Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.
Happy Wednesday! Here’s a roundup of who’s moving and shaking in the art trade this week.
- Philadelphia Museum of Art Promotes Jennifer Thompson: With a 25-year tenure at the museum, Thompson was most recently curator of European painting and sculpture and department head. She will now be deputy director of collections and exhibitions, overseeing several departments including registration, installation, and exhibition planning.
- Galerie Lelong Takes on Magnus Plessen: The self-taught, Berlin-based artist, who showed at the 2003 Venice Biennale, is known for “a distinctive painterly practice that explores the porous boundary between abstraction and figuration.”
- Alexander Tovborg Joins Olney Gleason: The Copenhagen-based artist, who works across painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance, will have his first solo show with the gallery next year.
- Victoria Miro Now Represents Clare Woods: Known for her still lifes of wilting flowers, the artist will debut new paintings at the Armory Show in New York in September, before having a show at Miro’s London space in February 2027.
- Freeman’s New York to Stage Vietnamese Modernist Sale: The auction house will offer works by artists like Lê Phổ and Vũ Cao Đàm on July 21. The priciest work, by estimate, is Lê Phổ’s Les Fleuristes (1983), expected to make between $120,000 and $180,000.
- Studio Museum in Harlem Names New Board Leadership, Trustees: Sherrese Clarke, founder and CEO of HarbourView Equity Partners, and Jamila Justine Willis, a partner at DLA Piper, have joined the board. Anita Blanchard, who also serves on the boards of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art Advisory Board, has been elected vice-chair, alongside current vice-chairs Damien R. Dwin and Carol Sutton Lewis. Kathryn C. Chenault was named board chair last fall after the Studio Museum’s building opened, while longtime chair Raymond G. McGuire was appointed chair emeritus.
Big Number: $35 M.
That’s the price tag of Pablo Picasso’s 1963 painting Le peintre et son modèle dans un paysage that Hauser & Wirth sold at Art Basel. Perhaps you’re having whiplash reading this since that happened about three weeks ago and is old news. Well, ARTnews can reveal that the consignor of that work is none other than Leonard Feinstein, a cofounder of Bed Bath & Beyond who once ranked among the world’s top collectors. In May, Feinstein filed a UCC Financing Statement in New York listing the work as his property in an agreement with the gallery.
Read This.
Last month, on the eve of Art Basel’s Swiss fair, its former global director, Marc Spiegler, had a lot to say about the current state of the industry. In an op-ed for the New York Times, he wrote that the vibe he had observed from galleries was one where “uncertainty abounded” and where dealers were “questioning the fundamentals of their business.” As Spiegler wrote, “It’s as if the art world they know has fallen off its axis.” While Spiegler might have proposed a return to regionalism—the solution du jour during the pandemic—his essay didn’t quite come off like a well-intentioned answer to the state of affairs. Instead, it read to many like he was chastising galleries for participating in the art market he helped create, and his proposal in many ways seems tangential to the problems that galleries are actually facing.
The op-ed has had its share of detractors, too: A few days after publication, arts writer Barbara Pollack penned a response in Hyperallergic titled “Marc Spiegler Got It All Wrong.” Reading his piece, Pollack writes, “can only provoke anger and frustration for artists and others trying to live and work in today’s uncertain, Brave New Art World.” She goes on to point out that Spiegler, via his Art Basel role, helped “push the narrative that art galleries could and should behave like multinational corporations.” She adds that at one time “artists —not galleries or art fairs—were considered fundamental to art’s survival.” This week, the Times published several Letters to the Editor responding to Spiegler’s essay, which ran the gamut of agreeing and disagreeing with it. Lari Pittman, the sole artist included in the mix, put it succinctly: “Sorry, Marc Spiegler, but galleries are not the engine of the art world. Artists and their art are. Culture only trickles up, and money never trickles down.”
