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The Headlines
THE WAR IN UKRAINE. On Friday, the United States placed sanctions on Russia’s culture minister, Olga Lyubimova, the Art Newspaper reports. Lyubimova has been in office since 2020 and was sanctioned by the European Union late last year. Meanwhile, Ukraine has put out a postage stamp showing one of the works that Banksy installed in the country last year, the Guardian reports. It shows a small child slamming a man to the ground in a judo match. (Russian President Vladimir Putin is a known judo enthusiast.) And the Mirror reports that a woman in Ukraine actually spoke with the pseudonymous street artist while he was installing that mural-turned-stamp. “I chatted with Banksy, not knowing who he was, as he created this artwork and when he spoke to my daughter she told him she liked it,” Yula Patoku said.
LIFESTYLE SECTION. The editor of the German art magazine Blau, Cornelius Tittel, became a Kundalini yoga teacher during the pandemic and now holds classes at its art-filled Berlin headquarters (the former home of the late media magnate Axel Springer), T: The New York Times Style Magazine reports. Attendees have included dealer Philomene Magers and Angelika Taschen. The New York Times asked Bjarke Ingels how he spends his Sundays in Brooklyn. He makes crepe-like pancakes for his son, goes for an afternoon run, and sometimes does blinis, caviar, and wine with his girlfriend. He also recently paid a visit to the studio of his friend, the artist Dustin Yellin. And the Financial Times took a look at Boisgeloup, the château in the Normandy region of France where Pablo Picasso developed his sculpture practice.
The Digest
The Art Institute of Chicago just opened a Salvador Dalí exhibition, and while conducting research for it, curators Caitlin Haskell and Jennifer Cohen discovered that a mysterious (and enormous) Dalí painting in the museum’s collection was included in the artist’s storied pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. [CNN]
The town of Salò, Italy, is planning to open a museum about fascism within its municipal museum. Anti-fascist groups allege that the institution has been supported by an influential businessman who admired Benito Mussolini; the Museum of Salò’s head declined to comment on that. [The Art Newspaper]
The fight over artist Seward Johnson’s enormous Marilyn Monroe sculpture near the Palm Springs Art Museum will continue. A California court reinstated a suit by the Committee to Relocate Marilyn, ruling that a city ordinance for temporary street closures cannot be used to keep the artwork in place for years. [Courthouse News]
The market for the work of Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington is hot, Kelly Crow reports. Four of her top-five auction results have come in the past two years, and a number of her pieces are being offered this week at sales in London. [The Wall Street Journal]
The MacDowell artist residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire, has tapped Chiwoniso Kaitano to be its executive director. She was previously the director of Girl Be Heard, which runs performing-arts programs that aim to create social change. [The Associated Press]
A job listing for an “executive/personal assistant”—with a pretty extensive array of responsibilities—for an anonymous “art world family” in New York has been a hot topic of late in art circles. Artist Emily Mae Smith, for one, declared the ad “completely bonkers” in critic Will Heinrich’s article on it. [The New York Times]
The Kicker
ART AND LANGUAGE. Amid the tempest over a publisher’s plans to edit the language in some Roald Dahl books, the Guardian has highlighted remarks that the author made in 1982, saying that, if any of his writing was changed posthumously, “then I’ll wish mighty Thor knocks very hard on their heads with his Mjolnir” (among other colorful things). He was speaking with artist Francis Bacon at the time, and they were “pleasantly oiled with drink,” according to writer Barry Joule, who recorded the talk. It seems that the weekend they all hung out, Dahl revealed that he was an early collector of Bacon’s work, and Joule recalls the artist remarking, “I knew there was someone out there buying my early pieces, but I had no idea it was you.” [The Guardian]