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.

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.

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.

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.