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The Headlines
BRITAIN’S CARAVAGGIO. Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery have joined up to acquire William Dobson’s 1630’s self-portrait, an artist viewed by some as “Britain’s Caravaggio,” reports the Times. In the fall, the painting of the dapper court painter to Charles I, who lived in 1611-46, will go on display at Tate Britain next to the artist’s portrait of his wife, Judith. Tate director Maria Balshaw also revealed that the painting was picked up for £2,367,405, far less than the rumored £5 million. “In my book, that makes it one of the bargains of the century. For the price of an average print by Andy Warhol, the nation has got its hands on a crucial bit of its heritage,” writes art critic Waldemar Januszczak, who argues the artist is “up there with Turner and Constable.”
PARIS HOLOCAUST MUSEUM VANDALIZED. The façade of the Mémorial de la Shoah museum in Paris was splashed with green paint over the weekend, along with two historic synagogues, and a restaurant in central Paris’s Marais district, reports Le Monde. No one has come forward to claim responsibility for the vandalism, but the city’s mayor has filed an initial legal complaint, while an investigation is under way for damage committed due to religious affiliation. Photos of the incident show “Le Mur des Justes,” [The Wall of the Righteous], containing the names of thousands who helped save Jews from Nazi persecution, located along the Shoah museum’s façade, now splashed with green paint.
The Digest
Banksy’s new artwork recently discovered in Marseille, France, has already been vandalized, and quickly cleaned up by a local restorer. Only a few days after it appeared, someone transformed Banksy’s stencil of a lighthouse into a phallic image. “I’m used to it. I’m from Marseille. It’s a national sport to combat [graffiti] tags here,” said Agnès Perrone, who repaired the work, which also features the phrase, “I want to be what you saw in me.” [Le Figaro]
Klaus Biesenbach, director of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and a dual German American citizen, said in an interview that he was not surprised by Donald Trump’s re-election to president in 2024. “Trump’s people now have much greater political clout than during his first term; he himself is carrying out a revolution on this basis, including a cultural revolution, and he is reinforcing his unfortunate dominance through the oligarchs with whom he surrounds himself,” he said. He also discussed the controversy between the museum and artist Nan Goldin over the war in Gaza, including his rebuttal to her accusation that Israel has committed genocide. “I never thought Nan would be so cold,” he said. [Spiegel]
Experts are warning that a 50,000-year-old rock art site on the Australian coast is under threat of destruction by a bid to extend a natural gas project in the area until 2070. Benjamin Smith, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia, has told the media that petroglyphs on the site have been damaged by air-borne pollutants from the local Woodside Energy plant. [The Art Newspaper]
On June 8, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will open a group exhibition on the history and geography of African American quilting, featuring works by generations of artists in the Brackens family. Curated by Elaine Yau, the show draws from a 2019 gift to the museum from the estate of quilt collector Eli Leon. “A big part of the show is trying to resist the erasure of Black women artists and their legacies,” Yau said. [The New York Times]
The Kicker
NEW NAOSHIMA MUSEUM. On Saturday, a new museum opened on Japan’s Naoshima island, making it the tenth art institution designed by Tadao Ando to join the site, and the first dedicated to contemporary art, reports the New York Times. The Naoshima New Museum of Art is the latest addition to the 1992-initiated project known as the Bennesse Art Site Naoshima, spread across three, art-filled islands in the Seto Inland Sea. “I wanted to create a kind of utopia in this world, one where people could genuinely find happiness through contemporary art,” said Japanese billionaire Soichiro Fukutake, about the Benesse initiative, which his family began as a way to rehabilitate the island from pollution damage. The new museum is also Fukutake’s last such endeavor, as he wraps up his involvement on the island. “I feel fulfilled — there’s nothing I regret or leave unfinished in life,” he said. For its inaugural exhibit titled “From the Origin to the Future,” the new museum is featuring site-specific new artworks by Asian artists, including pieces by Takashi Murakami, Pannaphan Yodmanee, and Sanitas Pradittasnee. About his ten architectural designs on the island, Ando remarked that “looking back, what I find most fascinating is that these 10 buildings were not developed through any preconceived master plan,” he said. “Rather, they emerged organically, growing and multiplying like living organisms.”
