What We're Reading: 4/24/24

An Unexpected Player Has Begun Providing Auction Guarantees

Museums and auction houses have always been odd bedfellows.

Museums turn to auction houses to sell art deaccessioned from their collections, sometimes sparking controversy, and to organize fundraisers. Auction houses, meanwhile, have become more active as sponsors of museum exhibitions and biennials, raising some eyebrows.

But now the two sectors are collaborating in an intriguing new way.

In what appears to be to be an unprecedented move, the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio has started providing guarantees for artworks that it wants to acquire at auction.

Via Artnet

Artist Idris Khan’s First American Museum Solo Exhibition Comes to the Milwaukee Art Museum

For Idris Khan, there’s beauty in repetition. Growing up in a Muslim household in the U.K., the London-based artist followed his father’s religious devotion. “We were praying together, but I never really knew why I was doing that. I never knew the language; I sort of just repeated.”

Iteration is now a lifelong investigation, and the main subject of his first solo U.S. museum show “Repeat After Me,” on view at the Milwaukee Museum of Art. The title is a mantra from Khan’s father: “‘Repeat After Me’ came from what he used to say to me in the mosque.” Viewers can see this fascination in the looping scrawl of Bicycle Wheel...after Duchamp, 2014, and the overlapping staffs in Bach...Six Suites for the Solo Cello, 2006. And in the new work created expressly for the exhibition, Khan continues to seek the beauty and constraint in the ritual of repetition. 

Via Cultured

Klimt portrait surrounded by mystery sells for €30m in Vienna

A late portrait by Gustav Klimt with a tangled history and surrounded by mysteries sold for a hammer price of €30m at Im Kinsky in Vienna, an auction record for Austria.

The recent discovery of Portrait of Fräulein Lieser (1917) was described by the Vienna auction house as “a sensation”. It was previously only known from a black-and-white photograph and had been believed lost until Im Kinsky received a phone call from the consignor around 16 months ago.

Via the Art Newspaper