Museums on Tour, Money Haunts Masterpieces

Italy is making a very pointed case for buying—and keeping—its ancient heritage in public hands. The Art Newspaper reports that 37 fresco panels from the 4th century BC, once inside the François Tomb discovered in 1857 at Vulci in present-day Lazio by the French archaeologist Alessandro François, are now on display in Rome at the National Etruscan Museum. The exhibition, “Tomba François,” opened on Wednesday, marking the first public showing since the state acquired the works from private owners last month for €15m. The cycle blends Greek mythology with Etruscan legend and history—Caelius Vibenna’s liberation and Achilles sacrificing 12 Trojan prisoners for Patroclus—plus a vivid animal frieze. The show runs until 31 December, then joins the museum’s permanent collection.

Staying in the United Kingdom, Ai Weiwei has opened a sprawling new show in Manchester that turns a humble object into a historical and political trigger. The Art Newspaper says “Ai Weiwei: Button Up!” opens today, 3 July, at Factory International’s Aviva Studios, filling the hangar-like Warehouse with large-scale works—some new, some existing, many never shown in the UK. Eight enormous banners titled “Eight-Nation Alliance Flags” are made from around 4 million buttons Ai bought from a closing Croydon factory in 2019; his team in Shandong recreated flags linked to the 1899 invasion of Qing-dynasty China by Russia, Japan, France, Germany, the US, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and the UK. On Friday, Ai will stage his first durational performance, “Sewing a Button,” lasting 24 hours and reenacting his 81-day detainment in 2011.

Also out of London, the market is reminding everyone that “Old Masters” is not code for sleepy. Artnet News reports that Christie’s and Sotheby’s brought in £76.7 million (one hundred one dollars million) across their Classics evening sales this week, a 9.4% rise on the same auctions last year. The energy, the piece argues, is being driven by discovery and by buyers who are new both to the houses and to the category. Sotheby’s said roughly 20% of buyers at its Old Masters evening sale were new to the auction house, and nearly a quarter of lots sold went to collectors new to the field; Christie’s cited “new bidders and buyers” across Tuesday’s sales. Advisor Evan Beard described a “new breed of collectors from a zeroes-and-ones background” focusing on classics, with bidding flaring where aesthetics hit hard.

Across the Atlantic, The Art Newspaper details a thornier collector story tied to newly released “Epstein files” from the US Department of Justice in January. The report says investor Leon Black owned Vincent van Gogh’s “Quarry near Saint-Rémy,” valued at sixty dollarsm in 2016, along with a major drawing, “Garden of Flowers,” then worth twenty five dollarsm, plus three other Van Gogh works on paper. The painting was bought privately—after earlier ownership by Steve Wynn—for forty six dollarsm, probably in the early 2000s, and Black lent it to the Musée d’Orsay in 2014 for “Van Gogh/Artaud: Le Suicidé de la Société.” On 26 June, Black testified before a House committee investigating the Epstein affair; when asked about possible NDAs with Epstein victims, he refused to answer and left, and has been subpoenaed to appear on 16 July.

Now to a very different kind of institutional muscle: national access. The Art Newspaper reports that the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian’s modern and contemporary art museum, will lend more than 200 works to institutions in all 50 states plus Puerto Rico. The program, created with the Arkansas-based Art Bridges Foundation, is called “50 for 50” and will place three-to-five-year loans, free to the receiving institutions. The works requested have been held in the Hirshhorn’s storage, and partner museums chose them to fill gaps or build on local strengths; the first loans are expected to go on view by the end of 2026. Examples of participating sites include the Oakland Museum of California, the Queens Museum in New York, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico in San Juan, plus smaller venues like the Brinton Museum in Big Horn, Wyoming.

If you want proof that the public will absolutely show up for medieval storytelling on flax, look at the British Museum ticket stampede. ARTnews reports that tickets to see the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum this fall sold out in just over 24 hours, in what the museum called the biggest day of ticket sales in its history. The 230-foot-long work—technically an embroidery—depicts the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and was made in the 1070s, with 58 scenes in colored wool on flax. On loan from the Bayeux Museum in Normandy, it will be shown in London from September 10, 2026, to July 11, 2027, the first time it has been publicly exhibited on British soil. When tickets went on sale July 1 at 10:00am BST, eighty thousand people joined the queue, with waits up to nine hours.

More America250 programming is unfolding in London, and one small British Museum display is explicitly reframing the founding story around Indigenous Peoples. Artnet News reports that “Declaring independence: USA 250” highlights complex alliances between revolutionaries, Great Britain, and Indigenous Nations through three diplomatic gifts. At its center is a silver Washington Peace Medal engraved in 1777 by Paul Revere and gifted to the Wabanaki Confederacy as part of a wartime treaty; the medal was later confiscated by the British and given to King George III. Also on view: a pipe tomahawk gifted by the Duke of Northumberland to Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, connected to his early-1800s advocacy for Mohawk land rights, and a 1712 wampum belt marking Lenape diplomacy with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Midway through the run, the Sussex Declaration will join the display.

Back in New York, ARTnews reviews “Democracy Matters,” the inaugural exhibition in the new Tang Wing for American Democracy at the New York Historical, curated by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto for the 250th anniversary of the United States. The show opens with fragments of an equestrian statue of King George III toppled in 1776 at Bowling Green; most of the statue was melted into musket balls, and several are displayed alongside four large surviving pieces. The review emphasizes the exhibition’s method: pairing fine art and historical objects to explore dissonances that have shaped the country since its inception. It points to Mel Chin’s “Flag of America” (2020) above a vitrine containing the Declaration of Independence and a petition by 547 loyalists that the institution colloquially calls a “declaration of dependence.” A major vignette centers on Thomas Cole’s “Course of Empire” paintings, framed as a warning about imperial expansion.

Across Hyperallergic, the Statue of Liberty gets pulled into the present tense as an image artists actively contest. In “Artists Reclaim Lady Liberty,” critic Aruna D’Souza traces how figures including Faith Ringgold and Claes Oldenburg have used the monument as a tool of protest and creative expression. The package also notes a recent flashpoint: last July, Amy Sherald said she was canceling the National Portrait Gallery stop of her solo exhibition “American Sublime” over concerns that the Smithsonian Institution had attempted to censor her painting “Arewà Basit,” showing a Black trans woman posing as the Statue of Liberty. Alongside that, the newsletter highlights an essay by Ed Simon revisiting the Hudson River School and the ideals and anxieties embedded in those landscapes—scenes that can hold wonder and, at the same time, reflect American mythmaking.

Finally, a Paris gallery show is making the case that the 1970s weren’t just a vibe—they were a pivot. Artnet’s Gallery Network spotlights “The Seventies,” a summer group exhibition at Helene Bailly Marcilhac that surveys the decade’s experimentation and the loosening of formal imperatives across disciplines. The text frames the period as building on earlier 20th-century movements like Cubism, Surrealism, Lyrical Abstraction, and Art Informel, while pushing technique and expression forward. Painting highlights include Jean-Paul Riopelle’s palette-knife “mosaic” works that blur painting and sculpture, alongside works by Hans Hartung and Chu Teh-Chun. The show also explores radical color through artists including Joan Miró, Sam Francis, and Sonia Delaunay, and pairs that with late works by Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall. It’s on view through September 5, 2026.

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

Today's Stories