Owners of Only Realized Frank Lloyd Wright Skyscraper Spark Outcry for Selling Protected Furnishings, Portrait Found in 1962 by Capri Junk Dealer Believed to Be a Picasso: Morning Links for September 26, 2024

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The Headlines
 
WRIGHT TO SELL? The owners of Frank Lloyd Wright’s only realized skyscraper in Bartlesville, Oklahoma were supposed to transform it into a new hub for tech start-ups, but two years after purchasing it from the city for next to nothing, they have instead sold some of the building’s one-off, easement-protected furniture, and put the whole building up for sale, reports The New York Times. The building is listed on a real estate auction website, “next to hollowed out strip malls and an empty Burger King.” Cynthia Blanchard , chief executive of the Copper Tree Group that bought the building for only $10, along with a promise to settle the building’s debt and spend $10 million on improvements, told the NYT, “We have done nothing illegal or nothing wrong.” The $10 million, nor the tech hub, ever materialized. And the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, which has a preservation easement on the property forbidding the sale of the protected items without its permission, is attempting to block the sales. The traded Wright furnishings “are trafficked goods,” insists Liz Waytkus, executive director of Docomomo US , an organization for architectural preservation. “The same that you would say of pottery or vases from Egypt or Mesopotamia that were obtained through illegal ways.”

PICASSO DISCOVERY. A portrait found by a junk dealer while clearing out a cellar in Capri in 1962, is now believed by some experts to be an authentic Pablo Picasso painting, reports The Guardian. For decades the painting, believed to be of Dora Maar, hung in Luigi Lo Rosso’s living room, though it was not to everyone’s liking. Lo Rosso’s wife “kept saying it was horrible,” remembers his son, Andrea Lo Rosso. But examination by experts, including the art detective Maurizio Seracini, and Cinzia Altieri , a member of the scientific committee of the Arcadia Foundation, confirmed the painting was by Picasso, and valued at $6.65 million. The Arcadia Foundation is now set to present their findings to the Picasso Foundation. Luigi Lo Rosso has since passed away, but his son Andrea has pursued research into the painting’s origins. “My father was from Capri and would collect junk to sell for next to nothing,” he said. “He found the painting before I was even born and didn’t have a clue who Picasso was. He wasn’t a very cultured person.”

The Digest

A previously questioned, rare and racy painting by the French painter Nicolas Poussin is coming to auction in Paris’s Hotel Drouot this November. Vénus Épiée par Deux Satyres (Venus Spied Upon by Two Satyrs) (1625–27) is estimated at $1.2 million. The painting shows an atypically erotic subject for Poussin, which once cast doubt on its attribution. [Artnet News]

Three climate activists who threw soup on paintings by Vincent Van Gogh at London’s National Gallery on Friday have pleaded not guilty to criminal damage. Members of the Just Stop Oil group, Stephen Simpson, 71, Mary Somerville, 77, and Phillipa Green, 24, vandalized the paintings, which avoided permanent damage, in protest against the sentencing of fellow activists for committing the same act. [AFP and Barron’s]

A group of artists participating in the Brooklyn Museum’s forthcoming open-call anniversary have co-authored a letter calling on the museum to “end its silence on the ongoing genocidal violence against the people of Palestine.” The letter has been signed by over 200 people. [Hyperallergic]

Salvador Dali lithographs left in a garage and forgotten about were sold for well over their estimate at auction in London on Monday. Estimated at $670 to $930 on average, some lots sold for up to $6,527. [Le Figaro]

The Kicker

YOUNG SNAPPERS. Cultured Magazine has announced the names on its 2024 “Young Photographers List.” All under 35, the selected artists “represent a microcosm of a vast and remarkable generation of image makers,” writes Rebecca Bengal. They include  Dawoud Bey,  Justine Kurland,  Cass Bird, Elle Pérez, Lyle Ashton Harris, Tyler Mitchell,  Farah Al Qasimi,  Jack Pierson, Richard Mosse, and Ethan James Green. “Think of this new group as the next ring, moving outward, in an era when photography is perhaps more prized, more omnipresent, and more distrusted than ever before,” she adds.