What We're Reading: 2/29/24

Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts represents the first book dedicated to the artist's life and work

Even in the most public of places, a book is still an interior object. Page after page, we open and close folios like doors, arriving and then departing. In that sense, the new volume by Pre-Echo Press is the fitting format to display the work of Japanese-American artist Miyoko Ito, including 210 paintings, as well as drawings and ephemera. ‘The most comprehensive inventory to date of Ito’s works,’ Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts fully invokes the painter’s searching interplay of interiors and exteriors, inner landscapes and floating souls.

Via World of Interiors 

Art Institute showed ‘willful blindness’ in buying Nazi-looted art, New York prosecutors say

The Art Institute of Chicago has been accused of exhibiting "willful blindness" to evidence suggesting it was purchasing artwork stolen during the Holocaust when it acquired a drawing that authorities say was looted by the Nazis.

The damning allegations were made in court documents filed in New York last week that argue the Art Institute benefited from a decadeslong "conspiracy of silence" over the drawing "Russian War Prisoner" by Egon Schiele.

The 160-page filing by the Manhattan district attorney's office lays out its case contending the work of art was stolen by the Nazis from cabaret star Fritz Grunbaum and later laundered through art dealers before arriving in New York.

Via Chicago Sun-Times

Venice Biennale Organizers Respond to Calls to Exclude Israel and Iran

Organizers of the Venice Biennale have responded to a call to exclude Israel from the event in light of the human toll in the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza.

Via Artnet