Arts & Culture

LONDON — Wassily Kandinsky's 1907 canvas 'Das bunte Leben' (The Colorful Life) sold at Christie's London on October 14 for £31.56 million, roughly $42 million, above its presale estimate. The painting was owned by the Amsterdam couple Emanuel and Hedwig Lewenstein, who lost it during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. It then hung for nearly five decades in a Munich museum, on loan from the state-owned Bayerische Landesbank. In 2023 a German government advisory commission on Nazi-looted cultural property recommended that the bank return it. The bank accepted that outcome, and the painting went back to the family's heirs. The auction was the Lewenstein heirs' sale of the work after that return. It was the top lot of Christie's evening sale, which raised £218.6 million in total.

LONDON — Twenty-two works from the Dartington Hall Collection have been bought for the nation. Plymouth's The Box and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery in Exeter acquired them jointly. An £815,035 grant from the Art Fund paid for the whole purchase. The auction house Phillips brokered the deal and announced it ahead of its London evening sale. Three works from the collection had been due to appear in that sale. The sale itself was 100 percent sold and totalled £14.8 million. Phillips's usual headline came from young artists: Megan Rooney's 'Blue departure' (2021) made £245,000 against an estimate of £50,000 to £70,000. The report does not say when the Dartington works will go on public display.

SAN FRANCISCO — Nearly 300 authors filed five near-identical copyright suits against Meta Platforms on October 19 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. They allege Meta trained its AI models on pirated books and later on physical books it bought and scanned. Lead plaintiffs include Jacqueline Winspear, author of the Maisie Dobbs mysteries. Attorney Kyle Roche of Freedman Normand Friedland, working with Stris & Maher, says his firm represents more than 2,200 authors and expects to file up to 1,000 individual claims by year-end. The plaintiffs want juries to set damages, citing the $150,000 statutory maximum. The Anthropic settlement pays roughly $3,000 per work. Related Meta cases are set for jury trials from May 3, 2027, before Judge Vince Chhabria. Meta has argued that AI training is fair use. The Authors Guild backed the plaintiffs but said it prefers class actions.

NEW YORK — Catapult, the independent publisher founded in 2015 by Elizabeth Koch and Andy Hunter, is being sold and will end operations October 30, according to its newly formed staff union. The company includes the Counterpoint, Soft Skull and Hawthorne Books imprints. The Catapult Workers Collective, part of UAW Local 2110, said the sale covers assets only. It said it was told continued employment with the unnamed buyer was not an option. The union says the company announced sale plans while workers were voting on unionizing, a vote the union said it won by an overwhelming majority in June. The website lists 25 employees. The union is negotiating a separation agreement. What happens to the backlist and to authors under contract has not been announced.

LOS ANGELES — Netflix said Monday that film chief Dan Lin is leaving after nearly three years. He is the second top executive to go in under a week. Variety reported that he was dismissed at the start of the weekend. It came days after layoffs of roughly 1,000 employees, about 6% of staff, and the abrupt exit of content chief Bela Bajaria. Former Disney and Fox executive Peter Rice replaced Bajaria and will run the film division until a permanent head is named. Lin's deputy Doug Belgrad and independent-film head Sheroum Kim were also cut. Lin oversaw the animated hit 'KPop Demon Hunters,' an Oscar winner. Netflix has not explained the decision. Variety said an announcement on a replacement is expected within days. Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, the former Warner Bros. film chiefs, are widely rumored but unconfirmed.

LONDON — The 70th BFI London Film Festival gave its Best Film award to Sergei Loznitsa's 'Imperium.' The film is built from archival footage of the early-1970s Soviet Union shot by Italian cameramen. The Sutherland Award for first features went to Sompot Chidgasornpongse's '9 Temples to Heaven.' Asmahan Bkerat's 'Concrete Land' won the Grierson documentary prize, and 'Aman' won the short film award. In Australia, the Adelaide Film Festival named John Trengove's 'The Smell of Apples' best fiction feature and Dragana Jurisic's 'The Balkan Cowboy' best documentary. Each film received $10,000. In New Mexico, the Santa Fe International Film Festival's audience awards went to 'La Bola Negra,' Martin McDonagh's 'Wild Horse Nine' and Nanette Burstein's 'Carl Sagan: We Are All Star Stuff.' All three are being watched as Oscar contenders.

LONDON — Gramophone's 2026 Classical Music Awards, announced in London on October 7, gave Recording of the Year and the Instrumental Award to harpsichordist Jean Rondeau for his complete Louis Couperin on Erato. The set marks the composer's 400th anniversary and runs to ten CDs plus a DVD, covering about 300 works and 12 hours of music, recorded on historic harpsichords and organs across Europe. The Piano Award went to Leif Ove Andsnes and Bertrand Chamayou for their Schubert piano-duet album on Erato, which Gramophone's own piece praises as a corrective to the idea that the duets are merely domestic music. The Recording of the Year choice was not universally welcomed. Slipped Disc called the awards a 'death-wish' set, and a reader comment on that site asked why the Schubert disc had not won instead.

SEOUL — Lee Jung-woo, 18, won the piano division of the 20th George Enescu International Competition in Romania last month, Seoul Economic Daily reported on Thursday, citing the Hyundai Motor Chung Mong-koo Foundation, which supports him. He played Chopin's Second Piano Concerto in the final and took first place with five special prizes, among them the Radu Lupu Prize and the Audience Prize. His École Normale Cortot Prize includes a recital at the Salle Cortot in Paris in the 2028-29 season. The foundation also said Shin Young-ho, 19, placed second in the piano division of the Viotti International Music Competition in Vercelli, Italy, which closed October 17. Lee Joo-eon, 15, has won or placed at three U.S. contests this year. The information comes from the foundation, which backs all three pianists.

LONDON — Pianist Susan Tomes has released 'Women and the Piano' on Hyperion (CDA68489), a recital of mostly short works by women pianist-composers across more than 150 years. It grew from her book 'Women and the Piano: A History in Fifty Lives'. Reviewer Gerald Fenech, writing in Classical Music Daily, praised the programming and Tomes's commitment. The disc opens with a Galant-style sonata by Marianne Martínez and includes the only known work by Marianna von Auenbrugger, who died at 23. It also contains pieces by Hélène de Montgeroult, Maria Szymanowska, Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Sophie Menter, Teresa Carreño, Amy Beach and Cécile Chaminade. It ends with Raie Da Costa's light-music 'Razor Blades'. Fenech argues that much of this music dropped out of the repertoire because its composers lacked professional opportunities, not because of its quality.