Mergers, Loot, and Museums in War Mode

Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art has reopened after weeks of bombardment forced it to close and triggered emergency efforts to protect its holdings. The Art Newspaper says the museum is now running a weekly, rotating post-ceasefire programme called Art and War, exploring artistic responses to conflict across time and place. This week’s focus turns to Spain, including three works from Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman series, and a display bringing together 11 works by four artists—Picasso, Antoni Tàpies, Robert Motherwell, and Juan Genovés—addressing the Spanish Civil War. Director Reza Dabirinezhad describes safeguarding the museum’s estimated three dollarsbn collection during the war, including removing about 80% of the waste oil from Noriyuki Haraguchi’s Matter and Mind (1977) to reduce risk.

A Nazi-looted painting has been found hanging for years in a hallway of a house near Utrecht. The Art Newspaper reports that art detective Arthur Brand announced Portrait of a Young Girl by Dutch artist Toon Kelder was discovered in the possession of the heirs of Hendrik Seyffardt, a Dutch collaborator and SS commander, and confirmed it is among more than one thousand one hundred paintings plundered from Amsterdam art dealer Jacques Goudstikker. Brand says he was contacted months ago by an heir who learned about the family’s past and wanted the work returned. Images show a “Collectie Goudstikker” label and the number 92 on the back; Brand matched item No. 92 in a 1940 auction archive to Portrait of a Young Girl. The current owner told the Telegraaf she did not know it was looted and the family is discussing returning it.

In New York, the Neue Galerie is set to merge with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2028. The Art Newspaper says the Neue Galerie—opened by Ronald S. Lauder in 2001 in the Beaux-Arts William Starr Miller House on Fifth Avenue—will close for renovations on 27 May, then reopen in the autumn, ahead of its 25th anniversary in November. After the merger, the building will become the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie and will continue to house the collection, programming, and Café Sabarsky. Lauder and his daughter, Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, will donate 13 works from their personal collections, including works by Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad, and Gustav Klimt. A joint advisory board will steer the merger, with Lauder as inaugural chair.

Another account of the same merger adds further detail about how the union will function. According to the article titled “The Met and Neue Galerie Embark on Historic Merger,” the Met will own the Neue Galerie’s mansion and refer to it as the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie—also shortened to the Met Neue Galerie—while preserving the existing museum experience. Renovations are slated to run from May 27 through August 2026. The piece says the Neue Galerie will continue operating as usual, with staff remaining, the collection on view, and the cafe open, while the Met will supplement programs and research capacities and expand the audience through digital initiatives and collaborative programming. It also reports major fundraising to bring the endowment to about two hundred dollars million, with more than two dozen Met trustees contributing, led by Marina Kellen French, and says the goal is reportedly 80 percent met.

In Moscow, cultural institutions are being reshaped as the Kremlin tightens control over historical narratives. The Art Newspaper reports that Verstka said on 13 April that exhibitions at the Gulag Museum were being packed up and moved away, amid a rebrand that shifts focus from Stalin-era repression to Nazi crimes against the Soviet Union. The museum’s website content was removed in February and replaced with text announcing a “Museum of Memory” dedicated to victims of genocide against the Soviet people, covering “all stages of Nazi war crimes during the Great Patriotic War.” A Moscow city government report said it would include “manifestations of Nazism,” Japanese biological experiments on Soviet citizens, and the Red Army’s “liberation mission.” The piece also notes Russia’s supreme court ruled on 9 April that Memorial is an extremist organisation and banned it, and quotes Sergey Lukashevsky calling the rebranding a signal that authorities will remove repression history from public view.

France is facing a sweeping security reckoning across its museum sector after a Louvre heist prompted a parliamentary commission. The Art Newspaper says a report published on 13 May offers 40 recommendations and warns of the “worrying condition” of collections across around two thousand French museums, after roughly 100 testimonies. A special chapter criticises former Louvre director Laurence des Cars, saying her leadership reflected a “dysfunctional drift” and alleging that delayed infrastructure updates “allowed the 19 October heist to happen.” The report lists rising threats—rioting, burglaries, cyberattacks, and terrorism—and notes that only 54% of museum galleries are protected by cameras, while one third of rooms in the Louvre lack any. It estimates €20bn to €25bn over a decade is needed and calls for staff training, stronger oversight, and changes to director appointments, urging more transparency and boards of trustees.

In London, the Wellcome Collection is preparing to restitute two thousand Jain manuscripts acquired in 1919 at what it now describes as “a low price” from a Jain temple in what is now Pakistan. The Art Newspaper reports a Memorandum of Understanding is being signed at the House of Commons, and that the transfer will be to the UK-based Institute of Jainology for deposit at the University of Birmingham. The arrangement reflects the post-1947 reality that there are virtually no Jains left in Pakistan and no suitable depository there, while India’s Jain community is fragmented without a single obvious institution to care for the collection. Wellcome’s head of collections Adrian Plau says the purchase was “against the best interests of their original owners.” Around half the manuscripts have a health connection, ranging from an early 16th-century illustrated Kalpasutra to 19th-century documents.

Also in New York, the Frick Collection has announced a three-year partnership with Louis Vuitton to support exhibitions, research, and public programming. ARTnews reports Louis Vuitton will be lead sponsor for three Frick exhibitions: “Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450–1500,” opening this fall; “Painting with Fire: Susanne de Court and the Art of Enamel,” opening in spring 2027; and a yet-to-be-announced exhibition focused on 19th-century paintings, opening in late 2027. The sponsorship also funds a two-year role, the Louis Vuitton Curatorial Research Associate, with Yifu Liu—currently a Frick curatorial fellow—set to focus on Asian porcelain holdings and research the art and fashion of the courts of Louis XV and Louis XVI and China’s Qianlong Emperor. Louis Vuitton will also fund June 2026–May 2027 First Fridays, free from 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. on the first Friday monthly except January and September.

The art world is marking the death of VALIE EXPORT, a groundbreaking feminist artist whose work interrogated art and cinema through the body. ARTnews reports that Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery confirmed she died May 14 at 85, three days before her 86th birthday, according to AFP. Born Waltraud Lehner in 1940 in Linz, Austria, she adopted the name VALIE EXPORT in 1967, choosing “Export” from a cigarette brand and explaining, in a Tate video from 2020, the idea that “I export my own thoughts.” ARTnews recalls her expanded-cinema works and key actions in 1968, including TAP and TOUCH CINEMA and Action Pants: Genital Panic, both memorialized in photographs by Peter Hassmann. She told Tate in 2020, “The center of my work is the body, and moreover, the female body.”

For your week’s reading list, the “Required Reading” roundup spotlights a mix of politics, culture, and criticism. One excerpt features Zoé Samudzi writing in ArtReview about American Inquisition, a mid-March exhibition at No Place Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, with paintings by Shiva Addanki and Nikholis Planck. The show draws its title from lines written by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in solidarity with then-detained Algerian-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, and takes a critical nucleus from Mike Davis’s Buda’s Wagon (2007), described as a global history of the car bomb and urban insurgencies. The roundup also includes Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker on “tasteslop,” a term attributed to forecaster Emily Segal, and an interview with Kimberlé Crenshaw in the Cut conducted by Andrea González-Ramírez about the weaponization of intersectionality and critical race theory.

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