Daily art news

Sotheby's Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art is currently underway in New York and a number of exceptional prices have already been achieved: · A new auction record for Amedeo Modigliani was set tonight when the artist’s iconic Nu assis sur un divan (La Belle Romaine) sold for a remarkable $68,962,500. Five different bidders competed for the stunning nude, driving the price well past the more than $40 million* that had been expected.

This is Thebian priestess Henutmehyt, from the 19th Dynasty (around 1250 BC), at the British Museum in London,. The exhibition opened on Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2010 , it brings together treasures from the museum's collection of Egyptian artifacts, including fragile papyrus scrolls that are rarely shown in public. A major new exhibition at the British Museum hopes to shed new light on the book, which was not a single volume, but a series of spells and illustrations inked onto papyrus scrolls and designed to help the dead make the perilous journey to the afterlife. 

Lincoln Center’s inaugural White Light Festival, running Oct. 28 to Nov. 18, offers a series of programing meant as an antidote to the collective experience of harried and relentlessly pressured 21st-century life in New York City.