Three museums, one collection

On Friday, at M+ in Hong Kong, the heads of three of the world’s leading modern art museums signed an agreement that goes further than any loan deal. MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and M+ will treat their holdings as one shared collection, curated by staff on three continents. The sharing starts in late 2027, when major works from M+ go on long-term loan to MoMA’s collection galleries. In 2028 a long-term Centre Pompidou gallery opens at MoMA, and similar plans are under way at the other two museums. A joint committee will meet every month, and its first in-person meeting is at MoMA this November. Ownership doesn’t change, and the Pompidou’s holdings remain the property of the French state. What changes is where its works can be seen while its Beaubourg building is closed for a five-year renovation. “This cultural alliance makes our museums embassies for each other,” MoMA’s director, Christophe Cherix, said. Laurent Le Bon, the Pompidou’s president, put it more simply: “No single institution can encompass the entire scope of global creativity.”

Why it lasts: for a century, a museum’s permanent collection has meant what it owns. If this works, a collection becomes a network, and what you can see in New York, Paris or Hong Kong will depend on what three museums agree to share, not only on what each one bought. Every other major museum will be watching.

A machine sees through a disguise

On the night of August 11, 2004, thieves took a 17th-century painting of Saint Agnese from the small church of Virgo Potens in Italy. Then someone disguised her. Her halo and palm branch were painted out, and the lamb in her arms became a parchment scroll, so that the saint looked like any young woman in an old painting. In October 2024, Italian police photographed the stands at an antiques fair in Parma and uploaded the pictures, and within hours their software flagged her. The BBC told the story this week. The program, the Stolen Works of Art Detection System, or SWOADS, was conceived in 2020 by a team under Lt. Col. Salvatore Rapicavoli, an IT engineer in the Carabinieri’s cultural heritage unit. It compares colors, shapes and composition against a database of more than a million stolen objects recorded since 1969, and it scans online catalogues day and night. “The machine doesn’t get bored,” Rapicavoli says. Since its launch in November 2023, it has helped recover more than 300 large paintings and statues and more than 165,000 smaller objects, worth over €203 million in all. It has limits. It can only find what was recorded, it doesn’t catch thieves, and Rapicavoli doesn’t expect it to find Caravaggio’s Nativity, since famous loot rarely appears for sale in the open. Carina Popovici of the authentication firm Art Recognition calls AI “a force multiplier.” Italy hopes to connect its system with other countries’ by 2027. Saint Agnese went back to her church in May 2025.

Why it lasts: stolen art has always depended on two things, the limits of human memory and how easy it is to change a picture. A system that never tires and doesn’t need to know what a painting means takes away both, at least for the little-known church paintings and heirlooms that make up most of its finds. Those are the works that matter most to the places they were taken from.

Old losses, new courtrooms

Two cases this week asked who answers for art that is destroyed or taken. On Thursday, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General charged a Russian lieutenant general in absentia with ordering the missile strike that wrecked the Hryhorii Skovoroda National Literary Memorial Museum on May 6, 2022. The museum occupies the 18th-century estate in the Kharkiv region where Skovoroda, one of Ukraine’s most influential philosophers, spent his last years. A Russian fighter jet fired an anti-ship cruise missile at it late at night. The fire that followed gutted the building, and only a statue of the philosopher was left standing. The general, who was born in Chuhuiv in the same region, “knew for certain that he was attacking not a military target but a monument of Ukrainian culture,” prosecutors say. Two officers who passed on and carried out the order have already been indicted. By September, Ukraine counted 2,161 heritage sites damaged or destroyed by Russian forces. On Friday, in a federal court in New York, the Republic of Austria and two Vienna museums, the Albertina and the Leopold, repeated their argument that a US law meant to help Holocaust victims’ heirs recover looted art is unconstitutional. The plaintiff, Timothy Reif, is a descendant of Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish cabaret performer and collector who died at Dachau in 1941. He is seeking twelve works by Egon Schiele, ten at the Leopold and two at the Albertina. Amendments enacted this spring removed the law’s 2026 expiry date and barred laches, a defense that lets courts throw out claims brought too late. The museums argue the works left Austria with Grünbaum’s sister-in-law in the 1930s and were sold to a Swiss dealer in the 1950s. Their filing answers briefs from the US Justice Department and from Senators Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, and John Cornyn, a Republican, who sponsored the law.

Why it lasts: one loss began in 1938, the other in 2022, and both are being settled now, in court. Whether attacking a museum is prosecuted as a war crime, and whether a museum can wait out a family’s claim, will set the rules for lost art for decades.