Yayoi Kusama Retrospective at Museum Ludwig Sets Attendance Record

The Museum Ludwig in Cologne concludes its most successful exhibition ever, a retrospective of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (97), which attracted over 450,000 visitors, surpassing the previous record of about 380,000 set by an Edward Hopper show in 2004/2005. To accommodate demand, the museum will stay open until 2:00 a.m. on the nights of August 1 and 2, with tickets sold at the museum box office from 8:00 p.m. each evening. The exhibition, featuring 300 works from Kusama's early childhood drawings to the present, will travel to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, opening mid-September. In other auction news, Henri Matisse's 1919 painting "La Chaise lorraine" sold for $41.5 million at Sotheby's New York evening auction, far exceeding its $25 million estimate. Carla Accardi's double-sided screen painting "Fonda notte"/"Pieno giorno" (1986) fetched €400,000 at the Dorotheum in Vienna, ten times its estimate, setting a record for the artist. Constantin Brancusi's gilt bronze "Danaïde" (c. 1913) achieved a record $93 million at Christie's Rockefeller Center, part of the collection of publisher S. I. Newhouse. The Brancusi exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin runs until August 9.