The Permanent Collection — What will still matter in five years
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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.
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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.
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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.
The Saleroom — Where collectors are betting
The art trade heads for the Gulf, war clause included
Today, Christie’s holds its first fine-art auction in Abu Dhabi. Mawasim offers 70 works by artists from the Middle East and North Africa, spanning nine decades, with a combined estimate of roughly $6.5 million to $9.7 million, according to HENI. Around them hang works by Rothko, Kandinsky and Picasso from Christie’s November sales in New York, bringing the art on view to more than $130 million, Khaleej Times reports. “The market can sustain two centres,” chief executive Bonnie Brennan told The National, adding that she wants a regular calendar of sales in the city. Christie’s auction sales rose 71 percent to $3.5 billion in the first half of this year, and millennials and Gen Z made up 47 percent of its new clients. Sotheby’s holds its first fine-art auction in Abu Dhabi on December 10, Frieze Abu Dhabi runs November 19–22, and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi opens December 11. In Doha, Art Basel Qatar released its 2027 exhibitor list on Tuesday: 82 galleries, down from 87, with 35 of last year’s exhibitors, including Hauser & Wirth, Pace and Victoria Miro, not returning. If conflict forces a postponement, galleries will get a refund or a place at the next edition, and the fair will now pay half the cost of shipping unsold work home, up to $20,000 per gallery. Saudi Arabia came under renewed missile and drone fire earlier this month, and in late February Iranian missiles struck Qatar, injuring 16 people. Back in Europe, Pace’s UK company, which runs the gallery’s business outside the US and Tokyo, lost $5.6 million in 2025, on turnover of $65.9 million, down from $104.9 million in 2023.
What it’s worth: the gallery business in the West is shrinking, and Gulf states are spending to build an art market of their own. The buyers are real, and so is the danger. When a fair writes a war clause into its terms, it shows how much the trade wants this market, and what it is prepared to risk for it.
Trompe-l’œil — Looks new. Isn’t.
A $47 million dinosaur
On Tuesday, a 67-million-year-old Nanotyrannus skeleton nicknamed Jodi sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $47.3 million, against an estimate of $6 million to $9 million, after a 12-minute contest among six bidders. The winner is anonymous. Jodi, found in 2019 on Jodi Pierson’s land in Montana, is the second most expensive dinosaur fossil ever sold at auction, after the T. rex called Gus, which fetched $50.1 million at Sotheby’s this summer. Some scientists say specimens this rare belong in museums, where researchers can study them. It hangs here not because the price isn’t remarkable. It is. It hangs here because the story only looks new. Fossils have been selling as trophies for years, and each record ends with the same unanswered question: will anyone be allowed to study this one?
Farewells
Jogen Chowdhury, 87, died in Kolkata on October 25. Uprooted as a boy by the Partition of India, he drew figures that ThePrint called “twisted, fleshy and unsettling,” and served six years in India’s upper house of parliament.
Ursula von Rydingsvard, 84, died at home in Manhattan on October 27. She spent her childhood in refugee camps after the Second World War and built monumental sculptures from cedar.
Rudi Fuchs, the Dutch curator who directed Documenta 7 in 1982, giving a stage to Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and later ran Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, has died at 84.
Afterimage
Last night the streets were full of disguises. Today is All Saints’ Day, and the week’s most haunting story is about a saint who was forced to wear one. After Saint Agnese was taken from her church on an August night in 2004, someone painted out her halo and turned her lamb, the emblem that echoes her name in Latin, into a scroll, so that she could be sold as nobody in particular. Twenty years later, at a fair in Parma, a machine that has never said a prayer knew her by her colors and her outline. Every story this week turned on the same question: who keeps a work of art, and where does it belong? Three museums on three continents decided to hold their collections in common. Austria argued in an American court over twelve Schieles that once belonged to a man who died at Dachau. Ukraine charged the general it blames for a missile fired at a philosopher’s house. A dinosaur went to a buyer no one can name. And Agnese went home to her church, where she will be restored and hung in her old place.
Before You Leave the Gallery
Would you rather see a great work of art in the place it was made for, or in a museum near you?
Sourced this week from ARTnews, Artforum, Artsy, Apollo, the BBC, NV, Yahoo News, The National, Khaleej Times, HENI, The Art Newspaper, the Associated Press, ThePrint and Hyperallergic.
— The Editors, Intellicurious —
