September 1 – October 21, 2023

Photographer Ellen von Unwerth talks burlesque, Britney and creating dreamworlds

Why the wives and girlfriends of footballers hold such a fascination for Brits

The shocking true story behind Scorsese's latest epic

How Gideon Mendel is a 'deep witness' to loss through flooding and wildfires

How the Queen of Pop is finally celebrating her legacy, and showing her humanity

Our newsletter just got a lot more essential. Find out what you're missing.

How a silent protest at the 1968 Olympics reverberated for years to come

Sashiko is easy, practical and beautiful – and gaining fans around the world

Why unsettling comedy The Curse is one of 2023's greatest series

Yayoi Kusama recently addressed her racist descriptions of Black people in several written works, including her 2003 autobiography Infinity Net, just before the opening of her latest exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMOMA).

“I deeply regret using hurtful and offensive language in my book,” the Japanese artist said in an exclusive statement to the San Francisco Chronicle supplied by the museum on Friday. “My message has always been one of love, hope, compassion, and respect for all people. My lifelong intention has been to lift up humanity through my art. I apologize for the pain I have caused.”

The museum’s choice to feature Kusama was criticized by Chronicle columnist Soleil Ho earlier this week. In an email statement to Ho, museum Director Christopher Bedford said that “SFMOMA stands firmly against these and all anti-Black sentiments.”

Bedford also told the Chronicle in a phone interview, “We can use this moment as a catalyst for a broader interrogation of what it means to present artists in our galleries.”

“I think it is a tremendous leadership opportunity for SFMOMA,” Bedford told the Chronicle, citing a series of public programs slated for early next year aimed at addressing the work of artists with “problematic histories.”

The Louvre Museum was evacuated on Saturday morning after receiving bomb threats. Alarms sounded throughout the museum as well as the underground shopping center beneath its iconic glass signature designed by architect I.M. Pei.

The Paris institution told the Associated Press that no one was hurt, no incident was reported, and police officers had searched the museum.

The museum’s website had a red banner which stated “For security reasons, the Musée du Louvre is closing its doors today, Saturday, October 14. Those who have booked a visit during the day will be reimbursed. Thank you for your understanding.” The same message was posted on the museum’s social media pages.

Earlier this year, the Louvre announced it would be limiting the number of daily visitors to 30,000 “in order to facilitate a comfortable visit and ensure optimal working conditions for museum staff”.

Prior to the pandemic, the Louvre could welcome up to 45,000 visitors each day, according to the Art Newspaper.

This week, art world cognoscenti reconvened for the opening of Frieze London at the city’s Regent’s Park. 130 galleries, ranging from megas to smaller-scale outfits, brought presentations spotlighting established artists like Gerhard Richter and Louise Borgeois, as well as more emerging artists. This year’s edition of the fair, its twentieth, was actually smaller than 2022, when 160 galleries participated.

Frieze, owned by US-based media and entertainment company Endeavor since 2016, has pledged to grow its fairs. Earlier this year, the company acquired EXPO Chicago and the Armory Show and it recently held its second edition of Frieze Seoul.

In the days leading up to Frieze’s VIP preview on Wednesday, Hamas launched an assault on southern Israel, leading the country to initiate a bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip. Yet, even as the news rang heavy over the trade event, it did little to interrupt business. Transactions at Frieze moved at a steady pace, as galleries reported collectors purchasing works at competitive price points mostly in the six-figures; only a select few reached the low millions.

In a statement, Ivan Wirth, Hauser and Wirth’s president, said “astute” collectors are becoming less fixated on younger artists and more are shifting attention back towards the practices of late-career or deceased artists with “radical” qualities.

Established figures like Wolfgang Tilmans, Antony Gormley, John Akomfrah, Barbara Chase-Riboud and Tracey Emin were among the critical darlings who surfaced at the fair. Alongside them were curators like Christopher Bedford, Nicola Lees; Sohrab Mohebbi; Clara Kim; Alexandra Munroe and Robert Rosenkranz; Maria Balshaw; Alex Farquharson; Hans Ulrich Obrist.

UNESCO’s forthcoming virtual museum of stolen cultural objects is one step closer to reality. 

UNESCO (short for The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has partnered with Interpol, among other as foreign parties, to develop the $2.5 million museum, with the first round of funding being provided by Saudi Arabia. 

In an announcement, UNESCO said, “The virtual museum will be a game-changing tool to raise awareness on the illicit trafficking and the importance of protecting cultural heritage among the relevant authorities, culture professionals and the general public, notably young generations.”

The museum was announced in September 2022, and last week the agency unveiled its schematic design by Burkina Faso–born architect Francis Kéré, winner of the 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize. 

“For this project, we needed an architect capable of rewriting the traditional playbook, who could design spaces while thinking outside the box, who could intimately link the material with the immaterial,” Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO director-general, told Artnet News.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office returned nineteen looted antiquities worth almost $19 million to Italian authorities in a repatriation ceremony at the Italian consulate in New York on October 10.

Some of the returned artifacts include a 6th-century CE Corinthian bronze helmet, a 1st-century CE gilded bronze plaque depicting a Dionysan religious ceremony, and an Apulian plate showing the god Eros from around 350 BCE.

The seized objects are at the center of multiple ongoing investigations of looted antiquities dealers, according to a statement from the District Attorney’s office. Among them are art dealer Robin Symes who is currently under investigation in the UK for the trafficking of goods, as well as late dealer Jerome Eisenberg and by extension the Royal-Athena Galleries he directed.

A number of looted antiquities have been seized from Symes, including most recently 266 objects also returned to Italy. Since 2017, the Manhattan district attorney has recovered 125 looted items from the Royal-Athena Galleries.

This is the latest in a number of notable returns of antiquities since Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg took his post two years ago. Since then, the office has returned more than 275 items to Italy and more than 1,000 objects to 27 countries. This effort has been accomplished with the help of US Homeland Security investigations.

Stacey’s Auctioneers and Valuers has a treat this season for the intersection of people who are passionate about both British Contemporary Art and felines: a rare ceramic cat executed by the artist David Hockney while he was still in art school, Artnet News reported Friday.

The sculpture, which comes with an estimate of £30,000 – £40,000 ($36,400 – $48,450), was a gift from Hockney to Peter and Wendy Richards of Bedfordshire in 1955. While a student at Bradford School of Art, Hockney and his friends had a penchant for hitchhiking to art exhibition across the United Kingdom. 

In 1955, while on their way back to London, Hockney and his schoolmate Norman Stevens found their trip stalled by a heavy rainstorm. The two artists sought refuge on the Richards’ land, under the eaves of their cottage. When Peter and Wendy spotted the waterlogged students, they invited them in, made them tea, and dried their clothes.

When traveling Hockney would often gift a work to those he met along the way. The sculpture, which is thought to be the first of six such cat works that Hockney made and sent out as gifts, was given to the Richards via the mail. The three remained in touch and Hockney continued to send letters and drawings to the couple over the years.

“I really don’t know what to do with the cat,” Hockney once wrote in a letter to the Richards before giving them the sculpture, according to the BBC. “The postman said unless it’s really well packed in plenty of straw and sawdust it would be risky. I think we’ll wait and bring down the cat and plates personally.”

Cady Noland’s work has never sat quite right with me. Sure, there are the familiar critiques—that her portraits of America, made of Budweiser cans and bullets, don’t feel like her America, since she is wealthy and white. One is that the elusive artist, known for walking away from the art world at the height of fame, felt like an even greater class traitor when she chose Gagosian’s Upper East Side location for a rare show, her second in New York in as many decades. Another is that she mounted the show without seeming to troll blue-chip dealers, the way David Hammons famously tends to. What unsettles me is the way that she incorporates walkers, wheelchairs, and canes into her portraits of American tragedy.

Don’t get me wrong: I loved her 2018 retrospective in Germany so much that I traveled to see it twice—and it was at the MMK in Frankfurt, arguably Europe’s most boring city. But one subway ride to Manhattan for the Gagosian show, which closes October 21, left me feeling unsatisfied.

This show is mostly new work, and as ever, Noland’s red, white, and blue sculptures made of resin and refuse chafe at the contradictions between the American dream and the American reality. There is, though, an untitled walker from 1986, wrapped in a leather strap and bearing a badge that says “special police.” It’s on view alongside sculptures that, pairing bullets and badges, invoke police brutality. Badges abound, but the walker’s is the only one inscribed with the word “special,” that grating euphemism for “disabled.” I can’t tell if the choice was intentional and insensitive, or just blithe and inconsiderate. But for decades, she’s shown assistive devices alongside grenades and can collections, as if she were equating disability with fates as tragic as destitution or death.

Part of me was pleased to see mass disablement included as one of the machinations of American neoliberalism for once. Inaccessible healthcare, unaffordable nutritious foods, gun violence, and an environment rife with disabling toxins are eroding American health (and, as the theorist Lauren Berlant argued, preventing our uprisings).

But another part of me saw Noland’s walker stumbling clumsily into a paradox, one that disability theorist Jasbir K. Puar articulated in her 2017 book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability.Puar describes mass disablement and injury as deliberate tactics of policing, writing specifically about the Israeli Defense Force. Then she asks: how do we hold space for rage at this reality alongside our longing for disability pride?

The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair opened its 11th London edition at Somerset House on Thursday, bringing together an impressive 62 exhibitors from 32 countries. It’s the fair’s most ambitious edition to date showcasing the works of 170 artists, spanning painting, photography, film, sculpture, installation, and mixed media. In addition to the exhibitors’ booths, this year’ edition also includes a group exhibition, titled “Transatlantic Connections: Caribbean Narratives in Contemporary Art,” on view at Christie’s and a special project, titled “Evil Genius” by Nigerian musician Mr Eazi in a first-of-its-kind merging of music and contemporary African art.

At the forefront of contemporary African art from the continent and the diaspora, the expansive fair champions diverse perspectives and experiences, collaborating with leading and up-and-coming galleries from around the world. Below, a look at the best on view at 1-54, which runs until October 15.

This year marks the 170th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh’s birth, but it is his final months that are now the subject of a major exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Organized in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where the exhibition debuted earlier this year, “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise. The Final Months” (through February 4, 2024) brings together 48 of the 74 paintings and 25 of the 33 drawings, many of which are being shown in Paris for the first time, that the Post-Impressionist made between May 20, 1890, when he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, and his death on July 29.

Van Gogh moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a pastoral commune about 20 miles northwest of Paris, to be closer to his brother and art dealer Theo and his infant nephew, Vincent Willem, as well as to receive treatment from Dr. Paul Gachet.

The first gallery in the Orsay exhibition focuses on Gachet, who made a career out of treating melancholy, the focus of his thesis, and counted artists like Paul Cezanne, Armand Guillaumin, and Camille Pissarro as his patients. Gachet considered van Gogh both a patient and a friend, inviting the artist over for lunch on Sundays. Among the works on view are van Gogh’s portraits of Gachet, including the famed 1890 painting donated to the Musée d’Orsay in 1949, as well as the only etching that van Gogh ever made; Gachet had provided the artist with the materials to create it.

Divided into six thematic sections, like “‘Auvers is seriously beautiful…’” and “The modern portraiture,” the exhibition includes village scenes, still lifes of flowers, experimental portraits with weave patterns, tone-on-tone paintings, a series of fascinating double-sided sketches, letters from Van Gogh including one that he never sent, and 11 of the 12 double square landscapes (1 meter by 50 centimeters, around 3 feet 3 inches by 1 foot 8 inches) that were among van Gogh’s final obsessions before his death.

It is an exceptional display. “This room is an unicum,” said Emmanuel Coquery, the director of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the exhibition’s co-curator. “The public won’t see anything like it, before a very long time.” (Coquery said he did not request the 12th double-square landscapes, titled Daubigny’s Garden from the Hiroshima Museum of Art in Japan “for logical and ecological reasons”; its twin, however, is on loan from the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland.)  

The Parthenon Marbles were once vibrantly colored with intricate patterns, according to a new study published in the journal Antiquity on Wednesday.

Originally intended to decorate the steps of the Athenian Parthenon Temple, the Parthenon Marbles were crafted more than 2,500 years ago by the ancient Greeks. Their fragments are now held by the British Museum in London, whose possession of them has ignited a contentious and ongoing restitution debate.

Though it might not be immediately visible along the surface, the deities and mythical creatures depicted in the statues were once painted in bright Egyptian blue, white, and purple hues. The colors represented the figures’ origins: the water from which they rose, the snakeskin of a sea serpent, background spaces between figures, and figurative patterns on the gods’ robes.

For centuries, it was assumed that Greek and Roman sculptures were muted in color or didn’t have any color at all. This common misconception came from years of viewing pristine stone and clay that had experienced decay and had been scrubbed clean. The same is true of the Parthenon Marbles, which weren’t prepared in a way that would allow their paint to properly adhere to the stones’ surfaces. As a result, previous historical restorations actually went so far as to remove traces of paint found on the figures.

Using luminescent imaging, archaeologists were able to find hidden chemical elements from traces of paint on the sculptures’ surfaces. The team found evidence of hidden patterns, such as floral designs and figurative depictions, that were created using a mix of four pigments.