Arts news

• Gagosian Teams Up with Movie Director Wes Anderson to Reimagine Joseph Cornell’s New York Studio

  06-11-2025 11:52 via artnews.com
  Gagosian has teamed up with move director Wes Anderson to recreate the New York studio of American artist Joseph Cornell at the mega-gallery’s Paris HQ. It will be part of an exhibition curated by Jasper Sharp and titled “The House of Utopia Parkway,” which is slated to run from December 16 to March 14, 2026.The gallery’s storefront gallery at 9 rue de Castiglione will be transformed into “a meticulously staged tableau, part time capsule, part life-size shadow box,
  
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• Franco Vaccari, Artist Who Expanded Photography’s Possibilities, Dies at 89

  12-12-2025 18:44 via artnews.com
  Franco Vaccari, an Italian conceptual artist whose experiments with photography expanded the medium’s possibilities, has died at 89. His death was announced by his gallery, the Bologna-based P420, which did not specify a cause.Vaccari died just four months before his work was due to be surveyed in a retrospective held at Museion in Bolzano, Italy. Opening in March, the exhibition was being staged to mark what would’ve been Vaccari’s 90th birthday and is due to explore how the a
  
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• Blenheim Palace Conservators Search For Writers of Century-Old Graffiti in Ceiling

  12-12-2025 17:01 via artnews.com
  Conservators currently at work restoring paintings in Blenheim Palace said they found the names of 11 people written in the ceiling decades ago, with the oldest dated to 1843.Blenheim Palace is the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, and is named after the 1704 Battle of Blenheim, which took place during the War of Spanish Succession. The land was given as a gift for the Duke’s military victory there, and construction started on the house in 1705. It was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in
  
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• A Crafty Show About State Fairs Stares Down the White House

  12-12-2025 16:40 via artnews.com
  Last March, when the Trump administration issued an executive order to “restore truth and sanity to American history,” the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) quickly became a target. Then, in August, the administration announced a comprehensive audit of all the Smithsonian’s exhibitions, didactics, and collections. Based on the executive order’s condemnation of any discussion of racism, sexism, and oppression as revisionist history, the audit promised to “celebr
  
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• See Inside Sotheby’s Star-Studded ‘Creators and Collectors’ Dinner

  12-12-2025 16:30 via artnews.com
  When Sotheby’s announced in 2023 that it had purchased, and would soon be moving its headquarters to, the iconic Breuer Building, it was all but certain that the auction house had big plans for it. Since opening the space in November, the landmark building, designed by architect Marcel Breuer and completed in 1966, has played host to one of Sotheby’s most successful sales seasons, as well as a packed schedule of ritzy opening events. Add one more: Sotheby’s inaugural “Cre
  
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• The ARTnews Guide to Post-Impressionism

  12-12-2025 15:00 via artnews.com
  Using post as a prefix for a chapter in art history can strike the ear as suggesting a period that, if not exactly a letdown from the one immediately preceding it, was too eclectic to earn its own specific title. Such was the case with Post-Impressionism, the panoply of styles that built upon the accomplishments of Impressionism.Encompassing the years between 1880 and 1900, Post-Impressionism introduced a diverse range of formal and thematic innovations that drove 19th-century art to new levels
  
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• Tate Director Maria Balshaw to Step Down After Nearly a Decade at the Helm

  12-12-2025 14:17 via artnews.com
  Maria Balshaw, the director of London’s Tate, has announced that she will step down from her role in spring 2026. She joined the museum in 2017 after directing the Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth Art Gallery. Her predecessor was Nicholas Serota, who led Tate for almost 30 years.
  “It has been an absolute privilege to serve as director of Tate over this last decade and to work with such talented colleagues and artists,” Balshaw said in a statement. “With a growing
  
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• Protests Arise as New York’s New School Threatens Severe Cuts to Staffing and Programs

  11-12-2025 22:55 via artnews.com
  As part of a radical “restructuring” to address a $48 million deficit, New York’s New School for Social Research is offering voluntary severance programs to a large group of faculty and staff. A December 3 email laying out the terms of the offer, which ARTnews has reviewed, went to 169 members of faculty and staff, including some forty percent of full-time faculty. The letter named a December 15 deadline to decide on whether to accept the offer.According to the American Associa
  
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• Christie’s to Sell Billionaire Bill Koch’s $50 M. Collection of American West Artworks

  11-12-2025 20:53 via artnews.com
  Christie’s announced Thursday that it will stage a single-owner sale of works owned by billionaire Bill Koch over two sessions on January 20 and January 21.The “Visions of the West” sale will feature dozerns of works owned by Koch, with a heavy emphasis on American artists who depicted the American West and the frontier. Frederic Remington, Charles Marion Russell, and Albert Bierstadt are among the artists whose works are to be sold from the collection.Koch, 85, is the lesser k
  
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• Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Repatriates 2,500-Year-Old Treasures to Turkey

  11-12-2025 20:30 via artnews.com
  The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond has returned 41 terracotta relief fragments valued around $400,000 to Turkey after an investigation led by the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. The works, acquired by the VMFA in the 1970s, were found to have been illegally taken from a Phrygian temple dating back to the 6th century B.C.E.The museum purchased 34 of the reliefs from Summa Galleries in Beverly Hills, California, in 1978, and the
  
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• Rijksmuseum and Municipality of Eindhoven Will Partner on a New Museum

  11-12-2025 20:22 via artnews.com
  The Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands in Amsterdam, announced today that it will partner with the municipality of Eindhoven to build a satellite branch in Eindhoven. The branch will show works from the Rijksmuseum’s collection.With a collection of over one million objects, the Rijksmuseum is famous for its holdings of Dutch art from 1200 to now, including works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, Judith Leyster, Frans Hals, Rachel Ruysch, Vincent van Gogh, Karel Appe
  
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• Ceal Floyer, Artist Whose Sculptures Bend the Mind and Confuse the Eye, Dies at 57

  11-12-2025 19:23 via artnews.com
  Ceal Floyer, an artist whose spare sculptures charmed and confused in equal measure, died on Thursday at 57. Esther Schipper, the Berlin-based gallery that represented her alongside Lisson and 303, said that she died after a long battle with illness.Floyer received international attention for sleek artworks that consider how meaning is constructed. Working within a long tradition of conceptual art that extends back to the 1960s, Floyer often made sculptures using familiar objects such as ladders
  
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• Post-Fair Expands for Its Second Edition With Broader International Reach

  11-12-2025 18:18 via artnews.com
  Post-Fair will return to Santa Monica from February 26–28 for its second edition, bringing 30 galleries—and 31 total exhibitors including the project space Untitled Love—back to the Art Deco former post office that helped define the fair’s early identity.Founded by Los Angeles dealer Chris Sharp, the fair debuted last year as a deliberately low-cost counterpoint to Los Angeles’s increasingly expensive fair landscape. Its inaugural edition offered single-artist prese
  
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• Paris’s Modern Art Museum Is the Proud New Owner of 61 Henri Matisse Works

  11-12-2025 18:15 via artnews.com
  When the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris mounted the exhibition “Matisse and Marguerite: Through Her Father’s Eyes,” the world took note, with feature articles in the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal recounting the life of his eldest daughter, conceived in an affair with one of his models, Caroline Jaoblau. When the show closed over the summer, Barbara Dauphin Duthuit, the wife of Henri Matisse’s grandson, opted to give the museum the 61 works she had l
  
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• UK Police Seek Suspects in “High-Value Burglary” at Bristol Museum

  11-12-2025 18:14 via artnews.com
  More than 600 artifacts have been stolen from the Bristol Museum’s British Empire and Commonwealth collection, in what UK police describe as a “high-value burglary.”On Thursday, authorities released CCTV footage of the suspects as part of a public appeal for leads on the robbery, which occurred in the morning hours of September 25. A police spokesperson said that information on the theft had been withheld until now to accommodate the investigation.The BBC reported that mil
  
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• Vancouver Art Gallery and Modern Art Museum in Paris Receive Major Gift, Rare Illuminated Jewish Prayer Book Heads to Auction, and More: Morning Links for December 11, 2025

  11-12-2025 16:29 via artnews.com
  To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.The Headlines GIVING TIME. A few notable museums have just announced landmark donations to their permanent collections. The Vancouver Art Gallery has received a “transformative” gift of 131 artworks from an anonymous Hong Kong collector, reports the South China Morning Post. The donated, “living” collection, meaning that new works can
  
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• A Searing Petition Protests Serbia’s Venice Biennale Pick, Calls Out the ‘Collapse of Culture’

  11-12-2025 16:11 via artnews.com
  It seems the US is not the only country whose Venice Biennale pick is stirring up discontent in the arts community back home. Prague-based artist Predrag Đaković was tapped to represent Serbia at the 2026 Venice Biennale with a project titled “Across Golgotha to Resurrection.” Serbia’s Ministry of Culture reportedly announced the competition on its website on September 6, with a one-month deadline, but did not announce Đaković’s win. Instead,
  
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• Gagosian to Stage Survey of Jasper Johns’s Crosshatch Paintings in New York

  11-12-2025 14:00 via artnews.com
  Half a century after Jasper Johns first unveiled his crosshatched paintings at Leo Castelli Gallery, the series is returning to center stage. On January 22, 2026, Gagosian, working with Castelli Gallery, will open a landmark survey of these works at its longtime 980 Madison Avenue flagship, where the exhibition will remain on view through March 14. The show marks the 50th anniversary of the crosshatched paintings’ debut in 1976 and nods to another historical hinge: Gagosian inaugurated the
  
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• Using AI and Abstract Paintings, WangShui Is on a Journey to Understand Love

  11-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  Artists who work with technology are typically viewed as nerds sequestered in studios filled with hardware, gadgetry, and complex wiring. But WangShui, an artist who made their name on innovative abstract paintings made with the assistance of AI, positions themself less as a geek than a hermit with a romantic worldview. “To me, being an artist is a spiritual project, and it always has been, no matter what tools I’ve used,” they told me during a visit to their New York studio ea
  
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• Tom Jung’s 1977 ‘Star Wars’ Painting Fetches $3.9 M., Breaking Auction Record for the Franchise

  10-12-2025 23:44 via artnews.com
  At a Heritage Auctions sale of Hollywood memorabilia in Dallas on Wednesday, a Star Wars painting sold for $3.88 million, breaking the record for an object associated with the series.The work, a painting by illustrator Tom Jung, served as the original half-sheet poster for Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope when it was first released in 1977. The work was consigned by the family of the film’s producer Gary Kurtz, who has owned it since it was first produced by Jung.The work first app
  
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• Consultants’ Gulf Gold Rush, South Arts New CEO and More: Industry Moves for December 10, 2025

  10-12-2025 21:31 via artnews.com
  Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.Happy Thursday! Here’s a round-up of who’s moving and shaking in the art trade this week:South Arts Names Doug Shipman as Next President and CEO: Shipman will depart his post as Atlanta’s City Council president to take the helm of the regional arts nonprofit in January, overseeing
  
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• Sotheby’s Nets $133 M. from Abu Dhabi Collectors’ Week as Its Luxury Prospecting Strikes Gold

  10-12-2025 21:27 via artnews.com
  Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.Last week, Sotheby’s took over the ritzy St. Regis Island Resort on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, transforming two of its restaurants into showrooms—one touting handbags, diamonds, and watches, the other staging a non-selling display of $500 million worth of art. In the palm-shaded gard
  
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• Louvre Thieves Evaded Police by a ‘Hair’s Breadth,’ Says Investigator

  10-12-2025 20:11 via artnews.com
  The thieves who stole jewelry from the Louvre evaded capture in October “by a hair’s breadth,” a senior official from the administrative inquiry into the museum’s security failings told the French Senate on Wednesday, as reported by Le Figaro.Noël Corbin, director of the General Inspectorate of Cultural Affairs (IGAC), noted that Louvre agents or the police had a chance to prevent their escape. Another rapporteur for the investigation, Pascal
  
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• Lalanne’s ‘Hippopotame Bar’ Sells for $31.4 M., Shattering Design Auction Record

  10-12-2025 20:05 via artnews.com
  François-Xavier Lalanne’s Hippopotame Bar sold today for a staggering $31.4 million at Sotheby’s in New York, shattering every precedent in the market for design and setting a new auction record for the artist by a wide margin. Estimated at $7 million–$10 million, the hand-wrought copper bar more than tripled its high estimate after a 26-minute bidding contest among seven bidders.Not only does the result confirm Lalanne’s commercial star power, it also re
  
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• Now’s Your Chance to Snag a $1.12 M. Picasso for Just $115 in a Global Raffle for Alzheimer’s Research

  10-12-2025 19:57 via artnews.com
  You might associate raffles with pretty low stakes: pitch in a few dollars for the Girl Scouts, say, and win a chance for something like a gift card or a spa day. But now aspiring art collectors can donate just €100 (about $115) to a raffle organized by France’s Fondation Recherche Alzheimer and win the chance to take home a Pablo Picasso valued at €1 million ($1.2 million).Entrants can buy one of 120,000 tickets at the site 1picasso100euros; the draw will take place April 14, 20
  
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• Now’s Your Chance to Snag a €1 M. Picasso for Just €100 in a Global Raffle for Alzheimer’s Research

  10-12-2025 19:57 via artnews.com
  You might associate raffles with pretty low stakes: pitch in a few dollars for the Girl Scouts, say, and win a chance for something like a gift card or a spa day. But now aspiring art collectors can donate just €100 (about $115) to a raffle organized by France’s Fondation Recherche Alzheimer and win the chance to take home a Pablo Picasso valued at €1 million ($1.2 million).Entrants can buy one of 120,000 tickets at the site 1picasso100euros; the draw will take place April 14, 20
  
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• Yokohama Triennale Announces Co-Artistic Directors for 2027 Edition

  10-12-2025 19:54 via artnews.com
  Japan’s Yokohama Triennale has announced Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero as co-artistic directors for its 9th edition, set to open at the Yokohama Museum of Art on April 23, 2027. Costinaș, from Romania, is a writer and critic. He is a senior curator at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, an art center in Berlin; at the end of the year, he will transition from his current role and become a curatorial adviser to the museum. Guerrero, from Bogotá, is a professor in the School of C
  
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• The New Mexico Desert That Inspired Georgia O’Keeffe Is Now a Protected Zone

  10-12-2025 18:50 via artnews.com
  A conservation plan is underway to safeguard the spectacular stretch of New Mexico desert that inspired some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s most enduring artworks. The initial phase establishes a protected area spanning some 26 square kilometers near Abiquiu, in northern New Mexico, encompassing the sandstone bluffs and grasslands familiar to fans of the modernist artist. The land is owned by a charitable arm of the Presbyterian Church, which partnered with the New Mexico Land Conservanc
  
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• San Francisco Asian Art Museum Returns Stolen Ancient Sculptures to Thailand

  10-12-2025 18:45 via artnews.com
  After years of research revealed they had been illegally removed in the 1960s, four ancient bronze sculptures were transferred from San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum to their original home in Thailand as a result of an investigation led by the US Department of Homeland Security.The works, most recently featured in the 2024 exhibition “Moving Objects: Learning from Local and Global Communities,” were connected to Douglas Latchford, a dealer indicted for illegally trafficking in S
  
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• ‘Nnena Kalu was ready for this – nobody else was’: how her Turner prize victory shook the art world

  10-12-2025 18:22
  As the first learning-disabled artist to win the UK’s most prestigious art award, Kalu has smashed a ‘very stubborn glass ceiling’. Her facilitator reveals why her victory is so seismic – and the secrets of her party playlistThe morning after the Turner prize ceremony, the winner of the UK’s most prestigious art award, Nnena Kalu, is eating toast and drinking a strong cup of tea. Everyone around her is beaming – only a little the worse for wear after dancing t
  
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