Blockbusters, Crackdowns, and a Market Under Siege

The Rijksmuseum is prepping a major Willem de Kooning survey in October, bringing the Rotterdam-born painter back to the Netherlands on a huge scale. Titled “Willem de Kooning at Work,” it includes more than 120 works and is billed as the largest European exhibition of his work in four decades. The show traces his development across a 65-year career with drawing as the central thread—treated not as preparation, but as the foundation of his practice. Visitors will see rarely shown works on paper alongside major paintings, including the Art Institute of Chicago’s Excavation (1950). Big loans include MoMA’s Woman I (1950–52) and the Whitney’s Woman and Bicycle (1952–53), both slated for the Rijksmuseum’s Gallery of Honor.

In today’s Artnet Bulletin, one of the most alarming items comes out of Hong Kong: five people working at two bookstores were arrested on suspicion of violating the city’s 2024 national security law banning “seditious content.” The New York Times quoted Chinese politics expert Victoria Hui, who described the arrests as part of a crackdown on bookstores as “the few remaining spaces where people can encounter ideas, build social ties, and sustain an intellectual public.” The digest also spotlights a few very different art-world turns: Colorado Public Radio profiled Adam Lerner, former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and the Palm Springs Art Museum, now helping develop a bathhouse in Denver. And in Manhattan, “Ian Wilson: Circles” opens at 41 Bleecker Street—by appointment.

Tate Modern is hosting a landmark Ana Mendieta retrospective, on view through January 17, 2027, that places her achievements front and center. The exhibition focuses on the scope of her work—spanning sculpture, installation, performance, and film—while emphasizing her “earth-body” concept, where she sought to “submerse” herself in nature rather than “impose” herself on it. A key highlight is her “Siluetas,” made in the 1970s, when she traced her own silhouette into landscapes around Old Man’s Creek while studying at the University of Iowa. Tate presents extensive documentation, including a layered installation of floating screens looping films that incorporate earth, water, wind, and fire, marking those films’ debut in the U.K. The show also includes a restaging of Untitled: Silueta Series in collaboration with her estate.

Concerns are growing about Cuban artist-activist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, whose whereabouts remain unknown after his prison sentence ended. He was removed from Guanajay Prison on 7 July, following a five-year sentence, yet appears to still be in the custody of authorities. Coco Fusco wrote in Hyperallergic that “state security agents removed him from Guanajay Prison on 7 July and whisked him off to an undisclosed location,” adding that human rights organizations have determined his status to be a forced disappearance. Curator Anamely Ramos told El Pais, “Right now, Luis Manuel is disappeared. He is not free.” Cubalex filed a writ of habeus corpus with the Provincial People's Court of Havana on 13 July, and later criticized delays it says could be aimed at forcing exile.

Italian authorities have returned 27 archaeological artefacts to Mexico after multiple investigations across Italy, according to a police press release. The handover took place at the Mexican embassy in Rome and involved the Carabinieri Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale (TPC). The objects include terracotta and clay figurines, sculptures of heads, and fossils, and the Carabinieri said they originated from “places of significant historical and cultural interest” in Mexico, with a collective value of “several tens of thousands of euros.” The objects were recovered through six separate investigations. In Florence, a tip from Peruvian authorities about a suspicious e-commerce sale led to the seizure of 16 illegally imported artefacts from a private home. In Venice, officials seized three fossilised fish from the Upper Cretaceous after inspecting a shipment from Santa Catarina. Mexico’s INAH classifies the objects as inalienable national property.

Two former managers of Shanghai Jiahe Auction Co., Ltd. have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms in a major fraud case that reportedly cost one collector about RMB 500 million (USseventy four dollars million). Hong Kong media reported that the collector, identified under the pseudonym Li Pin, purchased more than 40 items and later found that authentication documents showed many were forgeries or had artificially inflated valuations. The two former managers were convicted in four cases and sentenced to 14 years and six months, and 12 years, respectively. The court judgment said they arranged for employees and associates to drive up bidding, inducing purchases at inflated prices, with profits divided between consignors under a prearranged agreement. One reported example: Li paid RMB1.68 million for a Qianlong-era vase later appraised as a modern replica worth RMB250.

On July 14, U.S. Congressional representatives Dina Titus (D-Nevada) and Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) proposed a bill aimed at protecting public artworks commissioned by the federal government. The PRESERVE Act—short for “Protecting Resources and Ensuring Stewardship of Enduring Records of Visual Expression Act”—would require the General Services Administration to identify artworks in government buildings deemed “surplus property” and create a committee to oversee what happens to them. Titus said, “Publicly commissioned art should never become collateral damage when federal buildings are sold or otherwise disposed of,” and referenced the twenty six thousand works of art exhibited in museums and federal buildings around the country. Their statement also calls out the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, decorated with murals by Philip Guston, Ben Shahn, and Ethel and Jenne Magafan. Living New Deal has endorsed the bill.

Researchers say a mural at Calakmul may be one of the oldest known representations of the mythical Maya hero Juun Ajaw. The findings, based on three years of research, were published in IdeAs, the online journal of the Institute of the Americas, by archeologists Daniel Salazar Lama, Ana García Barrios, and Benjamin Esqueda Lazo De La Vega. They focused on what’s considered the earliest mural painting at Calakmul, depicting a man in a headdress holding a spear—an image long thought to show a warrior. Though the mural was removed for conservation in 2004, the team used advanced imaging to reconstruct it and its architectural setting. They argue it may depict Juun Ajaw, known from the Popol Voh, and may have been part of an immersive ritual environment in an underground stuccoed vault meant to evoke a cave.

At the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, an exhibition links Surrealism directly to antifascist action, with Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s wartime resistance as a centerpiece. In the 1940s on the English island of Jersey, the pair wrote notes taunting German occupiers—“paper bullets,” as they called them—urging defecting or sabotage, sometimes signed SOLDAT OHNE NAMEN (“soldier with no name”). Those notes appear in “In the Very Bowels of Change: Surrealism and Antifascism,” a version of a show first presented at Lenbachhaus in Munich in 2024 under the title “But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism and Antifascism.” The exhibition argues Surrealism was shaped by the politics of its time, and it traces milestones from Luis Buñuel’s film Golden Age (1930) to Surrealist mobilization during the Spanish Civil War.

Hyperallergic is zeroing in on a red-carpet controversy with a much bigger backdrop: Zendaya wore a pair of three thousand-year-old Iranian gold discs at a London photocall for Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming adaptation of The Odyssey. The discs were mounted in 18-karat gold and diamonds and made into earrings by jeweler Glenn Spiro for his Materials of the Old World collection, then acquired by London jewelry house Barron London, which said they’re from its private collection and not for sale. Archaeologists were among the first to criticize the appearance, arguing that wearing them as jewelry further commodifies and exotifies ancient objects. The Forensic Archive of Iran launched a petition seeking transparency on provenance. Hyperallergic frames the moment as emblematic of a market that physically alters archaeological and cultural objects into luxury commodities, a one-way process involving drilling, cutting, and mounting.

That’s the download for today—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for another fast, opinionated trip through the art world. Chinga la migra

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