Online Magazine No.381

20th/21st Century sale results, Pauline Boty, Capote’s ‘Swans’, Cosimo Castrucci, Poor Things, Blockchain-based art, and more | [Christie's]( [BUY]( | [SELL]( | [STORIES]( [Christie's] [Magritte, Bacon, Hockney and Monet drive 20th/21st Century London sales to £196m / $250m]( [‘Pure energy, total blasting joy’ — novelist Ali Smith on Pauline Boty’s tribute to Marilyn Monroe]( ‘ [Stylish art and objects with links to Truman Capote and his ‘Swans’ — all sold at Christie’s, of course]( [Poor Things: the designers of the sumptuous Oscar contender share the secrets of great interior design]( [Castrucci’s panorama of Prague — fashioned from semi-precious stones for a Holy Roman Emperor]( [‘A slow look at what can be a fast art’: Robert Alice on his landmark survey of blockchain-based art]( [More stories]( Editor’s picks [Alabama-born artist Danielle Mckinney often presents figures in private moments of comfort or leisure. In Home by 8 (2021), a solitary figure floats with arms outstretched in a heart-shaped pool set in a quiet courtyard, which the title suggests is a retreat from the outside world]( [Estimate: $50,000-70,000 13 March, New York]( [In this collection of 251 letters written between 1971 and 1988, the Surrealist Leonor Fini discusses her life and work with the art dealer and critic Castor Seibel. Her readiness to confide in him was not typical. ‘You have really won my friendship, which I very rarely give,’ she writes, underlining ‘very’ four times]( [Estimate: €30,000-40,000 12-21 March, Online]( [The domestic still life takes on an air of mystery in the work of Ana Mercedes Hoyos. Her close-up paintings of watermelons and bananas look like imaginary landscapes; and the flowers and bowls of fruit depicted in El gran desconocido (‘the great unknown’), dating from 1985, appear otherworldly in their glowing colours and fluid forms]( [Estimate: $40,000-60,000 12 March, New York]( [A love of Flash Gordon comics as a child in Milan led to Nanda Vigo’s lifelong obsession with futuristic design. The mid-century taste for what she called ‘wooden furniture from Sweden’ left her cold, so she turned instead to neon, glass, fur and — as in her ‘Manhattan’ floor lamp from 1972 — highly polished metal]( [Estimate: $5,000-7,000 until 12 March, Online](   © [Christie’s 2024]( [Web version]( | [Privacy policy]( | [Unsubscribe from Online Magazine]( Ali Smith with Pauline Boty (1938-1966), Epitaph to Something’s Gotta Give, 1962 (detail). Oil on board, in the artist’s painted frame. 40½ x 50¾ in (103.2 x 128.9 cm). Estimate: £500,000-800,000. Offered in the Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale on 20 March 2024 at Christie’s in London. Artwork: courtesy of the Pauline Boty Estate // Lee Radziwill at the Black and White Ball thrown by Truman Capote, 1966. Photo: Bettmann / Getty Images // The Baxter Dining Room in Poor Things, 2023. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. Photo: Atsushi Nishijima // Robert Alice at his studio. Artwork: © Robert Alice, All Rights Reserved