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The Headlines
WOMEN SHINE AT CHRISTIE’S SALE. Marlene Dumas’s Miss January (1997) has set a new world record for the most expensive artwork by a woman sold at auction, going for $13.6 million (all quoted prices include buyer’s fees) at Christie’s 21st century evening sale on May 14, reports Karen K. Ho for ARTnews. Overall, “after two nights of decent, not disastrous auctions,” writes Ho, the auction house’s sale continued that trend, yielding $96.4 million. The evening was led by 14 blue chip artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Baby Boom (1982), which sold for $23.4 million with fees, but much of the attention was on women artists, including Simone Leigh, whose 10.5-foot-tall bronze sculpture Sentinel (2020) sold for $5.7. That result also broke the artist’s 2023 record sale of Las Meninas II (2019) for $3 million. “It was women that carried the night, and that was very exciting,” said art adviser Abigail Asher. “What can I say? Maybe it’s because I’m a feminist.”
MODEL IN PAINTING IDENTIFIED AS LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. A mysterious painting of a soldier undressing next to water as he prepares to join another young man who is swimming, has been identified as a portrait of Lawrence of Arabia, reports the Times. For years the National Trust questioned whether the painting, which hung in Lawrence’s home for some 60 years, also depicted its owner. Now, experts say the artwork by Henry Scott Tuke, who met Lawrence in 1922, is modeled after the latter. However, Tuke made Lawrence appear younger than he was at the time he made the portrait. In fact, the artwork, titled Picture of Gray — an RGA soldier on a beach, may have been inspired by Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” in which the central character remains young, while his painted portrait ages. “It’s an imagined and idealized work, not an actual portrait of Lawrence in 1922,” said Dr John Chu, senior curator for the trust.
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The Digest
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has been gifted over 6,500 artworks from the renowned photography collector Artur Walther and the Walther Family Foundation. The donation includes exceptional post-war and contemporary photography from around the world, and a special showcase of works from the collection by African photographers will be exhibited in the Met’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing when it opens later in May. [The Art Newspaper]
The ancient Peruvian archaeological site and pre-Columbian city known as Chan Chan, has been vandalized with obscene graffiti. Officials are searching for suspects, and those responsible for damaging the UNESCO World Heritage Site face up to six years in prison. [Artnet News]
The transgressive art of the late British artist Helen Chadwick gets a rare retrospective at Hepworth Wakefield from May 17 to October 27. “Chadwick had a genius for evoking the slippage between desire and disgust,” writes Skye Sherwin of the artist whose influential practice was cut short at the age of 42, when she died unexpectedly. [The Guardian]
The city of Paris will not pay the full 3 million euros ($3.36 million) in losses related to months of migrant occupation of the city’s Gaîté Lyrique art center. The institution’s leaders say they were promised compensation for financial costs incurred over five months of closure and the forced use of its building as living quarters by hundreds of young migrants. [Libération]
The Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, which supports artists and creative communities, is one of three institutions to have been awarded the medal of excellence in the inaugural Art Basel Awards, which recognises those “shaping the next generation of cutting-edge artistry.” [Art Jameel]
The Kicker
SCROLLING THE CHINESE CLASSICAL ART MARKET. When a 700-year-old calligraphy scroll by Rao Jie sold in April for 25 times its low presale estimate at HK $213.5 million ($27.5 million), following a whopping, 95-minute bidding war at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong, the news understandably made some headlines. But if you’re only hearing about it now, that may also be because the outlook for the Chinese classical art market remains cautious, according to Enid Tsui, writing for the South China Morning Post. Overall, Hong Kong auction results have been declining, including a “sharper drop” for modern and contemporary art auctions, due to Chinese economic slowing, according to the Mishcon de Reya China Art Market Report 2025. Steven Zuo, head of Sotheby’s classical Chinese Paintings, explains demand for calligraphy from Rao Jie’s lifetime, during China’s Sung and Yuan dynasties, the pinnacle of the art form, is reliably strong, and therefore not reflective of a wider market trend. What’s more, this 14th century, six-meter long, cursive-script calligraphy containing two prose pieces, once belonged to the Qing imperial collection. “The prolonged bidding war over the work by Rao Ji was an exception rather than a reflection of the general market sentiment,” reasons Benjamin W. Yim, an experienced collector of Chinese art.
