Kröller-Müller Museum Gets New Director, Basquiat Doc Is Coming, , and More: Morning Links for July 31, 2023

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The Headlines

ON THE MOVE. The director of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands, Benno Tempel, has been hired to be general director of the Kröller-Müller Museum, the art paradise in a Dutch national park in the village of Otterlo. Tempel had been with the Kunstmuseum since 2009; from 1997 to 2000 was assistant curator at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, so he should feel right at home at the Kröller-Müller, with its enviable collection of nearly 90 paintings by the artist. (It bills itself as “van Gogh’s second home.”) He starts in the new job on New Year’s Day, and said in a statement that the Kröller-Müller “is a place where you can really get away from the hectic pace of everyday life.”

BEYOND THE WHITE CUBE. In the New York Times, Siddhartha Mitter has a deep dive on the late, great artist Beverly Buchanan’s masterpiece, Marsh Ruins—stone-like works that she placed in the wetlands of Brunswick, Georgia, in 1981. “For four decades, the sculpture has sat unmarked and unknown, cracking and sinking into the marsh—just as the artist intended,” Mitter writes. And over in the Art Newspaper, Benjamin Sutton has details of an intriguing outdoor exhibition that Marguerite Humeau has staged on a field in the San Luis Valley in Colorado, in conjunction with the Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum. “Every artist should start with a project in the San Luis Valley, because it’s really like a test ground, it tests you on every level,” she said.

The Digest

A new Jean-Michel Basquiat documentary is in the works, with Quinn Wilson, a former creative director for the musician Lizzo, directing. It will be titled King Pleasure, the name of the recent touring Basquiat show (now in Los Angeles) presented by the artist’s family, which is involved with the film. [Deadline]

Using infrared reflectography, researchers at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium discovered a portrait of a woman beneath René Magritte’s 1943 painting La Cinquième Saison, which shows two behatted men holding paintings. The hidden subject may be the Surrealist’s wife, the scholars believe. [The Guardian]

Lebanon picked Mounira Al Solh to represent it at next year’s Venice Biennale. The artist, who works in a variety of mediums to address history and memory, appeared in the 2015 Venice Biennale’s main show. Nada Ghandour, who curated the country’s pavilion last year, is doing so again. [ArtAsiaPacific]

The street artist Bordalo II snuck into a Lisbon venue where Pope Francis will celebrate mass this week and unfurled a carpet depicting massive euro banknotes, to protest what he sees as the excessive cost of the event. (Some €161 million, or $177.2 million, partially paid for by government funds.) [Reuters]

Hundreds of pieces of art and furniture owned by the late Robert Kime, who helmed redecoration projects for King Charles and John Taylor of Duran Duran, will be offered at the Dreweatts auction house in Newbury, England, with a total estimate north of £1.5 million (about $1.93 million). The works are from around the globe. [Metro]

Legendary German art dealer Rudolf Zwirner (father of international heavyweight David) is toasting his 90th birthday, and the German press has a bevy of articles on his storied life. [Welt, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, Weltkunst, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung]

The Kicker

THE SWEET LIFE. The LAM museum—a food-focused art museum in Lisses, the Netherlands (big day for the Dutch here at Breakfast)—is currently presenting a piece by artist João Loureiro that involves “offering six different flavors in six shades of grey,” as the institution puts it on its website. The 2012–13 work is titled Escala de Cinzas(Grayscale),is on loan from the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, and includes no flavor labelling, so eaters must figure that out for themselves. “By removing something as simple as color,” LAM’s director, Sietske van Zanten, said in a statement, “our senses are caught completely off guard—that’s the power of art. It makes you question what you see, and in this case, what you taste.” [LAM]