Auction Fever, Museum Power Plays

The auction world just got a jolt of gilt-bronze botany. According to Artnet News, a group of 15 mirrors Claude Lalanne made for Yves Saint Laurent sold at Sotheby’s on April 22 for thirty three dollars million, far above a fifteen dollars million high estimate, after a lively 10-minute bidding war. Saint Laurent first commissioned two mirrors in 1974 for the Salon de Musique of his Paris apartment; by 1985 Lalanne had produced 15, each framed in gilt bronze with electroplated leaves taken from her garden. The mirrors came from the collection of Jean and Terry de Gunzburg, who bought them at the Yves Saint Laurent sell-off in 2009 for €1.9 million. Sotheby’s says the price is a new record for Claude Lalanne and the highest design work ever sold at auction.

Staying in the United Kingdom, The Art Newspaper reports that Kent County Council, run by Reform, removed Antony Gormley’s early work Two Stones (1979–81) from outside the Kent History and Library Centre in Maidstone and sold it back to the artist for an undisclosed sum. Stuart Jeffery, Green Party leader of Maidstone Borough Council, said the work was removed “quietly,” adding that it vanished sometime during the week beginning 6 April. Kent County Council said it recognized the work’s cultural significance and Gormley’s connection to Maidstone, but sold it as part of managing “significant financial pressures.” Gormley was commissioned in 1979 by KCC and Arts Council England while teaching at Maidstone College of Art; it was his first public commission. ArtUK describes the piece as an eight-ton granite boulder from Scotland plus a replica in bronze and concrete.

In New York, The Art Newspaper previews the 45th edition of Aipad’s Photography Show, opening today, 22 April, at the Park Avenue Armory. The fair has a main section of around 65 exhibitors and a new sector, Focal Point, with 13 exhibitors offering solo presentations in a layout designed by Oficina.la. Returning galleries include Bruce Silverstein, Clamp, Danziger Gallery, Higher Pictures, Robert Mann Gallery, Yancey Richardson, and Howard Greenberg, alongside others from the US and abroad. Executive director Lydia Melamed Johnson says the fair can show the “emotional resonance” of photography and positions it as an entry point for collectors, with works ranging from a couple hundred dollars to rare Man Ray material. Johnson also argues AI-generated photorealism underscores the need to understand what choices are human and intentional—across photography’s 200-year span, from early plates to “tools of tomorrow.”

Staying with museums and memory, The Art Newspaper reports that Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie has finished digitising its high-resolution glass-negative archive of hundreds of paintings destroyed in the Second World War, including works attributed to Caravaggio and paintings by Peter Paul Rubens. In May 1945, two fires swept the Friedrichshain flak tower where around 430 large-format works had been stored, destroying paintings by artists including Rubens, Paolo Veronese, Anthony van Dyck, and Caravaggio. The surviving photographs come from a systematic campaign begun in 1925, with most negatives made by Gustav Schwarz (1871–1958), who worked for Berlin museums from 1906. Deputy director and project leader Katja Kleinert says the negatives’ sharpness is striking and their documentary value is enormous, including for provenance research. The plates were re-photographed in the photo archive room, rehoused in acid-free materials, and will likely be published later this year in the museum’s online database with zooming and downloads.

In Washington, D.C., ARTnews reports that Mitchell Rales has given one hundred sixteen dollars million to the National Gallery of Art to endow its Across the Nation lending initiative in perpetuity. When the program launched last spring, the NGA—supported financially by Rales—committed to lend up to ten artworks to ten partner institutions in Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Utah, and Washington, covering costs like travel, installation, insurance, and marketing. Rales, who co-founded Danaher Corporation with his brother Steven Rales in 1984, has collected contemporary art since the 1980s and founded Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland, with his then-wife, Emily Wei Rales, in 2006. Rales has been an NGA trustee since 2006 and served as board president from 2019 to 2024. The first two-year loan cycle runs through 2027; the next is slated for 2027 to ’29, with new partner museums to be announced.

Another ARTnews item tackles the Netherlands Art Property Collection, or NK Collection, a state-owned trove of thousands of objects repatriated after World War II—many looted from Jews killed, deported, or forced to sell by the Nazis. A committee appointed by the Dutch government, the Committee on Heirless Jewish Looted Art, has proposed shifting guardianship of these “orphaned” objects from the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands to a Dutch Jewish foundation, preferably housed at the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, with an annual budget for exhibitions and draft wall-label language explaining links to the Holocaust. The New York Times reports not everyone supports the plan: the Dutch Immigrants Association, representing Dutch Jews living in Israel, has proposed selling the collection and distributing proceeds to Jewish communities in Israel and the Netherlands, while others argue it’s too soon to treat restitution as concluded. Committee chair Lodewijk Asscher says restitution would remain possible if heirs are later found. Over three thousand five hundred objects remain in the NK Collection.

In London, Hyperallergic takes up a big question: can the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new East London sites live up to the V&A’s long-held idea of being “an institution of the people”? The article says the V&A has opened the doors of the long-awaited V&A East in Stratford, alongside its sister site, the V&A East Storehouse. Part of a £660 million redevelopment funded by London’s City Hall, V&A East has collection galleries co-designed with the museum’s Youth Collective—East Londoners aged 16 to 25—who also worked with Cuban artist Tania Bruguera on a stained-glass commission titled Towards A Civic Museum. The collection galleries present 500 objects emphasizing identity, social justice, and environmental action, with themes like “Our Place in the World” and “Crafting Stories,” including pairings like a 2020 portrait by Kehinde Wiley with a miniature self-portrait by an “unrecorded painter” from circa 1530–1620. The Storehouse, a 15-minute walk away, puts over half a million objects on open stacks.

In Paris, ARTnews reports that the architectural competition tied to the Louvre’s seven hundred seventy eight dollars million renovation plan—championed by French President Emmanuel Macron—appears set to restart, with the jury reportedly convening in mid-May. Le Figaro says the jury members are scheduled to meet on May 13 to assess five shortlisted proposals. The 21-person jury is chaired by Marc Guillaume, prefect of Paris, and includes civil servants, architects Anne Démians, Bernard Desmoulin, and Lina Ghotmeh, plus museum professionals including Neil MacGregor and Sam Keller in Basel. The shortlisted firms are Amanda Levete Architects, architecturestudio, Dubuisson Architecture, Sou Fujimoto, and STUDIOS Architecture. The project aims to address overcrowding at a museum welcoming around 9 million visitors a year, with plans for a new entrance, infrastructure upgrades, and—most controversially—a new thirty three thousand-square-foot exhibition space for the Mona Lisa. Macron has promoted a “New Louvre” completion by 2031, though the feasibility has been questioned.

In U.S. politics and public architecture, the Washington Post reports that a previously undisclosed contract for fundraising tied to President Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom allows anonymous donations and lacks certain conflict-of-interest protections. The agreement, signed in early October between the White House, the National Park Service, and the Trust for the National Mall, sets the legal framework for what Trump has described as a roughly four hundred dollars million project. Demolition of the East Wing began less than two weeks after the contract was finalized. The contract applies conflict-of-interest scrutiny to the Park Service and the nonprofit managing funds, but does not require conflict-of-interest review for the White House or the broader executive branch, while explicitly restricting release of donor names for those seeking anonymity. The document came out only after Public Citizen sued; a federal judge ordered its release after the administration didn’t respond to a records request. The administration says it has raised about three hundred dollars million so far. The legal fight continues: a federal judge ordered construction halted until Congress authorizes the project, though an appeals court has allowed work to continue during the case.

Finally, looking toward 2026, ARTnews reports that the Venice Biennale has named the five-person jury that will decide the Golden Lions. The jury president is Solange Oliveira Farkas, joined by Zoe Butt, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Marta Kuzma, and Giovanna Zapperi. Farkas founded the Videobrasil Biennial in São Paulo in 1983 and is now founder and artistic director of Associação Cultural Videobrasil; she also directed and curated at the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia from 2007 to 2010. Dyangani Ose is the former director of MACBA, Barcelona, who resigned in February after MACBA ruled her role with the 2027 Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial was a conflict. Kuzma is a professor at Yale School of Art and was its dean from 2016 to 2021. The Biennale’s 2026 curator, Koyo Kouoh, died in May 2025, so the board of directors, led by president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, appointed the jury; and the edition will not have lifetime achievement awards.

That’s the download for today—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for another fast, focused look at the art world’s moving parts.

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