Latest news with #DianeArbus
Hype Malaysia
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Hype Malaysia
1MDB-Seized Paintings Put Up For Auction; Netizens Question Validity Of Online Auction Website
It has been five years since one of the biggest scandals involving the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) took place. Since then, the United States Government has seized 4 renowned paintings—and they've now put these artworks up for auction. This move aims to offer art lovers and collectors a rare chance to own a piece of history. The auction runs from the 16th July (Wednesday) to the 4th September (Thursday). Furthermore, buyers won't have to pay any premium fees. However, concerns have already emerged about the entire process. From a questionable website to the drastic drop in starting prices, all eyes are now on these 4 artworks. According to documents filed by the US Justice Department, one of the pieces, 'Child with a Toy Hand Grenade' (1962), photographed by Diane Arbus, initially sold for $750,000 (RM3,189,375). Yet, the current starting bid is only $4,400 (RM18,711). Another piece, 'Red Man One' (1982), illustrated by Jean-Michel Basquiat, sold for $9.4 million (RM39.97 million) back in 2012 but now lists at just $2.975 million (RM12.65 million). Meanwhile, Picasso's 'Tête de taureau et broc' (1939) was acquired for $3.28 million (RM13.9 million) back in 2013. Alongside it, Basquiat's 'Self Portrait' (1982) is currently being auctioned at $850,000 (RM3.6 million). Some advisors speculate that the drastic price drops result from the artworks' ties to Low Taek Jho, also known as Jho Low (刘特佐), an affiliate of the 1MDB case. Due to the artworks' connection to multiple international fugitives and such a high-profile scandal, attracting serious buyers has proven challenging. On top of that, the auction website chosen by the U.S. Marshals lacks the sophistication expected for pieces of this value, which further reduces its appeal. Its overly simple design is so basic that some potential buyers might even mistake it for a scam. 'Most of my clients would not be interested in sitting on this website and bidding on it just because the website is so terrible,' said Arushi Kapoor, an art advisor, in an interview. 'If someone sent me this website that wasn't you, I would probably be like, 'someone's trying to scam me.' However, another art advisor pointed out that the rough website might serve as a filter, attracting only well-versed bidders who can look beyond the site's shortcomings. Ultimately, the combination of scandal and presentation casts a shadow over what could otherwise be a highly sought-after auction. Source: ARTNews Zaima Humaira contributed to this article
Malay Mail
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Malay Mail
Seized 1MDB paintings put up for auction, but art world sniffs at sketchy-looking website
NEW YORK, July 30 — The US Marshals Service is conducting an online sale of four valuable artworks created by renowned artists Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Diane Arbus, all of which were forfeited to federal authorities as part of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) financial scandal. A Texas-based auction house called Gaston and Sheehan, located in Pflugerville, has received the government contract to handle the sale of these pieces: two Basquiat works titled Self Portrait (1982) and Red Man One (1982), Picasso's Tête de taureau et broc (1939), and Arbus's Child with a Toy Hand Grenade. The digital auction commenced on July 16 and will conclude on September 4, with buyers notably exempt from paying any additional premium fees, ARTnews reported Industry professionals and art consultants interviewed by ARTnews described the pieces as exceptional quality works whose opening bid amounts appear remarkably low when compared to historical market values and comparable sales data. However, the basic design of the auction website and the controversial origins tied to a wanted international criminal could discourage serious collectors in what is already a challenging art market environment. Consultant Dane Jensen said that while the venue may lack prestige, it represents a potentially lucrative opportunity for astute collectors willing to overlook the unconventional circumstances. Art consultant Arushi Kapoor expressed scepticism about the platform's credibility, explaining to ARTnews that her clientele would likely avoid the poorly designed website, and that she herself might suspect fraudulent activity if someone had recommended the site to her. Justice Department records from July 2020 reveal that Christopher Joey McFarland voluntarily turned over the Basquiat Self Portrait to federal authorities, with McFarland being the co-founder of Red Granite Pictures alongside Riza Shahriz Abdul Aziz, the stepson of ex-prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak. The same partnership between McFarland and Aziz was responsible for financing the 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street. Malaysian financier Low Taek Jho, commonly referred to as Jho Low and currently a fugitive from justice, acquired the remaining three artworks during 2012-2014 and subsequently presented them as gifts to Hollywood actor and art enthusiast Leonardo DiCaprio, who had both starring and producing roles in The Wolf of Wall Street.
Boston Globe
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Rosalind Fox Solomon, whose photos captured emotional nuance, dies at 95
Ms. Fox Solomon was sometimes compared to Diane Arbus, and like Arbus, she studied with the great Austrian emigre photographer Lisette Model. But unlike her more famous peer, Ms. Fox Solomon captured sometimes off-putting subjects with a warm intensity that infused them with humanity, even if they appeared strange or unappealing at first glance. The white woman in 'Poke Bonnet, First Mondays, Scottsboro, Alabama' (1976), in Ms. Fox Solomon's 2018 book, 'Liberty Theater,' appears pleased with herself and overconfident, potentially queasy attributes given the time and place. Like the subjects of Ms. Fox Solomon's other portraits, she dominates the frame. But she is not an Arbus freak; nor is she grotesque. She is a familiar sort of woman in early middle age, not a caricature of a white Southerner. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The Black child in 'Girl Rising, Mississippi' (1977) gazes away from the camera, seemingly filled with determination. But Ms. Fox Solomon captured a world of hurt in the child's liquid eye, set jaw, and slight grimace. Advertisement It was that ability to convey emotional nuance -- what writer Teju Cole called, in a review of 'Liberty Theater' in The New York Times, 'her special ability to register tiny interstitial moments' -- that excited critics. Advertisement The portraits 'pin her subjects in situations of inadvertency, when their faces and bodies are between one attitude and another,' Cole wrote. Those were the moments, Ms. Fox Solomon's camera seemed to say, when subjects were most susceptible to interpretation. Similarly, a portrait of young Israelis in uniform, included in the collective exhibition 'This Place' at the Brooklyn Museum in 2016, shows their pensive and sometimes playful faces, a world away from war. Another photo shows a middle-aged man with a Star of David tattoo on an Israeli beach, looking proud but uneasy. "Jerusalem, Israel, 2011." Rosalind Fox Solomon/MUUS Collec Her pictures from Israel were 'arguably the most deeply human images in the show and perhaps the most traditional, reaching back to the work of Diane Arbus, Paul Strand and Eugène Atget,' Times critic Roberta Smith wrote. Ms. Fox Solomon came to photography relatively late, around the age of 38, as the somewhat restless (by her own account) but socially conscious wife of a Jewish businessperson in Chattanooga, Tenn. She had grown up in suburban Chicago and had known antisemitism as a child. And from her arrival in the South, in the early 1950s, she was aware of the inequities, racial and otherwise, around her. Her husband's family owned movie theaters, including a segregated one -- her book 'Liberty Theater' was an allusion to it. The nuanced view of Southern society that informs the book took shape during this period, as she suggested to an interviewer for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art in 2016. In Chattanooga, Black and white people lived in proximity to one another, as elsewhere in the South, and racism, as she saw it, was shaded, not monolithic. Advertisement 'I knew that the people in Chicago, and the people that I knew in New York, they just had absolutely no connection in any way to African Americans,' Ms. Fox Solomon said. 'And in Chattanooga there was more connection, or there was more possibility.' "Valentine Boxes, Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA, 1976." Rosalind Fox Solomon/MUUS Collec In 1968, while visiting Japan, she found herself unable to communicate with the people she was staying with, and her Kodak Instamatic became 'a way that I just could communicate with myself,' she told the interviewer. It was an epiphany. She came to realize that 'something is different about me when I'm taking pictures,' she said. 'I connect with something in myself that's different than when I'm in social contact.' What that something was, she didn't specify. But she told the interviewer, 'I always have tried as much as possible to connect my inner feelings to my pictures.' "Landmine Zone, Pnom Penh, Cambodia, 1992." Rosalind Fox Solomon/MUUS Collec Rosalind Fox was born April 2, 1930, in Highland Park, Ill., to Vernon Fox, a businessperson who worked in his family's wholesale tobacco and candy enterprise, and Joelle Wellman Fox. She received a bachelor's degree in political science from Goucher College in Baltimore in 1951. Soon after, she met her husband, Joel W. Solomon, and they moved to Chattanooga, where she became the Southern regional director of the Experiment in International Living, an exchange program for high school students. It was after visiting Japan -- in early 1972, the year after Arbus died by suicide -- that she accompanied her husband on a business trip to New York. There, she met Model, a pioneer of street photography, who had immigrated to the United States in 1938. Model was immediately impressed by the photographs Ms. Fox Solomon showed her. 'She had a lot of confidence in me,' Ms. Fox Solomon told the Smithsonian interviewer. Advertisement Ms. Fox Solomon was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979, and she traveled to Guatemala, Peru, India, South Africa, and elsewhere, photographing shamans, funerals, rituals, and festivals. Her work is in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and her 'Portraits in the Time of AIDS,' a searing vision of patients and caretakers, was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In 2019, she received a lifetime achievement award from the International Center of Photography. Ms. Fox Solomon leaves a daughter, Linda Solomon Wood; a son, Joel Solomon; and eight grandchildren. Her marriage to Joel Solomon ended in divorce in 1984; thereafter, she lived in New York City. This article originally appeared in
New York Times
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Rosalind Fox Solomon, Whose Photos Captured Emotional Nuance, Dies at 95
Rosalind Fox Solomon, a photographer whose penetrating black-and-white portraits shot in the American South, Israel and diverse spots around the globe earned her the admiration of critics and a place in the world's most prestigious museums, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 95. Her death, in a hospital, was announced by the MUUS Collection, a photography archive that houses her work. Ms. Fox Solomon was sometimes compared to Diane Arbus, and like Arbus, she studied with the great Austrian émigré photographer Lisette Model. But unlike her more famous peer, Ms. Fox Solomon captured sometimes off-putting subjects with a warm intensity that infused them with humanity, even if they appeared strange or unappealing at first glance. The white woman in 'Poke Bonnet, First Mondays, Scottsboro, Alabama' (1976), in Ms. Fox Solomon's 2018 book, 'Liberty Theater,' appears pleased with herself and overconfident, potentially queasy attributes given the time and place. Like the subjects of Ms. Fox Solomon's other portraits, she dominates the frame. But she is not an Arbus freak, nor is she grotesque. She is a familiar sort of woman in early middle age, not a caricature of a white Southerner. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Diane Arbus, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Born to the wealthy Nemerov family in New York in 1923, the photographer Diane Arbus married young and got her start helping her husband, Allan, shoot ads for her family's department store. After ending the collaboration — and her marriage — she turned to a unique kind of candid portraiture, shooting insightful, evasive, disquieting photographs, both of people she met on the street and of more unusual people, like circus performers, whom she sought out. Her work got her magazine commissions and artistic acclaim, including a central role in the 1967 Museum of Modern Art show 'New Documents.' But she made relatively few exhibition-quality prints, sold only four copies of her now iconic portfolio 'A Box of Ten Photographs' — which includes 'Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J.' and a Jewish giant at home in the Bronx — and in 1971, at the age of 48, she took her own life. Arthur Lubow, author of a biography of Arbus, wrote in 2003 that she was 'fearless, tenacious, vulnerable,' and people opened up to her. But as she said herself in Artforum in 1971: 'A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.' So it's no surprise that 'Diane Arbus: Constellation,' the largest show of Arbus's startling and mesmerizing photographs ever mounted, was unnerving, or that my first reflex was to search for something familiar. Now at the Park Avenue Armory, the exhibition includes every black-and-white silver gelatin print that the photographer Neil Selkirk has made from Arbus's negatives since her death in 1971. Arbus's companion, Marvin Israel, chose Selkirk to help prepare a monograph in the wake of her suicide, and he remains the only person Arbus's estate has ever allowed to print her photographs. Over five and a half decades this has amounted to 454 of the eerie and obsessive photographs that made her so famous: the twins, triplets, children in masks, nudists, men with tattoos or pins through their cheeks, sword swallowers, dancing couples and awkward celebrities. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
