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.”

The Pepsi-Cola Addict, written in 1981 by the cryptophasic teenager June-Alison Gibbons—who refused most communication with anyone other than her twin sister, Jennifer—is as idiosyncratic as one would expect. Preston Wildey-King—the Pepsi-Cola addict of the book’s title—lives in a tenement with his mother and his sister in Malibu, California. How Preston developed an addiction to Pepsi is unknown. This omission begs interpretation—readers must make their own projections onto Pepsi-Cola. Is it a sweet elixir that dulls the bitter taste of Preston’s fleeting childhood? Or a symbol of American overconsumption and excess? Gibbons doesn’t provide an answer, leaving us with a plot point as perplexing as the addictions we see every day. Sometimes a can of Pepsi is just a can of Pepsi. 

—Troy Schipdam, reader

Éric Rohmer’s 1986 film The Green Ray centers on a difficult person. We know that she’s difficult because, during a conversation midway through, she insists, multiple times, “I haven’t been difficult at all.” Her name is Delphine, and she’s a Parisian secretary who broke up with her fiancé two years earlier. While she craves human connection, she flees, sometimes literally, whenever it seems it might appear. In one of the film’s best scenes, she runs away from people who have the gall to invite her to a nightclub. In another scene, she stops to read a sign on a lamppost that says, “Retrouver le contact avec soi-même et avec les autres. Groupes et séances individuelles.” (“Reconnect with others and yourself. Groups and private sessions.”) She walks on.

When a friend tells her she’s sad, Delphine says, “I’m not sad.” She sublimates her loneliness into an obsession with having a good summer vacation. As the film opens, Delphine learns that her holiday plans have been upended: she’s been ditched by a friend who wants to travel with a new lover instead. “The three of us could go together,” Delphine suggests. She’s rebuffed. We soon see why: even when she’s not a third wheel, she’s hard to be around. A complainer who doesn’t enjoy much of anything, she’s resistant to offers of help and advice. When she learns that her sister and brother-in-law are going camping in Ireland, she asks her young niece, “It’s very rainy. Does that scare you?” At a dinner party, when the host has just served pork chops, she extols the virtues of vegetarianism.

After a nearly scandal-less summer of 2023, in the caustic August light, Ye West was spotted on a small boat in Venice, Italy, with his ass half out. His new wife had been giving him a blowjob in public. There were other patrons on the boat—it might have been a water taxi helping them from one place to the next. The couple appeared to be performatively oblivious to their surroundings. The boat became their black backstage, a transparent curtain between performance and private life, and it put me in the mind of Ye’s 2021 live performances leading up to the release of his tenth studio album, Donda. For at least one week, he lived beneath the Atlanta stadium where he was hosting the first two public listening parties to debut the album, which was still unfinished. The third performance, in Chicago, Ye’s hometown, also featured the installation of a replica of his childhood home, which he set on fire on stage, leveraging his Promethean dream against the serenity of fantasy. The album itself is not just an elegy for his mother, his martyr; it’s also one for him. He enacts his ego death by it, asks for forgiveness in advance, and retreats, “Off the Grid.” He’s ready to exercise his right to disappear into the next myth even as the old myth is not quite finished with him, not yet obsolete. In the Chicago version of this live listening show, he remarries Kim Kardashian and they walk offstage while the make-believe house keeps burning. Everything, even his family, is a prop on this set. This myth will not stop burning. And while Donda seems to genuflect and repent the loss of the maternal figure, the loss of the womb itself, the lack of access to that primal source of solace, there’s one line on the album that stands out to me as its deeper vendetta: “a single black woman you know that she petty.” Here, he denigrates the same power he uplifts. This is the same mother he laments; he’s hashing out lingering resentments. He’s just unsentimental enough to make a masterpiece that vacillates between grief and backlash. My favorite music begins and ends with this tortured erotic ambivalence; the most effective art is greedy about it, righteous and wicked at the same time, humble and opulent, minimal and spectacular, optimistic and despairing, unrepentant and begging for mercy.

Beneath the spectacle of the first Donda shows, there was a twin bed in a small prison-style rectangular space, with a digital clock and a flat-screen television on the wall. One ex machina–esque fluorescent light beamed from the ceiling. The floor was carpeted in bureaucratic gray, and on it the contents of one small suitcase were neatly arrayed like they might be in a college dormitory. There were also some free weights, which made it all look lonelier and more honest. A gray wardrobe held a few hanging garments. Ye was filmed in that room leading up to the second performance, doing push-ups, huddled with his collaborators and affiliates listening to and editing songs for the album, and yelling militant rehearsal commands as the show approached, a look of messianic drive and casual terror in his eyes.

“Make me new again, make me new again,” a section of the album entreats in a rap-gospel howl, a humble bridge between lyrics that land like mourning benches in a ruin. When showtime comes, Ye wears bright red on stage as if covered in blood, as if he wants to signify the lamb luring the wolf, yearning to be hunted, while his face is shrouded in a ski mask to feign anonymity. He doesn’t want to flash a Dizzy Gillespie grin, or a Louis Armstrong supergrin, or a Miles Davis minor scowl, or an Ellingtonian mélange of chagrin and glamor. Part of Ye’s regenerative capacity is this recovered stoicism after intermittent bouts of what some call mania and others assume is megalomania and others still dismiss as just another half-militant half-capitalist nigga shining in every direction at once. Maybe he hears the spirit of John Coltrane, who announces, “I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.” He finds a static identity and the idolization it attracts oppressive, and maybe sometimes he self-sabotages or risks everything to escape this. In this album-long apology to his mother, he seems to repent to the audience too, and then to retract it all and go back to his secretive and ritualistic mourning.

A Texas high school that suspended a Black student for more than a month over the length of his dreadlocks is removing the student and transferring him to an alternative disciplinary program. Starting yesterday, Darryl George, an 18-year-old junior at Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu, east of Houston, will report to EPIC until November 29.

“Your child has engaged in chronic or repeated disciplinary infractions that violate the district’s previously communicated standards of student conduct,” school officials wrote to George’s family in a letter obtained by the New York Times.

Barbers Hill High School’s decision to send George to the alternative program extends a pattern of disciplinary actions taken against Black students over their hairstyles. As my colleague nia t. evans and I wrote in a piece just last week, George’s suspension on August 31 came just one day before Texas’s CROWN Act, a law that prohibits race-based hair discrimination, was slated to go into effect. In 2020, the school came under fire for similarly suspending another Black student, DeAndre Arnold, over his dreadlocks, ordering him to cut them to attend graduation. 

“The racism is being shown,” said Candice Matthews, a civil rights advocate and spokesperson to the George family, after Barber Hills High School told George he was being transferred. Following his suspension in August, George’s parents filed a lawsuit against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for failure to enforce the CROWN Act. But the issue reflects a far wider and systemic racism:

The episodes at Barbers Hills High reflect a longstanding issue in the United States, particularly in schools where dress codes can discriminate against students. You saw it in the video of a New Jersey high school wrestler forced to cut his locs after a referee claimed that keeping them would forfeit the match. When a North Carolina charter school demanded that a young Indigenous boy cut his hair before returning to class after spring break. Such incidents, widely condemned as racist, have sparked laws similar to the CROWN Act around the country. Despite these protections, school administrators still enforce policies that target non-white students. 

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.

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?

Phew. Marcus, Jim and Pete at last managed to tear themselves away from Jesús Navas’ sparkly eyes for just long enough to record the pod!

On today’s international Preview Show, there’s an infestation of Louis van Gaals, James Maddison talks about his dinner again, and we discover the smokiest dressing room in world football.

Plus, Marcus is absolutely unbearable in this week’s edition of Jack’s Encyclopaedia. Just you wait.

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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.