The Artnet Bulletin is our new daily digest of five items from around the art world that are worth knowing. A different writer takes over each morning.
The Odyssey and Spider-Man star Tom Holland has a serious collecting addiction. A bunch of recent articles link the 30-year-old to various rare timepieces, including a Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar 5940R and a platinum Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, the six-figure chronograph he has been seen wearing throughout The Odyssey press tour.
In 2018, at the ripe age of 22 (when most people are worrying about graduating from college), Holland flashed a Patek Philippe Aquanaut 5167R-001 at Wimbledon, wore Cartier’s Drive de Cartier Moon Phases at the Rome premiere of Spider-Man: Homecoming, and donned a Piaget Altiplano Skeleton to the Academy Awards.
Someone needs to get this guy bitten by the art bug.
The Joan Mitchell Foundation just announced its 2026 fellows. The annual distinction recognizes 15 artists working in painting and sculpture. Each fellow receives $60,000 in unrestricted funds, distributed over the course of five years.
Congratulations to the fellows: Krista Clark (Atlanta), Cameron Clayborn (Memphis, Tennessee), Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo (Davidson, North Carolina), Beatriz Cortez (Los Angeles and Davis, California), Azza El Siddique (New Haven, Connecticut), Sam Frésquez (Chicago), Coulter Fussell (Water Valley, Mississippi), vanessa german (Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina), Porfirio Gutierrez (Ventura, California), Roscoe Hall (Birmingham, Alabama), Janet Olivia Henry (Jamaica, New York), Erica Lord (Santa Fe, New Mexico), Rob Rhee (Seattle), Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya (Sunland Park, New Mexico), and Dianna Settles (Lexington, Kentucky).
The Guggenheim New York landed on the cover of this week’s issue of the New Yorker. It shows Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling landmark through a clearing in a forest, with the black silhouettes of deer grazing in the foreground. The image is by Eric Drooker, the painter and graphic novelist.
“I grew up amid Manhattan’s monotonous grid and found the endless boxes, aligned along strict perpendiculars, overwhelming,” Dooker told the magazine. “As a child, the Guggenheim’s round form was my oasis. In a hectic, crowded metropolis, it was a breath of fresh air, a return to nature.”
We don’t really know who messed around with Pieter de Hooch’s painting A Man Smoking and a Woman Drinking in a Courtyard (1658–60), but it’s now clear that at least one figure was painted out of the composition. The motive is a mystery, but it may have been money or modesty, Smithsonian Magazine reports.
Pieter de Hooch, Figures in a Courtyard (1658–60). Courtesy: Mauritshuis, the Hague.
True to its title, the painting shows a man smoking and a woman drinking, as a girl observes from the sidelines. But restorers at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Netherlands, concluded that the scene originally also depicted a second man: a soldier seated at the table, holding a beer jug, suggesting that the trio was playing a drinking game.
De Hooch painted another version of the scene, now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Titled A Dutch Courtyard, it shows both soldiers, the woman, and a child. They used this work as a guide to paint the missing guy back in—and changed the title to Figures in a Courtyard. Somewhere, the artist is smiling.
Move over, Julian Schnabel: A one-man play honoring radiant child Jean-Michel Basquiat is returning to New York. Created and performed by Roger Guenveur Smith, In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat will begin performances at New York Theatre Workshop on September 9 and run through October 4.
The Obie Award-winning actor, playwright, and director is best known for his role as Smiley, the Basquiat-inspired artist and arsonist in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). Turns out the thespian met Basquiat in Los Angeles in the 1980s, and the two men became friends and collaborators.
The show had a limited engagement at Minnesota’s Penumbra Theatre two years ago. A review in the Minnesota Star Tribune called it “spellbinding” and compared Smith to “a mesmerizing monument.”
“His feet hardly move as he gestures during the hourlong show,” Rohan Preston wrote. “Yet Smith’s words flow over the audience like some kind of spider silk, binding and holding us in thrall even as we remain hyperaware.”
Join us tomorrow, when my colleague Andrew Russeth picks up the baton.