Expo Chicago, The City’s Largest Art Fair, Downsizing Under New Leadership

Expo Chicago, the city’s largest annual art fair, is gearing up to return this spring. But this year, it’ll be a little different.

Under new director Kate Sierzputowski, who previously served as Expo’s artistic director, the fair is downsizing its main installation at Navy Pier in an effort to be “more focused and curated,” she said.

Via Block Club Chicago

Louvre Faces €10M Loss After Decades-Long Ticket Fraud Busted

A sweeping fraud scheme targeting ticket sales at the Louvre was uncovered earlier this week, leaving the scandal-plagued museum facing losses estimated at more than €10 million. The Palace of Versailles was also implicated in the scheme, which involved the sale of counterfeit tickets and the overbooking of guided tours, the Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed on Thursday.

French authorities shared that nine people have been arrested, including two museum employees, several tour guides, and one individual suspected of organizing the scheme. The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed that more than €957,000 in cash—plus €67,000 in foreign currency—was seized, in addition to €486,000 in separate bank accounts. According to Le Parisien, three vehicles and multiple safe deposit boxes were also confiscated.

Via ARTnews

Artemisia Gentileschi, Michelangelo and Rembrandt bring new energy and records to New York’s Old Masters sales

The Old Masters auctions in New York saw notable results this week, with new records set for artists including Artemisia Gentileschi, Michelangelo and Rembrandt, while also bringing historically significant works—some fresh to market or newly restituted—into public view.

Christie’s Old Masters auction on Wednesday fetched a $54.3m with fees, the highest total for a New York sale in the category in more than a decade. One of Artemisia Gentileschi’s earliest self-portraits sold for a record $5.7m during its auction debut. Depicted as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Gentileschi painted herself holding a martyr’s palm leaf and wearing a crown and royal robes with a peek of a spiked wheel behind her. 

Via The Art Newspaper

Why Ultra-Contemporary Artists Are So Obsessed With Old Masters

Artists have always recycled their era’s “Old Masters”: Romans quoted the Greeks, Rodin studied Michelangelo, and Picasso returned to Rembrandt, to name just a few. While the prevalence of these relationships has ebbed and flowed over time, it is peaking again this winter. A striking number of gallery, foundation, and museum shows in New York are foregrounding emerging and established contemporary artists’ interplay with European art history, from Donatello to Goya, with press materials that underscore this lineage almost as strongly as the work itself.

Via Artnet