A potential heir to the legal successor of Adolf Lieser has emerged and claimed ownership of the Gustav Klimt portrait sold for $32 million in a buzzy auction in Vienna, per Der Standard. The individual, a Munich-based architect, is not a relative of the Leiser family, but lodged a claim after learning last week that the painting missing for a century had resurfaced at im Kinksy auction house. Titled Portrait of Fräulein Lieser (1917), the work was purchased by an anonymous Hong Kong dealer for its low estimate (but still an art auction record for Austria). The work is unfinished, but Kli ..read more

Dani Levinas, an art collector who gained a following for interviewing other collectors, has died at 75. The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., where he formerly served as board chair, announced his death on Wednesday. “Dani Levinas’s passion and enthusiasm for art by living artists will have an enduring impact on The Phillips Collection,” said current board chair John Despres in a statement. “We will truly miss his inspiration and guidance.” With his wife Mirella, Levinas bought up a significant grouping of works by Latin American artists, acquiring pieces by Jose Dávila, Cildo Meireles ..read more

Works from the art collection of Iowa business leader and philanthropist John Pappajohn and his wife Mary will be offered as a group of highlights during Christie’s Spring sales in New York next month, the auction house announced Friday.  The Pappajohns were a mainstay of ARTnews’s Top 200 collector list from 1998 to 2014. John passed away last year on April 26 at 94. Mary, aged 88, died in 2022. The collection, which is comprised of works by post-war and contemporary luminaries including  Bruce Nauman, Agnes Martin, and Ad Reinhardt, will be led by Jasper Johns’s 1961 work  ..read more

Various Russian publications reported on Friday that Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art was being searched by local police, potentially in connection to LGBTQ+ literature that is thought to be housed at the institution. On the social media platform Telegram, Ostorozhno Novosti, a local news channel, said that police officers were at a building that holds the Garage Museum’s archives. The museum’s leaders and curators were reportedly being kept from using their phones and were being held until the search ended. The reasons for the search were not clear, but Ostorozhno Novosti speculated ..read more

In 1924 the French poet and critic André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto. The 4,000-word document marked both the birth of the eponymous movement and the moment when its dogmas were codified, effectively laying the groundwork for the countless derivations of the form that would follow—in the 15 years before World War II, certainly, but also after, up to, and including today. The Surrealist movement may have waned, but its ideas have not. Now, exactly one century removed from the genesis of this art form, we find ourselves contending with the emergence of another: art made by artifici ..read more

In Colombian artist Carlos Motta’s 2013 video, Nefandus, an indigenous man and a Spanish man travel down Colombia’s Don Diego River telling stories of the violent sodomization against natives by the Spanish during the conquest in Latin America. “The landscape does not confess what it has witnessed; the images are out of time and veil the actions that have taken place there,” the narrator explains. This question of colonial violence against the land and the passage of time is at the center of Nefandus and “Part II of El Dorado: Myths of Gold,” the exhibition in which it is currently being shown ..read more

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. THE HEADLINES NEW KLIMT CLAIM. A potential heir to the legal successor of Adolf Lieser came forward with a claim they own the Gustav Klimt portrait of Fraulein Lieser, right before it sold at auction for a low estimate of $32 million, according to Der Standard. The potential heir, a Munich-based architect who is not a relative of the Lieser family, learned last week about the sale of the 1917 painting that had gone missing for a century, and lodged his claim the day ..read more

This essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday. The French polymath Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) was never content to work in one mode—and was ostracized for it. His retrospective at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice is titled “The Juggler’s Revenge”: it makes a case for this versatility, showing a cohesive spirit across works in film, sculpture, collage, drawing, literature, and jewelry. No bother, Cocteau was unperturbed, impressively ..read more

John Cage’s 1952 work 4′33″ has proven a touchstone for artists, composers, and thinkers of all kinds, spawning conceptual artworks, experimental gestures, and even an iPhone app. But even as almost everyone agrees on its importance, misunderstandings about the work proliferate. For one, 4′33″ is sometimes affectionally known as Cage’s “silent piece,” since the work calls for its enactor to stop using their instrument for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Cage himself used that terminology to describe the work, then would go on to contradict it, claiming that 4′33″ was not silent. This week’s big art ..read more

When I took my mother back to Paris for her first visit in nearly five decades, there was no question we would go to the Louvre. I was more surprised that she wanted to stand in the long line to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503) for the few seconds we would get to take pictures and selfies with the famous painting. This experience is often annoying and disappointing for tourists, with one recent analysis of 18,000 reviews deeming the Renaissance portrait “the world’s most disappointing masterpiece.” Da Vinci’s iconic image of an almost-smiling woman is protected by bullet-proof, anti-re ..read more