In this video, join Thomas Boyd-Bowman in an exploration of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Jeune fille à la corbeille de fleurs, a highlight of Sotheby’s Modern Art Evening Auction in November. Painted at one of the finest moments in Renoir’s career, Jeune fille à la corbeille de fleurs radiates with color and embodies the masterful portraiture for which he is best remembered. It was first acquired by the legendary art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and later purchased by Dr. Albert Barnes of the esteemed Barnes Foundation, only to be returned to Durand-Ruel a few years later. With this extraordinary provenance, this painting exemplifies the triumph of impressionism from the perspective of artist, dealer and collector.
Tag Archives: Arts & Literature
Previews: Times Literary Supplement – October 29
Views: Munch Museum Opens In Oslo, Norway
‘The Scream,’ arguably the most iconic image in art, is the centerpiece of a new museum dedicated to its creator Edvard Munch in Oslo.
Munch Museum is an art museum in Oslo, Norway dedicated to the life and works of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. As of the summer of 2021, 28000 pieces of art are being moved from the museum at Tøyen, to the museum at Bjørvika, Oslo.
Art: ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ By Abstract Expressionist Helen Frankenthaler
Alex Roediger, MoMA’s senior information coordinator, looks at Helen Frankenthaler’s “Jacob’s Ladder” (1957) with a painter’s eye, and finds that “more paint” isn’t always the key to making a dramatic statement—even in Abstract Expressionism.
Front Covers: Artifacts Magazine – Fall 2021

Read Issue
Art: Jacqueline Roque – Picasso’s Ultimate Muse
Picasso’s stunning painting ‘Femme Accroupie’, offered in Sotheby’s upcoming Modern Art Evening Sale (9 October | Hong Kong), is a portrait of his ultimate muse and wife, Jacqueline Roque. In this latest Expert Voices, Sotheby’s Chairman Brooke Lampley tells us of the huge artistic inspiration Jacqueline had on Picasso. Discover how this work was the final summation of an entire series of portraits of her, and how it was inspired by master artists of previous centuries.
Exhibitions: ‘Surrealism Beyond Borders’ – The Metropolitan Museum
Watch a video preview of the exhibition, “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” on view at The Met from October 11, 2021–January 30, 2022. Nearly from its inception, Surrealism has had an international scope, but knowledge of the movement has been formed primarily through a Western European focus. This exhibition reconsiders the true “movement” of Surrealism across boundaries of geography and chronology—and within networks that span Eastern Europe to the Caribbean, Asia to North Africa, and Australia to Latin America. Including almost eight decades of work produced by artists from over 45 countries, “Surrealism Beyond Borders” offers a fresh appraisal of these collective concerns and exchanges—as well as historical, national, and local distinctions—that recasts appreciation of this most revolutionary and globe-spanning movement. Learn more about the exhibition: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions…
Art Insider: Van Gogh’s Creative Spark In Paris
Vincent Van Gogh was a master of creating sumptuous still lifes. In this latest Expert Voices, Sotheby’s specialist Simon Stock describes how his painting “Nature Morte: Vase Aux Glaïeuls”, offered in Sotheby’s upcoming Modern Art Evening Sale (9 October | Hong Kong), perfectly captured the essence of the artist’s first summer in Paris in 1886. Discover how the artist infused his inspiration of Japanese wood block prints into his paintings, and how he painstakingly captured the joy of living in his still lifes, but also the transience of life.
Previews: Times Literary Supplement – September 24
Art Exhibit: ‘Chaïm Soutine / Willem de Kooning’ At The Musée de l’Orangerie
The Musée de l’Orangerie presents an exhibition bringing together the works of Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943), painter of the Paris School of Russian origin (now Belarus) and Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), abstract expressionist American of Dutch origin.
This exhibition will focus more specifically on exploring the impact of Soutine’s painting on the pictorial vision of the great American painter.
Soutine indeed marked the generation of post-war painters by the expressive force of his painting and his figure of “accursed artist”, grappling with the vicissitudes and excesses of Parisian bohemia. His work was particularly visible in the United States between the 1930s and 1950s, when the figurative artist of European tradition was re-read in the light of new artistic theories. The gestural painting and the pronounced impasto of Soutine’s canvases lead critics and curators to proclaim him a “prophet”, herald of American abstract expressionism.
It was precisely at the turn of the 1950s that Willem de Kooning began the pictorial work of Women, canvases in which a singular expressionism was built, between figuration and abstraction. The development of this new language corresponds to the moment when the painter summons the artistic universe of Chaïm Soutine and confronts it. De Kooning discovered his predecessor’s paintings in the 1930s, then at the retrospective which devoted the painter to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1950. He was then particularly marked by the presentation of Soutine’s paintings in the Foundation’s collections. Barnes of Philadelphia, where he visited with his wife Elaine in June 1952.



