The Headlines
ALINE KOMINSKY-CRUMB, the celebrated and irrepressible underground comic artist whose work inspired generations of artistic descendents, died on Tuesday of pancreatic cancer at the home in France, where she had long lived with her husband, and sometimes collaborator, Robert Crumb, the Associated Press reports. She was 74. Kominsky-Crumb’s work was regularly unflinching, uproarious, and avowedly feminist. In early 1970s, she was a member of the storied Wimmen’s Comix collective, but eventually departed “over disagreements about works that some found to be too unsparing (her alter ego character Bunch, for example, would sometimes pop pimples or masturbate or pick her butt),” Zoe Guy writes in Vulture.
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MEINHARD VON GERKAN, the German architect whose long list of projects includes the now-decommissioned Tegel Airport in Berlin and the city’s main railroad station, has died at the age of 87, Reuters reports. The Tegel structure was famed for its hexagonal shape, with airplanes able to park on five of its sides. Opened in 1974, it was shuttered in 2020 and is being redeveloped as a tech hub. The firm that von Gerkan founded in 1965 with Volkwin Marg, Gerkan, Marg and Partners, now has more than 600 employees, and DW has a rundown of some of its key projects, including the Congress Center Leipzig and the National Maritime Museum of China in Shanghai. In a remembrance in Arquitectura Viva, Marg wrote, “Together, we have always made a stand for good architecture; very often we were successful, and sometimes we were not.”
The Digest
A 1943 Max Beckmann self-portrait sold for a cool €20 million ($20.7 million) at the Grisebach auction house in Berlin on Thursday, making it the most expensive artwork ever hammered auction in Germany. The previous record was set last year by a 15th-century bronze sculpture from China that hauled in €9.5 million. [The Associated Press/Bloomberg]
Following the death of her husband, the trailblazing designer Virgil Abloh, last year, Shannon Abloh has been working to guard his legacy and see through his vast array of unfinished projects. Fashion critic Vanessa Friedman reported on all that entails. “We are on the 50-year plan,” Howard Feller, a business adviser, told her. [The New York Times]
The National Museum of Scotland is returning a looted totem pole in its collections to the Nisga’a Nation in Canada. The roughly 36-foot-tall piece, from the 1860s, was taken by an ethnographer sometime in the early 20th century. [The Art Newspaper]
The more than 300 glittering guests at President Biden‘s first state dinner, with French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday, included billionaire art collectors Hélène and Bernard Arnault and Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, veterans of the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. [Axios]
As international galleries rush to open in Seoul, Korean dealers are setting up beachheads abroad. Kukje is opening a Paris office, Gana is planning a showroom in Los Angeles, and Baik Art just inaugurated a venue in Jakarta, Indonesia. [Pulse]
Material recovered from the wreckage of the storied S.S. Central America, which sank in 1857 off South Carolina, will be offered at auction in Reno, Nevada on Saturday. The lots include mining pants possibly connected to Levi Strauss and a daguerreotype of an unknown woman who has been termed the “Mona Lisa of the Deep.” [AP]
The Kicker
COLOR WARS. The Pantone Color Institute selected as its 2023 color of the year Viva Magenta, terming it “powerful and empowering,” USA Today reports. Hot pink has been popular in many recent fashion shows and has strong supporters, but Laurie Pressman , the institute’s vice president, was not having it. “We love the impactful statement made by Barbiecore, but we feel that this is the bigger picture play,” Pressman said. “I don’t want to minimize the hot pink because to me, the biggest statement about that was embracing life. [USA Today]