Grayson Perry wins €150,000 Erasmus Prize

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Grayson Perry wins €150,000 Erasmus Prize | Grayson Perry has been announced as this year’s recipient of the prestigious Erasmus Prize. Awarded annually by the board of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation to an individual or institution that has made an outstanding contribution to culture, society or the social sciences in Europe, the accolade is accompanied by a cash prize of €150,000 and a titanium-plated ribbon embellishment inscribed with quotes by Erasmus. Perry, who is the first British visual artist to win the award since Henry Moore in 1968, was commended by the jury for producing work that employs ‘a unique visual language demonstrating that art belongs to everybody’, resonating with this year’s theme of ‘the power of the image in the digital era’. The prize, which Perry said he was ‘overwhelmed and honoured and humbled’ to receive, will be officially awarded by King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands at the royal palace of Amsterdam in November.

Sharon Corwin appointed president and CEO of Terra Foundation | The Terra Foundation for American Art, which is headquartered in Chicago, has appointed Sharon Corwin as its new president and chief executive. Corwin moves to the foundation from the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine, where she has served as the director and chief curator since 2006. Corwin’s appointment arrives almost a year after the announcement in March 2019 that Elizabeth Glassman, who had led the Terra Foundation for almost twenty years, was planning to step down. She will take up her role in September.

François Tajan (1962–2020) | François Tajan, the deputy chairman of Paris-based auction house Artcurial, has died (French-language article). Tajan joined his family’s auction house in the early 1990s, specialising in art deco sales, but quit in 2005 to join Artcurial, which has since expanded with new offices in Belgium, Italy, Austria and Morocco. Confirming the loss, a spokeswoman for Artcurial said that Tajan ‘took the first French auction house to a new level, as much through his vision for the business as through his intellectual curiosity’.

Provenance of Met painting updated to acknowledge ownership by Nazi-persecuted dealer | The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has amended the provenance of a significant work in its collection, reflecting new research into its history in Germany before and after the Second World War. The Rape of Tamar (c. 1640), which is attributed to the painter and co-founder of the French academy Eustache Le Sueur, is now acknowledged to have been owned by Siegfried Aram, a Jewish art dealer who fled Germany for the US in 1933, before being acquired by the German businessman Oskar Somer ‘as a contested part of his purchase of Aram’s villa in Schapbach’ that same year. It is not known as to whether Aram, who died in 1978, has any living descendants.