A thirteenth-century painting discovered hanging in an elderly Frenchwoman’s kitchen sold at auction near Paris for €24.2 million on Sunday. The Mocking of Christ by the early Italian master Cimabue was reportedly installed above the hotpot. Having been authenticated as the missing section of an altarpiece depicting eight scenes from the Passion of Christ – others are in the Frick Collection in New York and London’s National Gallery – the work became the subject of a bidding war at Actéon auction house before finally fetching a record price for the artist’s work.
Perhaps wondering why his own auction house hadn’t secured this coup, Sotheby’s new owner, Patrick Drahi announced on Monday that CEO Tad Smith would be replaced with immediate effect by Charles Stewart, who previously ran a television company owned by the French-Israeli billionaire. Stay tuned to see whether the auction house will be able to claw back some of the ground it has lost to Christie’s in recent years.
Bi- and triennial news: the second edition of the Jeju Biennale will be helmed by Inseon Kim. The founder of the Seoul-based nonprofit Space: Willing N Dealing will work with curator Leeji Hong on the exhibition, which opens in May 2020. Prospect New Orleans has announced that the fifth edition of the triennial, curated by artistic directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi and opening in October 2020, will be titled Yesterday we said tomorrow. Opening about sixty tomorrows later in December 2020 is the Kathmandu Triennale, which has appointed Kathmandu-based artists Hit Man Gurung and Sheelasha Rajbhandari as curators alongside artistic director Cosmin Costinas.
To keep up to date on the latest appointments, open calls, awards, scandals and the rest, keep following our rolling news…
