

Piece Me Back Together, 2023
Kacy Jung
Jonathan Carver Moore

“It’s maintaining this balance of what I want to keep showing and why I started, my true vision versus what is just sellable,” said Moore. “So if you’re going to do six shows a year, maybe four out of the six shows are shows that you can bank on.…But then I should have a wild card, right? That ‘wild card’ is often the one that might be the one that surprises everyone, and you have another breakout artist.”

With the gallery’s new residency program, Moore aims to forge connections between Bay Area artists and the global art community. For example, during Borlabi’s residency, the gallery organized events that allowed locals to engage directly with the artist. Visitors could converse with Borlabi, observe his creative process, and gain deeper insights into his artistic journey. Above all, it’s about grounding framing the art world with inclusivity rather than obscurity, Moore said.

Shimmer, 2023
Victoria Mara Heilweil
Jonathan Carver Moore

“I feel like when you have that deep connection to the art, then you have a better understanding of its value, worth, and its beauty,” Moore said. “And we want to do the same with the other individuals who would be a part of the residency.”

Moore just opened his ninth show at the gallery, “Infinite,” featuring work from lens-focused artist Victoria Mara Heilweil. In the future, the gallerist plans to host Cameroonian artist Sesse Elangwe at the residency, as well as Indian artist Anoushka Mirchandani, whom the gallerist is hoping to show at next year’s hometown FOG Art + Design Fair.

See It Differently, 2023
Sesse Elangwe
Jonathan Carver Moore

One show Moore is particularly enthusiastic about is a photography exhibition from South African artist Pieter Hugo, planned to open near the end of August or the beginning of September. This show will focus on Hugo’s compelling body of images featuring the Tenderloin district during his time as a resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County. These works immortalize “a neighborhood that people often avoid,” in Moore’s words, by representing people of color, queer people, and those facing poverty who are otherwise overlooked.

As the gallery continues to make headway, Moore remains steadfast on the mission that has guided it to this point thus fair—intersecting art with advocacy to foster an environment where every exhibition is a step toward inclusivity. “I’m merging two lives that I want to see come together: wanting to help people and then wanting people to see art and the gallery,” he said.

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Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artwork to be featured in new H&M collection. https://ift.tt/BW8vHCP

International fashion brand H&M has launched a new clothing line in collaboration with the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the luxury streetwear brand Who Decides War. Unveiled on June 19th in Paris, the collection intends to celebrate Basquiat’s impact on contemporary culture. It is being helmed by Who Decides War designers Ev Bravado and Téla D’Amore, and will be available at H&M stores worldwide starting on July 18th.

Founded in 2018, Who Decides War is known for its Black Americana aesthetic and high-profile fans, including the rapper Ice Spice and the late designer Virgil Abloh. In approaching their collaboration with the Basquiat estate, Bravado and D’Amore chose to refrain from using the artist’s signature motifs, like crowns and dinosaurs. Instead, they focused on lesser-known elements of his practice.

“We really wanted to take it in a way that spoke about the Black artists’ experience,” Bravado told Vogue in a recent interview. “When I see a lot of the other collabs that people have done with the estate, we always see the same things. But it’s like, ‘Okay, here’s a man who’s probably the most renowned artist of all time, let’s tell the story of the people who influenced him, and how we were influenced by him, and how we will continue to influence and continue to push forward Black art and culture.’”

The collaboration was inspired by “King Pleasure,” the 2022 exhibition organized by the Basquiat estate in Los Angeles, which showcased over 200 rarely seen paintings, drawings, and articles of ephemera. For the exhibition, the Basquiat estate partnered with various brands, including Who Decides War, setting the state for this new venture.

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Exhibition of Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz’s art collection gets global tour. https://ift.tt/gSlc1oL

Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys announced that their art exhibition, “GIANTS: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys,” will travel on a world tour. The exhibition, which debuted at the Brooklyn Museum, will first visit Atlanta’s High Museum of Art before visiting other museums. However, dates and other details have yet to be announced.

“Our mission has always been about making art accessible to everyone and showcasing these GIANT artists,” the Dean family said in a joint statement. “We realized quickly that meant this collection had to travel to communities across the country and the world.”

Moreover, Swizz Beatz’s (Kasseem Dean) personal connection to Atlanta was a major deciding factor in choosing the city. “ATL is an important part of my story since I went to Stone Mountain High, Redan High and Open Campus. I started DJing parties as a kid at Atrium and Club Flavors too! So, bringing Giants to the High is an art homecoming for me!” he said.

The exhibition, which includes approximately 100 artworks, will close at the Brooklyn Museum on July 7th before touring other museums. “GIANTS” features the celebrity couple’s personal collection of Black diasporic artists, including Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas, Arthur Jafa, Kehinde Wiley, Amy Sherald, and Barkley L. Hendricks. By showcasing these works, the couple intends to provide a platform for both renowned and emerging artists within the Black community.

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Inside Mary Cassatt’s World of Mothers, Babies, and Subtle Feminist Politics https://ift.tt/kdLjgWs

It would be unseemly behavior in a museum, but you’d be forgiven for wanting to nuzzle one of Mary Cassatt’s wondrously soft and textural pictures. Mother and Child (Maternal Kiss), a work on paper from 1896, is a particularly inviting candidate. The fulsome cheeks of its subjects, presumably a mother and daughter, are gently smushed together; wisps of silky hair are tucked into bows and buns; streaks of pastel sweep like taffy pulled across the paper.

In the popular imagination, this is where Cassatt’s work starts and ends—inside a cocoon of domesticity, or what the art historian Edgar Richardson once described as a “perpetual afternoon tea.” Mother and Child (Maternal Kiss) belongs to the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), where a new survey of the American Impressionist’s work is on view through September 8th. “Mary Cassatt at Work” sets out to unsettle the notion of Cassatt as a painter of idyllic nursery scenes. It arose from a desire to “bring contemporary questions and conversation into the material,” as the exhibition’s co-curator Laurel Garber said in an interview. “There are ways to look afresh at her scenes that have…ossified into these—I think—tired readings.”

“Mary Cassatt at Work” is undergirded by a contemporary feminist sensibility—a sensitivity to the historical underrecognition of so-called “women’s work.” Domestic labor, we are reminded, is essential: When Cassatt painted the home, she also painted the workplace. What’s more, because women of Cassatt’s socioeconomic status typically painted as an amateur pursuit, foregrounding the professionalism of her practice also adds an important feminist perspective. When Cassatt painted the home-as-workplace, she herself was working—not merely engaging in bourgeois hobbyism, a more socially sanctioned undertaking.

Certainly, Cassatt was a woman ahead of her time, and her work has been studied through a feminist art historical lens for decades. Today, fourth-wave popular feminism, with all its eagerness to claim individuals as icons, may be tempted to make her a feminist poster child. This exhibition has more modest aims; it largely avoids explicitly claiming Cassatt as a feminist. Still, it shines a light on aspects of the artist’s life and work that chime with contemporary ideas about women’s empowerment, at the level of both the individual and the collective.

Modern painter, modern life

Cassatt’s personal highlight reel is remarkable. Born in Pennsylvania in 1844, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia before moving abroad to continue her artistic training. In Paris, she became friendly with Edgar Degas and was eventually invited to exhibit with the Impressionists, not once, but four times. She was the only American to do so, and one of only a handful of women. In 1904, Cassatt became the second woman artist to win the Légion d’honneur from the French government. In today’s parlance, she broke glass ceilings.

Impressionism was the painting of modern life, and Cassatt’s own life was thoroughly modern. Despite frequently depicting infants, the artist herself never married or had children. The exhibition takes pains to underscore her uncompromising commitment to professionalism—spurred on by her family’s insistence, beginning in 1878, that her practice be financially self-sustaining. “I am independent!” Cassatt once wrote, a quote now emblazoned on a gallery wall at the PMA. “I can live alone and I love my work.”

Utopian female cooperation

One of the most significant works of Cassatt’s career, Modern Woman (1892–93), is described by art historian Nicole Georgopoulos in the exhibition catalogue as the artist’s “great opus on women’s liberation.” A large-scale mural commissioned for the Women’s Building at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, it depicted an Edenic garden in which women worked together to harvest and circulate the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge. Modern Woman is preserved only in photographs, but in its allegorical vision of women’s education, we catch a glimpse of Cassatt’s interest in models of collectivity and networks of knowledge.

These themes show up at a smaller scale in Gathering Fruit, a print from the same year as the World’s Fair. Rendered in verdant botanical patterns, it features a woman on a ladder passing plucked grapes to a child cradled by a second woman. Here, Cassatt reclaims the figure of Eve and repositions knowledge as a source of strength—not sin—for women.

Women’s work

Mary Cassatt’s world was riddled with maternal gestures (work titles included Maternal Kiss, Maternal Caress)—but her images were, in many cases, fictitious. Cassatt’s “mothers” were often paid models, and she also frequently depicted “pink-collar” laborers, such as wet nurses and hired caregivers.

“Mary Cassatt at Work” suggests that the identities of Cassatt’s subjects, along with her compositional choices, undercut the sentimentality of these images. Thus, they get to the reality of motherhood, whether authentic or enacted: It is work. In Maternal Caress (1896), Cassatt highlights the physicality of childcare. Its cherubic subject, a toddler with ruddy cheeks and strawberry blond curls, appears to be shoving her thumb into the mouth of her caregiver, who grips her arm tightly in a gesture of restraint. “The question that we wrestled with was, ‘Is that the right title?’” Garber’s co-curator Jennifer Thompson noted, of the painting, during a walkthrough of the exhibition. “Is there a caress happening?”

While it’s true that Cassatt, by virtue of her gender and class, would not have had access to many of the spaces that her male Impressionist colleagues often painted—street scenes, Parisian nightclubs, and the like—Garber noted that Cassatt wasn’t merely painting what was available. These scenes of domesticity were not just observed, but actively staged. This comes through in a letter Cassatt wrote to her friend Louisine Havemeyer, in which she described “the difficulty of posing the models, of choosing the color scheme, of expressing the sentiment and telling your story!”

“She makes choices in the way that the scenes are really interestingly cropped, or [the way] that she expands and monumentalizes the figures within the frame of the picture,” said Garber. “I find that to be really telling about the challenge she finds in capturing the intensity and physicality, but also the charge and tension, of these scenes.”

Cassatt the suffragette

Though Cassatt’s work and biography suggest an interest in women’s advancement, there is scarce evidence tying her to early feminist thinkers or organized women’s movements in France, where she lived for the majority of her adult life. She was, however, involved in the fight for suffrage across the Atlantic. Writing to Havemeyer in 1914, she advised her friend to “work for the suffrage. If the world is to be saved, it will be the women who save it.” Cassatt supplied 29 works to a 1915 exhibition organized by Havemeyer at a New York gallery to raise funds for the suffrage campaign.

Missing from the PMA exhibition but included in its catalogue is a work that further underscores Cassatt’s commitment to the cause. Woman with a Sunflower (ca. 1905) captures a familiar scene within Cassatt’s oeuvre—a seated woman with a child on her lap. What stands out is the large, radiant sunflower pinned to the woman’s dress. The flower was adopted into the official iconography of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1896, and, as the historian Georgopulos argues in recent scholarship, its suffragist symbolism would have been widely recognized at the time.

Modern viewers may be tempted to write off the bloom as mere decoration. But—as with much of Cassatt’s work—the painting harbors layers of meaning behind its soft, pretty surface.

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