Today’s FOUND is news-heavy again. However, there are also videos on using posters for anti-racism, the chemistry of colour, and a short but compelling introduction to Edvard Munch.
Art World Scammer Anna Delvey Was Interviewed by Internet Icon Ziwe, With Predictably Outrageous Results
From ARTnews
First Dancing With The Stars, now internet icon and comedian Ziwe Fumudoh: Anna Delvey is apparently on a press tour.
The 33-year-old Delvey, whose real name is Anna Sorokin, appeared in an extended interview with Ziwe, published to YouTube on Tuesday, to talk about her many scams.
Delvey was convicted of larceny, grand theft, and financial crimes in 2019, and sentenced to 4 to 12 years in prison, then released in 2022. In early 2022, she went about monetizing her infamy, hosting an art show while still in detention and adapting her life and cons into the Netflix miniseries Inventing Anna by Shonda Rhimes. By December 2022, Delvey had sold $340,000 worth of paintings and drawings. Since her release, Delvey has been held on house arrest, though that hasn’t stopped her from hosting lavish dinner parties at her East Village apartment, starting a podcast, and last September hosting a fashion show on her rooftop.
Art Bites: Could Monet See Into the Ultraviolet Spectrum?
From Artnet
At the twilight of his career, Monet was going blind. Surgery restored his eyesight. But did it give him the uncanny vision of an insect? Were his water lily paintings a result of this X factor?
“Monet is only an eye, but by God what an eye!” exclaimed Paul Cézanne in double-edged praise of his painting peer, the revered Impressionist master Claude Monet. It is unknown if Cézanne was aware that Monet did in fact possess superhuman vision.
In 1912, Monet’s exalted eyes came under threat when he began developing cataracts; a medical consultation found that the lenses of his eyes were clouding, blocking the light as it passed through. He was facing an artist’s worst nightmare—he was going blind. The cataracts may have just been a side effect of age, Monet was in his 70’s after all, but there is also speculation that lead-based paint was the culprit behind his retinal deterioration.
Art Bites: Why Was Sigmund Freud So Obsessed With Leonardo da Vinci?
From Artnet
The psychoanalyst described the artist as being of the "obsessive brooding" type.
In a 1909 letter, Sigmund Freud wrote to fellow psychoanalyst Carl Jung that he had encountered a “neurotic” patient whose sexual inactivity and inability to finish tasks was reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci, even if the man, Freud made clear, didn’t share Leonardo’s genius.
Freud had long been intrigued by the Renaissance polymath (an obscure 1900 Russian novel on Leonardo was among his favorites), but his new Viennese patient prompted a deeper investigation. In a frenzy, Freud gathered histories, criticisms, novels, replica works and in 1910 published Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood. Freud abhorred biographies, considering them a form of hero worship and a genre in which the author indulged in “infantile fantasies” akin to a child venerating its father. He made an exception for Leonardo and himself.
Data Dive: Why Have China’s Art Auction Sales Dropped by 49 Percent?
From Artnet
All major regional art markets contracted in the first half of 2024.
According to Artnet’s Mid-Year Intelligence Report, all major regional art markets contracted, but the U.S. remains the largest, with the U.K. second. China suffered the largest decline in sales so far this year.
Fine-art auction sales in the U.S. generated $2.2 billion in the first half of 2024, down 24 percent from the equivalent period in 2023. That is the third-lowest half-year total of the past decade, which includes the pandemic-affected year of 2020.
The U.K. came in second, with $827 million in sales, a 26 percent drop from the same period last year. In a business landscape made increasingly challenging by Brexit, a historically weak pound, and high inflation, auction houses have downsized some of their London sales.
How Lucas Cranach the Elder Went From Making Icons to Agitprop
From Hyperallergic
The artist would develop a distinctly Protestant imagery that replaced sacredness with utility, functioning essentially as propaganda minister for Martin Luther.
On Christmas in 1521, a former priest in peasants’ clothing delivered such an incendiary homily that, one cold and clear night shortly after, the churches of that red-roofed, gothic town would be stripped of their sacred statues. With hammer, chisel, and mallet, zealous reformers in Wittenberg, Germany set out in the city where the Reformation had started only five years before, now deigning to destroy what they perceived as popish idols. Bricks hurled through stained-glass windows and white paint splashed upon walls; over-tipped statues of saints and shrines scattered in naves. Not even Wittenberg Cathedral, to whose front door Martin Luther had nailed his “Ninety-five Theses” in 1517, would be spared the iconoclastic fury. Luther had absconded shortly before, his life endangered after his excommunication, but Andreas Karlstadt, that fiery preacher who now ministered in his place, hewed to an even more radical vision. “Images bring death to those who worship or venerate them,” he wrote in a pamphlet that justified this night of broken statues. “Our temples might be rightly called murderers’ caves, because in them our spirit is stricken and slain.”
Karlstadt was at war against art itself, but his mentor, who was currently translating the Bible into German while in hiding in Wartburg Castle, disagreed. For Luther, it was crucial to exorcize the worship of images from the heart; whether they were on an altar or not was incidental. As such, Karlstadt “does not preach faith,” Luther thundered in a 1525 sermon. “Unfortunately, only now do I see that.” When Luther returned from exile to helm the Reformation, indeed, he greeted the painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (the title differentiating him from his less talented son), warmly. Cranach, in turn, would develop a distinctly Protestant imagery that replaced sacredness with utility, functioning essentially as propaganda minister for the reformer.
A Sympathetic if Incomplete Portrait of Alberto Giacometti
From Hyperallergic
Though it glosses over his misogyny, Michael Peppiatt’s biography reflects Giacometti’s uncanny ability to capture the energy of ancient art in a modern format.
In a new biography by Michael Peppiatt, 20th-century Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti gets the rock star treatment. The cover of Giacometti in Paris is comprised almost entirely of the artist’s craggy and pitted face, as timeless and veristic as a Roman bust, and as eminently cool as Keith Richard. It’s a solid choice, telegraphing that what’s inside will be more about the man, his aura and his appeal, than about his art. But the image, taken by photographer Franz Hubmann, does reflect something essential in Giacometti’s work itself: its uncanny ability to capture the energy of ancient art in a modern format.
A Painting by Surrealist René Magritte Is Coming to Auction With a Near-$100 Million Estimate
From Barron’s
A painting by René Magritte is expected to sell for at least US$95 million at a Christie’s auction in November in New York.
Titled L’empire des lumières, 1954, meaning “The Empire of Light,” the work is a surrealist oil painting depicting both day and night simultaneously. It is “the most important surrealist work ever to appear at auction,” Christie’s said in a news release.
The piece is one of 27 works from the 1940s to the ’60s that Magritte painted depicting a scene simultaneously during the day and at night. These paintings often fetch significant sums. The most valuable L’empire des lumières sold at auction to date achieved a record £59.4 million (US$79.8 million) at Sotheby’s in 2022 in London.
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