Art-world figures recognised in Queen’s Birthday Honours List

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Art-world figures recognised in Queen’s Birthday Honours List | Chief Executive of the Royal Academy Charles Saumarez Smith, Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid, the painter Rose Wylie, and Liverpool Biennial director Sally Tallant are among those who have been decorated in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list. Saumarez Smith received a knighthood, while Himid, Wylie and Tallant were awarded OBEs, and Janet Vitmayer, the former director of the Horniman Museum, has been made a dame. Architects have also been decorated in the honours list, with Farshid Moussavi and Jane Duncan receiving OBEs. A full list is available here.

Hubert Neumann sued by daughter over the sale of $31 million Basquiat | Belinda Neumann-Donnelly, daughter of art collector Hubert Neumann, has sued her father for attempting to halt the auction of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Flesh and Spirit, which sold for $30.7 million at Sotheby’s last month. The Art Newspaper reports that Neumann-Donnelly’s lawsuit (filed on 7 June) claims that the work might have sold for as much as $45 million if Neumann hadn’t interfered with the sale.

Collector appeals against the return of a restituted Pissarro painting | American collector and real-estate entrepreneur Bruce Toll appealed against the return of Camille Pissarro’s The Pea Harvest in a Paris court on 6 June. The painting had been restituted in November 2017 to the heirs of Simon Bauer, whose collection of 97 paintings was expropriated in Paris in 1943. An order made by the French government in 1945 states that any seizures carried out under German occupation, and subsequent transactions, are ‘considered null and void’. Toll, who bought the painting at Christie’s in 1995, argued that the painting had been sold in good faith with an export license and that as a result ‘people will refuse to lend works of art to France’.

Recommended reading | On ArtNet, Andrew Goldstein talks to Art Basel’s global director Marc Spiegler about the role of fairs in the art market. In the Guardian, author Valeria Luiselli argues that the commercial exploitation and appropriation of Frida Kahlo results in ‘Fridolatry’, and in The Art Newspaper, Ben Luke speaks to Joan Bakewell about her experience conducting Marcel Duchamp’s only live televised interview, just months before his death.