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THE HEADLINES
TITANIC DISCOVERY. A believed lost bronze statue “Diana of Versailles” from the Titanic was found half buried at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean in a recent expedition to the site of the shipwreck. RMS Titanic Inc., a company with salvage rights to the wreck, set out to document what is left of the 112-year-old ship in August, managing to capture over 2m of high-resolution images. Ultimately, they found a “bittersweet mix of preservation and loss,” reports the Guardian, including the collapse of a large section of the ship’s iconic bow railing, due to decay. The Diana statue was last seen during another expedition in 1986. Now researchers are busy getting to work identifying what “at-risk artifacts” need to be recovered for preservation.
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OLYMPIC LOSS FOR MUSEUMS. Museums in the Paris didn’t win gold during this summer’s Olympics. Attendance dropped 25% during the period. That’s 22% down at the Louvre, 28% at the Pompidou, 29% at the Musée d’Orsay, and 35% less for the Museum of Modern Art, to name a few, reports Le Quotidien de l’Art. Le Monde relayed slightly different numbers for individual museums, with the same overall result. Nevertheless, “there’s nothing surprising here,” sources told French reporters. The same phenomenon happened during London’s 2012 Olympics, and Rio’s in 2016. Heritage sites and the city’s skull-stacked, underground catacombs, on the other hand, were all the rage. Perhaps a balance to the physical vitality on display above ground? In another silver lining, Le Monde reports attendees at several Paris museums were younger than usual, and institutions are hopeful a fresh influx of visitors during this fall’s exhibitions and upcoming Art Basel, Paris fair will make up for the loss. La vie en rose, as it were, goes on.
THE DIGEST
A 17th century unsigned portrait of a girl discovered in an attic and attributed “after Rembrandt” sold to a U.K. collector for $1.4 million, well above its estimated $10,000-$15,000. The painting was found in a routine house appraisal of a private estate in Camden, Maine, and sold by Thomaston Place Auction Galleries. A slip on the back of the painting from the Philadelphia Museum of Art attributes the work to Rembrandt. “It was in the attic, among stacks of art, that we found this remarkable portrait,” said Kaja Veilleux, the founder of Thomaston Place Auction Galleries. Indeed, “we often go in blind,” she said. [Artnet News]
California-based collector Aaron Mendelsohn, 74, has filed a court dispute of New York investigators’ attempts to seize an ancient Roman bronze statue he acquired in 2007 from Royal-Athena Galleries for $1.3 million. The Manhattan district attorney’s office claim the artifact was looted from Turkey in the 1960’s. Others have challenged similar seizure efforts by the same office, including the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. [The New York Times]
The Hirshhorn Museumand Sculpture Garden has appointed Colombian curator José Roca as its first curator of Latin American and Latin Diasporic Art. He has curated several major international biennials and was the adjunct curator of Latin American art at the Tate. [The Art Newspaper]
The Pompidou’s blockbuster Surrealism exhibit opens today, and French art critics have brought out the knives. The show is part of a traveling exhibition and features some 500 works arranged in a labyrinth that can literally get visitors lost (including this writer). Le Monde says the show “starts off badly,” and later improves, barring a few important missteps, while critic Judith Benhamou says, “the show is at once fabulous and disappointing.” Tough crowd. [Le Monde and Judith Benhamou Reports]
THE KICKER
SCULPTING THE MET. Frieze Seoul opens today, and what better opportunity to mention star Korean artist Lee Bul, 60. She recently discussed the prophetic, piercing pain of being bitten by a giant centipede while home on a mountain in Seoul, during an interview with the New York Times. She said the bite helped heal “the pain of sculpting,” and is “telling me to keep the mood up,” despite falling ill several times while creating four sculptures for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Façade Commission in New York. Set to be unveiled Sept. 12, the commissioned figures are partly sourced from Bul’s former humanoid “Cyborg” sculptures, and are guardian-like, fragmented entities that stand apart from previous work, including two canine-inspired pieces. The artist hopes people feel, “a number of mixed emotions, including the feeling that they’re close to understanding the work but also a slight feeling of nausea,” she said. Not your typically desired response to an artwork, but to the artist it serves a deeper purpose. “I also want to convey a hint of something a bit strange or uncomfortable that makes the viewer dwell on why that is,” she added.