Scholar Says Michelangelo Painted Himself in Sistine Chapel, $20 M. Henri Rousseau to Smash Auction Record, and More: Morning Links for April 20, 2023

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The Headlines

READY YOUR PADDLE. Next month in New York, Christie’s will offer a juicy Henri Rousseau, Les Flamants (1910), with an estimate of $20 million to $30 million, Melanie Gerlis reports in her weekly Financial Times column. The radiant scene of flamingos and flowers has been guaranteed to sell, and as Gerlis notes, that means that it will reset the renegade modernist’s record on the block, which now stands at $4.4 million, a figure set way back in 1993. The seller is the estate of Payne Whitney Middleton, a member of the storied art-collecting Whitney family. Her mother, Joan Whitney Payson (who owned the New York Mets) collected with her brother John Hay Whitney, who was president of MoMA, the FT reported in 2007. A van Gogh that Payson bought for $84,000 in 1947 went for an astonishing $53.9 million 40 years later, then the most ever paid for art at auction, the New York Times reported at the time. How much will the Rousseau go for? Only time will tell, but Gerlis notes that there are only about 240 pieces attributed to the man, and many of those reside firmly in museum collections.

GET YOUR TICKETS. The hotly anticipated survey of the revered sculptor Daniel Lind-Ramos opens today at MoMA PS1 in New York, and Jacoba Urist has an interview with him in ARTnews. Lind-Ramos, who is based in Loíza, Puerto Rico, “relies on the intimacy of memory and the universality of calamity to assemble his art from everyday materials—a TV, a shovel, found shoes, roofing, and dried tree trunks—to fantastical, contemplative effect,” Urist writes. The artist told her, “I start with an idea based on an experience, and then there are objects that relate to that experience. Maybe I have one object that generates everything, but I don’t have the others. I make a drawing or a sketch. Then something happens. Objects start coming. I start finding them. I start making them.” The end results stun. Head to ARTnews for the full story.

The Digest

A Banksy print that was likely first purchased for about AU$100 (US$67) at a pop-up from the elusive artist, Girl with Balloon (2004), will be offered next month with an estimate of AU$450,000 to AU$650,000 (US$302,000–US$437,000) at the Sydney auction house Deutscher and Hackett. [The Australian Financial Review]

The art historian Adriano Marinazzo has proposed that Michelangelo painted himself as God in the Sistine Chapel, noting that the Old Master made a sketch of himself in a similar pose. Some scholars think he is onto something, though one skeptic quipped, “Everybody’s got theories.” [The Wall Street Journal]

The French auction house Artcurial has taken a stake in a Swiss peer, Beurret Bailly Widmer, which operates out of Zurich, Basel, and St. Gallen. Update your Rolodexes: The Swiss firm will henceforth be known as Artcurial Beurret Bailly Widmer. [The Art Newspaper]

Today in Rome, Princess Rita Jenrette Boncompagni Ludovisi is facing eviction from the Casino dell’Aurora, a 1570 villa with Caravaggio’s only known ceiling mural. A court ruled that she had failed to properly maintain the home, which has been at the center of an inheritance dispute with the children of her late husband. [The Associated Press]

Corinne Erni has been promoted to chief curator of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York. Erni is currently deputy director of curatorial affairs, a position she will continue to hold, and succeeds Alicia G. Longwell, who retired late last year after four decades in the role. [ArtDaily]

ARTISTS IN PROFILE. Mark Bradford has a new show at Hauser & Wirth in New York and was profiled by Ismail Muhammad in the New York Times Magazine. Gagosian is opening a Richard Avedon exhibition next month in New York, and Ted Loos looked at his vast legacy in the Wall Street Journal.

The Kicker

THE LONG GAME. The Wall Street Journal has a thorough look at how mega-collector Bernard Arnault, the richest person in the world, has been prepping each of his five children to one day possibly take the helm of the luxury giant LVMH, of which he is CEO and chairman. Arnault, who is 74, recently raised the retirement age for his roles to 80, and while there is no clear sign that he will exit anytime soon, he proposed at a recent public meeting that some more time to focus on his tennis could be helpful to him. “The last time I played with Roger Federer, I think I won one point in a single set,” he said. “Maybe I could do a bit better than that.” Maybe. But scoring even one point against the Basel superstar is pretty impressive. [WSJ]

Correction, April 20, 2023: An earlier version of this article and the version that went out as Breakfast with ARTnews misspelled the name of the writer of the Daniel Lind-Ramos profile. The correct spelling is Jacoba Urist.