On May 14, 2025, Miss January, an oil on canvas by the South African artist Marlene Dumas, sold at Christie’s New York for $13.6 million, the highest price ever achieved at auction by a living female artist. Dumas’s painting had been consigned by Mera and Don Rubell, founders of the Rubell Museum in Miami, and the proceeds of the sale will allow the couple to continue collecting and supporting emerging artists.
Art News
On a quiet residential corner in the Coyoacán section of Mexico City sits the cobalt blue house where Frida Kahlo was born, painted, and lived for more than four decades. The Casa Azul is at once a home and a monument: its courtyard garden hums with fountains and dappled shade, while its rooms hold the intimate wreckage and triumph of a singular life.
Categorized as an Old Master within the canon of art history, Sir Peter Paul Rubens' work is characterized by a high concentration of color, movement, and form. Surpassing visual dynamism, many of his masterpieces aptly convey key socio-religious conflicts of the period.
Experience the wonder of summer through an enchanting exhibition at Munson Museum of Art in downtown, Utica, NY. Watercolor Stories: The Art of Charles E. Burchfield opens Friday, June 12, and remains on view through September 13.
The backroom work of conservation is increasingly becoming a form of public engagement and education at museums that have turned the restoration of their greatest works into forms of theater. Conservators lean in with swabs of cotton and tiny brushes to restore paintings inch by inch, while museumgoers peer through plexiglass as if at the zoo.
It has been roughly 10 years since data artist Refik Anadol opened his studio in Los Angeles, leaving an indelible mark on the city.
Joan Miró, the Catalan painter, had a successful retrospective at MoMA in 1941 and an exhibit with his dealer, Pierre Matisse (Matisse’s son), in 1945. Miró first visited the United States in 1947—one of seven visits to the States—and was included in the New American Paintings at MoMA in 1991.
Orphism seemed to stem from Cubism, in part, because it shared the desire to break down solid objects and challenge human perceptions of time, space, and volume. And yet, this “offshoot” of Cubism specifically placed color and lyricism at center stage.
Mary Abbott (1921-2019) loved the water. Her father, Lt. Commander Henry Livermore Abbott, was a decorated submarine commander in the first World War and a Naval advisor to FDR during WWII. She inherited his love of the sea. A native New Yorker (and sometimes cover girl), she came of age there as an artist in the late 1940s, joining the ranks of the new Abstract Expressionist movement. Her contemporary alignments included David Hare, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning.
New York’s marquee spring auctions have wrapped with a combined $2.5 billion in sales across Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips.
