First Paisley Arts Festival celebrates late designer Pam Hogg - BBC

A Swedish auction house will sell an abstract painting by Hilma af Klint, an artist whose work almost never comes to market. The painting, titled Ser III No. 5 (1920), will be sold by the Stockholm-based Bukowskis house during a November 19 sale of modern art and design objects. It has been given an estimate of $600,000–$800,000, and if it reaches even its low estimate, the work will shatter af Klint’s prior auction record.

Earlier this month, the real estate company 320 E 82nd Owner, LLC filed a petition seeking to compel socialite art collector Libbie Mugrabi and the auction house Phillips to turn over an untitled 1982 Jean-Michel Basquiat painting in the latter’s possession in order to satisfy a $2.3 million judgment. New York County Supreme Court judge Linda M. Capitti pushed the petition forward last week, approving an order on October 14 preventing the sale or transfer of the Basquiat and compelling Mugrabi and Phillips to appear in court on November 17 to show cause for why the Basquiat—as well as Mugrabi’s 100 percent membership interest in Moo Moo Enterprises, Inc., which holds the work—should not be turned over to satisfy the debt. Mugrabi has yet to respond to the petition or the judge’s order.

When a major museum receives apainting on loan from a private owner, the first step is documentation: photography, examination, report-writing. But it’s surprisingly rare for collectors to do the same with their new acquisitions. Skeptics might dismiss the effort and expense of institutional loan protocols as a bureaucratic performance, done more to appease the insurance company and the lender than to benefit the art. Paintings aren’t plants, after all—why behave as if they’ll suddenly wilt? But (for better or worse) paintings have many more moving parts than the casual observer might suspect, and it’s easy to underestimate their capacity for change. What is paint, anyway? What might look like a simple dab of dark red can actually comprise, on the molecular level, thousands of particles of metals and stones, blended with extracts from plants, insects, and animals, all suspended together in the delicate equilibrium of the paint film. It’s actually hard to say whether a painting counts as flora, fauna, or mineral. If an artist mounted vines and beetles and chunks of iron to a wall, this would be considered a mixed-media sculpture.