Vermeer Painting May Conceal Self-Portrait, Archibald Prize Winner Named, and More: Morning Links for May 5, 2023

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The Headlines

WINNER’S CIRCLE. Down in Australia on Friday, the Art Gallery of New South Wales announced the 2023 winner of the prestigious Archibald Prize, an open competition with a purse of AU$100,000 (about US$67,300). That lucky artist is 29-year-old Julia Gutman, who is the 13th woman to take the crown since the start of the annual event in 1921, the Guardian reports. Her piece shows the singer Montaigne, aka Jessica Cerro. The Sydney Morning Herald (which did a live blog of the prize press conference) spoke with Gutman, who said, “I’m not going to break into song, but it is really surreal.” At the event, the AU$50,000 ($33,600) Wynne Prize for landscape painting was awarded to Zaachariaha Fielding, and the AU$40,000 ($26,900) Sulman Prize for a subject painting, genre painting or mural went to Doris Bush Nungarrayi.

THE ART KING. The big day is almost here. King Charles III will be crowned on Saturday at Westminster Abbey in London—the 40th monarch to undergo the ceremony there over the past millennium, BBC News reports. Charles’s taste is often described as conservative (especially when it comes to architecture), but he also “is the most culturally attuned monarch for well over a century,” Alex Marshall writes in the New York Times. The former Prince of Wales studied trumpet and cello, loves Shakespeare and the opera, has commissioned a dozen musical pieces for the coronation, and had a watercolor he painted accepting into the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in 1987. (He submitted the work under a pseudonym: Arthur George Carrick.) Would you like to see some of his creations? Tatler Asia has five examples.

The Digest

Artist Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong and writer Judy Chui-Hua Chung have been selected to create a memorial for the victims of the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871, when 18 Chinese men were lynched. It will be built largely along Los Angeles Street in the city’s downtown. [Los Angeles Times]

Using X-ray tech, the Metropolitan Museum of Art examined Vermeer‘s A Maid Asleep (ca. 1656–57) and found that it once included a man working at an easel with a paintbrush—probably a depiction of the artist himself! [The Art Newspaper]

Hauser & Wirth has named as its Charitable Partner of the Year The House of AWT Project (Artists Working Together), the legendary ballroom house that runs programs to support at-risk Black and Brown LGBTQIA+ youth and young adults. [ARTnews]

Fun music trivia: Hamilton Leithauser, the lead singer of the reunited indie-rock legends the Walkmen, worked as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art back in the day. Museums are a good place to work, he told columnist Nate Freeman. “No matter what you’re doing you’re always at least surrounded by cool stuff.” [Vanity Fair]

Sotheby’s is offering NFTs that once belonged to the cryptocurrency hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, which went under last summer. The firm’s liquidator is consigning the material, which includes a Chromie Squiggle, a Zombie CryptoPunk, and more. [Benzinga]

The Teiger Foundation announced that it has given $4.2 million to dozens of groups and individuals for “curator-led projects, coalitions, and climate action within the field of contemporary art.” Consult the full list of recipients for hints about some toothsome-sounding upcoming shows. [Artforum]

The Kicker

VIVA LA VIDA. In the New York Times, Penelope Green has a vivid profile of Alexandra Auder, a yoga instructor, parody influencer, and now memoirist, whose new book, Don’t Call Me Home, covers growing up in the legendary Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan with her mother, the Warhol “superstar” Viva, in the 1970s and 80s. (Viva and Auder’s father, filmmaker Michel Auder, split when their daughter was young.) After college at Bard, the newly published writer said she had difficulty figuring out what to do. “I was like, ‘What the hell? I’m not prepared for this,’ ” she told the Times. “I didn’t know how to have a job. I’d never seen that. I’d only seen these weird artists.” It seems she figured it out. [NYT]