Events
- February – Burger King launches an advertising campaign called "Eat Like Andy" in the United States. The television spot which premieres during Super Bowl LIII features archival documentary film footage from 66 Scenes from America by Jørgen Leth of the pop artist Andy Warhol (1928-1987) unwrapping and eating a Burger King Whopper, footage approved for use by the fast food giant courtesy of the Andy Warhol Foundation. Prior to the game the mass market hamburger chain makes available to viewers who ordered it in advance via DoorDash an "Andy Warhol Mystery Box" which contains among other items a plastic bottle of ketchup and a platinum wig so one can "Eat Like Andy". [1] [2]
- March
- Italian scholars announce their opinion that a sculpture, The Virgin with the Laughing Child, loaned for an exhibition in Florence from London's Victoria and Albert Museum, is a work by Leonardo da Vinci of about 1472, making it the artist's only known surviving sculpture. [3]
- The Brant Foundation study center inaugurates a new East Village, Manhattan, New York City space in a former power station with an updated design by Gluckman Tang Architects. The opening exhibition is of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the neighborhood in which many of them were created.
- David Hockney settles at La Grande Cour, a farmhouse and studio in Normandy, where he will begin a long series of graphic artworks, initially of the Spring. [4]
- March 8–15 – The collection of work from the Young British Artists circle made from the mid-1990s by English pop singer George Michael (d. 2016) (including portraits of him by Jim Lambie and Michael Craig-Martin) is displayed and auctioned at Christie's, London, for charity.
- March 22 – The painting Vase with Poppies (oil on canvas 1886) by Vincent van Gogh held in the permanent collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, having been called into question by art historian Walter Feilchenfeldt in 1990, is declared authentic by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where it has been sent to determine its status as to whether it was a work by the hand of the artist or an impostor. [5]
- April 13–22 – Bird and Nature Festival (Festival de l'oiseau et de la nature) [6]
- May 1 – In the United Kingdom, a sketch of a bearded man in the Royal Collection is identified as Leonardo da Vinci. It will be displayed for the first time in the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace between May 24 and October 13, 2019, marking the 500th anniversary of the artist's death; as part of an exhibition which is set to be the largest showing of da Vinci's work in over 65 years. [7]
- May 15 – Rabbit , a 1986 stainless steel sculpture by Jeff Koons, sells at auction at Christie's in New York City for slightly more than $91 million U.S. setting a new record for the most expensive work of art by a living artist ever sold at auction, besting the previous mark of $90 plus million achieved by the David Hockney painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) which changed hands at the same branch of the same auction house in 2018. [8] [9]
- May 30–31 – Fédération photographique de France v Aurillacu [10]
- June 6 – David Williams-Ellis's three bronze figures of soldiers are inaugurated as the first part of the British Normandy Memorial at Ver-sur-Mer on Gold Beach. [11]
- July 1–2 – International Photographic Federation Bièvres (Fédération photographique de France) [10]
- July 1–September 22 – Rencontres d'Arles
- August – The National Gallery in London in preparing Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna of the Rocks for an upcoming exhibition of work from the hand of the Florentine master at the museum discover beneath the finished painting an abandoned composition as well other assorted sketches by the storied creator of the Mona Lisa and not seen for more than five hundred years. [12]
- September – A mural originally called "City" designed and created in 1929 at the Bauhaus by Josef Albers then sandblasted and reworked in the 1960s into the work "Manhattan" as commissioned by Walter Gropius for the PanAm Building is once more recreated from diagrams containing the artist's specifications (after the original was unrecoverable due to asbestos). It is then restored to its former home facing onto the skyscraper's lobby and atop the summit of the escalators moving up and down and into and out of Grand Central Terminal. [13]
- September 7 – A Dallas, Texas man, Tevon Varlack, strikes the Wall Street Bull by Arturo Di Modica with a banjo leaving a sizable dent in the horn area of the work. [14] During the following month, Di Modica and a team of metal workers from an upstate New York foundry arrive at the site and fix the wound to the artwork. [15]
- September 14 – The sculpture America , an 18-karat solid gold toilet, by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan is stolen while installed at Blenheim Palace in the United Kingdom, where it was available for use as part of an exhibition of Cattelan's works (while on loan from the permanent collection of the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York City). [16] It had been placed in a water closet formerly used by Winston Churchill. [17] [18] As the work had been connected to the building's water pipes, the theft therein caused structural damage and flooding. [19] A man is arrested in connection with the incident. [20] Cattelan later commented: "I always liked heist movies and finally I'm in one of them." [21]
- October 1 – A presumed Banksy art exhibition appears in a shop window in Croydon, London. [22]
- October 3 – Banksy's painting Devolved Parliament (2009) is sold at Sotheby's, London, for just under £9.9m. [23]
- October 7 – The Wall Street Bull by Arturo Di Modica is targeted for a second time when Extinction Rebellion activists throw fake blood over it and stage a die-in on the traffic plaza which is the sculpture's immediate surround. [24]
- October 21 – The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City which closed for improvements in June reopens after a $450 million makeover and the creation of additional galleries executed by the architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro. [25]
- October 28 – Cimabue's Mocking of Christ (13th century), found in June hanging in a domestic French kitchen, sells at auction in France for 24 million euros (including fees). [26]
- November – The Baltimore Museum of Art announces that during all of 2020 they will only acquire works created by women artists. [27]
- November 7–10 – Paris Photo in Grand Palais in Paris
- November 14 – The Venice Biennale temporarily closes due to the highest flood waters to beset the city in some fifty years. [28]
- November 25 – Thieves break into the Green Vault at the Dresden Castle in Dresden, Germany and steal an inestimable horde of jewelry and other precious objects dating back to the 18th century belonging to the German state of Saxony. [29]
- December – A gardener at the Galleria d'arte moderna Ricci Oddi in Piacenza, Italy stumbles upon the Gustav Klimt painting Portrait of a Lady which had been stolen from the same museum in 1997. It turns out the thieves – one of whom later grants an interview – planted the work back there four years earlier after the statute of limitations had run out on the theft. The picture, which is subsequently authenticated, was painted above an earlier work of a lover who died young. Portrait of a Lady is now valued at upwards of $65 million US. Of the one million plus works of art listed on the Italian theft database it was rated as the second most important following Caravaggio's Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence which was stolen from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo in 1969. [31]
- December 7 – The banana in Comedian , an artwork created in an edition of three for the 2019 installation of Art Basel Miami Beach by Maurizio Cattelan, consisting of the aforementioned fruit held to a wall by duct tape (the initial one of which was sold to an unnamed French art collector for US$120,000) is summarily eaten by David Datuna a self-styled performance vigilante who names his piece Hungry Artist and says of the finished work "It was very delicious". Galerie Perrotin, the exhibitor of the work at the art fair, replaces the fruit and states that the work is an "idea". [30]
- December 10 – Rebecca Salter is elected as the first female President of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, taking up office the following month. [32]
- December 28 – The Picasso painting Bust of a Woman on display at London's Tate Modern is damaged by a visitor. [33]
