Lost Masterpieces and a Market’s Identity Crisis

The Art Newspaper revealed the existence of a vast archive connected to Dr Paul Gachet (1828–1909) and his son Paul-Louis Gachet Jr (1873–1962), the family behind the doctor who cared for Vincent van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890. The present owner, who remains anonymous, gave the paper full access. Among the most significant items is Gachet’s drawing Van Gogh on his Deathbed. Gachet was called to the inn a couple of hours after Van Gogh shot himself in the chest on 27 July 1890; Vincent died very early on 29 July, with Theo beside him. Summoned again, Gachet inspected the body, found a stick of charcoal, and sketched a blunt, unidealized portrait—shaven, and showing the left side of Van Gogh’s head, lightly indicating the ear injury from 1888.

Artnet News reports that Art Basel 2026 posted solid sales, even if the pace was slower and collectors were thinner on the ground than before the downturn—and the fair’s biggest competition may now be its own sibling, Art Basel Paris. Hauser & Wirth announced major deals, including a Gerhard Richter for twenty dollars million and a 1963 Picasso for thirty five dollars million. Gray sold David Hockney’s Studio Interior #2 (2014) for eight dollars million, and Gagosian placed an untitled 1984 Willem de Kooning with a private Asian collection in the first hour for a high-seven-figure sum. The piece argues that Paris, launched in 2022 and expanded in 2024, is smoother and more accessible, while “Basel Basel” remains intensely specific—an acquired taste the fair may be wise to lean into rather than dilute.

A new documentary called Assembly goes behind the scenes of Rashaad Newsome’s biggest project: his commission for the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory. Co-directed by Newsome and Johnny Symons, the film follows the making of Assembly (2022), which Newsome describes as a “multi-experiential work” spanning classroom, exhibition, and performance. Newsome, speaking as a gay Black man in a hall lined with portraits of white military officers, frames the project as a reclaiming: “These spaces are everybody’s spaces.” The centerpiece is a pageant rooted in voguing—pioneered in the Black and Latino gay ballroom scene of the 1960s—blended with traditional dances from around the world. Newsome also created Being, a non-binary AI host he calls a griot, to conduct workshops and answer questions.

Artnet News says visitors to the Acropolis can now see the Parthenon’s western facade in a way not seen for centuries. On June 15, the Greek Ministry of Culture’s Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA) announced it had officially restored the pediment atop the Parthenon’s western facade after eight years of work, and the exterior scaffolding is now permanently gone. Culture minister Lina Mendoni said the west pediment is being presented “in its fullest form in some 220 years.” The announcement details how the YSMA, established in 1975, has been addressing damage from earlier restoration campaigns, including the work overseen by architect Nikolaos Balanos between 1894 and 1938. Following a 2008 plan re-approved in 2020, two orthostat slabs now complete the western pediment—one combining ancient fragments with new marble, the other entirely newly quarried.

Artnet News profiles Fischersund, the Icelandic perfumery and art collective that blends scent, sound, and visual storytelling. Led by Sigur Rós frontman and artist Jónsi alongside his sisters Sigurrós, Ingibjörg, and Lilja Birgis, and their parents, the group has been building this practice since 2017. At a scented concert during the Reykjavik Arts Festival, bergamot, iris, and white musk mingled as ambient sound and projected visuals merged into a single experience. The festival tapped Fischersund to create a bespoke scent, No. 101, built from local ingredients including arctic angelica, chervil, and black currant, and presented in a foggy greenhouse installation. The article also traces the group’s beginnings to Jónsi’s self-taught experiments and the first release, No. 23, chosen from 100 scents he’d made.

ARTnews looks at the current UFO obsession across film, politics, and the New York gallery scene. The article centers Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day (2026), about a cybersecurity specialist, played by Josh O’Connor, and a Kansas City weather presenter, played by Emily Blunt, who uncover a government conspiracy related to extraterrestrial language and close encounters. It also points to a cluster of New York exhibitions and projects: Karla Knight at Andrew Edlin Gallery, Dr. Thandi Loewenson at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Eliza Douglas’s show “Ghosts” at Gagosian, which pays homage to Douglas’s aunt Leslie Kean, who co-wrote a 2017 New York Times story about the Pentagon’s U.F.O. program. The piece also mentions Chloe Wise premiering a UFO-themed video at Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger, and a UFO-themed “immersive exhibition” Prada staged at the Chelsea Hotel.

Hyperallergic gathered 10 contemporary artists making work that reckons with fatherhood, timed to Father’s Day, and the roundup spans immigrant dads, absent dads, flawed dads, fellow-artist dads, adopted father figures, and imagined futures. Among the artists, Arleene Correa Valencia reflects on separation and letters after her father left Michoacán, Mexico, in 1996 to find work in the US; during a 2022 Federico Sevilla Sierra Printmaking Residency at Mullowney Printing in Portland, she made Antes de mí, six copperplate photogravures combining family photos, correspondence, Mexica imagery, embroidery, and beading. Amanda Ross-Ho reexamines her father Ruyell Ho’s 37-image portfolio made in the early 1980s to land a commercial photo studio job, transforming it into Untitled Prop Archive (THE PORTFOLIO). The list also includes Larry W. Cook’s Fatherhood (2018) photo series and Melissa Joseph’s reflections on her father K.C. Joseph’s creativity and life.

Hyperallergic reviews Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light, a new documentary written and directed by Paul Wagner and narrated by Claire Danes and Hugh Dancy. The film presents O’Keeffe as a “wanderer,” tracing an itinerary that includes growing up on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, boarding school, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, time in Virginia, a two-week residency in upstate New York, and living in South Carolina, Texas, and New York City. It also revisits her relationship with photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, including the unwanted notoriety from his photographs of her. A key turning point comes in 1915, when she made large charcoal abstractions she felt broke with derivative work; they reached Stieglitz via a friend, and he exhibited them at 291. The film highlights lesser-known work, including nude watercolor self-portraits made in Texas.

Hyperallergic’s Pride Month interview with Rosalie Favell, a lesbian Métis artist living and working in Ottawa, follows how she used family and personal archives to understand identity through autobiographical photography, personal text, and digital collage. Favell says, “I came out as a lesbian before I came out as an Indigenous woman,” and describes beginning her search into her Native heritage in her early 20s, noting how Métis identity was often unspoken because passing as White could be a means of survival. She discusses tracing genealogy through records kept by the Hudson’s Bay Company, and how that kind of documentation can help reconstruct family history. She also speaks about making Portraits In Blood (1990–93) after being invited into a Native women’s community in Winnipeg. A traveling retrospective, Rosalie Favell: Belonging (1982–2024), is on view through June 20 at the Art Gallery of Algoma and opens at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery on August 8.

Artnet News reports that one of only four life-sized bronze casts of Laocoön and his Sons will appear at auction in London for the first time in 150 years, estimated at £2 million to £3 million, offered ahead of Sotheby’s Old Masters evening sale on July 1. The bronze was cast in 1817 by Auguste-Jean Marie Carbonneaux from a plaster mold made in Paris after Napoleon took the original marble to the Musée Napoleon (now the Louvre). The commission came from British collector George Watson-Taylor for £two thousand, though Watson-Taylor later ran into financial trouble and reneged. Sotheby’s European head of sculpture and works of art, Christopher Mason, calls it a “wonderful Napoleonic moment.” The article traces its long journey through British collections, including William Beckford, the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos at Stowe, the Duke of Hamilton, and later Thomas Merthyr Guest’s family.

That’s today’s Daily Art Download—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for another fast, opinionated sweep through the art world.

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