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    A Special St. Patrick’s Day Guest: the Head of King George V

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    At its show in Australia this weekend, the raucously political rap trio Kneecap brought what appeared to be the missing head of a King George V statue onstage.The irreverent, unrepentantly political Northern Irish rap trio Kneecap welcomed a special guest onto the stage of its show in Melbourne, Australia, over St. Patrick’s Day weekend: the head of King George V, which appeared to be a missing piece of a statue that was decapitated in the city last year.“Some madman dropped by with a huge King George’s head so he could hear a few tunes for our last Melbourne show!” the group posted on Instagram, alongside a photograph of the enormous bronze face onstage in front of one of the group members, Mo Chara.It was the latest twist in a monthslong mystery, after a towering statue of King George V in the King’s Domain area of Melbourne was decapitated and vandalized with paint last June, part of a wave of anticolonial vandalism that targeted imperial statues across the state of Victoria. The missing head seemed to briefly reappear in January, when a video posted on Instagram showed it on a barbecue grill, lit on fire. But it has been missing, again, ever since.“Allegedly his head was cut off last year in the city..…anyways he was put on stage for a few tunes and then whisked away,” the group wrote in its post. “Remember every colony can fall 🔥”.Kneecap — a trio composed of the West Belfast musicians Mo Chara, Moglai Bap and DJ Provai — has raucously burst into the mainstream over the past year with a critically acclaimed, truth-adjacent biopic. The group is known for its high-volume Republican politics and gleefully inebriated shows, in which its frontman, Bap, regularly appears shirtless and slugging from a bottle of Buckfast, the cheap tonic wine that is a universal Irish touchstone for a messy night out.Central to the group’s ethos are anti-colonialist politics and promotion of the Indigenous language. Bap, Chara and DJ Provai perform in both Irish and English, and they have spoken often about the importance of promoting and preserving the Irish language, which was banned across the island during British occupation.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 Torlonia Marbles Are Coming to Museums in Chicago, Texas and Montreal

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      For the first time, the ancient marbles are traveling out of Europe to the United States and Canada, for a prolonged stint.Stashed away in a cavernous Roman deposit, hidden from the world for the better part of the last century, the Torlonia Collection — the largest collection of classical sculpture still in private hands — now appears to be continuing its jet-set itinerary that started in 2020.After a glittering debut in Rome, and star turns in Milan and the Louvre Museum in Paris, 58 of the sculptures belonging to the Torlonia family, based in Rome, will be showcased at the Art Institute of Chicago in March, and will then travel to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.Dating from approximately the fifth century B.C. to the early fourth century, the works on view will include highlights of the Torlonia Collection, but also 24 sculptures that were specifically selected for the North American run by the co-curators Lisa Ayla Cakmak and Katharine A. Raff of the Art Institute of Chicago, after “multiple trips” to the Torlonia laboratory in Rome where the collection is being restored. (“A magical, once in a lifetime experience,” Cakmak said during a video interview.)Titled “Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture From the Torlonia Collection,” the exhibition will “feel very different from the European presentations,” Cakmak said. For the curators, it has been important to make it clear “that this is a completely new project,” not just in how it “was presented in our interpretation and storytelling but also the checklist” of works, she added.The Torlonia Nile, formerly Barberini-Albani. Sculptures from the collection had been visible, off and on, until World War II. Then they fell out of sight.Lorenzo De Masi; via Torlonia FoundationIt is “intended to be for non-specialists,” people who “might not know much about the ancient world,” but would be interested in seeing what Marcus Aurelius, known to modern audiences through the first “Gladiator” film, actually looked like, said Cakmak. She added that a scholars day limited to experts was “in the planning stages.”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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      Storm King to Begin 2025 With Nora Lawrence as Executive Director

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      The family-run Hudson Valley sculpture park inaugurates its 65th anniversary year with fresh leadership, a $53-million upgrade and new acquisitions.Storm King Art Center, the 500-acre outdoor museum, announced on Tuesday that Nora Lawrence, its artistic director and chief curator, will succeed its president, John P. Stern, as the institution’s leader in January. It also announced a series of commissions and acquisitions, and a solo show by the Brazilian visual artist Sonia Gomes.It is the first time that Storm King — founded in 1960 by Stern’s grandfather, Ralph E. Ogden, and father, H. Peter Stern, in New Windsor, N.Y. — will be stewarded by someone from outside their family.In choosing Storm King’s inaugural executive director, the board decided to forgo a typical search and unanimously select Lawrence, who rose through the ranks over 13 years, starting as an associate curator.From left, the artist Sarah Sze and Lawrence on the grounds of Storm King in 2021.Lila Barth for The New York Times“There is no one more qualified to take the helm than Nora Lawrence, with whom I’ve had the privilege of working closely and whose artistic vision has helped make Storm King the international destination that it is today,” Stern wrote in a statement. He took the reins from his father in 2008 and now, at age 64, will transition to a position as the board’s president and senior adviser; his two sisters also serve on the board of the nonprofit organization.The generational change — Lawrence is 45 — is part of the “transformation from Storm King being a wonderful, family-led organization to becoming increasingly a more public-facing organization in every way,” said Adam D. Weinberg, a Storm King board member, who stepped down as director of the Whitney Museum last year.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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      From One Nonagenarian Artist to Another, a Tip of the Hat

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      Alex Katz admired a Mark di Suvero sculpture and gave it to the Brooklyn Museum. It now has pride of place in the museum’s 200th anniversary celebration.Consider two artists, now both in their 90s and both still working, who do not know each other personally despite coming up in the New York art scene around the same time.One of them, Alex Katz, became the painter of some of the most recognizable portraits of our age, the other, Mark di Suvero, a welder of huge steel sculptures that are ubiquitous wherever outdoor art is found.This is not a buddy comedy setup, but rather the philanthropic back story behind the recent permanent installation of a nearly 15-foot-tall abstract sculpture by di Suvero, “Sooner or Later” (2022), on the plaza in front of the Brooklyn Museum.The work is a gift to the museum from the Alex Katz Foundation, picked out by the painter himself, to honor the museum’s 200th anniversary.Katz, 97 and still making new paintings, went back to Paula Cooper Gallery three times to see it, before making the purchase; the gallery said that similar works are priced in a range from $3 million and $5 million.“I saw it in the window and thought it was fantastic,” said Katz, known for his striking, flattened and highly stylized portraits, frequently taking his wife, Ada, as a subject. (He had a large retrospective at the Guggenheim that began in 2022.)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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      Collector Sues to Block Investigators From Seizing Roman Bronze

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      Lawyers for the collector, based in California, said the Manhattan district attorney’s office did not have the jurisdiction or the evidence to support seizing the ancient statue.A California collector has gone to court to block efforts by New York investigators to seize an ancient Roman bronze statue that they assert was looted from Turkey in the 1960s.In a federal court filing last week in California, lawyers for the collector, Aaron Mendelsohn, 74, disputed the evidence they said investigators had presented indicating that the ancient statue of a man was stolen from an archaeological site in Turkey. The lawyers said that investigators had no jurisdiction to seize items in California and so were overstepping their authority.It was the latest in a series of recent challenges to efforts by the Manhattan district attorney’s office to seize artifacts believed to have been looted. The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago are also engaged in legal challenges with the investigators over items with disputed histories.In Mr. Mendelsohn’s case, his lawyers have accused the investigators of using the threat of prosecution to pressure their client into giving up the statue. In addition, they have argued that by pursuing the statue in a potential criminal proceeding, the investigators can avoid the fuller disclosure and access to evidence that would have been required in civil court.The district attorney’s office “has invoked New York criminal process in an effort to intimidate Mr. Mendelsohn into relinquishing the Bronze Male, without affording Mr. Mendelsohn a legitimate opportunity to fully explore the evidence that DANY claims casts doubt on Mr. Mendelsohn’s ownership or to litigate its true ownership,” Marcus A. Asner, a lawyer for Mr. Mendelsohn, wrote in court papers filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Western Division.The Manhattan district attorney’s office responded with a statement that said: “Our Antiquities Trafficking Unit has successfully recovered thousands of stolen antiquities that came through Manhattan from galleries, homes, and museums around the country. We will respond to this filing in court.”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

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      June Leaf, Artist Who Explored the Female Form, Dies at 94

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      Womanly power was a recurring theme of her work, expressed in idiosyncratic sculpture and paintings that did not align with prevailing trends.June Leaf, a painter and sculptor whose exploration of the female form, by turns whimsical, graceful or ominous, paved the way for later generations of feminist artists, died Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94. The cause was gastric cancer, said Andrea Glimcher, her agent at the Hyphen management firm and a friend.Ms. Leaf worked for much of her long career outside the mainstream. Idiosyncratic and intuitive, she developed a unique blend of expressionism and primitivism, allied with a childlike sense of play. Her varied output included toylike kinetic sculptures, frantic ink drawings with a nervous, tensile line, satirical social scenes, and macabre skeletons painted on canvas or tin.Womanly power was a recurring theme, expressed early on in goddess-like figures with hugely distended hips and breasts and women with batlike wings or gyroscope torsos, and later in a powerful series of metal heads reminiscent of tribal sculpture.At no point did the work align with prevailing trends in contemporary art, and for much of her life Ms. Leaf was overshadowed by her husband, the photographer Robert Frank, whom she married in 1975. She nevertheless commanded a devoted audience attuned to her unique frequency, as well as the admiration of a small group of critics and curators.Reviewing her first solo New York show in 1968, Hilton Kramer of The New York Times called her work “remarkably forceful and robust — the product of an earthy imagination with a striking talent for projecting images that are at once ferocious and macabre, satirical and touching.” He added, “She is that rare thing in painting today: a poet with a taste and a talent for complex images.”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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      Cleveland Museum of Art to Return a Rare Ancient Icon to Libya

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      A 2,200-year-old sculpture of a bearded man carved from basalt, unearthed in the 1930s, is believed to have been stolen in the early 1940s.While excavating an ancient Greek palace in eastern Libya in the 1930s, an archaeologist dug up a large earthen storage jar, looked inside and spotted something unexpected — a 2,200-year-old sculpture of a bearded man carved from basalt, a dark volcanic stone.The two-foot-tall antiquity, most likely chiseled during ancient Egypt’s Ptolemaic Dynasty, was a rare find. Known as a striding male figure, it is one of only 33 statues like it known to exist, Egyptologists say.But it wasn’t long before thieves got ahold of the bearded figure and took it on an illicit odyssey that brought it, in 1991, to the Cleveland Museum of Art.On Wednesday, after curators had reviewed abundant proof that the item was stolen from Libya, including photos of it on display in the 1940s at a small museum near its discovery site, the museum agreed to transfer ownership to Libyan officials.“When confronting a situation like this we look at all the material and try to come to an agreement that is beneficial to all parties,” said Seth Pevnick, curator of Greek and Roman art at the Cleveland museum.“It’s less about ownership and more about access” to the object, he said, adding that the museum is hoping to display it on loan for five more years.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 Land Artist’s Work Evades Demolition

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      A federal judge granted a temporary restraining order protecting a work by Mary Miss. A Des Moines museum wanted to destroy it, citing safety concerns.A work of environmental art by Mary Miss has evaded demolition — for now. A judge in the U.S. District Court in Des Moines on Friday granted her request for a temporary restraining order that would bar the Des Moines Art Center, the museum that commissioned the land art installation, from dismantling it. The museum maintains it has become a safety hazard and that the resources to repair it are not available.The decision, the Art Center said in a statement, amounts to “a court-ordered stalemate.”While the judge, Stephen H. Locher, found that destroying the work, “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” (1989-1996), would violate the Art Center’s contract with the artist, he also said that Miss could not force the museum to restore it to its original condition. He wrote, “The end result is therefore an unsatisfying status quo: the artwork will remain standing (for now) despite being in a condition that no one likes but that the court cannot order anyone to change.”The lawsuit is the latest twist in a fight over the fate of “Greenwood Pond,” which has highlighted the difficulty of preserving large-scale public artworks, especially for smaller institutions. Located on the grounds of a city-owned park next to the museum, the installation is a collection of sloping walkways, wooden sitting areas, huts and towers that encourage visitors to engage with the landscape. Over the years, the wood has degraded substantially, and the Art Center estimates that it would cost between $2 million and $2.6 million to restore it. (Miss contests that, but has not provided another figure.)In an interview on Tuesday, Miss said, “I don’t know why the museum wouldn’t come to me at this point and try to work this out instead of spending more money on legal fees.”Having visited “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” while in Des Moines to testify, she said she felt a newfound appreciation for the work. “I just can’t imagine this whole thing going south at this point,” she 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