This list presents a handful of notable, historical moments from the institution's 150-plus years of existence. From the museum’s murky accession of its first artwork in 1870 to the ground-breaking introduction of its Open Access Initiative in 2017, The Met and its artworks have reflected the cultures they came from.
Art News
The White House’s recent push to reshape President Donald Trump’s image at the National Portrait Gallery raises questions about who gets to write history and who gets to erase it. A series of interactions between the current administration and this particular Smithsonian institution during the past year has made clear the extent to which Trump is invested in curating his own national story.
In October 1900, a 19-year-old Picasso first arrived in Paris to visit the World’s Fair while simultaneously navigating the road to recognition in the city’s art scene. His first sale—three small canvases depicting bull-fights—sold for just 100 francs to Berthe Weill, an up-and-coming gallerist. Before long, Weill had sold the trio, with a profit of 50 francs, to publisher Adolphe Brisson.
Ironically, the most iconic portrait of the president was never completed.
The Persian Gulf is witnessing unprecedented art fair expansions as major players like Art Basel and Frieze compete for dominance outside slower American and European markets. Despite the Middle East’s reputation for a thin collector base, vast individual wealth and recent government investments in art are drawing auction houses and dealers to the region.
This past February, the Art Institute of Chicago became the recipient of a transformational gift, approximately 2,250 works of French art spanning the 16th through 19th centuries, said to be the largest holding of its kind in the United States. The donors were collectors Jeffrey Horvitz, a private investor, and his wife, Carol, a trustee of the Art Institute.
Dadaism or Dada is an art movement of the early twentieth century characterized by irreverence, subversion, and nonsense. Dada art, performance, and poetry emerged in Zurich as a reaction to the horror and misfortune of World War I.
The word salon has a rich history of its own and was even used to indicate several different things within France in this period including an elite social gathering often led by a woman, a large reception hall, or an academic art exhibition.
Los Angeles has long lived in the shadow of New York’s art world dominance, but with the opening of three major institutions this year, the city is strategically repositioning itself to become an even more serious cultural force.
I grew up in New York with parents who were early collectors of modern and contemporary art. In the 1970s, I would accompany them to SoHo to visit galleries like Pace, Mary Boone, and Castelli. We walked cobblestone streets, stepped into raw loft-like spaces, and talked about art not as decoration but as a way of seeing and an intellectual pursuit.
