To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.
Good Morning!
- Julio Le Parc, a pioneer of Kinetic Art and winner of the Venice Biennale Grand Prize, has died at 97 in Paris.
- Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, i.e. the duct-taped banana, was stolen from the Centre-Pompidou Metz.
- The British Museum says its decision to postpone a lecture titled “The Ancient History of Israel and Judah” was “not censorship.”
The Headlines
IN MEMORIAM. Julio Le Parc, the Argentine-born pioneer of kinetic art, died on May 30 in Paris, at 97, reports ARTnews. The artist’s health had declined in recent days, but he remained deeply engaged with his work until the end, while eagerly awaiting a major retrospective opening June 11 at London’s Tate Modern, his son Yamil Le Parc told the Argentine newspaper La Nación. Le Parc’s vibrating light installations and shimmering mobiles invited viewers to actively participate with the works, making him one of the leading figures in kinetic art, long before immersive art experiences took social media by storm. A founding member of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) in Paris, he believed in collaborative artistic experimentation and rejected the notion of a solitary artistic master. But Le Parc was singled out in 1966, when he won the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale, despite many of the works he presented relying on reflected light, optical instability, and movement. The Tate retrospective will open without him, but for an artist who insisted viewers become actively engaged with his creations, writes ARTnews‘s Daniel Cassady, “the exhibition arrives not simply as a memorial, but as a reminder of how much Le Parc influenced contemporary art.”
BANANA SPLIT. The Centre Pompidou-Metz has lost its banana. That is, the banana duct-taped to the wall in Maurizio Cattelan‘s viral artwork Comedian, which was stolen from the French museum on Saturday. The same night, the institution sent out a media blast complete with forensic evidence: a grainy image of a piece of twisted duct tape stuck on a blank, white wall, minus the banana. But in reality, little, if anything, was lost. Staff replaced the piece of fruit “as quickly as possible” with a fresh banana and tape. After all, the value of the work — a limited edition of which famously sold at auction for $6.24 million in 2024—lies entirely in its certificate of authenticity and in “the protocol governing its presentation rather than its perishable element,” explained the museum. As such, it said “no irreversible damage was observed” to the lost, possibly eaten (hopefully by someone in need of potassium) banana. This wouldn’t be the first time. Justin Sun, the crypto-billionaire from China who bought that $6.2 million banana, famously ate it. Nevertheless, the museum didn’t appear to find much humor in the incident and announced it had filed a legal complaint against “persons unknown.” The Centre Pompidou-Metz said it “condemns this act, which undermines the respect due to the works on display and temporarily deprives visitors of part of the experience offered by the exhibition.” Yet, visitors were arguably offered a different, no less interesting, if absurdist, spectacle of the fallout from the theft of a single, ripe banana.
The Digest
British Museum Director Nicholas Cullinan has further responded to criticism over a decision to postpone a lecture called “The Ancient History of Israel and Judah,” stating on Sunday that the museum’s action is “not censorship; it is stewardship.” [The Art Newspaper]
Brazilian police have named a man suspected to have masterminded the theft of several artworks by Henri Matisse from the Biblioteca Mario de Andrade in São Paulo last year. [ArtReview]
The British Museum in London was briefly evacuated on Saturday after staff discovered a “suspicious device,” as well as “malicious communications.” [ARTnews]
Due to security concerns, the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, is postponing an exhibition of 17th-century silver, known as the Popta Treasure, which it considers “one of the crown jewels” of the institution. [Omrop Fryslan]
Wolfgang Tillmans joined other artists in discussing the threat of Germany’s far-right AfD party, while calling for a redefinition of patriotism, despite his view that in recent decades, this “is the best Germany there has ever been.” [Die Zeit]
The Kicker
CONCEPTS OF LIFE. The artist Nairy Baghramian reflects on her relationship with the late, great dealer Marian Goodman in a new, thoughtful piece for Artforum. We learn that Goodman believed her most important contribution to art history was not her promotion of what became household names, like Marcel Broodthaers and Gerhard Richter. Rather, she told Baghramian it was a box set edition titled Artists and Photographs from 1970, with works by Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Smithson, and Dan Graham. At the time, Goodman explained, photography had been merging into conceptual art, undergoing a major transformation, and the edition “served as a bridge between [her art publishing company] Multiples, Inc., and the founding of her gallery in 1977,” according to Baghramian. Along with stories of her devotion to her artists and encouraging advice, Baghramian leaves us with the poetic description of Goodman carefully filling walnut shells with water and lining them up on her windowsill one winter morning, in an effort to keep the flies in her apartment alive and hydrated, following their journey up 34 floors. Were the walnut water vessels on her windowsill conceptual sculptures? The artist had asked. “In a way,” Goodman said. “Let’s call them concepts of life.”
