Restitution Reckonings and Museums on the Brink

A major restitution case just snapped into focus in New York. The New York Supreme Court has ruled that Lebanese billionaire art dealer David Nahmad must return Amedeo Modigliani’s Seated Man With a Cane (1918), a painting seized and resold after Jewish dealer Oscar Stettiner fled Paris in 1939. Judge Joel M. Cohen wrote that Stettiner “owned or at a minimum had a superior right of possession” and “never voluntarily relinquished it,” noting this had already been established by a French court in 1946. Nahmad bought the work at Christie’s in 1996 for three dollarsm, and it’s been stored in Switzerland since. The suit was filed in 2015 by Stettiner’s grandson Philippe Maestracci and Mondex. The painting is estimated to be worth up to thirty dollarsm.

Staying in Chicago, DePaul University’s decision to close the DePaul Art Museum is setting off a scramble—on campus and beyond. After the university’s 26 February announcement, an open letter initiated by students and faculty opposing the move quickly gathered more than three thousand signatures, but DPAM is still set to close on 30 June. The museum, founded in 1985, moved in 2011 into a new seven dollarsm, fifteen thousand three hundred fifty-square-foot, three-storey LEED-certified building. Director Laura-Caroline de Lara raised funds to keep staff in place and to finish exhibitions the museum is contractually obligated to complete through June. DePaul president Robert L. Manuel framed the move as “Reimagining the arts,” while the letter calls that “Orwellian,” arguing the museum is essential to teaching and student training.

One of the biggest questions around DePaul’s museum closure is what happens to its roughly four thousand-work collection. The holdings include paintings by Chicago-linked artists such as Gertrude Abercrombie, Christina Ramberg, Julia Thecla, Leon Golub, and Roger Brown, alongside photography by Andy Warhol, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Bruce Davidson, and Barbara Crane. There are also works on paper—etchings by Tony Fitzpatrick, drawings by Martin Puryear—and a large cache of vintage movie posters. The museum’s 2020 Latinx initiative added works by Yvette Mayorga, Edra Soto, Diana Solis, and others. De Lara has warned the collection can’t be “shoved in a closet” or scattered across offices, and says she’s working with the president’s office on ethical options like transfers to other institutions or retaining staff to maintain collection care.

In Los Angeles and New York, The Art Newspaper traces how boom-time gallery expansion can turn into a painful squeeze. The Hole, founded by Kathy Grayson in 2010, drew major visibility during LA art week in February—showing artists including Dan Attoe and Monica Kim Garza at the Felix Art Fair, and co-organising the 99CENT pop-up with Jeffrey Deitch. But its long-term West Hollywood space stayed inactive during that week and has now permanently closed; its final exhibition, devoted to the late Nicholas Hondrogen, came down in September 2025. Court records show non-payment complaints filed by landlords for The Hole’s two Manhattan properties between July and September 2025, including claims of more than one hundred twenty thousand dollars tied to the Tribeca space and more than sixty thousand dollars alleged at the Bowery location. Grayson says the gallery is working to resolve both disputes.

Over at the Jewish Museum in New York, “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds” spotlights the Swiss-German artist’s late work in the political turmoil of the 1930s, and it’s on view through July 26, 2026. The exhibition presents around 100 paintings and drawings from across Klee’s career, including rarely shown works from the 1930s to 1940s, framing his final decade as a period when his imagination and individuality persisted amid Nazi persecution. Klee resigned from the Bauhaus in 1931 and took a position at the Düsseldorf Academy, but the National Socialists dismissed him and branded his art “degenerate,” referring to him as “a Galician Jew.” Forced into exile in Switzerland, he confronted both fascism and, from 1935, the effects of scleroderma. The show is curated by Mason Klein and organized with the Zentrum Paul Klee and Kunstmuseum Bern.

ARTnews reports the death of German punk musician, painter, and installation artist Thomas Zipp, with Berlin’s Galerie Barbara Thumm announcing that he “passed away far too soon.” Zipp became known for immersive, site-specific installations—psychological theaters built from objects and references to religion, medicine, politics, and history, asking viewers to assemble meaning for themselves. Born in 1966 in West Germany, he studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where his teachers included Thomas Bayrle, and later attended London’s Slade School from 1992 to 1998. His palette often leaned toward scorched umber, ash white and gray, and heavy black, and Dadaism’s shock and absurdity shaped his work. He exhibited widely, with venues mentioned including Tate Modern, Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery, Kassel’s Fridericianum, and Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, sometimes opening shows with performances tied to his musical projects.

Turning to museum politics in Washington, D.C., Politico reports—citing two former employees—that the US Holocaust Memorial Museum altered parts of its website and canceled planned programming preemptively to avoid angering the Trump administration. One ex-staffer said administrators seemed to be “trying to proactively fall in line.” A web page titled “Teaching Materials on Nazism and Jim Crow” was removed sometime after August 29, 2025, and it had included lesson plans connecting legalized racism in the US with Nazi policies, plus links on African American soldiers in World War II and “Afro-Germans during the Holocaust.” The museum also changed a workshop title from “Fragility of Democracy and the Rise of the Nazis” to “Before the Holocaust: German Society and the Nazi Rise to Power,” citing concerns over how “fragility” might be perceived, and later canceled the workshop. USHMM said the administration had not requested changes and disputed the allegations.

In Manhattan, an ARTnews review dives into “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” the inaugural exhibition at the recently renovated New Museum, describing a sweeping look at human-machine relations and labor across history. Spanning four floors and more than 700 works, the show includes a section titled “Mechanical Ballets,” referencing Oskar Schlemmer’s Das mechanische Ballett (1923) and Das triadische Ballett (1922), where stiff, geometric costumes reduce dancers to constrained, machinic forms. Nearby is John Heartfield and George Grosz’s 1920 sculpture The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild (Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture), built around a tailor’s dummy and studded with military elements and prosthetics. The review also notes wall text on Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R., which coined “robot” from the Czech robota, “forced labor,” and points to Hito Steyerl’s 2025 video Mechanical Kurds about Kurdish workers doing microtasks via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Across the Atlantic, ARTnews covers the growing pressure around Israel’s participation at the forthcoming Venice Biennale—and the response from artist Belu-Simion Fainaru, who is representing Israel. “As an artist, I do not support cultural boycotts,” Fainaru wrote in a statement sent to ARTnews, adding that he believes in “dialogue and exchange” and that art “thrives on openness.” His pavilion has been protested by groups including the Art Not Genocide Alliance, whose open letter called Israel a “genocidal state” and demanded its exclusion; it was signed by dozens of artists in the main exhibition curated by Koyo Kouoh, as well as two curatorial advisers appointed by Kouoh before her death last year, and by dozens of national representatives. Fainaru’s exhibition, Rose of Nothingness, is described as an installation with a reflective pool filled with darkened liquid.

ARTnews also looks at why a Josh Kline essay has become a major talking point in New York. Titled “New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art,” it was published by October and has been widely shared by artists, critics, curators, and dealers. Kline, who had a mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum in 2023, calls contemporary art in America “sick with problems,” and argues that “New York City itself now constitutes a core problem in American art.” In an email interview, he said he wrote the piece for artists and others inside the art world, and chose October in part because it would put the essay online for free outside its paywall. He describes realizing New York feels “completely unsustainable,” citing the city becoming about 30 percent more expensive after the pandemic and an art-market recession since late 2023 or early 2024.

Finally, a major collection shift: the Fundación Banco Santander in Spain says it will return the Gelman Collection to Mexico by 2028, following an open letter signed by more than 200 art professionals criticizing Mexico’s handling of the works’ travel to Spain. In January, the foundation announced it would manage 160 works from the roughly 300 amassed by Jacques and Natasha Gelman between 1941 and 1998. The newly named Gelman Santander Collection includes major works by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, María Izquierdo, José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Gabriel Figueroa, Tina Modotti, and Graciela Iturbide—18 works by Kahlo alone. Some artists are designated Artistic Monuments in Mexico, meaning their art can’t be permanently exported, only loaned. Mexico’s culture secretary Claudia Curiel said the collection would return “in about two or three years,” and President Claudia Sheinbaum said she asked Curiel to look into it.

That’s today’s Daily Art Download—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more; until then, chinga la migra.

Today's Stories