News from the art world

Van Gogh drawing to break records

A reed-pen portrait of a young Provençal girl is likely to become the most expensive van Gough drawing ever sold when it goes under the hammer next month, said Anna PujolMazzini in The Daily Telegraph. Entitled La Mousmé, it was created in 1888, at a time when van Gogh had become fascinated by Japanese art, and spent much of his time poring over Japanese woodcuts. He had left Paris for the city of Arles (which he referred to as the “Japan of the south”) in search of peace and nature. He spent the summer there painting “landscapes of golden wheat fields”; then, when rain forced him to move indoors, he began to focus on portraits. The drawing (pictured) is a detail from an oil painting of the same name, which was inspired by Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème (a book which also inspired

Puccini’s Madama Butterfly). The painting hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC; the drawing is expected to fetch a record $7m-$10m at Christie’s in New York.

Grand plans for a disused Ikea

A disused Ikea store in Coventry could become home to “two of the UK’s largest and most important” collections of modern art, said Gareth Harris in The Art Newspaper. The Swedish retail chain closed its branch in the city last year with the loss of hundreds of jobs, but under plans drawn up by Coventry City Council, its former premises in the city centre may be offered to both the Arts Council and the British Council as a place to keep their vast holdings of 20th and 21st century British art. Both collections boast more than 8,000 artworks apiece by artists including Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, Grayson Perry and Tracey Emin, which are regularly loaned out to museums across the country but require permanent homes. The council has described the proposed National Collections Centre as “a multi-purpose collections and cultural facility” that “will contribute to a lasting physical, economic and cultural legacy” in Coventry, this year’s UK City of Culture.