Arts news

• Key Louvre Security Password at Time of Heist Was Reportedly ‘Louvre’

  06-11-2025 21:51 via artnews.com
  It’s yet unclear what tone the cinematic retelling of the Louvre jewel heist will take, but the latest revelation from Paris suggests a farce. A French court released a scathing report on Thursday detailing how leadership at the Louvre—home to some of the world’s most famous artworks—prioritized high-profile acquisitions and renovation projects over recommended security upgrades. Adding humiliation to injury, allegations emerged today that at the time of the heist, w
  
  Read more

• David Zwirner Benefit Exhibition Raises Nearly $1 M. for Ali Forney Center, Tripling Its Goal          

  12-12-2025 21:08 via artnews.com
  “Toward the Light: Artists for the Ali Forney Center,” an exhibition at David Zwirner gallery in New York, was only on view at the gallery for four days, but during that short time, it raised $950,000 for the Ali Forney Center, a nonprofit that runs a 24-hour drop-in center for queer youth and offers assistance with housing, education, job training, and medical care.Its curator, art adviser Stephen Truax, initially had the goal of raising $350,000, slightly more than was raised at la
  
  Read more

• New ‘Museumbrary’ Designed by SANAA Opens in Taichung

  12-12-2025 20:38 via artnews.com
  The Taichung Green Museumbrary—new contemporary art museum and public library complex in Taichung, Taiwan, that may count as the first institution ever to have a portmanteau for a name—opens tomorrow. The long-awaited institution houses both the Taichung Art Museum and the Taichung Public Library, both of which will be connected by a roof garden known as the Culture Forest.“This integrated design reflects the museum and library’s vision of learning as a shared, living pra
  
  Read more

• Pope Leo Repatriates Indigenous Artifacts from Vatican Back to Canada

  12-12-2025 20:21 via artnews.com
  After years of negotiations starting with a visit by the late Pope Francis in 2022, the Vatican repatriated a wealth of Indigenous cultural treasures that were unveiled this week in a warehouse belonging to the Canadian Museum of History. The institution in Gatineau, Quebec—around a 2.5-hour drive west of Montreal—is currently storing the 62-object handover while Indigenous elders and experts take stock of each piece and investigate its origins.As reported by the Canadian Broadcastin
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• TONO Reveals 2026 Festival Lineup Across Mexico City and Puebla

  12-12-2025 19:51 via artnews.com
  TONO, the time-based art festival, has announced the lineup for its 2026 edition, returning March 6–22 with a slate of new and existing video installations, performance commissions, music events, and screenings across Mexico City and Puebla. Programming will span major institutions including Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Casa del Lago UNAM, Museo Jumex, and Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, with additional exhibitions at Museo Amparo in Puebla. This year’s live program incl
  
  Read more

• Why Is Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss So Important?

  12-12-2025 19:31 via artnews.com
  In 1900, the events of the 20th century still lay ahead, its horrors and epochal upheavals unknown. But in one European metropolis, signs of that future could be gleaned from the social, political, and artistic unrest that roiled it.Vienna in the years leading up to World War I was the capital of an unstable dual-state domain, Austria-Hungary, whose decrepit monarch, Emperor Franz Joseph I, presided over a powder keg of ethnic groups. These included Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, and
  
  Read more

• Trump May Demolish Historic D.C. Buildings With Priceless Murals by Philip Guston, Ben Shahn, and Other Artists

  12-12-2025 18:58 via artnews.com
  Earlier this week, a retired General Services Administration official accused the Trump administration of attempting to demolish four historic federal buildings in Washington, D.C., including the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, Bloomberg Law reported.The former official, Mydelle Wright, made the allegation in a supplemental declaration filed in a case brought by preservation groups seeking to stop President Trump from painting a stone federal building. Wright said the White House is soliciting
  
  Read more

• Artist Arrested at Art Basel Miami Beach After Chalk ‘Performance’ Involving His Daughter

  12-12-2025 18:53 via artnews.com
  A performance artist from Luxembourg managed to turn a few scrawled lines of washable spray chalk into a night in jail during Art Basel Miami Beach—an outcome he claims was both unexpected and meaningful.Thomas Iser was arrested last week after spray-painting the words “Sorry to disturb, art in progress,” in exaggerated graffiti-style lettering, on a window of the Miami Beach Convention Center during the United States’ largest art fair. He then invited his three-year-old
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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,
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

Follow @ArtsUKnews on Twitter!