American art gets paranoid

Plus: In search of Sofonisba ͏‌

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Anna Brady reports on the November auctions in New York

Across the week, Sotheby's total sales came to more than $1.1bn (the second highest in the firm's history), Christie's around $964.5m and Phillips around $67.3m – all up from last year and back to a level not seen since the New York sales of May 2022. Auction houses often bemoan the lack of supply of quality works. Last week that was clearly not a problem. The question now is whether the market can absorb all of the blue-chip art that will emerge over the next decade through the Great Wealth Transfer and maintain the price levels. The answer, for now at least, is yes.

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Tim Smith-Laing on Marguerite Yourcenar's gift for evoking the past

Despite her near-legendary status in France – the most important French historical novelist of the 20th century, the first woman elected to the Académie française – Marguerite Yourcenar remains a lesser-known figure in the Anglophone world. While her best-known book, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), is a Penguin Classic, her second masterpiece, The Abyss (1968), has not graced a major list in English since 1994, and her other works are nearly impossible to find. With this in mind, the appearance of A Dream of Stone as part of David Zwirner's ekphrasis series is extremely welcome – even if only as a reminder of how much more should be on our shelves.

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Edward Behrens visits one of Paris's best but least-known museums

Fifty-nine Avenue Foch is home to the Musée d'Ennery, a curious part of the national collection of Asian art and an annex of the much better known Musée Guimet. It is open only on Saturdays. The building can accommodate no more than 15 people at a time yet the lucky few who enter will see a collection of Asian works of art that have been left exactly as they were in 1892. It consists of four large rooms (and a side chamber) dedicated to the the arts of China and Japan that include porcelain, jade, bronzes and netsuke. In the centre of the wall of the second room is a bust of the playwright Adolphe d'Ennery, the museum's namesake, who made a fortune out of adapting the novels of Jules Verne for the stage. Yet in a twist that could have come out of one of Verne's novels, to say the museum was named after him is a case of misidentification.

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Nick Trend goes in search of Sofonisba's paintings

Even at a time when women artists are the subject of major museum shows, the 400th anniversary of Sofonisba's death in 1625 is passing almost unnoticed. It seems that not a single exhibition is being held to mark the occasion. So, if you want to see Sofonisba's paintings, you will have to do a good deal of travelling and pick them off one by one. There are not many. Michael Cole, author of Sofonisba's Lesson (2019) identifies only 34 works 'largely accepted by specialists' out of some 200 which have been claimed for her (he also gives the provenances relied on here). But their collection during her life and their dispersal since her death, reveals a good deal about her reception by her contemporaries and her posthumous reputation.

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Nicole Iofreddi flourishes an ornamental sword from Lucknow

When the writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton came up with the phrase 'the pen is mightier than the sword' in 1839, he had surely never seen the swords crafted in Lucknow at the turn of the 19th century. Not only were these some of the most magnificent weapons being produced at this time, but their making also arose out of a violent history – one that rewrote the rules of power in the Indian subcontinent. In 1738–39, Nadir Shah, the emperor of Iran, invaded northern India. He and his forces sacked Delhi, raided the Mughal treasury and carted off the Peacock Throne, a jewel-studded 17th-century marvel that had taken seven years to make. Politically and symbolically this dealt a crushing blow to the Mughal Empire and, over the following decades, a number of regional courts started gaining prominence and power.

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In the current issue…

Contemporary American art is full of unease, writes Hettie Judah

Midway through the period explored in 'Sixties Surreal' at the Whitney, the historian Richard Hofstadter identified a tendency he dubbed, in the title of an essay of 1964, 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics'. The paranoid style encompassed qualities of 'heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy', and was characterised by 'paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people' in which 'the feeling of persecution is central [and] systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy'. Just as the Surrealism of 1920s Paris offers a way to read American art of the 1960s, so Hofstadter's concept of paranoid style offers well-tuned tools with which to approach the politics of our time.

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