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2020 in art

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  • 4 chapters

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Through Oslo

Events

  • January 20 - Vincent van Gogh's Self-Portrait as a Sick Person (August 1889) from the collection of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo is verified by experts at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam as authentic.
  • February - A painting of a Head of an Old Man, previously rejected as an authentic Rembrandt, from the reserve collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, is confirmed through dendrochronology as painted on a board which had been in Rembrandt's studio.
  • February 10 - Rembrandt's Portrait of a Young Lady (1632) from the collection of the Allentown Art Museum in Allentown, Pennsylvania is announced as authentic having been reassessed after conservation.
  • February 11 - David Hockney's 1966 painting The Splash sells for £23.1m at auction at Sotheby's in London.
  • February 13 - A Banksy artwork for Valentine's Day appears on the side wall of a house in Barton Hill, Bristol, England.
  • March - COVID-19 pandemic in Scotland: The Rebel Bear and others paint street art in Glasgow.
  • March 10 - The discovery of Salvador Dalí's painting Purgatory Canto 32 in a Kitty Hawk, North Carolina thrift store is reported.
  • March 14 - Paintings by Van Dyck, Annibale Carracci, and Salvator Rosa are stolen from Christ Church Picture Gallery in Oxford, England.
  • March 30 - Vincent van Gogh's 1886 painting The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen (on loan from the Groninger Museum) is stolen from the Singer Laren museum in Laren, Netherlands while it is closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands.
  • April - The Hula Hoop Tree in Amber, Iowa is felled.
  • April 3 - A 1980 statue of Ivan Konev, a Marshal of the Soviet Union, in Prague is removed.
  • April 15 - Banksy posts on his Instagram account a series of pictures showing stencilled rats causing mayhem in a private bathroom during the coronavirus lockdown.
  • May - The San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in San Francisco, California in the United States announces that it will not be accepting new students for the fall 2020 semester ostensibly entailing its closure after 150 years, including having survived the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.
  • May 6 - A new Banksy framed artwork, Game Changer, in appreciation of nursing staff is hung in Southampton General Hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, later to be auctioned in aid of the health service.
  • May 7 - Quentin Blake's large artwork The Taxi Driver is the centrepiece of a one-man exhibition at Hastings Contemporary in England which opens on this day to be viewed only remotely due to the coronavirus lockdown.
  • May 26 - It is announced that this year's Turner Prize award in the United Kingdom is to be replaced by a bursary for 10 artists which will be announced in July due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • June 7 - An 1895 statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century merchant, slave trader, MP and philanthropist (by John Cassidy), is pulled down by British Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol, England.
  • June 11 - Fugitive art dealer Inigo Philbrick, accused of swindling artworks valued in excess of $20 million US is apprehended and arrested by U.S. government agents on the South Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu and then transported to the U.S. territory of Guam to face federal charges.
  • June and July - In Richmond, Virginia, in the United States, following a series of actions taken against monuments to both the leaders of the vanquished Military forces of the Confederate States and one to Richmond African American native son and tennis legend Arthur Ashe, including the emblazoning of the Ashe memorial with the graffiti tags "White Lives Matter" and then "Black Lives Matter" and attempts by crowds to pull down the effigies of the defeated nation's armed forces' field commanders; all of the statues of the military leaders of the Confederacy are removed by the City of Richmond from Monument Avenue where they had been since the first decade of the 20th century, with the exception of the semblance of Robert E. Lee which is on State of Virginia owned land. The Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, moves to remove the statue of Lee but is blocked by a court injunction issued after the filing of a lawsuit.
  • July - It is announced that the history of Salvator Mundi (c.1500) by Leonardo da Vinci, the most expensive artwork on record ever sold will be the subject of a forthcoming Broadway musical set to take the stage in 2021.
  • July 14 - Banksy reveals in a video that he had decorated the interior of a car of London Underground rolling stock with graphics, If You Don't Mask, You Don't Get, relating to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, subsequently removed by Transport for London.
  • July 15 - A statue rendered in black resin by Marc Quinn of a British Black Lives Matter protestor, A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) 2020, is installed clandestinely by the artist on the plinth vacated by overthrow of the Statue of Edward Colston in Bristol without official permission; it is removed from this location 24 hours later by Bristol City Council which tweets "This morning we removed the sculpture. It will be held at our museum for the artist to collect or donate to our collection".
  • July 22 - Berlin-based American-born German curator Rebeccah Blum is murdered and the suspect in the case, her former partner, the English Berlin-based photographer, Saul Fletcher, commits suicide.
  • July 28 - Sotheby's London stages an auction sale, 'Rembrandt to Richter', which includes Paolo Uccello's Battle on the Banks of a River ("probably the Battle of the Metaurus - 207 BCE") in part settlement with the Gutmann family for the work's forced sale by the Nazi Reich in 1942.
  • July 30 - Heather Phillipson's sculpture The End on the Fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square, London, is inaugurated.
  • October - Four museums; the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Tate Modern in London, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in canceling an upcoming Philip Guston exhibition, "Philip Guston Now" cite the works by the artist which employ depictions of hooded figures representing members of the American racist organization the Ku Klux Klan. After an enormous uproar the traveling exhibition is subsequeqntly rescheduled for dates beginning in 2022 in an amended form to include the contribution of contemporary artists and historians.
  • November 16 - Work to dismantle the flanking walls of a pavilion erected by Tadao Ando at Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester city centre in England (2002) begins.

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