Constance Mayer (1774-1821)

Featured on the cover of the Gazette n°23, Prud'hon's study for The Dream of Happiness, a work by Constance Mayer preserved in the Louvre, was auctioned yesterday for €69,120 by Tessier & Sarrou. The drawing reveals all the love that the painter had for the young woman, who was as much his student as his companion.

On Wednesday, August 31, the Pichon & Noudel-Deniau (Azur Enchères) auction house devoted its "Fashion and Vintage" sale in Cannes to the beautiful creations of the leading Parisian luxury brands (experts: Chombert & Sternbach).

Lewallen worked as a curator at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive from 1980 to 2007, becoming senior curator emerita after retiring. Moving to L.A. from New York in 1972, she advocated for recognition of California’s history of Conceptual Art, a history which had until then been New York-centric. (ARTnews)

French artist Pierre-Paul Prud'hon’s study of an unattainable love offers a fresh promise of happiness that will not get away this time.

One of only two surviving ecclesiastical murals by the important Hungarian Jewish artist, The Crucifixion (1955) risks damage or dismantling in its current home, a now disused church in Oldham, England. Partially painted over in the 1980s, Save Britain’s Heritage hopes to list the artwork and restore it. (Guardian)

Two lovely works by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon and Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita achieved their rightful prices at this sale, which also included a portrait of pirate Barbarossa.

Carbon-dating on the stone piles unearthed by archaeologists revealed their extraordinary age, but the Neolithic relics’ purpose remains unknown, and further investigations will be carried out in upcoming months.

Constance Vale succeeds Igor Marjanović in the role at Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at St. Louis University. Director of Constance Vale Studio and The Factory of Smoke & Mirrors, Vale joined the school as an assistant professor in 2017, after teaching at SCI-Arc and the University of California. (eflux)

Musa Mayer, daughter of the Canadian American artist, donated the artworks that include 96 paintings and 124 drawings to the New York museum. With these works, the Met is now the largest holder of Guston's work. Mayer has also donated $10M to the museum to establish the Philip Guston Endowment Fund. (NYT)

The Gothic painting by Jacopo di Cione was previously owned by German-Jewish art historian August Liebmann Mayer, who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. Under a restitution settlement between Mayer’s heir and the estate of its late owner, the painting will be up for auction in New York at the end of January. (ARTnews)