The Art Newspaper China • During the first two days of the New York auctions (4-5 November), Chinese buyers accounted for around 10% of the $750m turnover at Sotheby’s. A few days later, the billionaire Liu Yiqian bought Modigliani’s Nu couché (1917-18) for $170m at Christie’s. Earlier this year at Sotheby’s, the Dalian Wanda Group, China’s largest commercial property firm, bought Monet’s Bassin aux nymphéas, les rosiers (1913) for $20m, and Wang Zhongjun of Huayi Brothers Media Corporation bought Picasso’s Femme au chignon dans un fauteuil (1948) for just under $30m.
• Adrian Cheng, the scion of one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest families and the founder of the K11 Art Foundation in Shanghai, started a number of projects with Western art institutions. The foundation announced partnerships with Paris’s Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo, where it presented the first solo show outside China of the young artist Tianzhuo Chen (24 June-13 September), and with London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, which staged a solo musical project and performance by the emerging Chinese artist Zhang Ding (12-25 October).
• At Shanghai Art Week in September, the West Bund Art & Design fair and the Shanghai Video Art Exhibition were among around 50 events. At the Yuz Museum, London-based Random International organised the carefully choreographed downpour of its Rain Room. The Long Museum showed 15 Rooms, curated by Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1 in New York, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the co-director of London’s Serpentine Gallery. Works were performed in the museum’s 15 rooms by artists spanning generations and continents.
The Art Newspaper Russia • The exhibition Valentin Serov: the 150th Anniversary (7 October-17 January 2016), at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, could become the most visited art exhibition in Russia this year. During the first three weeks alone, more than 80,000 people (around 4,000 visitors a day) saw works by the Russian painter. According to our annual ranking of the most visited exhibitions, only three shows at the State Hermitage Museum, in St Petersburg, and two other exhibitions at the Kremlin, in Moscow, have ever recorded better attendance. However, the Hermitage boosts its statistics by counting general admission tickets. So although the museum staged the country’s most popular show in 2014 (At the Court of the Russian Emperors attracted 14,452 visitors a day, including general admissions), the Four Great Masters of the Ming Dynasty: Tang Yin, at the Imperial Palace in Taipei, for instance, racked up 12,861 visitors a day without inflating its numbers through general admissions.
• In August, a group of Russian Orthodox Church activists, led by Dmitry Tsorionov, damaged prints by the Russian avant-garde artist Vadim Sidur that were on show at the Moscow Manege in the exhibition Sculptures That We Don’t See. Tsorionov’s movement, called God’s Will, is known for acting to “protect Orthodox values”, but was widely condemned for its bout of destruction. The authorities bowed to demands not to end the programme of police protection for 64 institutions of national significance—museums, archives and libraries. Tsorionov remained under arrest for ten days for disorderly conduct and is awaiting criminal proceedings on charges of destruction or damage to cultural heritage. These carry a maximum sentence of six years in prison.
• The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art opened the doors of its new Moscow home in June. Once a restaurant in Gorky Park, the venue, originally built in 1960 and renovated by the architect Rem Koolhaas, has become a semi-transparent cube integrated into the park’s landscape. Floor space measuring 5,400 sq. m accommodates five exhibition spaces that can be combined. “I made a difficult choice, but the only possible one,” Koolhaas says. “I rejected the idea of using my own designs and restored the building’s original style, only adapting it for a completely different purpose.” The museum’s founder, Dasha Zhukova, said that she could never have imagined, when she opened the institution in 2008, what a major project it would become.
Le Journal des Arts • The nomination in March of Serge Lasvignes as the new director of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, was highly significant because of the impact it has had and will continue to have on the museum’s policies. More attention is now being paid to community programmes and socially aware art, rather than the production of one blockbuster show after another. In an interview with Le Monde, in October, Lasvignes said that he had been shocked to discover that some visits to the museum “lasted merely 15 minutes”, and reflected on the idea that French museums should pursue ideas of “social significance”.
• In a bitter blow for his former employer, Guillaume Cerutti has left his post as deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and chief executive of Sotheby’s France to join arch-rival Christie’s as president for London, continental Europe, the Middle East, India and Russia. He is due to take up his new post in mid-2016, after his non-compete clause expires. Cerutti caused controversy earlier this year when he voiced his support for French museums that deaccession works of art to keep their collections relevant and up-to-date, a strategy that the French cultural establishment considers taboo.
• Anish Kapoor’s sculpture Dirty Corner (2011), nicknamed “the queen’s vagina”, has been the centre of attention for all the wrong reasons during the past few months, and has been vandalised four times since it was installed in Versailles in June. The damage, which began with a relatively harmless splash of yellow paint on the interior of the work, escalated rapidly to include unpleasant anti-semitic graffiti. The British sculptor’s decision to leave the graffiti in place as a memento of what happened triggered accusations of racism. The saga has sparked a fierce debate about authorship, public art, racism and intolerance in an increasingly conservative France.
Ta Nea Tis Technis • During Antonis Samaras’s tenure as prime minister of Greece, the archaeological discoveries of historical significance at Kasta Hill, Amphipolis, featured daily on the television news, but after the elections in January that made Alexis Tsipras the country’s prime minister, the subject was all but dropped. Scientists and archaeologists have appealed to the government to protect the excavation site and its artefacts from bad weather, but nothing has been done, which has led to serious damage. The ministry of culture has already said that the site will not survive another winter.
• Although the Greek minister of culture, Aristidis Baldas, has said that the new National Museum of Modern Art in Athens will open by the end of 2015, there are still serious issues that make this unlikely. It would not be the first time that the museum’s opening date has been missed. Although the institution was opened to the press in May and is ready to hold public exhibitions, it has had only a deputy director since Konstantinos Tasoulas, the minister of culture in Antonis Samaras’s government, fired the museum’s founding director, Anna Kafetsi. The ministry says that an international competition for the director’s chair is in the pipeline, but has released no further details.
• The Art Athina fair celebrated its 20th birthday in the face of Greece’s financial difficulties. With visitor numbers hitting 39,000, up from around 35,000 last year, the fair has become an art event of international importance, attracting interest even in economically straitened times. Alexis Caniaris, the fair’s director, told the Greek edition of The Art Newspaper that the event has managed to survive for 20 years without public funding. He pointed out that the fair is not just a significant cultural event, but that it is also a financial success.
II Giornale dell’Arte • The Museo Egizio in Turin, whose collections are second only to those in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, reopened on 1 April this year after a gargantuan restoration project lasting 1,080 days and employing 110 experts. The interior of the museum, which has more than 10,000 sq. m of exhibition space, has been entirely refurbished, and it received half a million visitors in the first five months after it reopened. Its newly appointed director is Christian Greco, who was sel ected by the museum’s foundation from more than 100 applicants.
• The Milan Expo (1 May to 31 October) proved the perfect launch pad for a spate of architectural projects. Stefano Boeri’s plant-covered, “vertical forest” tower blocks were a hit, as was David Chipperfield’s Museum of Cultures (Mudec), despite pending litigation over the flooring (which the starchitect claims was poorly made). The Fondazione Prada, designed by Rem Koolhaas, also opened in the city this year, as did Armani/Silos, Giorgio Armani’s museum and cultural centre, designed with Tadao Ando.
• It took a year to restore the world-famous west wing of Rome’s Palazzo Farnese, also known as the Carracci Gallery, which now serves as the French embassy. France contributed €800,000 through the World Monuments Fund, and Rome’s superintendent’s office for museums added €200,000. The vaulted ceiling was painted by Annibale Carracci and his brother Agostino between 1597 and 1608; they were commissioned by Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, the nephew of Pope Paul III. The monumental fresco cycle of mythological subjects resonated powerfully throughout the 17th century in Rome, helping to usher in the Baroque style that succeeded Mannerism.