Indian Artist Jogen Chowdhury Has Died, $80 M. Klimt Heads to Christie’s, and More: Morning Links for October 26, 2026

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Good morning!

• A major work by Gustav Klimt will go under the hammer at Christie’s New York next month with a price tag of $60 to $80 million.
• Celebrated Indian artist Jogen Chowdhury died in Kolkata on October 25 at 87.
• The National Gallery Singapore’s chief curator Patrick Flores and assistant chief executiveChris Lee, are the latest to depart the institution in December amid a staff shake-up.

The Headlines

KLIMT IS COMING. A major work by Gustav Klimt will go under the hammer at Christie’s New York next month with a price tag of $60 to $80 million, and it’s guaranteed to sell, reports ARTnews. If sold on November 17th, Klimt’s lush, green landscape painting Litzlbergkeller (1915-1916), which has been in the same private collection for nearly three decades, would put it among the Austrian artist’s top prices at public sale. The current, unnamed owner paid $14.7 million for it at Sotheby’s in 1997, which is the equivalent of $30.9 million today. “The inn of Litzlbergkeller sits at the water’s edge, between Klimt’s allover technique and abstraction, form and dissolution, prewar and certainties and the unknown,” said Max Carter, global chairman of 20th and 21st century art. Klimt’s current auction record is for Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914-16), sold at Sotheby’s, New York in November 2025 for $236.4 million.

IN MEMORIAM. One of India’s most celebrated artists, Jogen Chowdhury, died in Kolkata at 87, reports The New Indian Express. He had been ill with a rare type of blood cancer, according to his family. Trained at the Government College of Art & Craft from 1955 to 1960 and later at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 1960s, he was among a second generation of postcolonial artists who reshaped contemporary art in India. “Chowdhury’s rich contributions in the field of art are evident in numerous government buildings … The works he left behind will remain for centuries,” said West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari. Known for his figurative expressionist works, often using a cross-hatching technique to distort the human body, Chowdhury blended Western modern artistic currents with local Indian influences. In the 1960s and 1970s, “many of our major artists were fond of doing abstract art, thinking that it was ‘Modern’ and the ultimate expression of art,” Chowdhury told The Punch Magazine in late 2020.”

The Digest

The National Gallery Singapore‘s chief curator Patrick Flores and assistant chief executive Chris Lee, are leaving the institution in December, coinciding with the departure of its chief executive and director, Eugene Tan. [The Straits Times]

Some 600 Nazi-era artifacts, including personal letters from concentration camps, index cards kept by the Gestapo, and others, will go to museums and will no longer be auctioned in Germany, following an international outcry. [Monopol]

British Indian art expert Charles Greig has donated 50 18th and 19th-century artworks made in India to the Tate. [ARTnews]

Sotheby’s is holding its first auction in Abu Dhabi on December 10, titled Breaking Ground, following Christie’s first fine art auction in the city on November 1, located at the new Saadiyat Grove Experience Centre on Saadiyat Island. [The National]

Archaeologists have discovered a rare shipwreck from the 15th century, believed to be the oldest known Swedish warship. [Le Figaro]

The Kicker

IN MEMORIAM. Photographer Miguel Bergasa, who photographed Paraguay’s religious Mennonite community, has died, reports El País. Born in Pamplona, Spain, in 1951, Bergasa was known for his black-and-white documentary photographs of rural festivals and rituals at risk of erasure. “I like to capture images of things you know time will erase. There’s a sense of longing,” he once said.