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The Headlines
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLÉDOS. Spanish leaders are trading insults in a heated, increasingly political clash over the Basque regional government’s recent request to borrow Pablo Picasso’s Guernica for an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, reports El Pais. “It makes no sense for everything to be returned to its origin,” said the president of the Madrid governing body, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. “It represents a provincial mindset when culture is universal.” To this, Basque Nationalist Party leader Aitor Esteban accused Ayuso of being the “provincial” one for viewing “having a beer on a terrace as a national statement.” Two weeks ago, Basque regional president Imanol Pradales formally requested that the painting be loaned to the Bilbao museum to mark the city’s 90th anniversary, but Picasso’s black-and-white masterpiece has not left Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía since 1992, and the museum has repeatedly taken steps to keep it that way. Today, Spain’s culture minister is expected to make a public announcement about the transfer request.
IN MEMORIAM. Thomas Zipp, the German punk musician, painter, and installation artist with a relentlessly critical eye, has died, reports ARTnews. His gallery, Berlin’s Galerie Barbara Thumm, announced the news on social media. Zipp reimagined site-specific art as “a kind of psychological theater, filling gallery spaces worldwide with multilayered, scenographic installations,” writes Tessa Solomon. His works tended to be devoid of people but full of objects, creating environments alluded to religion, medicine, politics, and history, or “the weirdness of mankind,” as he once described the human compulsion to create.
The Digest
The Centre Pompidou Hanwha in Seoul’s Yeouido neighborhood will open on June 4. [Le Quotidien de l’Art]
What will happen to the De Paul Art Museum’s collection of about 4,000 artworks now that the museum is set to close in June? [The Art Newspaper]
This high turnover of top brass at the Pinault Collection has come under the microscope, with François Pinault’s “centralized” control one apparent reason. [Le Journal des Arts]
What do data and museum shows reveal about the shifting auction results for KAWS? [Artnet News]
The Kicker
HENRY TAYLOR + PICASSO. Tomorrow, a Henry Taylor exhibition opens at the Musée Picasso in Paris, prompting the influential artist to reflect on his expressive paintings and sculptures of Black life in an interview with the Financial Times, and specifically, whether he regrets any of his past artworks. “I gotta love it all,” he tells reporter Nadia Beard, while visiting Rome for another event. This jives with what Beard describes as Taylor’s defiance of conventional artistic progression that would measure “growth or arrival at a ‘truest’ vision.” Rather, his work instead thrives on “observation, seeking out, bearing witness,” she reasons. “I approach the work the same way [as before], I think,” Taylor said. “I’m always present. I’m always sort of spontaneous, and I’m not really planning … Being sincere and being present, and being inspired by the place.”
