Record Set for Work by an Indian Artist at Auction, Architect Raymond Moriyama Dies at 93, and More: Morning Links for September 19, 2023

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The Headlines

PAYBACK TIME. The Danish artist who (from one vantage point) made off with 532,000 krone (about $76,200) that he was loaned by a museum to recreate works involving banknotes was ordered by a court to repay the funds, the Guardian reports. Instead of remaking those pieces for the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, in Aalborg, Denmark, Jens Haaning sent over two empty frames that he titled Take the Money and Run. Haaning’s position was that he had made a new work. “It’s not theft,” he said at the time, according to the paper. “It is breach of contract, and breach of contract is part of the work.” He called for people “who have working conditions as miserable as mine to do the same.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the museum was not sympathetic to this view and went to court—which, on a happier note for Haaning, said he could keep his 40,000 krone ($5,700) fee.

A NEW HIGH MARK. A new record was set on Saturday for a work by an Indian artist at auction, with a 1937 Amrita Sher-Gil painting selling for the equivalent of about $7.44 million at Saffronart in New Delhi, Bloomberg reports. The previous high mark, notched a few days earlier according to the outlet, was held by an S.H. Raza piece. Sher-Gil’s work shows a group of women sitting outside in a circle as a figure peers on from a nearby doorway. Minal Vazirani, the cofounder of the auction house, told Bloomberg that “India is at a particularly important point in terms of making its mark on the global stage.”

The Digest

The Japanese Canadian architect Raymond Moriyama, whose inviting buildings included the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, the Ontario Science Center in Toronto, and the National Museum of Saudi Arabia in Riyadh, died on September 1 at the age of 93. [The New York Times]

There will be a wake and memorial events for artist Fernando Bolero, who died last week at the age of 91 in Monaco, in his native Colombia before he is buried in Pietrasanta, Italy, alongside his wife, artist Sophia Vari, his family said. Medellin, where the painter was born, declared a week of mourning. [AFP/Barron’s]

Designer Thom Browne—famed for his unusually sized suits—got the profile treatment from Rachel Syme, with photographs from the irrepressible Toilet Paper duo Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari. [The New Yorker]

The recently opened Bienal de São Paulo has blocked access to an Ibrahim Mahama installation that incorporates a 1950s Ghanaian railroad track, after a child tripped over it and broke his arm. [The Art Newspaper]

The Hotel Drouot auction house in Paris will offer the skeleton of a camptosaurus dinosaur next month with an estimate of €1.2 million (about $1.28 million). Dating back some 150 million years, it is known by the name Barry. [Reuters]

Researchers determined that once-radiant cadmium yellow in paintings that Joan Miró made in the 1970s (and some other art by big names) degraded over time because the paint he used had issues at its atomic level. “You would think that the paint manufacturers would have corrected the problem,” said one expert. [The New York Times]

The Kicker

GOTTA CATCH ‘EM ALL. In Spain, the Valencian Police’s Patrimony Unit recently arrested a woman for trying to sell at auction an allegedly fake Goya painting, El País reports. The paper chatted with a member of that law-enforcement group, Antonio López, and he uncorked some stories about his line of work, like a case that involved the confiscation of five ersatz Picassos that had erroneously been valued at some $171 million. “They were sold as Picassos, but they were Pikachus,” he said. [El País]