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      Just Stop Oil Activists Sentenced for Attack on Van Gogh Painting

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      A judge sentenced two climate protesters to prison terms for throwing soup at the work in 2022, an act he called “criminally idiotic.”One morning in October 2022, Anna Holland and Phoebe Plummer, two young climate activists, walked into room 43 of the National Gallery in London, opened two tins of Heinz tomato soup and then threw the sloppy orange contents at Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.”The pair then glued themselves to the wall beneath the painting’s frame, before Plummer shouted, “What is worth more, art or life?”On Friday, a British judge sentenced the pair, both members of the Just Stop Oil protest group, to lengthy prison terms for the protest, which he said was “criminally idiotic” and could have caused “irreversible damage” to the masterpiece.Judge Christopher Hehir, sentenced Plummer, 23, to two years in prison for damaging the painting’s frame. Holland, 22, received 20 months in jail for the same offense. The court had found the pair guilty of the offenses in July.During the sentencing hearing, Judge Hehir said that acidic soup had a “corrosive effect” on the painting’s 17th-century wood frame and had lowered the frame’s value by an estimated 10,000 pounds, or about $13,000. The painting — one of a series that van Gogh made between 1888 and 1889 — is one of the National Gallery’s most treasured paintings and currently a centerpiece of the museum’s 200th anniversary exhibition, “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers.”The judge said the duo’s action came close to damaging the masterpiece — within “the thickness of a pane of glass.” He added that “stupidity like this” could lead museums to withdraw cultural treasures from public view, or force them to introduce onerous security measures that would deter visitors.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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      How the Bead Artist Liza Lou ‘Messes With Your Mind’

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      A gun, a bottle of Jack Daniels, a splatter, a million beads. With these details, the California artist Liza Lou tells you stories. And just a minuscule bead, she explains, is like an underlined word: it can focus your attention, and slow you down.“Beads highlight what is ordinary and make you look at it,” said Lou, known for her life-size beaded sculptural installations, including “Kitchen” (1991-96), in the collection of the Whitney Museum, and “Back Yard,” acquired in 2002 by the Fondation Cartier. She was speaking recently in front of “Trailer,” another massive construction, originally made 25 years ago and filled with tens of millions of Czech glass beads. It just arrived at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.Lou, 55, has reached a turning point in her career, as she transitions from the objects that put her on the map — the Museum of Modern Art recently acquired a beaded teacup and saucer — into more abstract work, all created with her favorite material, which she called “tiny messengers of pigment, dot size expressions of joy.”Carmen Hermo, a curator who worked on the “Trailer” installation, said, “There is a tenderness to the attention that Liza pays” to every detail and bead placement. The meticulousness of works like “Trailer,” she added, “just kind of messes with your mind. There’s something so everyday but also very uncanny about it.”The artist inside “Trailer” when it was first exhibited at Deitch Projects, New York, in 2002. Furnishings are covered with beads, from walls and floors to a typewriter and bottle of Jack Daniels. Mick HaggertyThe artist’s beaded “Trailer” at the Brooklyn Museum, in which Lou asks whose labor is valued, and how. It rewards close observation, from its décor to its smokes and weapons.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesWe 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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      Getty Apologizes for Fireworks Display Gone Awry

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      A planned “explosion event” in Los Angeles by the artist Cai Guo-Qiang left several injured and others shaken.The Getty museum this week found itself having to apologize for the “explosion event” by the artist Cai Guo-Qiang at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum after it left several people injured by falling debris and many others shaken by the sound and smoke.“We’re aware of a few people who were hit by some kind of falling debris, and it was really loud, and we’re really sorry there were people who were freaked out by how loud and smoky it was,” Katherine E. Fleming, the president of the Getty Trust, said in a telephone interview, adding that appropriate procedures had been followed for stadium events and that city officials had been notified in advance.The fireworks display on Sept. 15 — which the Getty had said in an earlier news release would “recall the myth of Prometheus’s theft of fire from the gods” — marked the start of PST Art, a $20 million, Getty-funded museum collaboration which this year is focused on art and science.The Getty did not specify how many people were injured or to what extent. “Unfortunately, pieces of debris fell on some people. We know a few of them required first aid,” a spokeswoman told The Art Newspaper in an email. “Of course this is distressing to us, and we have expressed our concern to the people for whom we have contact information.”Calls to the Los Angeles Fire Department and police were not immediately returned.Some people in the area were also highly disturbed by the loud noise. “It sounded like bombs dropping in the neighborhood,” one resident told CNN.Carol Cheh, a Los Angeles arts writer, added that in the “times that we live in” it was understandable that people were rattled. “Here we are setting off massive explosions with a ton of smoke and no explanation in a major city,” she said.For Cai’s show, “WE ARE,” more than 4,000 people on the stadium’s playing field watched fireworks shells on bamboo sticks explode with drone-launched pyrotechnics overhead, a type of fireworks that began to be approved this year. Cai narrated the event from a podium on the sidelines with an A.I.-assisted translator.Cai, who designed the pyrotechnics for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, had worked on the Los Angeles display with an artificial intelligence program developed by his studio. “I’m thinking about a celebration of the hopes and successes of the human civilization,” he told The Times in July, “and I’m having A.I. play a role as my collaborator to help tell the story.” More

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      The Final Hours of a Tastemaker’s Trove

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      The society fixture, decorator and philanthropist Mica Ertegun helped define the tastes of an era. Now her great collections are going on the block.On a steamy afternoon last week, a team of movers from Christie’s padded quietly about a townhouse on a side street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, yanking strips of packing tape from spools as they began bundling up thousands of artworks and objects for auction. The ripping sound the tape made resembled, in a way, screams of protest.“Can’t we get them to stop?” asked Linda Wachner, an American businesswoman and friend of Mica Ertegun, the woman whose house, until her death in December at 97, this was. “At least for a while.”There was a time in the recent social history of New York City when there would have been no necessity to pose the question “Who is Mica Ertegun?” Readers of the tabloid gossip pages, and almost anyone from a certain social stratum, would have known the name of the woman whose New York Times obituary tidily characterized her as “a doyenne of interior design”; wife of a man, Ahmet Ertegun, whom The New Yorker once called “the Greatest Rock-and-Roll Mogul in the World”; a successful decorator named to Architectural Digest’s AD100 Hall of Fame; a celebrated hostess and designated leader of fashion whose dresses were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.This, of course, was an analogue era. We don’t live there anymore.We inhabit instead a world in which taste is less developed over a lifetime than acquired overnight through Pinterest boards; a time when the megarich buy trophy art as a form of asset class; when the oxymoron known as “quiet luxury” noisily announces itself in the form of branded clothing or else in houses appointed with arrangements of costly if blandly generic objects approved by arbiters at Goop.From the Reagans to Mick Jagger and Jann Wenner, Ahmet and Mica Ertegun knew seemingly everyone.Winnie Au for The New York TimesThousands of objects from the Erteguns’ collections will fall to the hammer in late fall.Winnie Au for The New York TimesOurs is a sphere galaxies away from the one Ms. Ertegun knew, and, to a certain degree, helped conjure into being. And so the opportunity was not to be missed when, for several hours, this reporter and a photographer were given relatively free rein to wander the paired townhouses the Erteguns inhabited for decades (one for the use of Ms. Ertegun’s successful decorating business, MAC II, founded in 1969 with her partner, Chessy Rayner). We were left to prowl among collections that by day’s end would be wrapped, bundled and carted away, never again to be arranged in that particular manner.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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      A New Perspective on Van Gogh’s Final Flowering

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      A major exhibition in London focuses on the painter’s final years, finding new feelings in some of his most famous works.The two vivid portraits — the poet and the lover — hang together in the first room of the exhibition, as they did above van Gogh’s bed in the so-called Yellow House in a working-class neighborhood of Arles, France.It was there, roughly two years before his death by suicide in July 1890, that he dreamed of creating a “Studio of the South” — an artist commune that would produce avant-garde art bathed in the golden light of southern France. (“I know that it will do certain people good to find poetic subjects — THE STARRY SKY — THE VINE BRANCHES — THE FURROWS — the poet’s garden,” he wrote to his brother, Theo.)Van Gogh’s friend, the painter Paul Gauguin, came to stay for two months in late 1888 (ending with the dispute in which the Dutchman famously lopped off part of his own ear), but van Gogh was otherwise alone in Provence. It was a prolific period during which — despite emotional turmoil, mental breakdowns and periodic institutionalization — the artist produced some of his most famous, inventive and moving works.“Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers,” which runs through Jan. 19, 2025, at the National Gallery, in London, brings together over 50 works (some of them rarely on loan) to present a fresh and tender vision of the well-known artist. The show is a centerpiece of the museum’s 200th anniversary celebrations.“Sunflowers,” (1888).The National Gallery, LondonThe exhibition’s focus is on the painter’s two final years, when his distinctive writhing line, hallucinatory palette, impastoed surfaces and romantic visions reached new heights. It also highlights how he displayed his works in the Yellow House, carefully arranging them to create an environment of images in conversation, and his desire to make paintings that transformed what he observed in ordinary life into a kind of poetry.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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      Art Institute of Chicago Receives $75 Million Gift

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      The donation from Aaron I. Fleischman and Lin Lougheed will support the museum’s new galleries.The Art Institute of Chicago on Tuesday announced a gift of $75 million that will support new galleries for its collection of late-19th-century, modern and contemporary art.The new building will bear the names of Aaron I. Fleischman and Lin Lougheed, the married couple whose donation is the largest individual naming gift in the museum’s history.“This converts what has been an aspiration into a reality,” said James Rondeau, the president and director of the Art Institute.“It is just about access to collections,” he continued. “Only about 16 percent of our modern and contemporary collection is on view.”The museum has yet to announce the total cost of the building project, the square footage or a completion date, Rondeau said. While the addition will increase the Art Institute’s $115 million annual operating budget, Rondeau said the museum had prepared for that by building its endowment by $200 million over the past five years.The new galleries are part of a project that began in 2019 to enhance existing spaces and explore how to make the most of the museum’s campus. The Art Institute is working with the architecture firm Barozzi Veiga.Fleischman, formerly a prominent lawyer in Washington, began collecting in the mid-1980s and has been a trustee of the Art Institute for nearly 15 years. Lougheed received a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University, and he has specialized in international education.“Touring the collections on view and in storage I came to believe that more of the museum’s extraordinary collection needed to be available to visitors and presented in world-class architecture,” Fleischman said in a statement, adding that he was excited “for the museum to tell a more complete story of modern and contemporary art.” More

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      Gao Zhen, Artist Who Critiqued the Cultural Revolution, Is Detained in China

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      Mr. Gao is being held on suspicion of slandering China’s heroes and martyrs, an offense punishable by up to three years in prison, his brother said.Gao Zhen, a Chinese artist who has drawn international acclaim for works critiquing the Cultural Revolution, has been detained in China, his brother and artistic partner Gao Qiang said on Monday.The Gao brothers are best known for their statues depicting Mao Zedong in provocative or irreverent ways, such as “Mao’s Guilt,” a bronze statue depicting the leader on his knees, supplicant and remorseful.The police in Sanhe City detained Gao Zhen, who moved to the United States two years ago, last week while he was visiting China, his younger brother said in an email, on suspicion of slandering China’s heroes and martyrs — a criminal offense punishable by up to three years in prison.The police also confiscated several of the brothers’ artworks, all of which were created more than 10 years ago and “reassessed Mao’s Cultural Revolution,” Gao Qiang said. The works included “Mao’s Guilt”; “The Execution of Christ,” a statue depicting Jesus facing down a firing squad of Maos; and “Miss Mao,” a collection of statues of Mao with large breasts and a protruding, Pinocchio-like nose.About 30 police officers stormed the brothers’ art studio on Aug. 26 in Yanjiao, a town in Sanhe City about an hour away from Beijing, Gao Qiang said. The officers asked Gao Zhen, 68, to hand over his mobile phone, and when he refused, they handcuffed and arrested him, Gao Qiang said. Gao Zhen was in China with his wife and son, visiting relatives, his brother said.The next day, Gao Zhen’s wife was notified by the Sanhe City public security bureau that he was being detained on suspicion of slandering heroes and martyrs, Gao Qiang, 62, said.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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      At Los Angeles Galleries, Savoring the Waning Days of Summer

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      During an often quiet season in the art world, several outstanding solo shows and one group show offer a feast for the eye and the mind.Rick Lowe’s “Cavafy Remains,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, in the group exhibition “Social Abstraction” at Gagosian Beverly Hills.via Rick Lowe and Gagosian; Photo by Thomas DubrockThe traditional summer lull in the art gallery calendar typically spurs a rash of phoned-in group shows, a chance to drag unsold works out of storage and repackage them under limp catchall themes. Not so much this month in Los Angeles, where several eye-catching solo exhibitions feature artists who are overdue for a moment in the sun.On the evidence of these shows, there’s no single dominant trend in art right now, but rather a general sense of permission to take seriously a broad spectrum of artists and positions, especially those of older generations. In this late-summer heat, it’s a welcome respite.‘Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: The Finest Disregard’Through Jan. 25. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles; 323-857-6000; lacma.org.Top to bottom: “Minnie Mouse Wearing Venice Canals Dress,” 2004; “Minnie Mouse Wearing Pineapple and Palm Tree Pattern,” 2005; “Minnie Mouse in a White Dress With Red Polka Dots,” 2007; “Minnie Mouse in a Green Dress With Pink Polka Dots,” 2007; and “Minnie Mouse in a Pink Dress,” undated.via Magdalena Suarez Frimkess and Los Angeles County Museum of ArtAt 95, the Venezuelan-born Magdalena Suarez Frimkess has waited a long time for her first museum retrospective. Trained in Chile as a sculptor, she came to the United States on a fellowship in 1962 and met Michael Frimkess, a classical ceramist. They were soon married, and settled in Los Angeles. After he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she began applying her Pop-inflected imagery onto his elegant vessels, painting them with colored glaze.This exhibition of ceramics, furniture, paintings and drawings at LACMA, curated by José Luis Blondet, takes its title from an astute review in Art in America by Paul Harris: “The work of Magdalena Suarez Frimkess — the most daring sculptor working in Chile — is distinguished by the finest disregard for whatever is supposed to be so.” 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