March 7 – April 8, 2023

Ai Weiwei talks imprisonment, solutions, and making sense of the world

From lust to Bugs Bunny – the evolution of a symbol

Quiet "stealth luxury" is dominating runways and TV screens – but why now?

How historical authenticity swept the gaming world

Our verdict on the new Super Mario Bros. movie

As the movie Air premieres, we explore the rise of the ultimate cult sneaker

New Netflix series Transatlantic explores a covert WW2 operation

Why less is more in clothing, according to fans of capsule dressing

As her ski crash trial ends in her victory, why she splits opinion

Including the Super Mario Bros Movie, Renfield and Evil Dead Rise

(Spoiler alert: this article contains information and plot points from the fifth episode of The Exhibit, a docuseries created by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and MTV.)

For the fifth episode of The Exhibit, the seven artists were back at it again, this time reimagining one of their past works to represent their hopes for the future. The show may now be winding down, with just one more episode to go, but tensions still ran high as the artists raced to complete the assignment in ten hours.

This week’s guest judges, alongside Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu, included acclaimed sculptor and installation art Abigail DeVille, whose 2020 piece Light of Freedom currently resides in the museum’s sculpture garden, and Keith Rivers, an art collector, former NFL player, and member of the institution’s board of trustees. They judged the works on the basis of originality, quality of execution, and concept of work.

Nam June Paik, the video artist who predicted a paperless society in 1968 and created TV glasses in 1971, long before Google Glass existed, served as the inspiration for this week’s assignment.

Jennifer Warren created an oil painting of a screaming face that was based on her work Cool Facade, wherein she expressed her pure terror in the face of rapidly changing technology. Misha Kahn’s virtual reality painting inside of a 3-D sculpted frame was based on his childhood claymation video Chair on an Adventure.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is currently in the news for indicting former President Donald Trump, but it also continues to repatriates looted and stolen antiquities.

On March 31, the office of Alvin L. Bragg Jr. announced the repatriation of the Khmer Lintel, an 11th century structural element that was looted from Cambodia during the 1990s and smuggled into Thailand. The Khmer lintel formed the support for a temple door and featured carvings of celestial deities dancing together, known as apsaras in Hindu and Buddhist cultures.

According to the DA’s office, after the lintel arrived in Bangkok, it was sold by a local dealer to an American collector and remained in a private collection in Manhattan until its seizure last October.

“This is a beautiful piece that has been sitting in a private collection and hidden from the public view due to the actions of selfish looters,” Bragg said in a statement. “We will continue to make clear that stolen antiquities passing through Manhattan will be tracked down and returned to their countries of origin.”

The District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit has received a lot of press attention for the sheer volume of its recovery work, which includes several recent seizures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the repatriation of more than 950 items valued at approximately $180 million.

The Russian-owned auction house Phillips is in an uncertain financial position, according to audit records that were reviewed by the Guardian.

A recent audit carried out by a UK accounting firm found that the house is relying on guarantees—internal financial deals made with outside backers to secure funds on auctioned artworks—provided by two founders of the house’s parent company, a Russian luxury retailer. These guarantees, plus increasing debts, have reportedly forced Phillips into a situation where it faces “material uncertainty.”

In response to an ARTnews inquiry, a Phillips spokesperson said the questions raised about its financials do not affect its business internally. “Phillips regularly assesses its expenses on a regular basis. There are no planned adjustments to the company’s operations and staffing,” the spokesperson said.

The records reviewed by the Guardian stated that the dynamic could potentially place “significant doubt” on the business’s stability.

Phillips, one of the three largest auction houses in the world, oversees offices in New York, London, and Hong Kong. It is owned by Leonid Fridlyand and Leonid Strunin, the founders of Mercury Group, a Moscow-based luxury retailer.

A museum in Munich has taken down a Picasso portrait after a recent intervention from the German culture minister over its disputed ownership.

“I expressly call on the Bavarian state government to finally clear the way for the Bavarian State Painting Collections to agree to an appeal to the Advisory Commission,” Culture Minister Claudia Roth told the Bavarian publication Süddeutsche Zeitung. “This is really overdue now,” she said, hinting at passing a new restitution law.

The Limbach Commission, a government-established body that handles restitutions, has attempted to intervene in the dispute over the 1903 portrait Madame Soler by Pablo Picasso, which has been on display at the Pinakothek der Moderne for almost six decades. But the Bavarian State Painting Collections has not agreed to any mediation so far.

The removal of Picasso’s Madame Soler from public view at the museum is the latest development in a long and bitter dispute between the heirs of art collector Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and the Bavarian State Painting Collections, which bought the painting in 1964. The two parties disagree on whether the painting was sold under duress during the rise of Nazis in Germany.

Madame Soler portrays the wife of Picasso’s friend, the tailor Benet Soler, and was painted during the artist’s Blue Period. The museum has denied that this is a case of looted art, since owner-collector Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy transferred it across the Swiss border to an art dealer in the early 1930s amid rising antisemitism.

A bronze statue that held court over the Greek and Roman galleries at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for over a decade has been seized after an investigation found it was stolen from a Turkish archaeological site in the 1960s, according to the New York Times.

The statue, which researchers at the museum say is a depiction of the Roman ruler Septimius Severus, is the latest in a string of artifacts that seem to have found a home in the Met’s extensive collection despite coming from illegitimate sources.

The headless bronze statue is one of almost 20 items that have been “characterized as looted” by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office in the last three months, the Times reported, and is one of three items recently seized that are on the way back to Turkey.

Also being sent back to Turkey is a bronze head of Severus’s son and heir, Caracalla, who ruled as emperor after his father. Both bronzes are thought to be looted from Bubon, an archaeological site in the southeast “where members of the imperial family were worshiped during the period when Rome ruled the area,” the Times said.

According to the Times, restituting artifacts stolen from sites like Bubon has been a goal of Turkish authorities for years. Investigators said statues often were dug up by local farmers in the 1960s and sold, rather than being reported to the Turkish government.  

A Michigan college has ended its relationship with the Florida charter school whose principal was pressured to resign after parents complained that her Renaissance art syllabus, which included a picture of Michelangelo’s David, was inappropriate for sixth-graders. 

The Tallahassee Classical School, which was licensed to use Hillsdale College’s classical education curriculum, is no longer affiliated with the small, Christian college, Hillsdale spokesperson Emily Stack Davis said in a statement to MLive.com.

“This drama around teaching Michelangelo’s David sculpture, one of the most important works of art in existence, has become a distraction from, and a parody of, the actual aims of classical education,” Davis said. “Of course, Hillsdale’s K-12 art curriculum includes Michelangelo’s David and other works of art that depict the human form.”

The charter school license was “revoked and will expire at the end of the school year,” Davis added.

Hope Carrasquilla, the principal of Tallahassee Classical School, resigned earlier this month. The high-profile controversy began after the school children were shown Michelangelo’s David, which one parent called “pornographic,” the Tallahassee Democrat reported. The lesson also included Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, both of which contain nudity. 

Large iron staples have been found in Notre-Dame Cathedral’s stonework among the walls, columns, and tribunes. A recent study in the peer-reviewed journal Plos One revealed the find—and suggested that because of the staples, Notre-Dame may be even more significant than experts even realized.

Researchers used a radiocarbon-based dating method to determine that the iron staples were from the 800-year-old monument’s original construction. Historians have long thought that the metal pieces were added during renovations in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This discovery makes Notre-Dame “the first known Gothic cathedral where iron was massively used as a proper construction material to bind stones,” the researchers note. “Whereas other buildings used wooden tie rods stretched between the arches… the first master builder of Notre-Dame de Paris made the bold choice of a system using a more durable material that could be more easily concealed.”

With permission, the team removed some of the staples to examine them more closely and found that they weigh between four-and-a-half and nine pounds each and are approximately 8 to 20 inches in length. Additionally, the researchers found “that several pieces of iron, sometimes from different provenances, were welded together to form each staple.”

It is unclear why different metals were used, but this may reflect the overall duration of the project, which took more than a half-century to complete beginning in 1163.

It was the morning of July 11, 2022, when the Consul General of Mexico in New York City, Jorge Islas López, appeared at Arte Primitivo-Howard S. Rose Gallery. He was there as a representative of Mexico, trying to stop an auction and requesting the return of pre-Columbian goods that were being marketed online by the gallery. That day, he filed a reportwith Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. An investigation was launched.

That morning, Mexico rejected the auction on social media, as part of #MiPatrimonioNoSeVende (MyHeritageIsNotForSale), an online campaign that is led by the Mexican government. The campaign seeks to raise awareness of archeological goods that belong to Mexico and that are abroad illegally.

The Secretariat of Culture of Mexico and Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) disapproved two auctions conducted by Howard S. Rose Gallery because the gallery was selling pre-Columbian goods belonging to the cultural patrimony of Mexico, according to the bureau and institute. On July 11, 2022, the Secretariat said experts of INAH had identified 1,384 goods belonging to Mexico that were being sold in the auction. And on September 26, 2022, INAH’s experts identified more pieces, 152 of which were being sold by the gallery.

On November 10, 2022, Islas López said that he was going to reach out to all of the corresponding authorities regarding this case and rejected the auction.

“Nobody has the right to take the cultural and historical patrimony of a society and a country. Cultural patrimony tells us stories of the origins, the beginnings of a society,” Islas López said in an interview with ARTnews, speaking in the New York officeof the Consulate General of Mexico. “A community should not steal the identity of another community.”

London’s art scene will likely soon be able to rejoice: a valuable portrait by Joshua Reynolds, one of England’s most famous artists, seems sure to remain in the city some of the time, albeit under somewhat unusual terms.

London’s National Portrait Gallery and Los Angeles’s Getty Museum said on Friday that they will jointly acquire Reynolds’s ca. 1776 painting Portrait of Mai (Omai), putting an end in sight for the tense race to keep the painting within England before its export ban runs out. Still, because the museums will work together on the planned acquisition, the painting will move between England and the US, and could even appear at the Getty during the Olympics in 2028.

The acquisition is not finalized yet, and there is still the possibility it will not go through if both institutions can’t pay their halves of the £50 million ($61.9 million) needed to keep the work from leaving the UK. It is known, however, that the National Portrait Gallery has nearly raised its half, and the Getty has often acquired works for greater sums, such as the $53 million it paid at auction in 2021 for a Gustave Caillebotte painting.

International joint acquisitions such as this one are extremely rare. Never before has a UK museum linked up with a US institution to obtain a work in a situation such as this.

Nicholas Cullinan, director of the National Portrait Gallery, said in a statement, “The portrait is unique in both British and world culture and yet has never been in a museum collection: now it has the potential to be in two, one facing the Pacific from where Mai came, and the other only yards from Reynolds’ studio, where it was painted. For the Gallery it is important that this outstanding portrait is for the UK public, and we will share it with other institutions across the country.”