To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.
The Headlines
FRESH START. The New Museum will reopen on March 21 following a two-year closure, the institution announced Tuesday, after previously delaying its return from last fall, the New York Times reports. The closure began in March 2024 to accommodate a major expansion on an adjacent site that will add 60,000 square feet to the museum’s SANAA-designed building, bringing its total footprint to nearly 120,000 square feet. Designed by OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu with Rem Koolhaas, the addition nearly doubles exhibition space and includes new galleries, artist studios, education areas, a 74-seat Forum, expanded Sky Room, bookstore, and a restaurant led by Oberon Group’s Henry Rich with chef Julia Sherman. New commissions by Tschabalala Self, Klára Hosnedlová, and Sarah Lucas punctuate the building. The reopening weekend will offer free admission March 21–22. The inaugural exhibition, “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” will fill the museum with works by more than 200 artists exploring shifting ideas of humanity amid technological and social change.
GOING DANISH. Phillips has announced that the collection of the former US Ambassador to Denmark, John L. Loeb Jr., will hit the auction block this spring in London and New York, ARTnews reports. The series of sales represent the most significant collection of Danish art in private hands and the largest of its kind outside Denmark’s museums, the house said. As ambassador to Denmark in the early 1980s, Loeb assembled the collection, drawn to the quiet beauty of 19th-century Danish painting. Highlights include masterpieces by Vilhelm Hammershøi, some of which were on view in a recent exhibition for the artist at Hauser & Wirth, alongside works by Bertha Wegmann, P. S. Krøyer, and Anna Ancher. The auctions are expected to exceed $12 million. A selection of works will debut in Copenhagen on January 28 at the Erichsen Mansion ahead of a global tour.
The Digest
Rare portraits and manuscripts of Oscar Wilde are set to go under the hammer, commemorating the 125th anniversary of the famed Irish author and poet’s death. [Antiques Trade Gazette]
Flowers laid in the aftermath of the Bondi terror attack will be transformed into a new artwork for the Sydney Jewish Museum by Jewish Australian artist Nina Sanadze, who plans to preserve the petals as “something that lasts for centuries and keeps the memory.” [The Art Newspaper]
A 1937 painting by Rabindranath Tagore smashed auction estimates to sell for $1.2 million, setting a new record for the Bengali polymath amid surging demand for Indian modernist art. [Artnet News]
A 1872 Monet masterpiece, The Petit Bras of the Seine at Argenteuil, will go on display at South Shields Museum and Art Gallery starting Saturday, as part of a four-venue tour by the National Gallery of London. [BBC]
The Kicker
CAVE ENCOUNTER. Does Piet Mondrian “owe his success to a cross-dressing lesbian artist who lived in a Cornish cove?” the Guardian asks. The artist in question is British painter Marlow Moss. While Mondrian is celebrated for his iconic grids and bold primary colors, much of his abstract vocabulary may owe a debt to Moss, long overlooked in art history. Though she died in obscurity in Cornwall in 1958, she pioneered the use of double and parallel lines in the 1930s, techniques later adopted by Mondrian to add tension to his compositions. Today, her work is enjoying a revival: the Kunstmuseum in The Hague now has her paintings on view front and centre; her sculptures will soon head to Berlin’s Georg Kolbe Museum; and her 1944 painting White, Black, Blue and Red sold for a record £609,000 ($820,000) at Sotheby’s, hinting at a belated recognition for a true modernist innovator.
