Restitution Wars and the Auction Market’s Misfires

A restitution story in Germany ends with a major market moment. The Art Newspaper reports that Georg Kolbe’s Tänzerinnen-Brunnen, also known as Dancer’s Fountain, sold for a record-breaking €4 million with fees on Thursday night, 4 June, at Villa Grisebach’s summer auctions in Berlin. The Georg Kolbe Museum began researching the fountain in 2024, contacted the descendants of its commissioner, Heinrich Stahl, and ultimately restituted the work in February in line with the 1998 Washington Principles. Stahl, a prominent member of Berlin’s Jewish community, was murdered in the Theresienstadt ghetto. Commissioned in 1922, the fountain pairs a bronze white female dancer with three crouching Somali men in limestone. The sale beat Kolbe’s prior €1.4 million record.

Staying with The Art Newspaper, the art world is marking the death of Julio Le Parc, a pioneer of kinetic art, who died on 30 May at age 97 in Paris. Le Parc had hoped—despite declining health—to travel to London for the opening of Light. Colour. Action, a major exhibition at Tate Modern devoted to his work, running 11 June through 3 May 2027. The show brings together more than 60 works spanning seven decades, tracing his lifelong focus on movement, light, colour, perception, and audience participation. Born in the province of Mendoza in 1928, Le Parc moved to Paris on a French government scholarship in 1958 and later co-founded the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (Grav). Tate’s exhibition, curated by Val Ravaglia and Francis Hardy, will open without him.

From glossy to deeply personal: Artnet looks at how Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn and Japanese video game creator Hideo Kojima turned a long-distance friendship into an installation. Their expanded collaboration, Satellites II, is part of Prada Mode and runs June 3–7 at New York’s Hotel Chelsea. The show transforms the historic hotel into a space-station-like “spatial narrative,” with silver rooms and cloud motifs. It’s anchored by pairs of retro-futuristic television sets showing footage of either Refn or Kojima, taking turns contemplating connection, creativity, identity, and death, in English and Japanese. Refn says they’ve “never had a conversation except through other people,” while Kojima describes them as satellites communicating from afar. The project first debuted at Prada’s Aoyama store in Tokyo in 2025.

Across the Atlantic, a Klimt restitution dispute is headed to court. A woman claiming to be the sole heir to the portrait’s Austrian subject has sued for restitution of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Fräulein Margarethe Lieser, which came to auction at Im Kinsky in 2024. The painting sold on a single bid for thirty seven dollars million—an Austrian auction record—but the bidder, a Hong Kong collector represented by Patti Wong and Associates, later withdrew after the sale. South Carolina–based Patricia J. Leahy filed suit in New York State Supreme Court on Thursday on her own behalf and that of Nickolas Johann Kraft and Hans Lieser, naming Eva Ropper and the auction house as defendants. Klimt began the portrait sessions in 1917; it remained unsigned and partly unfinished when he died in 1918.

Still on market drama, Sotheby’s quietly tried to sell a Jackson Pollock for fifty dollars million—and it didn’t go as planned. Sources say Sotheby’s organized a private auction for Number 19, 1951, a monumental oil-and-enamel work owned by Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher. The effort was unusually secretive: on Tuesday, June 2, the second floor of Sotheby’s headquarters at Manhattan’s Breuer Building was kept off limits, and Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s chairman for Europe, was flown in from London. One source says Sotheby’s couldn’t find enough bidders to get the auction off the ground, and it was ultimately called off. The painting has been publicly exhibited before, including in MoMA’s landmark Pollock retrospective in 1999 and in “Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots,” which opened at Tate Liverpool in 2015.

Mexico is demanding a halt to an auction of Mexican artifacts in Colorado. The Mexican Ministry of Culture called for the suspension of a sale organized by Artemis Fine Arts in Louisville, Colorado, scheduled for today and titled “Fine/Visual Art, Ancient, Ethnographic Art.” According to TeleSUR, the auction includes 80 artifacts of Mexican origin, flagged by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the federal agency tasked in part with protecting cultural heritage. Culture Secretary Claudia Curiel de Icaza said, “Our heritage is not an object of profit,” adding that defending it is tied to Mexico’s memory and cultural sovereignty. Mexican authorities cite federal law treating such artifacts as property of Mexico and noting export has been prohibited since 1827. Artemis owners Bob and Teresa Dodge operate under U.S. and international frameworks, including the 1970 UNESCO Convention.

Police and federal authorities are investigating suspected arson at the Museum of African American History in Boston after Juneteenth materials were set on fire outside the institution. Boston police say the incident happened around 8 a.m. Wednesday at the museum’s African Meeting House site on Beacon Hill. Security footage reportedly shows a man opening a package, scattering some contents, and setting several items on fire in an alley behind the historic building. Museum president and CEO Noelle Trent said the package contained materials for the museum’s upcoming Juneteenth celebration, and told GBH News, “For us, this feels like a hate crime,” calling it unnerving given the site’s significance. Police are working with the National Park Service and civil rights groups and have not classified the incident as a hate crime.

ARTnews’s Morning Links is a split screen of light, luxury, and deep time. The Financial Times reports that James Turrell will open the largest Skyspace made for a museum at Denmark’s ARoS Aarhus Art Museum on June 19. Turrell, who has been making Skyspaces since 1974, described his focus on light and perception, saying, “I paint with light. I use light to work the medium of perception.” The new work is titled As Seen Below – The Dome, a Skyspace. The same roundup also spotlights a 236-foot superyacht debuting a traveling, “museum-grade” exhibition for exclusive guests starting in Monaco, plus a restored New Deal mural by Abram Champanier going on view at the Museum of the City of New York.

On the labor side of the art economy, Hyperallergic reports mass cuts at Pace Gallery. The mega-gallery has cut 50 workers and cut 50 artists from its roster—about a fifth of its staff and a third of its artists—just years after opening its one hundred dollars million flagship building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and pushing into crypto art. CEO Marc Glimcher characterized the move as a “model correction,” and said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic that “the current gallery model isn’t only broken, it’s unfixable.” In the same issue, Hyperallergic also reports the death of Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-French artist, director, and author of Persepolis, who died at 56, remembered as an outspoken critic of the Iranian government.

Finally, Hyperallergic looks at betting on the art market as Kalshi launches a dedicated art category on its prediction platform. Users can wager on auction outcomes—like whether Andy Warhol will break his auction record this year, or whether Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Gertrud Loew (1902) will sell for more than forty dollars million at a Sotheby’s auction later this month—alongside predictions for blue-chip artists including Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, and Amedeo Modigliani. Hyperallergic notes heightened scrutiny over insider trading and state gambling regulations, and that Kalshi is regulated by the U.S. government, unlike its offshore competitor Polymarket. Independent curator Carlye Packer questioned whether interest would grow, while Felix Art Fair co-founder Dean Valentine warned the art world’s opacity could create “vast opportunities for abuse.”

That’s today’s download—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more art world news you can actually use, and until then, Chinga la migra.

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