What We're Reading: 1/18/21
The 12-bedroom pillared Georgian-style mansion late investment manager Richard Driehaus owned on 40 acres in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, sold Friday for $36 million.
The sale price, to a buyer whose identity could not yet be determined, is the highest on record in Lake Geneva and the highest in the history of the state of Wisconsin for a single-family home.
Via Chicago Tribune
Masterpiece will recieve new frame at Chicago's Art Institute
"A Sunday Afternoon On the Island of La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat is one of the most recognizable paintings in the world. The Art Institute of Chicago now has the daunting task of replacing the painting's frame.
Via CBS News
Maya Angelou Is the First Black Woman to Appear on the U.S. Quarter.
The poet, writer, and activist Maya Angelou has become the first Black woman to appear on a U.S. quarter.
The U.S. Mint released a coin featuring her likeness into circulation earlier this week; the coin was created as part of the American Women Quarters Program, through which a series of special-edition coins honoring American women will be minted over the next four years.
Via Artnet
New Research Tracks Ancient Artifacts Looted by the Nazis
When the Nazis invaded Greece in 1941, Julius Ringel, a major general in the German army, took an active role in initiating illegal excavations on the island of Crete, where Minoan culture had flourished more than 3,000 years earlier.
Though the cinematic exploits of Indiana Jones in the 1980s provided a popular, fictional view of a Nazi lust for antiquities, the art world has, understandably, focused considerably more attention on the seizure of art from Jews.
But the topic of the Nazi role in antiquities looting is increasingly drawing attention, in part through the work of scholars who are peeling back the mysteries of what happened to the objects that were excavated or seized eight decades ago.
Via the New York Times