Our daily round-up of news from the art world
Pussy Riot members detained over protests against imprisonment of Ukrainian filmmaker | The Guardian reports that two members of Russia’s dissident punk rock band Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina. and Olga Borisova, were arrested and detained for several hours yesterday in the Eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk. Alyokhina and Borisova had been conducting a public protest against the imprisonment of Ukrainian film-maker Oleg Sentsov, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence in Yakutsk for terror offences. The Pussy Riot protesters were released after a court hearing for holding an unauthorised demonstration, where the judge found errors in their case files.
Countess sues art dealer over a Dutch old master painting | A 1660 painting by Dutch marine painter Willem van de Velde the Younger is at the centre of a legal dispute, following a suit filed in the Manhattan courts by Lesley, Viscountess Hambleden. Lady Hambleden claims that she trusted the art dealer Timothy Sammons, a former Sotheby’s specialist, to sell the painting belonging to her late husband, the William Herbert Smith, 4th Viscount Hambleden, but that The English Royal Yacht Mary About to Fire a Salute was sold in 2012 without her authorisation for around $5 million less than its true value, for $650,000.
Claudio Abate (1943–2017) | Italian photographer Claudio Abate, born in Rome in 1943, has died (Italian language article). Abate, who opened his own studio aged just 14, was acclaimed for his photographs depicting the actions and events of Rome’s avant-garde artist community, regularly documenting work by figures such as Jannis Kounellis, Simone Forti, and Trisha Brown.