The Permanent Collection — What will still matter in five years
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A court unsells a Pissarro
On Thursday, a French court ordered that a Camille Pissarro painting sold at Sotheby’s in London be returned to the heirs of its prewar owner, and that the sale be cancelled. Darse de pêche et bassin Duquesne (1902), a view of the port of Dieppe, belonged from 1935 to Salomon Flavian, a Jewish banker. The court found that the Nazis looted it in Paris in 1941, as recorded in France’s 1947 register of looted property. A study backed by Sotheby’s and Mondex, a Toronto restitution firm, argued that the painting had left Flavian’s hands before the war. The court found no convincing evidence of that. Sotheby’s sold it in June 2024 for £1.2 million under a settlement that, according to the heirs’ lawyer, only two of Flavian’s relatives had signed. Under French law, cancelling the 1941 seizure voids every sale that followed. Sotheby’s now has two months to reveal the buyer’s full identity or pay €1,000 a day. The house says it is “disappointed,” disputes the court’s reach over a sale made in London, and is considering joining Mondex’s appeal. “It is a very important ruling,” said Corinne Hershkovitch, the heirs’ lawyer. Two days earlier, The Art Newspaper reported that Italy is moving toward a restitution panel of its own. A bill before parliament would create a five-member committee to rule, within 180 days, on art confiscated or sold under racial persecution between 1933 and 1945, with no statute of limitations. Italy has “barely scratched the surface” on Holocaust restitution, said Gideon Taylor of the World Jewish Restitution Organization.
Why it lasts: an auction sale used to be the end of a painting’s story. This ruling says a sale can be undone years later, in another country. If it survives appeal, anyone selling a work with a gap in its wartime history will have to weigh that risk.
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The dead leave the display case
Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum has taken the mummified remains of an Egyptian priest named Nekht off public view, and Glasgow Life, the charity that runs the city’s museums, has received a request to return them to Egypt. It hasn’t said who made the request. Under a draft policy, Glasgow will show human remains only with documented consent from the dead or, where appropriate, their descendants. Without that consent, a spokesperson said, removing ancient Egyptian remains from display is “more respectful to the deceased individuals.” A mummified head, foot and hand from the Valley of the Kings have also come down, and remains at the St Mungo Museum are next. At the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian, the open sarcophagus of Lady Shep-En-Hor has been covered. Not everyone agrees. Stuart Robertson, former director of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society, called the consent test “an absurd and impossible standard.” In Germany, on Tuesday, the Museum Wiesbaden will hand ten skulls to representatives of the Indonesian government. They were sent home in the 19th century by Ernst Albert Fritze, a military doctor from Hesse who served the Dutch in their East Indies colony from 1817. Hesse’s culture ministry says it is the first time human remains have been returned from Germany to Indonesia.
Why it lasts: for generations, mummies have been a staple of Western museums. The question now is not only who owns the dead but whether they should be looked at at all. Once one major city answers no, others will be asked the same question.
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Rome plans a museum for a fascist modernist
Italy’s culture ministry has unveiled plans for a state museum devoted to Mario Sironi, a leading Italian modernist and a committed fascist. It is due to open next year in Rome, in the 1928 headquarters of the national association of disabled war veterans. That monumental fascist-era building already holds two Sironi frescoes, one of them showing Mussolini on horseback. The museum will show 30 works the ministry recently bought from the Mario Sironi Archive and 90 more on loan from it. Culture minister Alessandro Giuli calls it “the defining achievement of my term in office.” Sironi joined the fascist movement in 1919 and drew more than 1,700 cartoons and illustrations for Mussolini’s newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia. His work runs from Futurism to the regime’s monumental commissions. Tomaso Montanari, an art historian on the museum’s scientific committee, doesn’t oppose the project. He says its materials “must make clear that there is no endorsement of fascism,” and that the ministry has only “partially” accepted his call to show work from other periods. Another committee member, Fabio Benzi, warned of “legitimising a certain authoritarian aesthetic under the guise of cultural rediscovery.” The museum’s press materials, The Art Newspaper notes, don’t mention fascism or Mussolini.
Why it lasts: every country with a dictatorship in its past has to decide how to show the art made for it. A state museum is the strongest statement a government can make about an artist, and the wall texts in Rome will be read closely, in Italy and abroad.
The Saleroom — Where collectors are betting
Two markets, one week
Christie’s first fine-art auction in Abu Dhabi, last Sunday, made $8.94 million with fees, from 70 works by 58 artists from 13 countries. The top lot, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s Variations on the Hexagon (2006), sold for $844,800 after almost seven minutes of bidding, more than three times its high estimate. Christie’s says 37 percent of those taking part were new to the house, and it announced nine auction records, though Art in Context points out that only three are outright artist records and four are artists’ first sales at auction. “This is only the beginning,” said Anthea Peers, Christie’s president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In Vienna, meanwhile, four galleries are closing or leaving, among them Exile, after 18 years, and Eva Presenhuber’s Vienna space. “There are simply no new collectors emerging,” said Exile’s Christian Siekmeier. Canada’s dealers are losing their biggest market. US tariffs of 50 percent on Canadian paintings, sculpture and prints, in force since August, have led Macaulay & Co to drop a Miami fair in December, and Vancouver’s Equinox Gallery expects its US sales, about 15 percent of the total, to fall to zero. The bigger test comes in New York, where the November auctions begin on November 16. At Christie’s the next night, a Kandinsky and a Klimt are each estimated at $60 million to $80 million.
What it’s worth: the money is moving, not disappearing. New buyers are turning up in the Gulf while the middle of the gallery business thins out in Europe and Canada. The New York sales will show whether the top of the market is as strong as Abu Dhabi suggests.
Trompe-l’œil — Looks new. Isn’t.
Picasso, in silver
In 1955, Picasso asked François Hugo, a goldsmith in Aix-en-Provence, to make plates in silver from designs Picasso had made for ceramics in Vallauris. Seventy years later, sets of those plates, and gold medallions too, keep appearing for sale, worth millions of euros in all. Sotheby’s London sold a complete set of 24 silver plates for £1.4 million in 2021. The first alarm came in 2023 from Mona, the museum in Tasmania, about plates it had bought at Sotheby’s. In March, Paloma Ruiz-Picasso filed a complaint on behalf of nine heirs alleging fraud, counterfeiting, forgery and concealment. It names no suspects. The Picasso Administration says it has found at least 17 suspect sets, hundreds of pieces in all, and a court in Aix-en-Provence has opened a preliminary criminal investigation, The Art Newspaper reported on Thursday. Nicolas Hugo, the goldsmith’s grandson, says the right to reproduce the pieces disappeared with them, and that anything from his father’s and grandfather’s time is too old to prosecute. It hangs here not because the sums are small. They aren’t. It hangs here because the complaint is eight months old, the investigation has barely begun and no one has been charged. For now, it is a story about how much a famous name can make a silver plate look like a Picasso.
Vernissage — Doors opening this week
Powerhouse Parramatta, Sydney. After nearly 15 years and A$915 million, Sydney’s new arts and science museum opened on Saturday on a former car park in the city’s west. More than 3,000 objects fill its column-free galleries in five opening shows, among them Es Devlin’s The Turning and Task Eternal, on flight and space, made with the Smithsonian and the British Museum. About 25,000 people registered for opening-weekend events, SBS reported. “This place will become a cultural backbone for Western Sydney,” said acting chief executive Abbie Galvin. She is acting because chief executive Lisa Havilah stepped down in August amid misconduct allegations, which she denies, while a law firm investigates a whistleblower’s claims about governance and procurement. The old Powerhouse in Ultimo closed in 2024 for a A$300 million rebuild.
Art Dhaka, Bangladesh. Bangladesh’s first art fair opened on Friday in Aloki, a former garment factory turned cultural hub, under the slogan “Art for All.” It runs until Tuesday. Dhaka has only a handful of commercial galleries, and the country is still settling after the 2024 fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government. “We don’t have a strong gallery system,” said co-founder Durjoy Rahman.
Farewells
Miquel Navarro, 81, died on November 1. Inspired by his hometown of Mislata, near Valencia, he built imaginary cities from hundreds of geometric forms that visitors could walk through. He represented Spain at the 1986 Venice Biennale, and his public sculptures include La Pantera Rosa (1984) in Valencia.
Fernando Calvillo, 45, community relations director of the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, died in the October 28 high-speed train crash near Urda, in Spain’s Toledo province. Born in Aguascalientes, Mexico, he was an artist and a connector of artists in Oklahoma City. His husband, Lawrence Naff, survived.
Afterimage
John Berger was born a hundred years ago on Thursday. In Ways of Seeing, the 1972 book that grew out of his television series, he wrote that “the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.” This week tested that sentence everywhere. The Pissarro view of Dieppe is the same canvas that sold in London in 2024. Now that a court has called it loot, it is a different object. In Rome, a fresco of Mussolini on horseback will read as history or as homage, depending on the words on the wall beside it. In Glasgow, a priest named Nekht, shown for years as an exhibit, is now treated as a person who never agreed to be seen. Even a silver plate looks different once you know who might have made it. Berger believed that looking is never innocent. A century after his birth, museums are starting to agree.
Before You Leave the Gallery
Once you know a painting’s history, can you ever see it the same way again?
Sourced this week from The Art Newspaper, ITV News, taz, The National, Art in Context, The Art Insider, ABC News, SBS News, Hyperallergic and Mexico News Daily.
— The Editors, Intellicurious —
