Art Industry News: Mount Holyoke Art Professor Arrested for Attempted Murder of Her Colleague + 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, January
7.

NEED-TO-READ

How a Nazi-Looted Painting Entered
an Israeli Museum – The Tel
Aviv Museum of Art is returning a 19th-century painting to
the heirs of the
German-Jewish publisher and art collector Rudolf
Mosse. But first, it
will mount a presentation about the history of the Dutch
painter Jozef Israëls’s From Darkness to Light (1871) and how it came to be donated to the
museum. The painting, which was sold under duress in the Nazi era,
resurfaced on the market in 1993, when it was bought in good faith
by the Tel Aviv-based art dealer Meir Stern, who was himself an
Auschwitz survivor. He sold the work to a private collector who
donated it to the museum, which has now pledged to step up its
provenance research to identify any other looted art in its
holdings. (TAN) 

More Join the Chorus Speaking Out Against Trump’s Threat
– More museum leaders and heritage professionals are speaking out
after US President Trump
threatened to attack Iran’s cultural sites. Jim Cuno, the CEO
of the J. Paul Getty Trust, wrote that “it is tragic that today
there would be any contemplation or rhetorical threat of further
destruction of cultural heritage, particularly when what precious
little remains in the world is already suffering from wanton
destruction, looting, neglect, reckless overdevelopment, and
climate change.” The director of Boston’s Museum of Fine
Arts, Matthew
Teitelbaum, went further on
Twitter, writing: “The preservation of antiquities and cultural
sites should not be endangered by any US administration.”
(Twitter, Getty)

The German Museum Director Who Talked to Her Far-Right Haters
– The remarkable director of
Dresden’s Albertinum, Hilke Wagner, has received hate mail from
supporters of Germany’s
far-right AfD party.
Instead of throwing them away, she called her attackers.
“We didn’t necessarily reach
a point of agreement, but we cleared up misconceptions,” she says.
“I understood some of the grievances better.” She didn’t stop
there. Next, she organized a town hall-style meeting for the
museum’s constituents, including AfD supporters, called “We Need to
Talk.” Curators have responded to demands to show more art about
the city’s wartime destruction, but have chosen to show the
material alongside antiwar works by artists such as Maria Lassnig,
Marlene Dumas, and Wolfgang Tillmans. They have also highlighted
the work of East Germany’s overlooked female artists.
(Guardian) 

Performance Artist and
Professor Arrested – In a story that seems fit for a
Netflix true-crime documentary, the performance artist and
Mount Holyoke art professor Rie Hachiyanagi has been
arraigned for an alleged attack on a professor in her 60s to whom
she confessed her love. When the fellow professor revealed she did
not share her feelings, Hachiyanagi is accused of attacking
her, stopping only when the woman pretended to have a change of
heart, at which point they called for medical
help. Hachiyanagi, who has taught at the college since 2004,
is known for her installations of handmade paper. (Daily
Beast)

ART MARKET

A.I.R. Gallery Plans Feminist Book
Fair – The nonprofit A.I.R.
Gallery is launching a feminist and queer art book fair, which will
take place in its Brooklyn space on January 18. The event,
organized by one of the first women-led, artist-run nonprofit
galleries in the US, will host publishers including Belladonna,
GenderFail, Visual AIDS, and more. (Hyperallergic)

Bonhams Launches Designer Handbags
Division – The auction house is
launching a new designer handbag and fashion department—a niche but growing and
fiercely competitive sector. It will hold its
first sale in April at Bonhams
Knightsbridge. The division will be led by Meg Randall and Winnie
Gee, specialists lured from Chiswick Auctions. (Press release)

COMINGS & GOINGS

British Museum Fights to Keep an Indian Miniature in the UK
– The British Museum has raised
the necessary funds to acquire an 18th-century miniature by the
Indian painter Nainsukh of Guler that had been at risk of leaving
the country. The UK government placed an export bar on the
painting, which depicts a set of trumpeters, in order to allow time
for a UK institution to raise £440,000 ($580,000) to halt its sale
overseas. (Guardian)

Foundation for Contemporary Arts Launches Painting Award
– The New York-based
foundation is launching a new annual grant: the Helen Frankenthaler
Award for Painting. The inaugural edition of the $40,000 grant,
established to honor the legacy of the pioneering Abstract
Expressionist who was also an early advocate for the foundation,
has been awarded to the New York-based painter Kerstin Brätsch.
(Artforum)

Legal Challenge to Moving Confederate Monuments Fails –
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals
has upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss a lawsuit
challenging the relocation of Confederate monuments from the
University of Texas campus at Austin and a park in San Antonio. The
court found that the objecting parties—an organization called the
Sons of Confederate Veterans and two descendants of Confederate
soldiers—failed to claim a “particularized injury,” or damage that
affects them directly in a personal and individual way.
(Courthouse News)

FOR ART’S SAKE

How This Stunning Artist Almost Disappeared From History
– As part of an ongoing
series in which critics celebrate artists who remain
underappreciated, Jerry Saltz sings the praises of
Beauford Delaney, the 20th-century
painter whose portraits, street scenes, and still lifes offered a
graphic, strong, and thoroughly contemporary answer to Cubism and
Surrealism in the late 1920s. Delaney, a close friend of James
Baldwin, rose to prominence in New York for his portraits of
dancers and society figures, but he died a lonely alcoholic in 1979
and has been largely overlooked since, in large part because he was
black and gay in an art world that made little room for either
identity. (Vulture)

Hikers Find Skeleton of Japanese-American Artist –
A pair of hikers in California
stumbled upon a skeleton last fall, which has now been identified
as that of Giichi Matsumura, a Japanese-American artist who, in the
final days of World War II, left an internment camp to paint in the
mountains. His remains were buried in the mountains after Matsumura
died in a freak summer snowstorm. (NBC)

Hirshhorn Plans Another Kusama Show
– From April 4 through
September 20, the Hirshhorn—which found extreme success
with Kusama in 2017—is mounting yet another exhibition
dedicated to the Japanese artist. “One With Eternity: Yayoi Kusama
in the Hirshhorn Collection” will include three new acquisitions
displayed alongside a number of early paintings, sculptures,
and photographs of the artist. Two of her “Infinity Mirror Rooms”
will be on view. (Press release)

The post Art Industry News: Mount Holyoke Art Professor
Arrested for Attempted Murder of Her Colleague + Other Stories
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