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A 1917 drawing by Egon Schiele is at the center of a restitution case that will soon head to court in New York.

The work in question, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (1917), depicts Edith Schiele with her hands folded in her lap. The drawing was made a year before both Edith and the artist, both at 28 years old, during the 1918 influenza epidemic. Portrait of the Artist’s Wife is estimated to be worth several million dollars.

The heirs of two Jewish collectors, Karl Mayländer and Heinrich Rieger, have both claimed ownership of the work. Mayländer was a textile merchant; Schiele made at least two portraits of him. Rieger was Schiele’s dentist. Both were killed by the Nazis during World War II, and their respective heirs both claim their relatives lost the work during the Holocaust.

Philanthropist and art collector Robert Owen Lehman Sr., known for heading the Lehman Brothers investment firm through the Great Depression, bought Portrait of the Artist’s Wife from the London gallery Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd. for £2,000 ($5,600) in 1964. He then gifted the piece to his son, the award-winning documentary filmmaker Robert Owen “Robin” Lehman Jr., as a Christmas present. It remained with him until 1972, when Lehman Jr. briefly lost the work during his divorce; when his ex-wife died in 2013, the work was recovered from under her bed. In 2016, Lehman Jr. gifted the work to the Robert Owen Lehman Jr. Foundation.

The trial over the work’s ownership began in Rochester, New York, on Tuesday, with testimony expected to last until the end of May. In his ruling, State Supreme Court judge Daniel J. Doyle will consider circumstantial evidence, decades-old records, and a spotty provenance. Expert witnesses are expected to weigh in, with each party presenting evidence on their behalf.

A painting by Eramus Quelliness II stolen more than four decades ago was recently returned to its owner after being spotted at a regional auction house in a southern French town.

Chatsworth House in the English town of Derbyshire had lent A Double Portrait of Sir Peter Paul Rubens and Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1640s) to the Towner Art Gallery for an exhibition focused on works by Anthony Van Dyck, a Flemish Baroque artist.

The oil on wood painting was taken by thieves on May 26, 1979 after a “smash and grab” raid on the gallery’s exhibition. The burglars left several original drawings by Van Dyck that had also been on display and were much more valuable. (Christie’s sold a Van Dyck drawing for $2.1 million in February.)

“Some of the priceless drawings were left and they took this which I suppose looked more expensive,” Alice Martin, head of the Devonshire collections at Chatsworth House, told The Art Newspaper, which first reported the news Friday.

The painting was originally painted in preparation for an engraving and not for display on a wall. After the theft in 1979, it was assumed lost. An art historian spotted A Double Portrait of Sir Peter Paul Rubens and Sir Anthony Van Dyck listed for sale in Toulon, France, and alerted the British country house.

The website for Christie’s was taken offline by the auction house on Thursday evening after a “technology security issue” was discovered to be impacting some of its systems.

As of Friday afternoon, the website was still offline. A single webpage was available with the company’s name and a message reading, “We apologise that our website is currently offline. We are working to resolve this as soon as possible and regret any inconvenience.”

In a statement emailed to ARTnews, a spokesperson for the auction house said, “Christie’s confirms that a technology security issue has impacted some of our systems, including our website. We are taking all necessary steps to manage this matter, with the engagement of a team of additional technology experts. We regret any inconvenience to our clients and our priority is to minimize any further disruption. We will provide further updates to our clients as appropriate.”

The news was first reported by the New York Times on Friday at midday, calling the incident a “cyberattack” by hackers, though it was not clear on what that characterization was based.

The incident comes just days ahead of the May sales week in New York, a crucial period for the auctions houses and an important bellwether for the art market. On Tuesday, Christie’s will hold the Rosa de la Cruz Collection evening sale and its 20th/21st Century evening sale, which figure to be its sales of the season. One of the top lots for the latter sale is the Brice Marden diptych Event (est. $30 million–$50 million), apparently being consigned by Richard Schlagman, the enigmatic former owner of Phaidon Press.

Two climate activists smashed a part of the glass case protecting the original text of the Magna Carta, England’s historic charter of human rights, in the British Library in London on Friday. The pair, identified as Reverend Dr Sue Parfitt, 82, and Judy Bruce, 85, were detained by security staff. 

In a video posted to social media  by the climate group Just Stop Oil, Parfitt holds a chisel to the glass as Bruce hits the instrument with a lump hammer several times. Parfitt then brandished a banner bearing the words, “THE GOVERNMENT IS BREAKING THE LAW.” The document was not damaged according to a statement from the library.

The Magna Carta was a 13th century English treaty which established that no person, including monarchs, are above the law. Only four original copies of the treaty exist, two of which are held in the British Library, one in Salisbury Cathedral and the other in Lincoln Castle. 

Just Stop Oil actions have hit cultural institutions across Europe, as its members target famous artworks and world heritage in a bid to bring attention to the ongoing environmental collapse. 

In October 2022, two activists  glued themselves to Johannes Vermeer‘s The Girl with the Pearl Earring at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. The following year, arrests were made at London’s National Gallery after  The Toilet of Venus by Diego Velázquez was attacked with what appeared to be emergency rescue hammers. Both paintings were reported as undamaged by their respective stewards. The protests, meanwhile, have remained divisive in the art world and greater museum-going community, though show no sign of abating. 

Can New York sustain as many art fairs as its calendar currently has? As New York Art Week dragged into its second week yesterday, I—and I’m sure I’m not alone—began to wonder. With Frieze and its satellites behind us, this week brings Independent and TEFAF New York, which both opened to VIPs Thursday.

With a 1 p.m. start-time, TEFAF, the US iteration of the Dutch fair in Maastricht, was bustling and crowded by the start of its second hour. Perhaps that might have more to do with the fact that aisles were so narrow that navigating them was an obstacle in itself, or the fact that TEFAF’s booth architecture feels so intrusive that you forget you’re standing in one of New York’s architectural gems, the Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory.

And that doesn’t even begin to get us to what is actually on view. While TEFAF prides itself on presenting objects from antiquity to today in all forms—visual arts, design and furniture, and jewelry—this edition appeared lackluster. Add to that the fact that the fair’s floral arrangements, a signature of TEFAF, were also rather drab, lacking in the abundance of tulips that marked the fair’s arrival in 2016, where the flowers defied gravity and the champagne and oysters were flowing. (There were oysters Thursday but they too lacked the panache of the days of yore.) But as the day drew to a close, I did receive a few self-reported sales reports from galleries, so there’s that.

Below, the best of what’s on view at the 2024 edition of TEFAF New York, which runs through Tuesday, May 14.

In 1924, amid the wreckage of the Great War, French poet André Breton railed against the values of the world as it was and could never again be, one ruled by realism and rationality. “The mere word ‘freedom’ is the only one that still excites me,” Breton wrote in his Surrealist Manifesto. Revelations of the soul or society weren’t coming in the daytime. Only “the omnipotence of dreams,” he wrote, could liberate humanity. True or not, the ferocity of his belief inspired a century of strange poetry, paintings, sculpture, and more.

To mark the centennial of Surrealism, museums have once again measured the influence that the movement exerted—and still exerts—on art making. From an exhibition of Surrealist works by Caribbean and African Diasporic artists to a show of Surrealism from Eastern Europe, we’ve rounded up the dedicated programming worth catching worldwide.

Thebe Magugu is setting up house.

The South African designer has opened his first retail location in Johannesburg, but Magugu House is more than just a store. Set on a 32,000-square-foot plot in the upscale suburb of Dunkeld, the house and garden will also host exhibitions and events. 

Built in 1931, the home on leafy Bompas Road has been in the same family for three generations. It’s been converted to house both public spaces and the brand’s offices, in addition to an atelier for small custom productions. 

The ground floor, painted in signature shades of pistachio and terracotta, has a showroom, fitting room, reception room and two small art galleries showcasing the latest installment of Magugu’s Heritage capsule collection, alongside the project he did with Valentino as part of U.S. Vogue’s dress-swap initiative.

A nook in the entrance hall displays the book tote bearing the brand’s signature sisterhood emblem which he designed as part of his capsule collection for Dior.

To look upon Camille Claudel’s Torso of a Crouching Woman is to be shocked by it. Though the figure lacks a head, arms, and left knee, she is stolidly centered. The burnished bronze figure writhes, pulling the skin and tendons taut across the delicate bones of her back. The attenuated surface, animated by the innumerable minuscule movements required to maintain the figure’s equilibrium, trembles with life. The absence of the left knee, lower thigh, and upper shin exposes the figure’s breasts and abdomen; her bottom rests on the back of a sudden ankle. Despite the violence of the cleaved limbs, the sculpture radiates tenderness.

The work, one of 58 in the Getty Center’s recently opened exhibition on Claudel, transcends its fragmentary parts. After all, what woman has not been broken apart and yet endured? The figure’s plight and posture inevitably recall the anguish and desperation experienced by the artist as a 19th century woman determined to transcend the limitations of her time.

Claudel’s life story has often superseded her work. The best-known parts were both astonishing and tragic: her tumultuous relationship with her mentor, Auguste Rodin, who was both twenty-four years her senior and already a world-renowned sculptor, and her decades-long confinement in a mental hospital until her death. And much has been written about Claudel’s fraught familial relations and the immense mental and physical strain that she endured in order to make art at a time when women were primarily considered domestic property. However, curators Anne-Lise Desmas at the Getty Center and Emerson Bowyer at the Art Institute of Chicago, where the show initiated, furnish Claudel with a new story, deftly resurrecting the arc of her life and the revelation of her creative output.

The Getty show spans her oeuvre, from early portraits of her beloved brother to the bronze commissioned by the French state just before her internment, Wounded Niobid. In each, one can see both her prodigious natural facility and the distillation of her singular vision after years of self-discipline and study. From an early age, Claudel displayed an aptitude for sculpture and an intuitive feeling for light and shade. At 17, she was accepted to the Académie Colarossi–one of the few French art institutions to admit women–and by 20, was the principal assistant at Rodin’s rue de l’Université studio. 

To love Rodin’s exquisite hands is to love Claudel’s, both literally and metaphorically. Not only did Rodin model Claudel’s hands in many works, she herself fashioned many of the hands, feet, and heads included in some of his most monumental commissions, like The Gates of Hell, ostensibly a scene from Dante’s Inferno and The Burghers of Calais, a commemoration of French heroism. At the Getty, a striking selection of disembodied appendages and miniature heads demonstrate her anatomical acuity and an uncanny ability to imbue inanimate material with life. This ability is never more striking or haunting than in Study of Left Hand, a 10-inch black-bronze hand, its curved index finger hovering above the knuckles poised to extend toward the unassuming viewer an accusatory point. One can hardly imagine the innumerable times that Claudel, in acquiescence or resistance to her fate, held out her hands. She offers them again now. 

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THE HEADLINES

COOPER UNION PROTESTS. Students, faculty, and alumni of New York’s Cooper Union art and design school staged a walkout on Thursday to protest the school’s ties to Israel, reports ARTnews’ Tessa Solomon. They join other actions which are increasingly spreading around global campuses, and at art schools such as the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Demonstrators called for a “full disclosure” of the Cooper Union’s investment portfolio and divestment from any businesses connected to Israel, in addition to any weapons manufacturers. They also demanded a process be enacted for removing school board members via a vote by faculty, students, and alumni, and said a study abroad program at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem should be shut down.

CRUSHING IT. Apple apologized Thursday for an advertisement titled “Crush,” about its latest iPad Pro model, showing symbols and tools of artistic creativity, such as paint and musical instruments, being smashed by an industrial crusher in an animated video. Then the crusher reveals the new iPad model. “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry,” the company told Ad Age Magazine. The ad has already been seen over a million times on Apple’s YouTube channel and was shared by Apple CEO Tim Cook on social media. However, criticism was swift online, with actor Hugh Grant summing it up in his comment on X: “the destruction of the human experience courtesy of Silicon Valley.”

THE DIGEST

At art fairs, gallerists sometimes heed the not-so-invisible hand of the attention economy, mounting big, gauche presentations that seem designed to be photographed first and appreciated second. But spare, unflashy art can thrive at a fair, too, and the newly opened edition of Independent New York offers solid proof of that.

This year’s Independent, which opened its preview at Spring Studios in Tribeca on Thursday, is alive with energy in more than a few of its booths, but the jolts that the fair offers are largely gentle. That’s a good thing.

There are no artistic stunts and no mega-galleries at this fair, whose 77 exhibitors are predominantly mid-size operations. As has been the case in the past at Independent, which this year turns 15, the emphasis is on glossy, sleek art with an international flavor.

The fair is guilty of aesthetic conservatism—the vast majority of the work on view is painting, and much of it is fairly apolitical this time around. Then again, that’s the case for every art fair. This one, at least, has its pleasures. There’s a plethora of pieces by under-recognized and dead artists, and generally, there are few stars or market phenomena among the living, which means that there is new talent waiting to be noticed.

Below are eight of the best artists on view at Independent, which runs through Sunday.

13 min read

History is much closer than we think, especially in a city like Oxford. The people of Oxford walk through history with each step they take on the cobblestone streets and with each student that goes to one of the many halls for their classes. However, history is not only architecture, but also those who made it happen. As such, it is important to bring to light and honour to those who are oftentimes known, but not acknowledged.

March is International Women’s History Month, and Oxford has seen its fair share of women who have fought to be more than simply footnotes in history. Through their actions, they have inspired or paved the way for other women to continue the journey towards an equal society. Though their actions might have been singular in nature, a personal fight, in the grand scheme of things, it is important not to only view them as such. While the women remembered here might not have known each other, their actions had an impact on each other’s lives. Just like the stones in Oxford’s beautiful architecture, their actions built upon one another and inspired other people to either add another stone or use those stones to create a staircase so that the women after them could stand at even greater heights.

It is an honour to be able to remember these women today. They might not have been the first to stand on the moon, but they saw that true change in society came from taking steps to push for equality. It is easier to tread on a path where one has an idea of where to go thanks to the guidance of those before you, allowing them to explore further and to continue to fight. This is how the women here are connected with one another – one’s actions inspiring another and thus creating women who fought for the change they desired to see.

Lady Margaret Beaufort

February 17 – May 4, 2024

March 23 – May 4, 2024

April 18 – May 18, 2024

February 10 – May 4, 2024

April 6 – May 4, 2024

November 17, 2023 – May 5, 2024