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Anyone who saw early presentations of Joel Shapiro's sculpture in New York will remember a small untitled floor piece from 1973: a foot-long wood mannikin pulled limb from limb, its wire spring ligaments exposed.

The bad boy gesture of this anomalous pieceits dismissal of sculpture's future as a representational art, its equation of construction with destructiongot immediate attention. Critics quickly connected it with Alberto Giacometti's Surrealist bronze Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932), another floor piece whose grisly insinuations punish a viewer's impulse to take it too literally.

Yet right down to his current Nasher Sculpture Center exhibition in Dallasan ensemble of ostensibly abstract sculpture and drawings deftly fitted into the museumShapiro has pursued and elaborated what we might call, with the faintest echo of Surrealism, the haunting of forms by our reflex to representational ways of seeing.

The big new untitled centerpiece of the Nasher show has the entry hall bay of the Center's elegant Renzo Piano building all to itself. In this work, Shapiro deploys all the resources of his art: assertive geometry, palpably improvised composition, the undisguised artifice of exposed internal joints and supports, pointed ambiguities of finish and, most dramatically, color. (A painted maquette of the piece in a separate gallery demonstrates his knack for knowing when a multi-color composition the size of a breadbox will work at the scale of a civic monument, without inflation of sentiment or of aesthetic magnetism.)

Intimations of figural anatomy, of architecture and art historical allusionparticularly to the crisp, utopian dreaminess of Constructivismpervade the big central work. Shapiro has left various faces of the sculpture's boxy wood components unpainted, evoking the appearance of surface grain by which many of his bronzes acknowledge the carpentered originals behind their casting. This variable treatment leaves a viewer vacillating between seeing the sculpture's parts as slabs of solid color, or as (incompletely) colored slabs.

Despite the exposure of small joints and footings that stabilise the sculpture, its compositional coherence renders unnoticeable the wide, low, white plinth on which it sits. In effect the work incorporates its base, foreshadowing more stagy levitations in the works that follow in the show.

As a maturing artist Shapiro studiedly flouted minimal sculpture's avoidance of pedestals, of easy illusions, hidden armatures, gravity defying structures and human reference. He toyed with mass, scale and shape in ways that activated bodily awareness of perception (as contemporaneous works by Carl Andre and Richard Serra did) while teasing the eye with figural inklings, such as recurrent rhombhedral forms suggestive of a generic house. Such forms, properly positioned or abridged, as a few appear in the Nasher, can also suggest heads: metaphoric, if sometimes inhospitable, dwellings of the mind or self.

A second bay of the Nasher building contains an installation of five new works intended for the space, each painted a single color.


A large, faceted construction in blue, the most figural of the lot, sits on the floor. A viewer may want to say it sits "upright," though its form implies no possible alternative position. Its crumpled L-shape somehow troublingly brings to mind the images of 21st century American war veteran amputees that occasionally interrupt the smooth image traffic of the common culture. (A number of small hanging, stunted figures he made in the past decade also conjure thoughts of the "stress positions" inflicted on designated "enemy combatants.")

Formally, the work rebukes the cubistic mumblings of lesser sculptors such as James Rosati and Bruce Beasley. Its title,  Really Blue (after all) (2016), evokes a memory of Yves Klein's signature hue, and of the imagined bodily aftermath of Klein's famous staged (and manipulated) photograph, Leap into the Void (1960).

Shapiro's twists of form, their felt yet impossible-to-decode fluctuations of scale, volume, implied mass and symbolism, seem to obey an unconscious logic subtending the self-conscious etiquette of reception.

A yellow solid, guyed to the floor and ceiling with thin cables like the other hanging pieces here, recalls the enigmatic polyhedron that furnishes Albrecht Durer's 1514 engraving, Melencolia I, an allusionif we count it onethat dims emotionally the sculpture's sunny color.

The least characteristic thing here, hanging kite-like near the ceiling, is a not a solid, from most vantage points, but a gray open form that reads like a torn-away corner of fragile architecture, or a pesky fragmentary memory of a Donald Judd box.  

Surprisingly, this five element installation reminded me most forcefully of Shapiro's early dismembered lay figure, not by any overt visceral echo, but the way it again raises so many questions: what holds a work of art (or an ensemble) together? What holds its interpretation together? And, ultimately, what holds together the responsive self?

"The only thing I want to do is stick stuff in space," Shapiro says. It is a statement that serves as a finger in the dike to such effusions. And his ink-blot abstractions on paper, a few reminiscent of Henri Matisse or Sam Francis, others closer to Hermann Rorschach, bring us back to the child's play roots of Shapiro's art.

The show left me thinking of Nietzsche's definition of maturity: "to recover the seriousness one had as a child at play."

The Nasher invites a wide-minded reading of Shapiro's new work by grading it into the context of the museum's permanent collection, mingling earlier acquisitions of his work with germane, powerful neighbors such as Anthony Caro's deep green steel Sculpture 3 (1961), a pair of late 1940s figurines by Giacometti and Spider (1940) by Alexander Calder, which levitates forms in a manner worlds away from Shapiro's.    


Kenneth Baker retired in 2015 after 30 years as resident art critic for The San Francisco Chronicle. He is an Art Newspaper correspondent based in San Francisco.


Joel Shapiro, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, until 21 August

The multidisciplinary work of Ragnar Kjartansson does not fall into conventional categories. Histories of film, music, theatre and literature all feed into his video installations and performances as well as his drawings and paintings. The 40-year-old Icelandic artist stages works that can go on for hours and even weeks. These epics oscillate between fact and fiction, the poetic and the absurd, and generally involve many participantsactors, musicians, friends, family members and himself. Partly inspired by his crazy godmother who sang for Sigmund Freud, he is also well known as a musician and singer and even has his own record label. He spoke to The Art Newspaper from his Reykjavik studio as he prepared for the opening of his first UK survey at Londons Barbican Centre.



The Art Newspaper: The Barbican seems the perfect venue for your first big UK show as, like much of your work, it encompasses art, music, film and theatre.

Ragnar Kjartansson:  It makes total sense. Ever since I was a kid we would go on trips to London and go to the Barbican and see the future.


Both your parents are actors. Was this theatrical background an important influence?

It was crucial. I was raised in the theatre and just being backstage watching these people in make-up and in rehearsal, when the same scene was repeated and repeated over and over again, was almost a sculptural thing, and a lot of my art comes from that. Also watching my parents and their friends discussing how they wanted to make people feel just seemed like crazy showbusiness and so unlike visual art.


What is real and what is play-acting seems to be a dominant theme.

Yes, its a really slippery thing and something Im always working with. Complicated things like irony make everything more honest in a wayits how we talk together and how we communicate. Honesty is just dull, at the end of the day.


Music, in one form or another, always features in your work.


I had this crazy godmother [Engel Lund] living in my basement, who spoke 20 languages and sang folk songs from all over the worldshe did a private concert for Freud in Londonand her legacy is still going strong all over the world. Another huge influence was the music scene in Reykjavik. Its a crazy city with so much going on, and when I was growing up it was the Sugarcubes and all this badass stuff happening there. Because grunge was the mainstream thing, we had the most polite band on Earth. It was called Ks.


Why did you choose to go to art school rather than just focus on making music?


Because art school was cool. If you want to be a pop star you go to art school. All the pop stars went to art school, so thats why I went. But then the art goddess took me by the hand and led me away from the silliness of the pop world.


In the Barbican show are 144 paintings you made daily over six months in the Icelandic pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Is painting an important part of your practice?


I look at most of my works as paintings or sculpture in a way. Even though they come from a performative plan, the painterly idea is always with me and I always continue to work as an artist-painter. If the video works dont work as paintings, then I dont show them.


What criteria do you apply for a piece to work as a painting?


Just something that is there and can become more profound while you are staring at it. Thats a painting, basically.


Your daily paintings in Venice were made while you were living in a palazzo, copiously drinking and smokingliving the dream (and the nightmare) of the clichd Romantic painter.


It was acting out what it was like to be the classical macho 20th-century artist, trying to be [one of] these hard-drinking painters that I was always intrigued by in art school. They are such a very funny tribe. Making paintings is not so hardcore, but it was hardcore to be always drunk while doing it. The performance was that we were making these paintings and that we had to constantly drink beer and smokeit was really disgusting.
 

Much of your work has an often extreme durational and repetitive element. Why is it so important to test the limits of both the audience and the participants?


Its not really about testing strength. Basically thats just our lives. Human beings just repeat stuff; we are really good at it.


But putting the final aria from The Marriage of Figaro in a 12-hour live loop or making your nieces repeat the same folk song for a six-hour stretch is rather more than just everyday stuff.


It is. But because its more sublime than everyday stuff its easier to do it than everyday life, in a way. Im very intrigued by this constant tension between the sublime and the banal, and also with ideas like beauty. Beauty is this Satanistic thing that I really like to flirt with.


Do you repeat things to make us appreciate them more?


Absolutely. Its like looking at a painting: you stare at it and it unravels for you. Thats what repetition does to things that are performative or narrative in their essence. When you repeat them, the narration goes out of them and they become like a painting or a sculpture and unravel. Thats why I use repetitionto somehow unravel stuff. When I was in art school that was my normality. People were repeating stuff in my family all the time, and then I got to know Bruce Naumans work and it was, like, OK, they do it in art also!


Do you consider yourself part of the performance tradition of Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, et al?


I am absolutely a disciple of those Titians.


But your work plays with artifice and reality in a different way.


Seeing those works in art school, I guess I saw through them at the end of the day as being showbusiness. I love them to bits and pieces, but theres a lot of showbusiness. For example, Chris Burden has to make sure hes not shot in the heart. But that doesnt make the work any worse; I think it makes the work more profound. Marina Abramovic becomes more multilayered when you realise her work is so dramatic and truthful but its also matter of showbusiness at the same time.

Every five years from 2000 onwards you have made a film in which your mother repeatedly spits into your facewhy?


I was still at art school and I think the idea came from a work I saw by Gillian Wearing where there is a mother beating up her daughter [Sacha and Mum, 1998]. That piece was with actors, but then I realised, Wow! I have the real thing! I can ask my real mom to spit on me. So I was ripping off Gillian Wearing but, because I didnt know his work then, I didnt realise I was also ripping off Bruce Nauman.


But why every five years?


Because it becomes a memento mori. My mother is very good about it. She sometimes has trouble explaining it to her friends, but its become this family tradition and nobody questions it any more.


Are you trying to make a direct emotional connection with your audience?


Yes, I think so. Like all artists I guess I make work for myself, because I somehow want to see it and I hope that maybe somebody will dig it. But Im always very, very aware of having no expectations with the viewers. The minute I as a viewer feel that a work is trying to please me, then I dont have any interest any more: its just not sexy.

Ragnar Kjartansson, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 14 July-4 September

Its the summer of Ai Weiwei in Pittsburgh. The Chinese artist and activist discusses two exhibitions on show in Andy Warhols hometown in this video interview, made available exclusively to The Art Newspaper (Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei at the Andy Warhol Museum, until 28 August, and Zodiac Heads at the Carnegie Museum of Art, until 29 August). Ai travelled to Pittsburgh in June for the openingshis first visit to the US since his travel ban was lifted by the Chinese government.

Although the two artists never officially met, Ai spotted Warhol from across the room at crowded downtown art events when they were both living in New York in the 1980s. You hear people say, Andy is here! and you realise you can see his hair somewhere in the crowd, Ai said.

 

There was a sense of occasion during last nights curated anniversary sale, which saw Christies offer 31 lots of art by British artists.

The sale fetched 87.2m (99.5m with fees), just below the total estimate of 95.7m-138m, and saw an 87% sell-through rate, with 27 out of the 31 lots finding buyers. The only disappointment of the sale was Lucian Freuds Ib and her Husband (1992), which carried an estimate of 18m and failed to sell. It had previously sold at Christies New York in 2007 for $19.4m with fees. Sometimes works just dont perform as wed expect, said the auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen after the sale.

The rest of the sale took a much more positive turn, however, with auction records set for seven artistsFrederic Leighton, Henry Moore, David Roberts, Frank Auerbach, Lynn Chadwick, Bridget Riley and Thomas Daniell. The lot of the evening was Henry Moores monumental Reclining Figure (1951), cast as an edition of five, which sold above estimate for 22m (24.7m with fees). Bridget Rileys Untitled (Diagonal Curve) (1966) almost doubled the artist's previous record, selling for 3.8m (4.3m with fees; est 2.5m-3.5m). Riley herself was in the building during the sale, but was taking in her other works in a non-selling exhibition downstairs and was uninterested in what her works were selling for, according to Pylkkanen.

The benefits of a devalued pound sterling for foreign buyers were made apparent by the large number of Asian and US bidders on the phones. At least two spirited Asian bidders helped make an unlikely star of Alfred James Munnings' painting The Queen and Aureole in the Paddock at Epsom before the Coronation Cup (1954). Estimated at 400,000-600,000, lengthy bidding saw the work eventually sell for 1.8m (2.1m with fees). The Queen was undoubtedly a contributing factor, said John Stainton, the international director and head of British paintings, after the sale.

A number of house guarantees were converted last minute into third-party guarantees, indicating that the house may have been a little nervous given the current political and financial landscape, but specialists were pleased, and no doubt relieved, by the result. Weve never had 32 countries bidding on British art before, Pylkkannen said.

The contemporary sales this week proved the market is holding up well, and indeed the only disappointment of the June sales was Christies Impressionist and Modern evening auction of 22 June. Coincidentally, or not, the noticeable lack of bidders that night occurred on the eve of the UKs EU referendum vote, at a moment when global markets and currency traders were expecting to see the pound sterling soar against other currencies as a result of the UK voting to stay in Europe. For foreign buyers, it would have arguably been the worst night to buy art, as they could have risked spending much more on a work once their own currencies had been converted.

Canonical and universally acknowledged today, Spanish Golden Age painting (early 16th-late 17th centuries) was, for historical reasons, an unknown quantity in the rest of Europe until the end of the Napoleonic Peninsular War (1807-14), when paintings began to find their way to the markets and museums of London and Paris.

Once the Congress of Vienna established peace on the continent in 1815, Spain began to attract visitors. The British were encouraged by aficionados like Richard Ford, the author of the classic Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845), and William Stirling-Maxwell, the author of Annals of the Artists of Spain (1848). (Both were pioneers who turned on the steady flow of British Hispanists that later included Gerald Brenan, George Orwell and, in recent years, Nigel Glendinning.)

The French, too, were drawn to the country and the names of the first wave of French visitors and enthusiasts is a stellar roll-call of the 19th century: Madame de Stal, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Eugne Delacroix, Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Stendhal, Hippolyte Taine, Honor de Balzac and Prosper Mrime.

International loans

The German-speaking nations (pace Austria with its Habsburg connections) were otherwise occupied. Although the Prussian government collected systematically from 1815 onwards for what is now the Gemldegalerie (unusually, not a royal collection-based institution), precedence was given to Italian and Northern European art over French, English and Spanish works; these departments grew only after the Second World War.

The museums collection of Spanish art today numbers around 50 works  from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries (out of 3,000 Old Masters). The Gemldegaleries show El Siglo de Oro [the Golden Age]: the Age of Velzquez opens in July and will temporarily enlarge the museums collection with the addition of 100 paintings and sculptures borrowed from institutions worldwide, including the Prado, Madrid, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and the National Galleries in London and Washington, DC.

Works by El Greco, Zurbarn, Murillo, Alonzo Cano and Velzquez allow curators to trace artistic developments in the principal centres of Toledo, Valencia, Seville and Madrid during the late 16th and 17th centuries.

The exhibition is sponsored by a large consortium that includes the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the Savings Banks Finance Group and the La Caixa Foundation. A catalogue is published by Hirmer Verlag (336pp, 49.90).

El Siglo de Oro: the Age of Velzquez, Gemldegalerie, Berlin, 1 July-30 October

Shapeshifters, a group show of shaped canvases that blur the line between painting and sculpture, opened Monday (until 12 August) at Luhring Augustine. The show, which includes 19 artists such as Elizabeth Murray, Joe Bradley and Richard Tuttle, also features historic work by Frank Stella, who was included in the 1964 Guggenheim Museum exhibition The Shaped Canvas, which was organised by Lawrence Alloway.

At David Zwirner, Sigmar Polke: Eine Winterreise (until 22 July) includes travel-related works by the German artist that range from light-hearted paintings of palms trees to abstract landscapes referring to hallucinatory journeys of the mind. The exhibition largely focuses on works that were inspired by an around-the-world trip that Polke embarked on in the early 1980s, when he subsequently began to use unconventional and sometimes toxic materials to render colours he had observed across various cultures.

It is also almost your last chance to see Martha Rosler: If you cant afford to live here, mo-o-ove!! at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which closes next weekend (until 9 July). Organised by the art group The Temporary Office of Urban Disturbances, the show quotes the former New York mayor Ed Koch in its title and expands on a project that the American artist Martha Rosler initiated in 1989 titled If You Lived Here that dealt with gentrification, homelessness and urbanism.

For one night only, ten unusual London venues will host site-specific projects, installations and performances for Art Night (2 July). The first edition of the annual festival is organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, with plans for subsequent ones to be led by a different guest institution each year. A disused underground platform in Charing Cross station and a luxury flat on the Strand are just some of the locations that will house works by artists such as Koo Jeong A and Laure Prouvost. Open from 5pm until late, some events require booking.

Refreshingly frank, the exhibition David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life (until 2 October) at the Royal Academy of Arts shows just that: a series of paintings of friends and acquaintances, including art world figures such as John Baldessari and Larry Gagosian, and a single still life. After Hockneys 2012 show had more than 600,000 visitors, the RA is expecting long queues and is advising visitors to book their tickets in advance.

Christies are celebrating their 250th birthday with Defining British Art (until 15 July), an exhibition of British art and a rare chance to such a concentration of high quality works in the auction houses small exhibition space. Highlights of the show include a 16th century portrait of King Henry VIII by the Circle of Hans Holbein II and The Monarch of the Glen (1851) by Sir Edwin Landseer, alongside works from Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud.

With the spotlight on Hieronymus Bosch in the year of the 500th anniversary of his death, a Dutch specialist has raised an intriguing puzzle. Why is the prominent bagpipe player in the foreground of The Haywain holding his instrument incorrectly? The piper is the figure in blue, just to the right of the centre. He is seducing the nun with a sausage dangling on a string. The Haywain is now one of the key works in the Prados current retrospective.


Jos Koldeweij, a curator of the exhibition held earlier this year in s-Hertogenbosch (and professor at Radboud University Nijmegen), points out that the musician is playing as if he was left-handed. But if he was left-handed, then the position of the two hands should be reversed when holding the pipe.

Koldeweij believes the most likely explanation is that Hieronymus Bosch has taken the figure from a print, which might well show the image in reverse. The question is: what prints with bagpipe players might have been accessible to Bosch in around 1515, when The Haywain was painted. Readers are requested to send any ideas to: londonoffice@theartnewspaper.com

Bosch: the Fifth Centenary Exhibition is at the Prado, Madrid, until 11 September

Auguste Rodin died in November 1917 as war continued to rage in Europe. He had achieved acclaim and gained many friends in the UK, but because of the war, British mourners were unable to travel to France, so a memorial service was held in London. It took place at St Margarets Church, next to Westminster Abbey, on 24 November. From there, the mourners crossed the road to pay tribute at The Burghers of Calais, the multi-figure bronze sculpture standing in Victoria Embankment Gardens, close to the Houses of Parliament. Two wreaths were left by the distinguished group of mourners. One was from Her Majestys Government; the other, with lilies of the valley and carnations, was inscribed: To my dear master in friendship and deep homage from your model and friend, Julia.

Julia was one of the names adopted by the English actress Sybil Mignon Cooke, who Rodin had met in 1907. Then aged 66, he began a relationship with the 21-year-old Cooke (1886-1973). Their affair is revealed in letters that have just been acquired by the Muse Rodin in Paris. The papers came from her descendants, with the sale arranged by the London dealer Bowman Sculpture. Rodins love for the young actress is another reminder of the sculptors close links with Britain. Called Mignon by her family, Cooke was renowned for her lovely voice, striking looks and witty charm, according to Ben Hunter, who researched and handled the Bowman sale. Acting under the stage names Viola or Julia/Juliette, she performed in Berlin in 1907. Later that year she travelled to Paris, where she met Rodin, who was then Europes most distinguished sculptor.


Youth in all its beauty
Cooke quickly agreed to model. The result was at least seven drawings, either standing in the nude or holding a veil. These were kept by Rodin and are now in his museum. After the session, Rodin wrote to Cooke: Alas, my voluptuous memory does not manage to capture you; that adorable form of your youth in all its beauty which demanded my adoration as an artist and a man... I kiss your hands and very secretly your beautiful portrait.

Rodin gave Cooke two of his works. One was a drawing of a young woman opening her dressing gown, inscribed Hommage Mademoiselle Juliette. The Rodin specialist Christina Buley-Uribe (author of My Divine Sisters, a book on Rodins women) dates it to about 1900in which case it cannot depict Cooke. However, it would have been more likely for Rodin to have given the actress one of the drawings he made of her (the facial features in the one presented to her are not clear enough to identify the sitter). The second gift was a plaster maquette of a relief of a female bust, not based on Cooke. Rodin also gave her his photograph.

At the end of 1907 Cooke returned to Berlin and they kept in touch. She wrote to thank Rodin for his gifts: I still have in my bedroom your dear portrait [the photograph] and the small plaque... They are the most precious things that I possess. The following year Rodin sent her a telegram, saying he would be delighted to see her if she returned to Paris. Whenever Cooke travelled from Berlin to her parents home in London, she would stop in the French capital and pose for Rodin. Once in 1909 they spent the day together, including a lunch. In her diary Cooke described how they ate at a Duval restaurant like students.


Cherished thoughts
On another occasion they went shopping, with Rodin buying her silk stockings, two blouses, gloves and a hat. Cooke wrote in thanks, saying it was so fun to choose these little items, signing off your devoted little Viola. Rodin gave her another photograph of himself, signed with affectionate homage and devotion. After another meeting, Cooke wrote to Rodin: These are hours I will keep always in my most cherished thoughts. In 1911 Cooke implored Rodin to visit her in Berlin: If you want to work with me, all my time would of course be dedicated to you if you wished. Maybe we could even do a little statue or statuette togetheror if not I could sometimes come and watch you workah, that would be so nice! Rodin spoke no English, so they communicated in French.

In June 1913 Rodin was visiting London for the installation of The Burghers of Calais, and Cooke invited him to her parents home in Argyll Lodge. Photographs of Rodin were taken in the garden. (We reproduce one for the first time.) It was their last meeting. In her final letter to Rodin, in 1917, Cooke recalled her visits to his studio as the happiest hours of [my] life. On 2 October 1917 she married Robert Hood. Six weeks later Rodin died.

We will never know the exact nature of their relationship. Buley-Uribe has described it as friendly intimacy and Hunter maintains that it is dangerous to assume anything about their relationship. But Rodin was enchanted by Cooke and adored her youthful body; she could hardly have been more adoring, pleading with him to allow her to pose. No doubt his fame and wealth attracted her, but it seems to have been deeper than that. Rodin is renowned for his affairs with models, including the sculptor Camille Claudel. It seems likely the aged sculptor and the young English actress probably did have some sort of affair.

After Cookes marriage, she had one son. Her married life appears to have been uneventful, at least compared with her acting career in her early 20s. She died in 1973, leaving the cache of documents to her son Robin. He died in 2010, and earlier this year the papers were bought by the Muse Rodin. Cooke never talked publicly about Rodin, but she nevertheless carefully preserved his letters. We do not know if this was in recognition of their historical significance or because of her intimate feelings for the great sculptor.


How War Defined Rodins affection for Britain
Rodins legacy in Britain was inextricably bound up with the First World War. In July 1914 Rodin was in London for his display at the Grosvenor House exhibition of contemporary French art. War then broke out and it seemed risky to return the 18 sculptures he showed. In September that year, Rodin managed to travel to London. A highlight was lunch at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A); he particularly enjoyed English beer in the grill room. Two months later Rodin presented the 18 sculptures to the V&A in tribute to English and French soldiers who were fighting side-by-side as brothers.

The war also affected the unveiling of one of Rodins most prominent public sculptures. Though the National Art Collections Fund (now the Art Fund) paid 2,400 to buy the huge bronze of The Burghers of Calais (cast in 1905) in 1911, it took some time to erect. First there were disputes about where to place the work and then, once it was agreed that it would stand just outside the Palace of Westminster, war broke out. It was placed in Victoria Embankment Gardens in 1914, but its official unveiling was then postponed. Only on 19 July 1915 did this finally happen. (As The Art Newspaper revealed in November 2011, the bronze had been donated to the governments Office of Works, and technically there was no owner when that body was disbanded after the Second World War. Following our report, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced it was assuming ownership of this extremely valuable work.)

Rodin eventually had numerous British friends, patronsand lovers. His first attempt to break into the English market came in 1877, when he submitted a design for a monument to the poet Byron that was to be erected on the edge of Londons Green Park. The commission went to the now forgotten sculptor Richard Belt (his statue is marooned on a traffic island at Hyde Park Corner).

Rodins first visit to London was in 1881, and the following year and in 1884 he exhibited in the Royal Academys Summer Exhibition. But in 1886 his work Ixelles Idyll (1885), a bronze sculpture of two kissing infants, was turned downmuch to his annoyance. In 1902 the first Rodin sculpture entered a UK public collection. St John the Baptist (1879) was acquired by the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A), with Rodin crossing the Channel for a celebratory dinner at the Caf Royal in Piccadilly Circus.

The following year he was elected to succeed James Whistler as president of the London-based International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, set up to encourage Modern art. For the next few years he returned to England once or twice a year, including a visit in 1904 when he showed a large plaster of The Thinker (1904).

A year later he worked on a monument to Whistler, which was intended for Chelsea Embankment. Rodin did not produce a conventional statue, but an allegorical figure of a female muse climbing the mountain of fame. His model for the muse was Gwen John, the Welsh painterand his mistress. However, the monument was never completed; in 2005 a statue of Whistler by Nicholas Dimbleby was erected on the site.

Sales to Britain began to flood in. In 1904, Edward Perry Warren, an American collector living in Lewes, East Sussex, commissioned a marble version of The Kiss. Warren, who was gay, specified that Rodin should model the genitals as a Greek would have done. Commissions then came in from aristocrats (the Countess of Warwick, Lady Sackville and Lord Howard de Walden) and celebrities (George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Balfour). In 1908, Rodin won royal approval when Edward VII visited his Paris studio.

But The Burghers of Calais was undoubtedly his biggest break in Britainhe was reportedly greatly honoured by its acquisition. Meanwhile, just over a century later, his donation of those 18 works to the V&A, made as war tore Europe apart, remains the greatest gift to the museum by a living artist.

The verdict is in: Tod Williams and Billie Tsien will design the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, the presidents hometown. The husband-and-wife team beat out six other firms on the shortlist for the USs next presidential library. Most of the other contenders, including Adjaye Associates, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Renzo Piano and Snohetta, have won high-profile museum commissions of their own in recent years.

Tod Williams and Billie Tsien are best known for their divisive design of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, which was demolished in 2014 to make way for the expansion of the neighbouring Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). (The victory for Williams and Tsien might be made just a little bit sweeter by the fact that they beat out Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the firm in charge of MoMAs expansion.)

The Obama Presidential Center, built in collaboration with the University of Chicago on the citys South Side, will house the presidential archives and a museum dedicated to Obamas two terms in office. The institution carries a price tag of around $500m and is expected to be complete by 2021. Construction will not begin until after Obama leaves office in 2017, according to the Chicago Tribune. Williams and Tsien will work with the Chicago-based firm Interactive Design Architects on the project.

The architects presented the Obamas with early conceptual outlines during the selection process but a more detailed design is expected to take at least one more year to complete. The Obamas choice hinged on finding an architect with whom they had good chemistry, the president of the Obama Foundation told the Tribune. The couple and their advisers were also impressed by Williams and Tsiens interest in respecting nearby parks designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, a sticking point among local open-space advocates.

The New York-based architects are no strangers to sensitive, closely scrutinised assignments: they designed the new location for the Barnes Foundation in downtown Philadelphia, which opened in 2012.

It is a joy, an honor and a responsibility to create a place that reflects the optimism and integrity of the President and the First Lady, the architects said in a statement published on the Obama Foundations website. This has been a transformative presidency and we will work to make a Center that embodies and expands the Obamas vision.

Wearable sound-creating sculpture at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts...

The German collector Thomas Borgmann has donated more than 600 works by artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Paulina Olowska, Cosima von Bonin and Cerith Wyn Evans to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, a move that augments on an international scale [our] holdings of contemporary art, museum officials say. A selection of the works is due to go on show in an exhibition planned for late 2017.

The composition of the gift matches the diversity of the art produced over the last twenty years, encompassing paintings, installations, collages, sculptures, photography, works on paper, and films. Of particular note is the large scale of many of the pieces, a museum statement says. Borgmann, who used to run a gallery in Cologne from 1969 to 1985 and again in 1993-94 with Gisela Capitain, explains why he opted for a Dutch museum, saying: I have closely followed the Stedelijk ever since my first visit in the 1960s; this museum felt like a natural home for these works.

The donation includes Canadian artist Jack Goldsteins complete canon of 16mm film works made in the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, Subject Driven, an installation by the US artist Matt Mullican, offers an overview of his entire body of work, created between 1970 and 2008 and includes more than 180 individual [pieces], according to the museum statement. Wyn Evanss neon installation One of the most notorious . (2008), Tillmanss 1995 work Deranged Granny (self) and Lucy McKenzies 2004 Untitled photograph will also enter the collection.

The Civil Chamber of Spains Supreme Court dismissed an appeal on 21 June from the Gala-Salvador Dal Foundation in its lawsuit against a Barcelona exhibition producer, finding that the foundation does not have the legal standing to protect the artists image, according to Spanish media reports.

The foundations lawsuit, originally filed in Barcelonas provincial court, stemmed from an exhibition at the Royal Artistic Circle of Barcelona of the artists sculptural works from the so-called Clot Collection, organised by the production company Faber Gotic. It claimed that Faber Gotic and its owner Juan Javier Bofill Pellicer had infringed on the foundations trademark, intellectual property and image rights, and had used Dals name and image in advertising and for commercial purposes without authorisation. While the provincial court found that the trademark and intellectual property rights had been infringed, it acquitted Juan Javier Bofill Pellicer and found that the artists image rights had not been damaged.  

The Supreme Courts decision backs up the provincial courts ruling, which found that the foundation never had the legal authority to exercise protection of image rights. It also said that the foundations interest in the case was not to preserve the memory of the Surrealist painter, but rather to exploit the financial power of the artists image, since the defendants had refused to pay a fee to use Dalis name and photographs of the artist in its signage.

The court pointed out that in his will, issued in September 1982, Dal appointed the state of Spain as the sole and free heir of all his property, rights, and artistic creations, in order to preserve, spread, and protect his works of art. A year later, he established the Gala-Salvador Dal Foundation to protect and defend his artistic, cultural, and intellectual work, his property and rights of any kind, his memory, and the universal recognition of his contribution to the fine arts. Although the state ceded all its rights to the foundation, this did not mean it had the right to protect the artists image.

Since the lawsuit was filed well after Dals death in January 1989, aged 84, the court found that such circumstance implies that his fundamental personality rightsspecifically the right to his own imagebecame extinct with his passing, as death marks the end of the legal personality of natural persons.  

There are some Kweens coming in to The Soda Factory & throwing down a Block Party on Thursday July 14th for Jukebox Thursdays, a late night of live music & party antics.

DJs FlexMami, Elle Sass & LUEN are taking the decks for your favorite flavors and a night of baetime.

book your space at hello@sodafactory.com.au

These chicks know whats up.

Afternoon tea is the ultimate indulgence. Sofitel Sydney Wentworth and The Art Gallery NSW have come together to create the an art inspired high tea. Drawing inspiration from the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prize 2016, Sofitel’s pastry team has created an inactive indulgent afternoon tea with tickets to the Archibald Exhibition.

$55 per person, inclusive of Rennefeldt Tea and a ticket to the Archibald exhibition.
$65 per person, inclusive of a glass of sparkling and a ticket to the Archibald exhibition.
$75 per person, inclusive of a glass of Veuve Clicquot and a ticket to the Archibald exhibition.

Subject to availability. Conditions apply. Bookings are essential. Accor Plus members are entitled to 10% discount.

Soiree at the Wentworth is commemorating its French history with 3 classic French cocktails to mark the storming of the Bastille in 1789.

Relax and unwind with a classic French cocktail in a magnifique setting.

Subject to availability. Conditions apply. Beverage offer is available on 14 July 2016 from 10am in Soiree at The Wentworth. Bookings are not essential.

In celebration of Bastille Day, Sofitel Sydney Wentworth has created a menu, inspired by its French heritage and culinary experiences. Enjoy a French inspired 3-course menu with a glass of sparkling wine at Garden Court Restaurant.

Enjoy this 3-course menu with a glass of sparkling for $75 per person

Bookings essential. Available on 14 July 2016 dinner only. Subject to availability.

The 27-year-old Georg Baselitz was an angry man in 1965, says Eva Mongi-Vollmer, curator at the  Stdel museum and the co-organiser, with the former museum director Max Hollein, of Georg Baselitz: the Heroes. The young artist revelled inbut then rejectedthe path offered by the Western canon of 20th-century art to which he was exposed upon leaving East Germany for West, having lived up until his 20s under the Nazis and then the German Democratic Republic. The work he was making was completely out of time, Mongi-Vollmer says. There was, she adds, a German version of Pop art in the mid-1960s, but figurative painting, particularly this ugly form, was unusual then.  

Baselitz began the works, which all depict lone, dishevelled workers and broken soldiers in torn uniforms, during a fellowship in Florence, where he was exposed to Mannerism. Childhood memories were among his other influences, Mongi-Vollmer says.

The show is the first to concentrate solely and extensively on the Heroes (also called the New Types) works. It includes around 40 of the 60 existing paintings and 30 drawings. It is sponsored by Goldman Sachs.

Georg Baselitz: the Heroes, Stdel Museum, Frankfurt, until 23 October

The turmoil that has followed the UKs decision to leave the EU has affected global financial markets and the strength of the pound, now at its lowest level against the dollar since 1985. International art sales in the capital, however, seem to be a different story. Perhaps spurred by the search for a bargain due to the currency exchange rates, confident buyers buoyed the contemporary evening auctions at Sothebys and Christies, while sales at Masterpiece London, now in its seventh edition, were reported just a few hours after the fair opened to VIPs on Wednesday, 29 June.
 
The past weeks events have been such a shock that we didnt know what to expect, says Nazy Vassegh, the fairs director, but collectors are coming and theyre buying.

A striking piece of jewellery, made from a seven-and-a-half-carat diamond by the designer Joel Arthur Rosenthal, was sold almost immediately at Symbolic & Chases stand (C7) for a seven-figure sum. And the Old Master dealers Agnews (C19), had already sold Nose-diving on the City (1939), a painting by the Italian Futurist Tullio Crali, which they brought to Tefaf in March, with an asking price of around 300,000.
 
Here are some highlights you should not miss when visiting the fair, which runs until 6 July:
 
Axel Vervoordt (C2)

Selection of works, price on request

The Belgian gallery Axel Vervoordt has brought a wide selection of works for their its time at Masterpiece, ranging from 5,000-year-old, but strikingly contemporary-looking, ancient Egyptian and Arabic alabaster sculptures, to Modernist paintings by the Gutai artists Kazuo Shiraga and Jiro Yoshihara, and a large wall piece by the Ghanaian contemporary artist and Golden Lion winner El Anatsui. The price for the latters work is on request, but similar sized pieces have held estimates of $600,000-$900,000 at auction. The gallery is also known for its design pieces and its carefully put together stands, and this one is no exception as it is fast becoming one of the talking points of the fair.

Dickinson (D2)

Van Dyck, Madonna, Child and St John (around 1627), around 1.2m

This newly-attributed work by Van Dyck has not been seen in public since 1887. This is an exciting addition to Van Dycks oeuvre, and we can trace its provenance all the way back to 1775, when it was purchased by an ancestor of the present owner during his Grand Tour of Italy. We enjoyed the process of piecing together the pictures history, which adds to its appeal, and the story of its discovery has been very popular with visitors to our stand, says Molly Dorkin, associate director at Dickinson.

Mayoral Gallery (B33)

Salvador Dal, Anatomies (1937), 2.2m
 
The Barcelona-based Mayoral gallery is staging a small exhibition of works by Surrealist artistsincluding Salvador Dal, Ren Magritte and Joan Mirinspired by dreams and the escape from reality. The point of departure for the show is the Surrealist poet Andr Bretons publication Trajectoire du rve (Trajectory of dreams), which was illustrated by Dal and Mir. We wanted to do more than just hang some works on a wall, says Eduard Mayoral, the director of the gallery, and this is a particularly unusual painting. Dals Anatomies (1937) is from a rare series that he painted in the late 1930s and in which the artist developed his recurring motif of substituting womens heads with flowers. The gallerys thoughts on Brexit? Last week was pretty uncertain, but the contemporary auctions were strong, so were not worried, Mayoral says.
 
David Ghezelbash (B11)

Head depicting the emperor Caligula, first half of the first century AD, price on request

This rare sculpture of the much-maligned Roman emperor Caligula who, throughout history, has been labelled a cruel, sadistic, insane tyrant, was discovered in Cordoba between 1936-39, in the foundations of the Bank of Spain. Whether or not we are to believe all that was said about Caligulathe only surviving historical accounts of him were written by his enemiesthe fact remains that sculptures of him are incredibly rare. He was so hated that, after his death, portraits and sculptures of him were widely destroyed, according to a representative of the gallery.

M&L Gallery (A9)

Enrico Castellani, Untitled (Superficie) (1961), around 700,000

Part of the more recent wave of Italian galleries that have set up shop in Londons Mayfair, M&L are taking part in the fair for the first time with a presentation of works by post-war Italian artists, including Michelangelo Pistoletto, Lucio Fontana and Enrico Castellani. This green wall piece by Castellani, with its recognisable, monochromatic stretched canvas, won this years Masterpiece award for best work at the fair by a living artist and was sold almost immediately on opening day. Its a particularly rare and early work, says Matteo Lampertico, one of the gallerys partners, it has a much softer appearance and colour, before Castellani started using those brighter, more Pop Art tones that we are now familiar with. It has also never been seen on the market before.

DAG Modern (A39)

G.R. Santosh, Untitled (Tantra Series) (around 1930), around 158,000

For their first appearance at Masterpiece, DAG Modern, with spaces in New Dehli, Mumbai and New York, is presenting a wide selection of Modern Indian art, from the Benghal school to the Bombay Progressive Artists Group, at a wide range of price points. Were are in the business of commerce but we also want to educate the public, which is why weve put together a scholarly book for each work at the stand, says the gallerys head of exhibitions and publications, Kishore Singh. Our stands are usually bigger than this, and weve previously commissioned educational videos for all of the works that weve had on display at other fairs. This large, colourful Modernist work by the Kashmiri, self-taught artist G.R. Santosh applies a geometrical, orderly aesthetic to the Tantric image of a goddess, the fount of creation, and combines the essential male and female principles with vibrant yellow and red tones.

The British artist David Hockney returns to the Royal Academy of Arts, London, next week with a new show 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life (2 July-2 October). His last exhibition at the institution, A Bigger Picture (21 January-9 April 2012), was one its most popular shows ever with more 600,000 visitors. This more intimate showin the Sackler Wing rather than the main galleriesis of new works made since the last show and after the artist moved back to Los Angeles. This trailer is for the documentary Hockney (2014), directed by Randall Wright and released earlier this year in the US.


For more on the Royal Academy show, see David Hockneys whos who opens at the Royal Academy, and for details of the artists forthcoming retrospective, see David Hockney to get retrospective at Tate Britain next year.