The seven-foot-wide work seems to have significantly declined in value. When Christie’s brought the work to auction in 2022, that house gave it a $30 million estimate; just before the sale, the work was quietly withdrawn. This time, Sotheby’s has awarded the work a $15 million–$20 million estimate.

Any Basquiat coming to auction is deemed an event, largely due to the phenomenally high prices his work typically commands. Although the recent secondary market prices are still high, Basquiats used to more regularly outpace their high estimates by large sums at auction. The dip in prices could be explained by collectors being more thoughtful about how many millions they are willing to spend at auction, and by auction houses adjusting estimates to better fit those new, high interest rate–driven buying habits.

In May, Basquiat’s Untitled (ELMAR), also from 1982, led a modern and contemporary art sale at Philips, selling for $46.5 million. That painting had been estimated to sell for $60 million. The other two Basquiats sold by the house in evening sales that month—Untitled (Portrait of a Famous Ballplayer), from 1981, and Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari (1982)—headed to auction at lower values, selling for $7.8 million and $12.6 million, respectively. Those figures, which all include buyer’s premium, were squarely within the works’ estimates.

Christie’s and Sotheby’s, too, had Basquiats for sale in May. An untitled 1984 collaboration between Basquiat and Andy Warhol went to Sotheby’s with an estimate of $15 million to $20 million. It sold for $19.3 million. Meanwhile, yet another 1982 work, The Italian Version of Popeye Has no Pork in His Diet, sold at Christie’s for $32 million on an estimate of around $30 million.

Earlier this year, Phillips’s Americas president Jean-Paul Engelen told Puck’s Marion Maneker that Basquiat was “the new Picasso,” a euphemism for the fact that the artist has now achieved legendary status on the market. According to Maneker, roughly $125 million worth of Basquiat’s work sold in May. Look back to the last four years, and that figure crosses the billion-dollar mark.

There’s no question that Basquiat’s market has juice at the moment, a trend that it likely to continue. The only question is whether Sotheby’s priced the work low enough to get collectors interested. Either way, it doesn’t matter much. The work, according to Sotheby’s website, has a guarantee and an irrevocable bid, which means it has effectively already sold. The question, now, is who’s taking it home.

Leading the New York sale on May 14 is the monumental 1982 picture Untitled (ELMAR), a nearly eight-foot-wide canvas featuring a modern-day Icarus about to fall out of the heavens and an archer firing two arrows in his direction. Untitled (ELMAR) is expected to sell for between $40 million and $60 million.

Untitled (ELMAR) was included in an exhibition dedicated to Pellizzi’s collection at the New York’s Hofstra Museum in 1989. It was also on view at an exhibition commemorating the 10-year anniversary of Basquiat’s death at Gagosian Los Angeles in 1998 and featured on the cover of the accompanying catalogue. The picture was also shown at the artist’s retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2018.

In New York, Philips will also sell the 1981 canvas Untitled (Portrait of a Famous Ballplayer). The painting will come with a $6.5 million–$8.5 million estimate. Two weeks later, on May 31, in Hong Kong, the house will sell Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari (1982) for an estimated $12 million–$18 million. 

Basquiat’s paintings have sold particularly well in Asia. In May 2022, an untitled 1982 painting from Japanese multimillionaire Yusaku Maezawa’s collection sold for $85 million. Just six years earlier, Maezawa had bought it at Christie’s for $57.3 million.

The artist’s work is a staple at New York evening sales. During last year’s May sales, Christie’s sold a 12-foot-wide 1983 triptych from the collection of the Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani for just over $67 million, putting the painting among the most expensive Basquiat works ever auctioned.

“Basquiat’s relevance and fame has only continued to grow each year and he is one of the most sought-after artists of any century,” Robert Manley, deputy chairman and worldwide co-head 20th century and contemporary art at Philips, said in a statement. He referred to Gagosian’s current exhibition of Basquiat’s work in Los Angeles, and said, “From where I stand, the momentum seems to be picking up.”

This will be the picture’s first appearance at auction since it sold, also at Sotheby’s, back in 2010 for $2.65 million. Sotheby’s has placed its estimate this time at $18 million, meaning that if it sells for that price, it will have increased in value more than sixfold.

The work is part of a famed—and polarizing—grouping of paintings that the two art stars produced collaboratively between 1984 and 1985. Basquiat was far younger than Warhol, who at that point was seen as an aging Pop artist seeking relevancy. Some accused Warhol of parasitically feeding on Basquiat’s fame with these works, which combine the former’s consumerist imagery with the latter’s skulls and graffiti-like scrawls.

But today, the Basquiat-Warhol collaborations are largely remembered fondly. An expansive show dedicated to the series appeared at Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton last year. The untitled painting heading to Sotheby’s appeared in the New York iteration of that show, at the Brant Foundation, the art space run by collector Peter Brant. 

In 2022, there was also the theatrical hit The Collaboration, which focused specifically on the years Warhol and Basquiat worked together.

Speaking of the untitled work headed to auction, Lucius Elliott, head of evening sales devoted to art of the past few decades at Sotheby’s, told ARTnews, “It really is the apex of their collaboration. By 1984, they had been working together for a year. They’d grown comfortable enough to push and pull on the canvas. Things were obliterated. Things were created. But both artists fully exist on the canvas, working in their different vernaculars of the same subject matter.”

Basquiat-Warhol paintings typically perform well at auction, even if they net prices that are far beneath the eight- and nine-figure sums regularly achieved by these artists individually. The record for one of the Basquiat-Warhol pictures is $11.3 million, achieved in May 2014 at Phillips during a contemporary art evening sale in New York.

The mixed-media paintings were billed as newly discovered Basquiats, and are now thought to have been inauthentic. According to the lawsuit, first reported by the New York Times on Tuesday, the five co-owners of these works had promised De Groft a cut of the proceeds if they sold.

The works, De Groft and the paintings’ owners claimed, were made while Basquiat was living and working in Los Angeles around 1982 and had been forgotten in a storage unit.

Questions of their authenticity began to surface, however, shortly after their debut. A brand expert, for instance, told the Times that the FedEx typeface featured on a piece of cardboard was not used by the company until 1994—six years after the artist’s death.

An interview with the purported original owner of the paintings, as part of the FBI affidavit, also swore he had never purchased work by Basquiat.

The suit claims that De Groft leveraged the museum’s reputation to legitimize and increase the value of the fake paintings to benefit his own interests. He has denied any wrongdoing.

The museum is seeking an unspecified sum in damages for fraud, conspiracy, breach of fiduciary duty, and breach of contract.

“O.M.A. spent hundreds of thousands of dollars—and unwittingly staked its reputation—on exhibiting the now-admittedly fake paintings. Consequently, cleaning up the aftermath created by the defendants has cost O.M.A. even more,” reads the lawsuit filed in Florida’s circuit court.

The lawsuit “seeks to hold responsible the people the museum believes knowingly misrepresented the works’ authenticity and provenance,” said the museum’s current board chair, Mark Elliott, in a statement.

This is the latest development related to the Basquiat show. Last year, following an FBI raid on the museum and the confiscation of the paintings, the museum fired De Groft, who has a history of “rediscovering” artworks and who was subsequently placed on probation by the American Alliance of Museums.

In a plea deal earlier this year, Los Angeles auctioneer Michael Barzman admitted to making the fake Basquiat paintings.

De Groft’s emails and text messages, which appear to reference future sale of the paintings, are included in the court papers. De Groft and two co-owners of the works, Pierce O’Donnell and Leo Mangan, have said that Barzman is lying.

The museum alleges that De Groft was also seeking to legitimize the provenances of other works by Titian and Jackson Pollock with which he is associated in the court documents.

De Groft, according to the lawsuit, agreed to show the Basquiats before seeing them in person and only viewed them three months prior to the exhibition’s opening. Additionally, De Groft dismissed concerns raised by staff.

Though the museum alleges that De Groft withheld information of the FBI investigation from the full board, the board’s then-chairwoman Cynthia Brumback had known and reportedly did not disclose the information. Instead, she directed staff to De Groft.

ARTnews has reached out to De Groft for comment.

The Headlines

A BREAK IN THE CASE. Last June, the FBI raided the Orlando Museum of Art, taking 25 paintings said to be previously unknown Jean-Michel Basquiats, an attribution disputed by many experts. The OMA’s director was soon ousted. Now federal prosecutors say that a Los Angeles man has admitted to helping create and sell the paintings, per the New York Times. Michael Barzman, an auctioneer, will plead guilty to making false statements to investigators when he initially claimed to know nothing about the allegedly ersatz artworks. Court docs say that Barzman worked with an unnamed individual, who spent five to 30 minutes making each work. His lawyer told the Courthouse News Service that his client did it because he “was drowning in medical debt.” One of the current owners of the works, attorney Pierce O’Donnell, told the Times that he still believes the paintings are genuine, calling Barzman “a proven unreliable person.”

CARL FISCHER, the self-taught photographer who shot many of Esquire magazine’s instantly iconic (and frequently controversial) covers in the 1960s and ‘70s, died last Friday at the age of 98, Neil Genzlinger reports in the New York Times. Working with the art director George Lois, who was credited with the concepts, Fischer used an array of techniques to portray public figures in unusual circumstances, like the boxer and activist Muhammad Ali stuck with arrows and the artist Andy Warhol sinking into a huge can of Campbell’s soup. He made the latter by taking the Pop star’s portrait and pasting it into an image that he made of a marble falling into a normal-size can of tomato soup.

The Digest

Australian artist John Olsen, who won fame for his vibrant, abstracted landscape paintings, and who took home his nation’s prestigious Archibald prize in 2005 for a self-portrait, died on Tuesday at 95. “Painting was our father’s life, and he was painting right up to the last,” his children said in a statement. [The Guardian]

Italy is pursuing legislation that would impose a minimum fine of €10,000 (about $10,900) for vandalizing important cultural sites. That figure could climb to €60,000 ($66,000) in some cases. The proposal comes as climate activists have been targeting monuments and artworks in protests throughout Europe. [The Associated Press]

Staffers at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels have cosigned a letter to the Belgian government complaining of a toxic workplace marked by unequal treatment and a lack of “equity and basic justice.” They claim that their “leaders turn a deaf ear while we survive in a general malaise.” [The Brussels Times]

Officials are exploring a plan to stage miniature biennales around the Indian state of Kerala, its minister for tourism revealed at the closing ceremony for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. [The Hindu]

A wildfire in Gangneung, on the east cost of South Korea, damaged heritage sites, including the Sangyeongjeong pavilion that dates to 1859 and parts of the Inwolsa temple. [The Korea Herald]

Archaeologists at the Mayan site of Chichen Itza on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula have found an ancient scoreboard that was used in a soccer-like game. It measures about a foot across, weighs a formidable 88 pounds, and is believed to date to around 800 to 900. [Reuters]

The Kicker

A SURPRISE COMMISSION. The United States Postal Service recently released the 46th stamp in its Black Heritage series, a vivid portrait of the late novelist Ernest J. Gaines. The man responsible for that image is artist Robert Peterson, who is based in Lawton, Oklahoma, and while he has been painting seriously for about a decade, he had some doubts when the USPS first reached out to him. “I thought it was fake, to be honest,” Peterson told KFDX. “I thought I was being scammed or Punk’d or something like that.” Next year, he will have a solo show at the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas. His stamps can be purchased online, at post offices across the country. [KFDX]

The Times previously reported in February that numerous questions were raised about the authorship of the works—mixed media painted on cardboard—after their debut. Notably, a brand expert told the Times that the FedEx typeface featured on a piece of cardboard purported to have been painted on by Basquiat was not in use by the company until 1994, six years after the artist’s death. De Groft has maintained that the paintings are Basquiat originals, citing expert testimony. The chairwoman of the museum’s board, Cynthia Brumback, has publicly supported De Groft’s claims. The paintings were set to travel to Italy for exhibition on June 30.

In the federal subpoena to the Orlando Museum of Art, the F.B.I. has, according to the Times, demanded “any and all” communication between the institution’s employees and the owners of the paintings “purported to be by artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.” This includes correspondences between experts consulted about the artworks, as well as the OMA’s board of trustee records on the matter. The scope and specific target of the F.B.I. investigation is currently unclear. The Times reported that interviews conducted by the agents have focused on the painting’s primary owners who have stated that they intended to sell the collection.

In a statement to ARTnews, the OMA said: “Last year, the Museum complied with a request for information. The Museum has never been led to believe it was or is the subject of any investigation and has never had any FBI activity on-site. We see our involvement purely as a fact witness. As we close the Heroes and Monsters exhibition in a few weeks, we will continue to cooperate should there ever be any future requests.”

Brumback told the Orlando Sentinel in March that though “we know questions have been raised about the exhibit,” museum visitors have had a positive reaction to the paintings. “Attendance is up, diversity is up, shop sales are up,” she said. “People are enjoying themselves, which is very important to us. It supports our mission.”

According to the OMA, the exhibit’s pieces—ranging in size from a 10- inch square to a five-foot-high slab featuring a disembodied head—were created by Basquiat in 1982 while the artist was living and working out of studio beneath Larry Gagosian’s Los Angeles home. Basquiat reportedly sold the works directly to television screenwriter Thad Mumford for $5,000 in cash without the knowledge of his art dealer. Gagosian, in a statement to the Times, said the scenario of their creation sounded “highly unlikely.”

The works reappeared 25 years later when Mumford failed to pay the bill on his Los Angeles storage unit and its contents went to auction. The collection of paintings was bought by art and antiquities dealer William Force and his financier, Lee Mangin, for around $15,000. An interest in six of the 25 paintings was purchased by Los Angeles trial lawyer Pierce O’Donnell. The owners later commissioned reports by multiple Basquiat experts and a handwriting expert, several of which determined the works to be genuine.

The museum has cited these reports in its defense of their legitimacy, as well as a poem written by Mumford in 1982 in homage to their creation; it includes the line “25 paintings bringing riches.”

Prior to his death in 1988 at the age of 27, Basquiat created some 600 paintings and 1,500 drawings, according to the Brooklyn Museum. His market shows little sign of slowing: In 2017, he became the most expensive American artist ever sold at auction when an untitled skull painting from 1982 was bought for $110.5 million with fees at Sotheby’s, smashing the record Basquiat achieved a year before when a red skull went for $57.3 million.

If the Mumford trove is legitimate, their collective worth could reach $100 million.

The artist’s estate, however, disbanded its authentication committee in 2012, three months after the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, citing the costs of defending itself against lawsuits related to authentication, dissolved its own authentication entity.

Well-executed fake Basquiats, carrying elaborate forged provenance materials, have been in circulation for decades. In July 2021, the FBI arrested a man in New York City for allegedly attempting to sell forgeries of work by Basquiat and Keith Haring, among other artists, as genuine. And last week, federal agents charged Daniel Elie Bouaziz, a Palm Beach-based art dealer, with wire fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering for selling allegedly fake works by world-famous artists, including Basquiat, Warhol, and Keith Haring, for millions of dollars.

The most expensive work featured in the alleged scheme was an unnamed painting supposedly by Basquiat that agents claim Bouaziz bought on the website LiveAuctioneers for $495. He later sold it to an undercover agent for $12 million, according to the complaint.

The Headlines

THE ARTIST, CURATOR, AND HISTORIAN SAMELLA LEWIS, whose work helped to define and preserve African American art history, died on Friday at the age of 98, Alex Greenberger reports in ARTnews. Lewis’s vast accomplishments include writing the canonical books Black Artists on Art (1969), which was released by her own press, and Art: African American (1978); founding the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles; and creating an expansive body of art, with a particular focus on prints. “Because Lewis’s prints were reproduced frequently in literature, they have been seen widely,” Greenberger writes. “And yet, Lewis’s art is not as commonly exhibited in institutions as that of her colleagues.” Curator Naima J. Keith has described the artist’s works as “pictorial manifestations of the age of civil rights and black liberation.”

REAL TALK. An art dealer in Palm Beach, Florida, Daniel Elie Bouaziz, has been indicted on federal charges for allegedly selling fake works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Banksy, and more, Alex Greenberger reports in ARTnews. The dealer’s lawyer has not responded to a request for comment. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that the F.B.I. Art Crime Team has been investigating 25 works billed as Basquiats in a show at the Orlando Museum of Art in Florida. The owners of the works say that they were discovered in 2012 in a storage locker that had been used by screenwriter Thad Mumford. Some experts have raised questions about the authenticity of the pieces; the museum’s director, Aaron De Groft, who has maintained that they are real, did not comment in the Times story.

The Digest

Billionaire money manager, collector, and philanthropist Fayez Sarofim died on Saturday at his Houston home at the age of 93. Sarofim acquired pieces by Edward Hopper, Willem de Kooning, El Greco, and many more. His charitable efforts included a $75 million gift to Houston’s Museum of Fine Art for its recent expansion. [Forbes]

The French artist Claude Rutault, who pursued a rigorously conceptual approach to painting, died on Saturday at the age of 80. “Those who knew him will miss his mischievousness, intelligence, strong personality, generosity, and freedom of spirit, evident in his work,” his gallery, Perrotin, said. [ARTnews]

An unidentified man was taken into custody after smearing cake on the bullet-proof glass that protects the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. The Leonardo was not harmed. Video from the scene shows the man declaring that the action was an environmental protest. [ARTnews]

A Mayan city has been discovered at a construction site near Merida, Mexico. Archaeologists believe that the area, which has buildings for people at various places in a social hierarchy, was inhabited by some 4,000 around the years 600 to 900. [Reuters]

HUMAN RESOURCES. The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, has named Tyler Blackwell curator of contemporary art, Leo Weekly reports. He is currently an associate curator at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. And the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton, Massachusetts, has tapped Simon Morsink to be its executive director, the Telegram & Gazette reports. Since 1994, he has run the Morsink Icon Gallery in Amsterdam with his brother Hugo Morinsk.

HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS. Lehmann Maupin partner Jessica Kreps gave Cultured magazine a look at her Upper West Side home, which includes pieces by Hillary Pecis and Mel Bochner, and Architectural Digest ventured inside a recently renovated Dallas residence that has Andy Warhol, Ugo Rondinone, and Sam Gilliam on the walls.

The Kicker

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN TILDA SWINTON ASLEEP IN A BOX? New Yorkers may recall that the Museum of Modern Art presented that sight—a performance conceived by artist Cornelia Parker—back in 2013. The piece came up in a new New York Times profile of Parker that probes the connections that her work has to Catholicism. Critic and historian Marina Warner proposed that the snoozing actress “looked a bit like one of those mummified saints who are not meant to be mummified, but have been preserved miraculously because of their sanctity.” [NYT]

Basquiat’s market has soared with each auction season in recent years. In 2021 alone, three works by Basquiat sold for prices above $40 million.

The entrepreneur, who has appeared on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list each year since 2016, set the auction record for Basquiat when he placed the winning bid for Untitled (Devil). Maezawa, whose fortune comes from founding the online retailer Zozotown, would go on to reset Basquiat’s auction record with the purchase of a 1982 painting of a skull for $110.5 million at Sotheby’s the year afterward. Both of those purchases helped make Maezawa an art-world celebrity.

“I believe that art collections are something that should always continue to grow and evolve as the owner does,” said Maezawa in a statement, remarking on his decision to sell Untitled (Devil). He is in the midst of planning a private museum in Chiba where his collection will be housed.

In 2016, Untitled (Devil) was being sold by the New York dealer Adam Lindemann. The 16-foot-wide painting features an image of a horned devil that appears throughout much of Basquiat’s art. In the 2016 sale, Untitled (Devil) exceeded its high estimate of $40 million.

That most recent film starred Naomi Watts, Octavia Spencer, and Tim Roth—as well as Kelvin Harrison Jr., who has signed on to rejoin Onah and play the role of one of the most romanticized and revered contemporary artists in America or anywhere else.

In an extensive Director’s Statement on a website for Samo Lives, Onah writes, “Simply put, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work and life has been an absolute inspiration. When I began to learn about him at the age of 14 it was incredible to discover someone who boldly forged his own path into a world where most who didn’t fit the expected profile of a fine artist had been unable to (i.e. white and male). Though I could not yet fully appreciate the enormity of what Jean-Michel’s achievements meant, I could certainly feel there was something so groundbreaking and unique about them.”

He goes on to attribute part of his learning about the artist to the 1996 biographical film Basquiat, directed by painter Julian Schnabel. “But the older I got and the more I learned about Jean-Michel,” Onah writes, “the more I began to feel his story hadn’t fully been told in cinema. Never have we seen the full spectrum of Basquiat’s incredible life as a Black artist and a child of the immigrant African diaspora.”

Filming is expected to being in the fall. The movie will also feature a soundtrack by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, who together composed notable scores for Annihilation, Ex Machina, and Free Fire.

When it first flickers on a screen, Samo Lives will join other cinematic treatments of the art star’s life including Schnabel’s Basquiat (which featured Jeffrey Wright as the artist and David Bowie as his latter-day collaborator Andy Warhol) and Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, a documentary by his friend Tamra Davis from 2010. Fans of Basquiat are also required to watch Downtown 81, a simultaneously awful and awe-inspiring movie that stars Basquiat himself as an artist making his way around the fertile interdisciplinary art/music/etc. scene of the East Village in its heyday.

The Headlines

THE ART OF POLITICS. Today is the one-year anniversary of the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. In the Washington Post, Peggy McGlone looks at how the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., has worked to preserve artifacts like protest signs from that infamous day. “It will help future generations understand how fragile democracy is, and certainly was that day,” the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, told the paper. Meanwhile, Italy is sending a fragment it owns of the Parthenon to Greece as part of a four-year exchange, which could keep the heat on Britain to return its Parthenon marbles, the Guardian reports. Though Italy has loaned its piece—held at an archaeological museum in Palermo—to Greece in the past, Sicily’s councilor for culture said that the loan could eventually become permanent. Late last year, Greece renewed its call for Britain to return the marbles. For more on the long-running controversy, ARTnews has a primer.

MUSEUM BULLETIN. A strong day for news from the museum sector! Let’s dive in. Tate Liverpool in England is looking for an architect for a £25 million (about $33.8 million) “major reimagining,” per Building Design. The Datong Art Museum in China, designed by Foster+Partners, is complete after nearly 10 years of construction , according to Designboom. (Despite the lengthy gestation, it still looks futuristic.) The Los Angeles Times carries word that the Orange County Museum of Art in California has a plan to acquire 60 works to toast its 60th anniversary, with an emphasis on women artists and artists of color. And the Louvre said that its attendance fell last year to its lowest level since 1986 , with just 2.8 million visitors, the Art Newspaper reports.

The Digest

A new Jean-Michel Basquiat biopic is in the works from Endeavor Content, with director Julius Onah at the helm and Kelvin Harrison Jr. staring as the painter. It is titled Samo Lives. [Variety]

The collector Hermann Gerlinger will sell about 1,000 works from his storied collection of German Expressionism via Munich’s Ketterer Kunst auction house to benefit charities. The pieces had been on permanent loan to museums in the country for three decades, an arrangement Gerlinger nixed last September. [The Art Newspaper]

The singer The Weeknd has listed his Los Angeles penthouse for $22.5 million (he just bought a $70 million Bel-Air mansion), and photographs for the property include quite a bit of art, including what appears to be material by KAWS, Keith Haring, and Hajime Sorayama. [New York Post]

Declan Long makes the case for a basic income for artists in a new essay, and highlights basic-income efforts in Finland, Ireland, and Canada. [ArtReview]

The nine inaugural winners of the Silvers-Dudley Prizes—which honor criticism and journalism—include art critics Ingrid Rowland, who’s based in Rome, and Jason Farago, of the New York Times. The awards are named for the late New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers and his late partner, Lady Grace Dudley. [Associated Press/The Washington Post]

ON THE MOVE. After 20 years as director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Iwona Blazwick is stepping down, ARTnews reports. Across the pond, M’kina Tapscott, who has worked at Project Row Houses in Houston as director of education and programs, has been named director of the Artworks Trenton visual arts center in New Jersey, per NJ.com.

The Kicker

A COLLABORATION FOR THE AGES. The AFP has a rollicking interview with Elena Palumbo-Mosca, who helped create 20 or more of Yves Klein ‘s “Anthropometries” by slathering her body with paint and pressing it onto the surface of the works. A cabaret dancer in her student years, she went on to become a translator of European Union agencies, and told the news agency of her work with Klein, “It was clear that we were doing something that nobody had ever done.” It was not a simple project. She recalled, “As soon as we’d finished our work, we went to wash ourselves off off-stage—the paint, after all, was toxic.” [AFP/France24]