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- Helen Cammock removed her video claiming Churchill starved Indians during the Bengal famine from London’s National Portrait Gallery.
- Charles Hinman, known for his three-dimensional sculpted canvases, has died at age 93.
- The top ten sales at Art Basel last week were revealed.
The Headlines
UNDER PRESSURE. Following heated backlash, artist Helen Cammock has removed her video work from London’s National Portrait Gallery, which claims former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill willfully starved Indians during the 1943 Bengal famine, reports BBC. “Today, Helen Cammock decided to remove her film, Persistence, from display at the National Portrait Gallery. We respect her decision, just as we acknowledge the opinions of those who were offended by what was said in the film,” the museum told the BBC on Monday. Over 50 people, including Churchill’s grandson, signed a letter saying Cammock had misconstrued the facts in her video. In remarks about the incident, Cammock, a Turner Prize–winning artist, said the video was never meant to be a documentary and that viewers should “hear it out.” In a statement, she added: “There is an incredible pressure on artists and arts institutions to bend to external pressure; to be benign at best and silent at worst. I do not accept this pressure. To question, challenge and explore ideas and histories is vital to a healthy society and art is intrinsic to this.”
IN MEMORIAM. Charles Hinman, known for his three-dimensional sculpted canvases, has died at age 93, reports the New York Times. His death on May 29 in Raleigh, North Carolina, was due to complications from a fall, according to his daughter, Delphine Hinman Zohn. Hinman called the approach to making his paintings, for which he shaped canvas over curved, wooden armatures, a “skin over bones” process. Starting in the 1960s, he built a name for himself as a lyrical Minimalist. This put him in good company, with artists such as Frank Stella, Leon Polk Smith, and Ellsworth Kelly. “Inspiration is a lightning bolt that comes down from the clouds,” he said in a 2014 interview. “You embark on a path, and you think, ‘I’m going to the conclusion,’ but partway there, a surprise comes. That’s part of the quest, to offer something that is new for me to do and for them to see.”
The Digest
From a $2.3 million Yves Klein sculpture to a $35 million Picasso, these are the top sales made at this year’s Art Basel. [ARTnews]
French police discovered a stolen painting by Pablo Picasso during a drug trafficking raid in the suburbs of Paris. [Le Parisien]
New court documents filed Monday afternoon by lawyers representing Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio accuse the Kennedy Center of “gamesmanship” for keeping up tarps blocking the sign on the center’s facade and fighting a court order requiring the removal of President Donald Trump’s name from it. [Forbes]
Chanel’s Métiers d’Art Hub in Shanghai, Le19M, unveiled the first batch of Chinese and French creatives commissioned to collaborate with Chanel’s ateliers: Ding Yi, Yin Xiuzhen, Shen Yuan, Wu Jian’an, Bi Rongrong and Qian Lihuai, alongside Diane Chéry, Deborah Fischer, Mathilde Albouy and Julian Farade. [WWD]
Ophélie Ferlier-Bouat, 43, was named the next leader of the Petit Palais museum in Paris. [Le Quotidien de l’Art]
The Kicker
THE BEYONCÉ OF MUSEUMS? In a new feature for the Atlantic, writer Clint Smith tracks the diplomatic resistance of the Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch in response to unprecedented pressure from the current administration. As Bunch stated at an event in March, “There is not a thing that I’ve allowed to be changed at the Smithsonian. I don’t care what you hear.” Now, some see him as the only high-profile leader standing up to Trump, and a virtual “Beyoncé of museums.” But Bunch appears to be nearing retirement, and his family in particular is worried about the strain of the job. After all, he has been powerless to block the administration’s threats to withhold funding and the fallout from executive orders that range from closing the Smithsonian’s Office of Diversity to the firing of Kim Sajet, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery until June 2025. We learn that Bunch himself thought he was about to get axed during a summer White House meeting with the president. Still, it was “the most stressful lunch I’ve ever had in my life,” he said at another speaking event in November. Now, with the possibility of Trump installing loyal board members to the Smithsonian, who could potentially oust Bunch, the question remains whether the institution will manage to continue withstanding targeted executive interference, and what it needs to survive.
