Art Industry News: Kara Walker’s Offer to Show the Sugar Sphinx at Turbine Hall Was Rebuffed by the Tate + Other Stories

Art Industry News is a daily digest of the most
consequential developments coming out of the art world and art
market. Here’s what you need to know on this Tuesday, September
24.

NEED-TO-READ

Spain’s Greatest Private Art
Collection Opens to the Public – The House of Alba’s Madrid palace is opening
its doors to the public for the first time this Thursday. The
Palacio de Liria houses the aristocratic family’s magnificent art
collection, as well as a historic library. Highlights include
Goya’s portrait of the Duchess of Alba de Tormes as well as works
by Titian, El Greco, Rubens, and Velázquez. The 18th-century
building was gutted by fire during the Spanish Civil War, but the
Duke of Alba was able to rescue his art and keep it safe by storing it in the Prado
museum, the Bank of Spain, and, by calling in a favor, the British
Embassy in Madrid. (El Pais)

An Eight-Month Restoration Begins on King Tut’s Coffin –
The boy pharaoh’s gold coffin has
been fumigated and is now ready to be conserved as part of a
painstaking restoration project. This marks the first time in
almost 100 years that the coffin has been removed from its royal
tomb. After restoration, it will be reunited with Tutankhamun’s
two other coffins at the new Grand Egyptian Museum. The two outer
coffins are made of wood, while the inner one is made of gold.
(Daily Mail)

Kara Walker Drops Big Hints About
Her Epic Tate Work – The
American artist will unveil her highly anticipated Tate Modern
commission next week in its vast Turbine Hall. Kara Walker does not
give much away, although she says the project will
“weave the intersections of the
common themes” between black Americans and black Britons.
The American curator
Bolanle Tajudeen reveals that the
Tate work will also include water and, like much of her oeuvre,
“deals with the transatlantic slave trade.” There is a deeper
connection between Walker’s work and Tate: Henry Tate, part owner
of the sugar company Tate & Lyle, funded the first Tate gallery in
the 19th century. But when Walker suggested to an unnamed former
Tate director that her giant sugar sphinx
would be just the thing for the Turbine Hall, she recalled
(mimicking his British accent) that he told her dismissively: “We
only commission original projects.” (Guardian)

The Priest Who Knew Who Stole a
Caravaggio Masterpiece – Previously unseen testimony from a priest who
tried to recover a Caravaggio stolen from a church in Palermo 50
years ago reveals that the painting hung in the home of
notorious mafioso Gaetano Badalamenti for years. In an interview
filmed in 2001, but locked away in a drawer, the now-deceased
priest reveals that the mafia sliced off a portion of the painting
in a failed extortion attempt. The unedited interview with the
late Rocco Benedetto, the
former parish priest of the Oratory of San Lorenzo,
will be screened in Palermo on
October 15. (Guardian)

ART MARKET

Gagosian Fights Back Against
Collector in Koons Lawsuit – Gagosian’s legal battle with
the billionaire collector
Steven A. Tananbaum over the gallery’s alleged failure to
deliver three Jeff Koons works is raging on. Gagosian plans to
appeal a decision made late last month
that allowed key elements of the suit to
proceed. (ARTnews)

A Major Charles White Painting
Comes to Christie’s – The
American artist’s 1976 painting Banner for Willie J, which was included in White’s well-reviewed traveling
retrospective in 2018, carries an estimate of $1 million to
$1.5 million. When the painting hits the block at Christie’s New
York on November 13, it stands to at least double his current
auction record of $509,000, set last year. (ARTnews)

Independent Releases Exhibitor List
– The Independent art fair is
returning to New York during Armory Week in March 2020. Leading
galleries making their debut at the fair at Spring Studios in
Tribeca include new neighborhood transplant P.P.O.W, Eva
Presenhuber, Corbett vs. Dempsey, and Marianne
Boesky. (Press release)

COMINGS & GOINGS

Berkeley Museum Director to Step
Down – The longtime director of
the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Lawrence Rinder,
is stepping down next March after almost 12 years in the role.
Rinder, who oversaw the museum’s move to a $112 million Diller
Scofidio + Renfro-designed building in 2016, is leaving the
California institution after 13 years to spend time working on a
novel, volunteering, and “enjoying nature.” (ARTnews)

Deadwood Is Getting a Brothel
Museum – A local nonprofit is
opening a museum in Deadwood, South Dakota—the town made famous by
the HBO show of the same name—dedicated to capturing the history of
the city’s brothels. The museum, run by Deadwood History, Inc.,
will open on the site of a former brothel called the Shasta Room in
mid-2020. (Smithsonian)

Former Otis President Dies at 73
– The founder of SITE Santa Fe
and former president of Otis College of Art and Design, Bruce W.
Ferguson, died aged 73 at his home in Los Angeles on September 14.
The cause was cancer, according to his family. Over the course of
his career, he collaborated with artists including Kara
Walker, Francis Alys, and Eric Fischl. (Los Angeles Times)

FOR ART’S SAKE

An Ancient Palmyra Sculpture Gets a
Makeover – A team of Danish
researchers have been working with Copenhagen’s Ny Carlsberg
Glyptotek museum to reconstruct how a tomb from ancient Palmyra
unearthed in 1928 would have originally looked. As part of the
initiative, they have digitally reconstructed missing fragments
from a half-length portrait of an unknown woman dubbed
The Beauty of
Palmyra, filling in her
lips, nose, and left hand, and adding rich pigment to the
sculpture. (TAN)

Josef Albers’s Famous New York
Mural Returns to New York – Josef Albers’s enormous Manhattan mural has
returned to the lobby of the former MetLife building. The mural was
a central part of the Modernist lobby of the Walter
Gropius-designed building on Park Avenue, and there was widespread
public outcry when it was removed during a renovation in 2000. It
has now been recreated in a project led by architect Raúl de
Armas’s New York firm, MdeAS. (TAN)

London’s Wallace Collection Will
Lend Its Old Masters – The Wallace Collection is joining the big
leagues of international museum lenders after its trustees and
lawyers reconsidered its founder’s will. In a historic U-turn, they
have now decided that its treasures, which include paintings
by Rembrandt, Rubens, Van
Dyck, Canaletto, Titian, and Velázquez, can travel after all, ending
more than a century of loan prohibition. (Press release)

Moschino’s Runway Brings Picasso to
Life – The fashion house’s
Jeremy Scott transformed Moschino’s spring 2020 runway show into a
tribute to Picasso. Models were decked out in painterly prints
reflecting different periods of the Spanish master’s oeuvre, from
Bella Hadid’s “Rose Period” to Kaia Gerber’s abstract guitar look.
(Fashionista)

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The post Art Industry News: Kara Walker’s Offer to Show the
Sugar Sphinx at Turbine Hall Was Rebuffed by the Tate + Other
Stories appeared first on artnet News.