Is This Art? Is Sarah Lucas a Sculptor?

The front page of Art News on Tuesday announced that that Sarah Lucas had just won a $400,000 prize from New York’s New Museum. “The award,” the article said, “officially titled the Hostetler/Wrigley Sculpture Award after New Museum trustee Sue Hostetler Wrigley, will be given to five women artists over the next decade. The prize’s purse includes an honorarium for the winner, as well as production, installation, and exhibition fees associated with the sculptures commissioned through it.” Click here.

I’ve been to the New Museum at least a dozen times. They’ve had some good shows. But most of them I’d describe as trying too hard to be “of the moment.” So, I was curious to see the type of work Lucas does.

Here’s an example:

Here’s another one:

Prediction: This is Lucas’s 15 minutes. Her work will find its way into various warehouses within 10 years and never see the light of a museum window thereafter.

Things Worth Remembering: W.H. Auden’s Poetry

It might have been 40 years ago. I was walking by a church in Manhattan and noticed a sign on the door indicating that Auden, WH Auden, one of the greatest English language poets of the 20th century, was reading his poetry inside. I walked in, not knowing what to expect, and there he was, looking just a professorial as I had imagined. He was at a lectern, reading, reading beautifully, one of the poems mentioned here.

In a letter dated Mar. 5, 1839, 23-year-old Charlotte Brontë declines a marriage proposal with her own version of “It’s not you, it’s me.” 

In the letter to the Reverend Henry Nussey, which is very polite but very clear, she tells him that she has “no personal repugnance to the idea of a union” with him (how charitable). But then she writes:

“I feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you. It has always been my habit to study the character of those amongst whom I chance to be thrown, and I think I know yours and can imagine what description of woman would suit you for a wife. Her character should not be too marked, ardent and original – her temper should be mild, her piety undoubted, her spirits even and cheerful, and her ‘personal attractions’ sufficient to please your eye and gratify your just pride.

“As for me, you do not know me, I am not this serious, grave, cool-headed individual you suppose – you would think me romantic and [eccentric – you would] say I was satirical and [severe]. [However, I scorn] deceit and will never for the sake of attaining the distinction of matrimony and escaping the stigma of an old maid take a worthy man whom I am conscious I cannot render happy.” (Source: LitHub)

Another Auction, Another Record Sale 

Sotheby’s London sold a Wassily Kandinsky painting for a record-breaking $45 million on March 1. The 1910 landscape was recently given to the 13 heirs of a German Jewish businessman persecuted by the Nazis, according to The Wall Street Journal. The painting, Murnau with Church II, had hung in a museum in the Netherlands for 70 years. The buy was the largest for Sotheby’s winter sale, beating out a $29.2 million Gerhard Richter and a $28.1 million Picasso portrait of his daughter.

The 10 Most Expensive Paintings of the Last 12 Years

Masterworks, a company that sells fractional shares of important artworks it buys at auction, sent me this list of the 10 most expensive paintings sold in the last dozen years. I was surprised by some of them.

1. Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi – $450.3M (sold 2017)
2. Willem de Kooning, Interchange – $300M (sold 2015)
3. Paul Cézanne, The Card Players – $250M (sold 2011)
4. Andy Warhol, Orange Marilyn – $225M (sold 2018)
5. Paul Gauguin, Nafea Faa Ipoipo? – $210M (sold 2015)
6. Jackson Pollock, Number 17A – $200M (sold 2015)
7. Mark Rothko, No. 20 (Yellow Expanse) – $200M (sold 2014)
8. Rembrandt, The Standard Bearer – $197.9M (sold 2021)
9. Andy Warhol, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn – $195M (sold 2022)
10. Gustav Klimt, Wasserschlangen II – $187M (sold 2013)

It’s not surprising that the da Vinci tops the list. And I get the Rembrandt. And Cézanne’s The Card Players. But I don’t understand how a de Kooning fetched $300 million. Or how two of Warhol’s “Marilyns” made the list. Same with the rest. Am I wrong? What do you think?

This painting by Piet Mondrian has been hung upside-down for 77 years.

The goof was discovered by the curator of a new exhibition at a museum in Germany.

 Here’s how she figured it out.