Author: greg

“We don’t have any literature that says he made the painting for Off-White. But we know a little bit about Basquiat. We know his family. We did an exhibition of his work at the Louis Vuitton Foundation a few years back. We know he loved New York, and that he loved luxury and he loved sneakers. My guess is that the off-white painting is not by chance. The color is so specific that it has to be some kind of homage,” Alexandre Arnault will be telling us in a couple of weeks.

update: sold for GBP 10.43m to who knows? Josh Baer, probably?

I’ve been thinking about Barbara Chase-Riboud a lot the last few years, and not just because of her recent surge in exhibitions and attention. She was the subject of some of Carrie Mae Weems’ most insightful comments in a talk at the National Gallery which I kept returning to over and over during the political tumult of the previous administration. It was the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Lecture in September 2015, and it’s both soothing and electric.

Anyway, point is, holy moley, Barbara Chase-Riboud made jewelry-sized objects? I had no idea. There is no date on the gold, articulated ring, which looks like the shell-like elements are meant to cascade down the back of your hand. It comes with a copy of the Philadelphia Museum’s 2013 exhibition of BCR’s Malcolm X Steles, though, so maybe that’s a hint. [OTOH, the 2016 listing of another example from the edition at Christie’s has Chase-Riboud’s dates wrong, and includes a random image of a different ring. So maybe not authoritative.]

Meanwhile the silver brooch, which hovers over a sheaf of loosely looped chains, and feels like some of Chase-Riboud’s sculptures, was published in the April 1972 issue of Craft Horizons. A copy of the magazine is included in the lot.

[next day update: Indeed, around 1972. In her 2019 Oral History with the Archives of American Art, Chase-Riboud explains that a jeweler, Gennari, approached her to make some pieces. “For me, the jewels were not jewelry at all; they were simply very small sculptures,” she said.]

The pieces come from the collection of Acey Wolgin, who, with her husband Bill, was a collector of post-war art. They lived in Philadelphia, and their collection is coming up for sale at Rago Arts in a couple of weeks.

The Acey & Bill Wolgin Collection, Oct. 18, 2023 [ragoarts]

Martin Bailey just dropped an extraordinary tale of investigation of an amazing tale of officially organized looting in The Art Newspaper. The subject is an early 16th century painting of Christ, , which became the most important religious relic in Ethiopian Orthodoxy. It was stolen on orders of the British Museum in 1868, who sent an agent to Ethiopia to loot artifacts and manuscripts from the midst of war. That agent, Richard Holmes, took the painting from above the bed of the emperor, and ended up keeping it for himself.

The painting’s nearly invisible, deracinated history since then, and reconnecting it to its Ethiopian context, are a central part of The Art Newspaper’s investigation, which began in at least 1998.

Kwer’ata Re’esu was widely copied within Ethiopia over the centuries, but the original was carefully guarded by the emperors. Until the 1990s, when TAN located it in Portugal, Kwer’ata Re’esu had only been known by a single 1905 photograph. Bailey went to visit it and took what are now the first known color images of the painting, including its frame and backing, all seemingly intact after 500 years.

Exclusive: first colour photographs shed fresh light on Ethiopia’s most treasured icon and its looting by an agent of the British Museum [theartnewspaper]