UniCredit to sell part of its corporate art collection

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

UniCredit to sell part of its corporate art collection | The Italian bank UniCredit will sell off part of what is one of the world’s largest corporate art collections in order to fund social initiatives across Europe. The collection contains some 60,000 works, including those by Klimt, Richter and de Chirico, but is considered by chief executive Jean Pierre Mustier one of the ‘non-core assets’ that the bank plans to divest as part of their Social Impact Banking initiative. It remains undecided how many of the works will be sold but the sales should begin before the end of this year, according to The Art Newspaper.

Wildenstein & Co sued over 1985 sale of alleged fake painting by Bonnard | Wildenstein & Co is being sued by a collector for $275,000, the price of an alleged fake Pierre Bonnard painting sold by the New York gallery in 1985. The plaintiff also seeks $50,000 in authentication fees. They are represented by the trust Greenway II LLC, which filed the lawsuit in the US District Court of the Southern District of New York yesterday. The documents claim that the gallery’s failure to inform the trust that the work, Still Life with Basket of Fruit, is not listed in Bonnard’s 1974 catalogue raisonné, was an act of fraud. Lawyers representing the gallery have stated that the work ‘has an impeccable provenance, which was well-known at the time’.

Thomas Nozkowski (1944-2019) | The abstract painter Thomas Nozkowski has died aged 75. Known for small-scale works that make use of vivid colours and bold, graphic shapes, Nozkowski made his name in New York after graduating from the Cooper Union in 1967. At first he produced sculptures, but soon transitioned to a painting practice that skirted around Abstract Expressionism and Conceptualism in order to take inspiration from real-world sources.

Guggenheim launches conservation fellowship endowed by Russian billionaire Vladimir Potanin | The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is launching the new Vladimir Potanin Conservation Fellowship for Russian-speaking conservationists. The Russian billionaire Vladimir Potanin, president and chairman of Norilsk Nickel, is a trustee of the Guggenheim Foundation and a major donor to Russian museums through his eponymous foundation. Fellowships will last 12 to 18 months and the first begins in January 2020.