Lee Krasner’s The Eye is the First Circle (1960), Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland. This 16ft-wide canvas is from Lee Krasner’s emotionally charged series of Umber Paintings, made while she was mourning both her mother and her husband, fellow Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. The work set an auction record for Krasner when Glenstone, the private museum of the collectors Mitchell and Emily Rales, bought it for $11.7m with fees at Sotheby’s in New York in May. Named after the first line in a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, the painting is currently on view at London’s Barbican Art Gallery in the exhibition Lee Krasner: Living Colour (until 1 September), which is due to travel to Frankfurt, Bern and Bilbao. © Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society; courtesy of Sotheby’s
Nabi works from the collection of Vicki and Roger Sant, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. The Phillips Collection has announced a promised gift from the late Vicki Sant, the chair of the board from 2000 to 2015, and her husband Roger, with around 40 works and two print portfolios by artists from the fin-de-siècle French group, the Nabis. Among them are paintings and decorative arts objects by Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard and Félix Vallotton. An exhibition of the works, Bonnard to Vuillard: the Intimate Poetry of Everyday Life, goes on show at the Phillips Collection on 26 October. Maurice Denis’s Les Musiciennes (1895) © The Phillips Collection
Pair of tables and mirrors by Thomas Chippendale (around 1771), Victoria and Albert Museum, London. A pair of marquetry-topped pier tables and matching gilded mirrors designed by Thomas Chippendale for the Music Room at Harewood House in West Yorkshire have entered the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. The set will remain on loan to the stately home where the first Baron Harewood, the Conservative politician Edwin Lascelles, gave the English furniture maker the biggest commission of his career. In late autumn, V&A conservators will restore the table frames in London and treat the mirrors in situ. The acquisition through the Acceptance in Lieu scheme settles £5.6m of inheritance tax from the trustees of the 7th Earl of Harewood Will Trust. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum; © Charlotte Graham for the Harewood House Trust
Six paintings and a sculpture by Georg Baselitz, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich. The German artist Georg Baselitz has given six recent paintings and a sculpture to the Bavarian State Painting Collections, which is exhibiting them in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich until 31 December. The works include Piet in Shorts (Remix) (2008), which features a skull with hair like Hitler’s and a swastika within a background that alludes to Piet Mondrian’s abstract works. Two further canvases refer to one of Baselitz’s most important influences, Willem de Kooning. The gift brings the number of Baselitz works in the Bavarian State Painting Collections to 31, some dating back to the early 1960s. The artist made the donation in honour of Duke Franz of Bavaria, an early supporter who encouraged the Pinakothek to give Baselitz the institution’s first-ever solo exhibition for a contemporary artist in 1976. © Jochen Littkemann
William Hogarth’s William Wollaston and his Family in a Grand Interior (1730), City of Leicester Museums Trust. The UK city of Leicester has raised the £564,528 needed to acquire a William Hogarth painting that has been on loan to the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery since 1943, thanks to major grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund. William Wollaston and his Family in a Grand Interior (1730) is one of Hogarth’s “conversation pieces”, small-scale informal group portraits depicting genteel family gatherings—and the art of polite conversation itself. The work, which had passed down for generations in the Wollaston family, was allocated to the museum through the UK government’s Acceptance in Lieu scheme, settling inheritance tax of £903,672. It will remain on view until 6 September before undergoing conservation for a Hogarth exhibition at the museum in early 2020. Courtesy of Leicester Arts and Museums Service
Top five acquisitions of the month
Our pick of the latest gifts and purchases to enter museum collections worldwide—from Lee Krasner's record-setting painting to a Hogarth conversation piece
Lee Krasner's The Eye is the First Circle (1960) © Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society; courtesy of Sotheby’s
