Our Art News Letter for May 2, 2015 - CATHERINE L. JOHNSON, Charlie Hebdo, El Anatsui, Georgina Adam, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Juan Antonio Picasso, Kour Pour, Louis XIII, Nicholas Roerich, Oscar Niemeyer, Paul Durand-Ruel, Picasso, Rembrandt...

The surviving Charlie Hebdo cartoonist who frequently drew Mohammed for the newspaper has announced he’s retiring the character. More

The entrance of the Palazzo Bollani during the 53rd Venice Biennale. It was also the venue for Costa Rica’s cancelled pavilion this year. (Image via Jean-Pierre Dalbéra/Flickr)

Over the course of the last month, the number of countries exhibiting at the 56th annual Venice Biennale has dropped from 90 to 88, following the withdrawal of Costa Rica and Kenya from the show. More

The Dealer,  Paul Durand-Ruel, Who Made Impressionism Famous - 

So universally popular are the Impressionists today, it’s hard to imagine a time when they weren’t. But in the early 1870s they struggled to be accepted. Shunned by the art establishment, they were even lambasted as ‘lunatics’ by one critic.

Monika Rostvold temporary removed her blindfold to interact with campus police.

Monika Rostvold, an art student at Texas State University, sparked a frenzy both on campus and online Monday when she sat on the steps of her university's library wearing nothing but a blindfold, a nude-colored thong, and pasties. More

Six Authors Withdraw from PEN Gala in Protest of ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Honor

More

Figueres, Spain: Art of Salvador Dalí

Georgina Adam wants to know why Sotheby’s is carting a lot of art to Qatar only to sell it back to buyers in Europe and North America. Sotheby’s said it “sets out to attract an international spread of bidders and buyers”. A painting by Kour Pour, the hot young US-based artist whose work is inspired by carpets, sold for $162,500, well over its $70,000-$90,000 estimate, going to a US buyer. More

Kour Pour

The Nicholas Roerich Museum will sell two works by Roerich's works that have never appeared at auction before to fund acquisitions:

His Country, dedicated to the interpretation of the Himalayan landscape. 

The Host of Gesar Khan. the great semi-mythical King, venerated widely throughout Central Asia.

Nicholas Roerich (October 9, 1874 – December 13, 1947) – was a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, perceived by some in Russia as an enlightener, philosopher, and public figure, who was influenced by a movement in Russian society around the occult. He was interested in hypnosis and other spiritual practices and his paintings are said to have hypnotic expression.

The world's top detective for Nazi looted art: Sleuth has tracked down £250 million worth of stolen art including priceless works by Picasso, Renoir and Matisse.  Read more

Picasso stage curtain painting going on view - A stage curtain believed to be the largest Pablo Picasso painting in North America is set to be displayed at a New York City museum.

Measuring 20 feet by 19 feet, “Le Tricorne” or “The Three-Cornered Hat,” was painted in 1919 for an avant-garde ballet troupe. It hung at the storied Four Seasons restaurant for 55 years.

It will be placed on long-term view at the New-York Historical Society beginning May 29. A related exhibition will run from May 29 through summer 2016. More

GET YOUR DANCE OUT! + CATHERINE L. JOHNSON / ARTIST + ST. PAUL’S SPRING 2015 ART CRAWL

A collage by Vik Muniz depicting Rio de Janeiro was seized in the scandal (all images courtesy the Oscar Niemeyer Museum )

A Brazilian museum has opened an exhibition of art seized amid the largest corruption scandal in its country’s history. Works Under the Guard of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, on view at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in the southern city of Curitiba, features 48 of the 203 photographs, sculptures, and paintings the institution is holding for the Federal Police. More

SOTHEBY’S TO AUCTION BIG ASS EGG - “Nearly 200 times the size of a chicken egg and at least 400 years old”, “Laid by the largest bird ever to live on the planet”.

1. Elephant birds are members of the extinct family Aepyornithidae. Elephant birds were large to enormous, flightless birds that once lived on the island of Madagascar, which lies about 420 km off the southeast coast of Africa. Wikipedia

El Anatsui’s Earth’s Skin (2007), in the collection of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

The Venice Biennale, which opens to the public in a little more than three weeks, announced today that it has awarded its highest honor, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, to artist El Anatsui, saying in a statement that the prize “acknowledges not just his recent successes internationally, but also his artistic influence amongst two generations of artists working in West Africa. More

Juan Antonio Picasso

“Los Picassos Negros” (“The Black Picassos”).

Pablo Picasso’s maternal grandfather, Francisco Picasso Guardeño, left Spain in the late 1800s to pursue business opportunities in Cuba. He died on the island in 1888, but not before falling in love and having four children with an Afro-Cuban woman, Cristina Serra. 

Juan Antonio Picasso is one of more than 40 living descendants of that union, the Cuban branch of the Picasso family, and he is the only one who is known to make his living as an artist. 

Juan Antonio Picasso - Se Van Los Seres. Photograph: Julie Schwietert Collazo

Except for his passion for art and the fact that his home town of Havana, like Pablo's Malaga, looks out over the sea, Juan Antonio has few similarities with the great Spanish artist.

Juan Antonio Picasso - Rapto Guajiro.110x130cm. Óleo

He says he feels more inclined toward Antoni Tapies - another Spaniard - than to Picasso, but further details his influences citing Cuban artists Nelson Dominguez, Roberto Diago and Eduardo "Choco" Roca.

Juan Antonio Picasso - Yose y Paloma.70x50cm-Tempera

He has currently mounted in Havana his third one-man show, after his March 2005 exhibition in the northeastern Spanish town of Figueras, where, he said, "it all went very well." "Mixtures," as he has dubbed his exhibition, brings together 31 works in oil, charcoal, water colors and tempera, in a compendium of nods at Cuban daily life not lacking in references to the island's syncretic religions or the kitchen appliances the government hands out to the island's inhabitants.

More: Guardian, LinkedIn,   Artnet, DominicanToday

The Rijksmuseum exhibit The Late Rembrandt has already drawn about 400 thousand visitors. This is great news for the museum, but apparently not for some of the visitors. The museum has also receive hundreds of complaints about how the busy the museum is, especially from Dutch people.
This is according to Rijksmuseum director Wim Pibjes, who is absolutely absolutely thrilled that the exhibit has drawn so many visitors, Het Parool reports. More

The found painting is thought to be the second version of Ingres's Le Vœu de Louis XIII (The vow of Louis XIII, 1824) Photo via: Wikipedia

The chance discovery of a painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, located in the town of Lons-le-Saunier, in the French province of Jura, was made during an inventory conducted by Emmanuel Buselin, curator and advisor of historical monuments of the region, the work was found in the attic of the chapel of the former hospital Hôtel-Dieu, Le Monde reports. More

A detail of the Ingres painting found in Jura, Photo via: La Voix de Jura

Six Authors Withdraw from PEN Gala in Protest of ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Honor

A ‘Charlie Hebdo’ cover (photo by Mona Okiddo-Eberhardt/Flickr)

As AP and the Times point out, the present controversy over the gala reflects the broader debate that flamed up in the wake of the original attacks on the magazine’s offices. While much of the literary community expressed support for Charlie Hebdo, others called the mainstream glorification of the publication into question, pointing to its perceived racism. But many of the loudest participants in the ensuing discussion seemed fairly divorced from the French context — many weren’t French speakers, and some hadn’t even heard ofCharlie Hebdo prior to the tragedy, much less read it. My news and Twitter feeds were littered with takes that seemed to materialize out of nowhere: as soon as it was fashionable to have an opinion, opinions seemed to abound. More

24 satirical Drawings, Molla Nasraddin was an eight-page Azerbaijani satirical periodical

Molla Nasraddin was an eight-page Azerbaijani satirical periodical published in Tiflis (from 1906 to 1917). The magazine was “read across the Muslim world from Morocco to Iran.” It was edited by the writer Jalil Mammadguluzadeh (1866-1932), and named after Nasreddin, the legendary Sufi wise man-cum-fool of the Middle Ages. More on Molla Nasraddin

The Azerbaijani weekly magazine Molla Nasreddin was revolutionary for its time, bravely ridiculing clerics and criticising the political elite as well as the Russian Tsar and the Shah of Persia.

Founded in 1906, it pulled no punches in tackling geopolitical events and also promoted women's rights and Westernisation. The magazine's title, Molla Nasreddin, came from the name of the naive but wise mullah, famous throughout the Middle East for his anecdotes.

Mullahs in Persia issued a fatwa calling for Mirza Jalil's death. He was attacked in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, where the magazine was published, and constantly threatened. The city was then the cultural capital of Russia's South Caucasus.  BBC

This map is from the magazine Molla Nasreddin, an early 20th century satirical magazine from Baku that's gotten a some attention recently.  The caption reads "The States of the Nations of the World in the Twentieth Century." Like much of the magazine's content, it represented an appeal to the Asian, Islamic and colonized peoples of the world to wake up and reform themselves so they could compete with the West. The cartoon shows pair of Indians are pulling a whip-wielding Englishman in a rickshaw,  Greece is doing something to a bent-over Turkey, and China fast asleep. Uncle Sam peaks up over the globe on the right, while a polar bear watches alertly from above. This map turned up on Zerkala, a site that looks like it would be amazing if you knew Russian.

The cartoon describes a child, dogs and other creatures treated as dirt unlike the Koran in people's hand

The new Slavs and Tatars book, reproducing the original drawings from Molla Nasreddin

This 1909 cartoon, Pilgrimage to Hajj, had a pretty clear message

Molla Nasreddin

Hunting for flies. European politics towards the East

Caption: "What we see everyday." The world is upside down: the donkeys are being carried by the people. Visible from their glasses and pipes, the donkeys here are the rulers. An ascerbic critique of the ruling clerical class, the caricature hints that the Azeris are following people that they should instead be leading.

Students enter an "Asian school" and leave as donkeys

Students enter a European school and leave as educated adults

In the top cartoon a boy is born, while below the father responds to the birth of a girl (1909)

This 1929 shows the "English Consul and his wife: in England (L) and in Iran (R)

“Son, hit your mom and I will admire you.”

“A member of the Young Turks leads old clerks and members of the Ottoman Empire’s security apparatus away by a leash.” “Enough!” he tells them. “You’ve ruled us for 32 years.”

What is against the New Methods is Islamic Sharia law and Tekfir – apostasy, declaration of him as unbeliever. Molla Nasreddin № 17.jpg. Molla Nasreddin magazine (on Azeri), published between 1906-1931

“It doesn’t hurt to always bear arms…as it is necessary for both praying and for fighting.” The editors note slyly: “Yet another position upon which fundamentalist Muslims and Evangelical Christians could get together and share best practices.”

The captions for the left and right pages, respectively, are “According to the book, the world of the devil,” and “According to the book, the world of believers.” “With the bicycles, cars, bridges and buildings, the world of the devil is modern and developed,” the editors write. “The world of believers is full of ethereal illusions and idleness.”

“Listen, son, go buy a copy of Molla Nasreddin but don’t tell anyone.” “In a show of bravado,” the editors write, “the illustration demonstrates that despite the religious establishment’s disapproval of Molla Nasreddin, the clerics still read it, if secretly.”

“A biting critique of the role of clerics in the newly formed Iranian Majles (Parliament): the ‘Sina’ (literally: chest) refers to the self-flagellation of the Shi’ite Ashura-Tasua ceremonies.”

"Molla Nasreddin about Azeri women" by Joseph Rotter - «Molla Nasreddin» magazine, № 11. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - 

"Moslem journalists". Caricature from "Molla Nasraddin" magazine (№ 34, 1910)

"The Haji Travels to Mecca." Molla Nasreddin. (circa 1906-1917).

England and India; 1. 100 yrs ago 

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