The Week in Art The Art Newspaper

This week: the extraordinary story behind what Canadian police have called “the biggest art fraud in history”. More than 1,000 fake works purporting to be by the First Nations artist Norval Morrisseau are seized and eight people have been charged. The Art Newspaper’s Editor, Americas, Ben Sutton, tells the extraordinary story, involving a rock star, a television documentary and alleged forgery rings, and what it tells us about the market for First Nations art in Canada.
A report into artists’ pay in the UK has exposed the inordinately low sums paid to artists for their labour by arts organisations. We talk to the art collective Industria, who wrote the report, and Julie Lomax, the CEO of a-n, The Artists’ Information Company, which has published the study.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is An Old Woman (around 1513) by the Northern Renaissance artist Quinten Massys, a painting better known as The Ugly Duchess. A new exhibition at the National Gallery focuses on this work in its collection, exploring its origins in a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, and the combination of satire, folklore, humanism and misogyny from which it emerged. Emma Capron, the curator of the show, tells us more.
A PDF of Industria’s Structurally F–cked report can be found at a-n.co.uk.
Industria’s website is we-industria.org.The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance, National Gallery, London, until 11 June.

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Is the Old Masters market struggling? As Tefaf opens its fair in Maastricht, we look at this major moment in the market calendar and what it tells us about the strength or otherwise of the market for historic art. The Art Newspaper’s Acting Art Market editor, Anny Shaw, joins us from the fair. The Institut du Monde Arabe, or Arab World Institute, in Paris has just received a major gift of more than 1,600 modern and contemporary works from the French-Lebanese dealer and collector Claude Lemand and his wife, France—a collection that will transform the displays in the institute’s museum. We talk to the director of the museum, Nathalie Bondil, about her future plans and the €6m project to transform the institute. And this episode’s Work of the Week is a self-portrait in red chalk by the Venetian Rococo artist Rosalba Carriera. Dagmar Kornbacher, the director of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, tells me about the drawing, which is a key work in Muse or Maestra?, the museum’s new exhibition of work by historic Italian women artists.
Tefaf Maastricht, until 19 March.
Muse or Maestra?: Women in the Italian Art World, 1400-1800, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, until 4 June.

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This week: as the Art Dubai fair opens, The Art Newspaper’s acting digital editor Aimee Dawson tells us about this latest edition, its ongoing commitment to displaying the art of the global south and its continued focus on digital art. The Museum of Modern Art in New York opens the largest media exhibition it has ever staged, Signals: How Video Transformed the World on 5 March. It looks at how artists around the globe have used video as a networked technology capable of reaching huge audiences but also how they have employed video to reflect on or engage in activism and urgent political developments. We talk to the show’s curators, Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo. And this episode’s Work of the Week is a coffee pot and milk jug from 1960 by Lucie Rie, the great modernist potter. Eliza Spindel, co-curator of the exhibition Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, UK, tells us about these objects and Rie’s life and work.
Art Dubai until 5 March.
Signals: How Video Transformed the World, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 March-8 July.
Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK, 4 March-25 June.

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This week: Nigeria heads to the polls this weekend; what are the implications for its museums and art scene? Dolly Kola-Balogun, director of the Retro Africa gallery in Abuja, reflects on the candidates and discusses the importance of art, and culture more widely, to the country’s future. We also talk to Patrick Bringley, the author of a new book All the Beauty in the World: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, in which he reflects on his experiences as a guard at the museum and coming to terms with the loss of his brother. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Boats in Front of the Grotto in the Park at Méréville by Hubert Robert. It features in The Garden: Six Centuries of Art and Nature at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, whose curator, Magnus Olausson, tells us about the painting.
All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, by Patrick Bringley, Simon and Schuster (US) $27.99, out now. The Bodley Head (UK), £20, 16 March.
The Garden—Six Centuries of Art and Nature, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden, until 7 January 2024.

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This week: Turkey and Syria. As the countries reel from the devastation of the 6 February earthquake, how can communities and agencies protect damaged heritage? We talk to Aparna Tandon from Iccrom, the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property about culture’s significance in the humanitarian response to the crisis. As Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle arrives at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, we take a tour of the show’s key moments with its curator, Eleanor Nairne. And this episode’s Work of the Week is a Germantown “eye-dazzler” blanket, made between 1895 and 1905 by a Diné weaver from the Navajo Nation. It’s part of a new show at the Bard Graduate Center in New York, Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest. Hadley Jensen, the curator of the exhibition, tells us more.
Disasters Emergency Committee’s Turkey-Syria Earthquake: dec.org.uk; a PDF of Aparna Tandon’s handbook First Aid To Cultural Heritage In Times Of Crisis is available for free at iccrom.org.
Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle, Barbican Art Gallery, London, until 21 May. The book accompanying the exhibition is published by Prestel, priced £24.99 or $29.95.
Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest, Bard Graduate Center, New York, until 9 July. An online exhibition featuring an interactive catalogue has approximately 250 items from the American Museum of Natural History’s collection of Navajo textiles will be available later this month at bgc.bard.edu.

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In this special episode, we are in Amsterdam for one of the shows of the year: Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum. As an unprecedented 28 of the 37 surviving Vermeer paintings are gathered in the Dutch capital, Ben Luke talks to several people involved in the project: Gregor Weber, one of the exhibition’s curators, tells us about his new biography that reveals the depth of influence of the Jesuits and Catholicism on the artist. In the exhibition itself, we talk to Pieter Roelofs, Weber’s co-curator; Ige Verslype, a conservator who led an extensive research project on Vermeer paintings in the Rijksmuseum, Mauritshuis and Frick collections; and Taco Dibbits, the Rijksmuseum’s director. Plus, we bump into the artist Alvaro Barrington in the exhibition and he tells us what he makes of Vermeer as an artist working today. In this episode’s Work of the Week, we explore a debate around the attribution of a painting: Betsy Wieseman, Curator and Head of the Department of Northern European Paintings at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington DC, discusses Girl with a Flute (around 1669-75). Wieseman and her NGA colleagues now regard the painting as a work by Vermeer’s studio, even though it appears in the Rijksmuseum show as an authentic work by the master.
Vermeer, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, until 4 June. Gregor Weber, Johannes Vermeer: Faith, Light, Reflection, Rijksmuseum, €25 (pb)

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