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    Leonard A. Lauder, Philanthropist and Cosmetics Heir, Dies at 92

    He was best known for his success in business, notably the international beauty company he built with his mother, Estée Lauder. But he was also an influential art patron.Leonard A. Lauder, the art patron and philanthropist who with his mother, Estée Lauder, built a family cosmetics business into a worldwide juggernaut that supplied generations of women with the creams, colors and scents of eternal youth, died on Saturday at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was 92.The death was announced by the Estée Lauder Companies.While best known for his business enterprises, Mr. Lauder was also one of America’s most influential philanthropists and art patrons. He gave hundreds of millions to museums, medical institutions, and breast cancer and Alzheimer’s research, as well as to other cultural, scientific and social causes. His art collections ranged from postcards to Picassos.In 2013, he pledged the most significant gift in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a trove of nearly 80 Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures by Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris. Scholars put the value of the gift at $1 billion and said its quality rivaled or surpassed that of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Pompidou Center in Paris.After the gift was announced, he added another dozen major Cubist works, The New York Times reported in a profile of Mr. Lauder last year.The eldest son of Estée Lauder, who in 1946 founded the company that bears her name, Mr. Lauder was for decades a senior executive and the marketing expert and corporate strategist behind his mother, the flamboyant public face of the Lauder empire, who pitched its lipsticks, bath oils, face powders and anti-wrinkle creams with almost messianic zeal.In a business reliant on imagery and mythmaking, his mother, the daughter of a Queens merchant, had created a genteel Hungarian aristocratic past for herself and a name to go with it. Josephine Esther Lauter, the wife of a luncheonette owner, thus became the glamorous Estée Lauder.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Joel Shapiro, Celebrated Post-Minimalist Sculptor, Dies at 83

    His stick-figure sculptures conveyed a surprising depth of emotion, hinting at the threat of imbalance. He also produced more than 30 large-scale commissions.Joel Shapiro, a celebrated American sculptor who sought to challenge the constraints of Minimalism in works that imbued life-size stick figures with a surprising depth of feeling, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 83.His daughter, Ivy Shapiro, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was acute myeloid leukemia.Mr. Shapiro’s best-known sculptures are easy to recognize. Constructed from wooden beams jutting in different directions, they typically suggest a human figure with outstretched arms, a blocky head and a torso shaped like a cereal box.Often the figures appear to be walking or paused in midstep; it’s not clear if they are coming toward you or moving away. They look sturdy and almost athletic compared with the gaunt walking men of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who was one of Mr. Shapiro’s heroes.A sculpture by Mr. Shapiro was unveiled at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2019.Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesDespite their narrow formal vocabulary and building-block-like clunkiness, Mr. Shapiro’s sculptures convey an uncanny range of emotion and movement. From one piece to the next, his figures variously leap with apparent joy, dance balletically, fall backward, twist in existential pain, topple onto their heads or collapse onto the floor in a tangle of arms and legs. Their subject, in the end, is balance, or rather imbalance — of both the spatial and mental sort.“Every form is loaded with the psychology of its maker,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview for this obituary in 2024.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Director of National Portrait Gallery resigns after Trump’s effort to fire her

    The director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, has resigned just two weeks after Donald Trump attempted to fire her and accused her of being “highly partisan and a strong supporter of DEI”.“We thank Kim for her service. Her decision to put the museum first is to be applauded and appreciated. I know this was not an easy decision. She put the needs of the Institution above her own, and for that we thank her,” Lonnie Bunch, the Smithsonian secretary, wrote in a Friday internal email that was obtained by multiple outlets.“We are grateful to Kim for leading the National Portrait Gallery with passion and creativity for 12 years. Throughout her tenure, she has reimagined and reshaped the impact and storytelling of portraiture.”The announcement comes after the Smithsonian Institution earlier this week rebuffed Trump’s attempt to fire Sajet, with the museum’s governing board asserting its independence and turning away the president’s claim of authority over the institution’s staffing.Trump announced on 30 May that he had fired Sajet, calling her a “highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position”.His attack focused, among other reasons, on her Democratic political donations and her rejection of a pro-Trump painting by artist Julian Raven. Sajet reportedly told Raven his artwork was “too pro-Trump” and “too political” for the gallery, the artist told the Washingtonian in 2019.In a statement on Monday, the Smithsonian’s board of regents declared that “all personnel decisions are made by and subject to the direction of the secretary, with oversight by the board”. The statement did not name Sajet or mention the Trump administration directly.Following Trump’s announcement, Sajet continued reporting to work throughout early June, creating a direct confrontation between the White House and the Smithsonian Institution – the country’s flagship cultural institution that has a 178-year-old governance structure built against political interference.Appointed in 2013, Sajet became the National Portrait Gallery’s first female director. Kevin Gover, undersecretary for museums and culture, has replaced her as acting director of the museum.In a statement shared by the internal memo on Friday, Sajet said it had been “the honor of a lifetime to lead the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery”.“This was not an easy decision, but I believe it is the right one,” she wrote. “From the very beginning, my guiding principle has been to put the museum first. Today, I believe that stepping aside is the best way to serve the institution I hold so deeply in my heart.“The role of a museum director has never been about one individual – it is a shared mission, driven by the passion, creativity, and dedication of an extraordinary team.”A statement from a White House spokesperson, David Ingle, reads: “On day one, President Trump made clear that there is no place for dangerous anti-American ideology in our government and institutions.“In align with this objective, he ordered the termination of Kim Sajet. The Trump Administration is committed to restoring American greatness and celebrating our nation’s proud history.” More

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    Jillian Sackler, Philanthropist Who Defended Husband’s Legacy, Dies at 84

    Though the Sackler name was tarnished over Purdue Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis, Arthur Sackler’s should not be, she insisted; a company founder, he died well before the trouble began.Jillian Sackler, an arts philanthropist who struggled to preserve the reputation of her husband, Arthur, by distinguishing him from his two younger Sackler brothers and their descendants, whose aggressive marketing and false advertising on behalf of their pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma, triggered the opioid epidemic, died on May 20 in Manhattan. She was 84.Her death, in a hospital, was from esophageal cancer, said Miguel Benavides, her health proxy.Dr. Arthur Sackler, a psychiatrist and researcher who became a pioneer in medical marketing, bought Purdue Frederick, originally based in New York City, in the 1950s and gave each of his brothers a one-third share. They incorporated the company as Purdue Pharma in 1991. (Its headquarters are now in Stamford, Conn.)Dr. Sackler died in 1987 — nine years before the opioid OxyContin was marketed by the company as a powerful painkiller. Shortly after his death, his estate sold his share of the company to his billionaire brothers, Raymond and Mortimer, for $22.4 million.The company’s misleading advertising claim that OxyContin was nonaddictive prompted doctors to overprescribe it beginning in the 1990s. The proliferation of the medication ruined countless lives of people who became dependent on it.Ms. Sackler in 2012. She spent decades defending her husband, who died nine years before the opioid crisis.Fairchild Archive/Penske Media, via Getty ImagesIn 2021, the company proposed a bankruptcy settlement in which members of the Sackler family agreed to pay $4.2 billion over nine years to resolve civil claims related to the opioid crisis. In return, they sought immunity from future lawsuits.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Lorna Simpson: Painting as a Weapon of Freedom

    In a small but haunting survey at the Met, a celebrated conceptual artist shifts gears, with meteoric results.Some of our most interesting artists have one thing in common. They do outstanding work early on, then, rather than coasting by recycling that success, they complicate it, even change gears.The artist Lorna Simpson is one these restless souls, and she has the technical and imaginative chops to make major changes work, as is evident in a corner-turning retrospective of paintings, “Source Notes,” now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.In the late 1980s and 1990s, Simpson gained a strong reputation as a standout among a new generation of conceptual photographers and artists who — following “Pictures Generation” progenitors like Cindy Sherman a decade earlier — used photographic techniques somewhat the way painters used paint. Through a traditionally point-and-shoot, ostensibly reality-capturing medium, they created entirely fictional images.Simpson began as a straight-up picture-taker. A native New Yorker — born in Brooklyn in 1960, and raised in Queens — she studied photography at the School of Visual Arts and initially identified her work with the genre of “street photography.” Graduate school at the University of California, San Diego, where Conceptualism was the reigning mode, added a new dimension to that early impulse. So was the perception that her career opportunities in the field were limited: “Being a Black woman photographer was like being nobody,” as she has put it. So she saw no reason not to experiment both with her medium and with the subjects that interested her, namely the politics of gender and race.To that end she developed a studio-based style that combined staged images, notably shots of unnamed Black women posing in plain white shifts against a neutral backdrop, their faces turned away from the camera or out of its range, with results that evoke voyeuristic 19th-century ethnological documents, mug shots, and performance art stills. Most of these images have incorporated short texts that hint at explanatory narratives, some violent, without actually providing anything explicit.Detail of “5 Properties,” 2018. Ebony and Jet magazines, poly sleeves, bronze, plaster, glass.Dana Golan for The New York TimesCreating on aura of mystery has been her generative M.O., one she has applied to film and installation work as well as to still photography. What has changed in the past decade is her primary medium. Around 2014, she began, for the first time since her pre-art-school years, to focus on painting, and the Met exhibition is a tight but monumental survey of this new work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Rosana Paulino, a Brazilian Artist Who Wields Poetry and Persistence

    Rosana Paulino, one of Brazil’s most influential artists, works from a narrow three-story house in Pirituba, a neighborhood of simple homes and shops that huddle along the hillside in the northwest outskirts of São Paulo. Her small balcony looks toward a pocket park, a railway line and a nature preserve on a ridge that belies the urban sprawl beyond.The daughter of a cleaner and a house painter, Paulino has pushed her way with stubborn insistence from modest origins in the Black working class into Brazil’s top institutions — at one time working clerical jobs for three years to pay for prep classes to get into the best universities. But she remains rooted in São Paulo’s north-side neighborhoods, where Black culture formed around the rail yards and the warehouses where laborers transferred coffee and other crops before shipping them abroad.“Espada de Iansã,” watercolor and graphite on paper, from the Senhora das Plantas series. Paulino’s female figures seem to merge with Brazilian plants that carry ecological or spiritual symbolism.Gabriela Portilho for The New York Times“It’s very important for me to stay here,” Paulino, 58, said, on a muggy afternoon in April, as a tropical rainstorm gathered. “It’s that old story — you start to have a name and money and so you move out of your community. No, no, no. That’s absolutely not for me.”She emerged as an artist when bourgeois tastes and Modernism dominated the museums and schools, making little space for the work and perspectives of artists from Brazil’s Black majority.Lately the climate has changed. A survey at the prestigious Pinacoteca de São Paulo museum in 2018 and participation in the 2023 São Paulo Biennial cemented Paulino’s hometown recognition; her inclusion in the 2022 Venice Biennale, with some two dozen large-scale drawings of part-human, part-plant female figures, brought visibility abroad.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Ready for Their Reboot: How Galleries Plumb Art History’s Forgotten Talent

    Saara Pritchard, an art adviser, was visiting a friend in Miami when a painting in the bedroom caught her eye. Bordered in silver leaf, it was a close-cropped, black-and-white image of John F. Kennedy, eyes skyward and mouth slightly agape. The haunting image resembled a death mask — as if made by the love child of Andy Warhol and the Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. Who, Pritchard wondered, had painted it?The answer was Marcia Marcus, a popular artist in the downtown New York scene in the 1960s and ’70s who had since faded from view. Pritchard, 40, set out to learn everything she could about Marcus. Within a year she was standing in the home of one of the artist’s daughters, Jane Barrell Yadav, in Yonkers, N.Y., who had more than 200 of her mother’s canvases. The paintings were packed tightly in closets and makeshift storage racks in the living room.Marcia Marcus from “The Human Situation.” Left, “Tyna, Alvin, Baby,” 1970-71; right, “Family II,” 1970. The two girls are modeled on her daughters Kate, left, and Jane, with their father. via Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York; Photo by Elisabeth BernsteinThrough June 21, many of those artworks are on view at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, a stately Upper East Side gallery, as part of “The Human Situation,” an exhibition conceived by Pritchard that put Marcus’s work in dialogue with two better-known female painters from the era, Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh. Over the past two and a half years, Pritchard has worked alongside Barrell Yadav and her sister Kate Prendergast to piece together Marcus’s story in the hope of turning her from an art-historical footnote into a blue-chip star.Marcus is among a growing group of artists who have benefited from what could be called “the rediscovery industrial complex”: a cottage industry within the art market that looks to the past to find figures — often women and artists of color — neglected by the establishment. By repackaging them for a contemporary audience, savvy dealers hope to enrich the art-historical canon even as they make a healthy profit.The upside can be considerable. Consider the case of the painter Lynne Drexler, who lived on a remote island in Maine. Before she died in 1999, she sold her work to tourists for as little as $50. In recent years, her lyrical landscapes have sold for more than $1 million at auction.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Creativity Challenge: Start With Some Quick Doodles

    <!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–>Many of us have a narrow definition of creativity. We think it’s a rare gift reserved for artists. But we’re all creative in some way, whether or not we think so. And being creative comes with big health benefits. It can energize you, sharpen your ideas and problem-solving skills and act as […] More