Tonight’s Evening Sales of Impressionist, Modern and Surrealist Art brought a total of £87.7 million / $115.3 million (est. £62.1 – 89.3 million). Helena Newman, Sotheby’s Worldwide Head of Impressionist & Modern Art, said: “It was great to see these first indicative sales of the season hit the ground running with such a promising and lively start. The combination of activity from across Asia and from the rest of the world made for exceptionally deep and determined bidding. The two top lots – Monet’s shimmering view of Venice and Schiele’s radical modernist canvas – both possessed the holy grail of qualities that never cease to excite collectors, and we were thrilled to be able to bring to the market a variety of rarely seen works that attracted not just strong bids but also throngs of visitors to our galleries.” • 82% of the lots offered found a buyer.

Visitors to the National Gallery are now able to view a new acquisition by one of the Renaissance’s most significant figures. Venus and Cupid (1529) by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), one of the leading German painters of the early 16th century, is being displayed in Room 4 and is an important addition to the National Gallery’s impressive collection of paintings by an artist widely regarded as a master of the German Renaissance. The painting has been generously gifted to the National Gallery from the Drue Heinz Charitable Trust following the death last year of Mrs Heinz, a committed and renowned patron of the arts in the United States and Britain. The painting depicts two mythological figures and is one of a series that Cranach produced during the 1520s and 30s, including the National Gallery’s own Cupid complaining to Venus (about 1525). One of the characteristics that defines Cranach’s care

Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso – two of the most seminal figures of twentieth-century art – innovated entirely new ways to perceive grand themes. While the resonances between them are filled with endless possibilities, a key connection can be found specifically in their exploration of the void, or the absence of space, which both artists defined from the figure through to abstraction. Calder and Picasso wanted to present or represent non-space, whether by giving definition to a subtraction of mass, as in Calder’s sculpture, or by expressing contortions of time, as in Picasso’s portraits. Calder externalized the void through curiosity and intellectual expansion, engaging unseen forces in ways that challenge dimensional limitations, or what he called “grandeur-immense”. Picasso personalized the exploration, focusing on the emotional inner self. He brought himself inside each character and collapsed the interpersonal space between author and subject. The

The Heard Museum is presenting Josef Albers in Mexico. The exhibition demonstrates the influence and connectivity between the work of Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) and the abstracted geometric vocabulary of pre-Columbian art, architecture and material culture. The Heard Museum is the third and final stop of the exhibition which opened in New York in 2017 then traveled to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2018. Josef Albers in Mexico is organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and curated by Lauren Hinkson, Associate Curator of Collections at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Drawing from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Josef Albers in Mexico presents an opportunity to learn about a little-known aspect of the artist’s practice and the influences he absorbed in his travels. “Through his close attention to ancient architecture, Josef Albers deve