Heists and Homecomings: Art’s High-Stakes Week

Italy is waking up to a brazen theft in Sicily. Reuters reporting relayed by The Art Newspaper says four works by Renaissance master Antonello da Messina were stolen from the Museo Regionale di Messina in the artist’s hometown on 15 August, during Assumption Day celebrations and the traditional Vara procession. Thieves took five wooden panels from the Polittico di San Gregorio altarpiece (1473), but abandoned two outside the museum—Finistre sull'Arte identifies those as St Benedict and St Gregory—leaving three panels still missing. They also stole a small double-sided painting from a secure display case, showing the Virgin with Child and a Franciscan monk on one side and Christ on the other. The alarm activated immediately, and surveillance suggests the gang worked within two to three minutes.

ARTnews is also tracking the Sicily case, describing thieves stealing three of the five surviving devotional panels painted by Antonello da Messina from the Regional Museum of Messina, also known as MuMem, during the Ferragosto holiday on Saturday evening. Authorities found two panels abandoned against a wall outside the museum, and a fourth, smaller double-sided work—Virgin and Child with a Franciscan monk on one side and Christ on the other—was also taken. Museum director Marisa Mercurio told the Guardian, “It is an extremely serious and significant loss,” calling the works culturally, artistically, and symbolically important for Messina and Sicily. The report notes the altarpiece, Polittico di San Gregorio, was made for the Monastero di San Gregorio, destroyed in the 1908 Messina earthquake. It also references the Italian government’s February purchase at Sotheby’s in New York for fourteen dollars million, and Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli’s remarks about that acquisition.

Staying in Italy, ARTnews brings a very different kind of discovery: two thousand five hundred-year-old Etruscan bronze relics excavated from an ancient well tied to the Etruscan city of Kainua. Heritage Daily reports archaeologists from the University of Bologna and the Ravenna Archaeological Group uncovered “remarkably well-preserved” bronze artifacts near Marzabotto, including two bronze statues of female figures and an “extremely rare” bronze bowl. The report says the objects emerged with metallic lustre still present, and archaeologists believe they were deliberately deposited as votive offerings—pointing to the well as a sacred place associated with ceremonies involving water, and possibly Kainua’s foundation. Human remains from two adults were also found, thought to be from a different era than the bronzes, suggesting later ritual activity that kept the well’s sacred significance alive over time.

From Italy’s ancient past to a present-day recovery in Brazil: The Art Newspaper says São Paulo state civil police recovered eight works by Henri Matisse stolen in an armed robbery at the Mário de Andrade Library last December. Police located the works on 13 August in an apartment in São Bernardo do Campo and arrested a man suspected of storing them for the alleged mastermind; a firearm was also found. The eight recovered pieces—valued at more than one hundred ninety thousand dollars—are from Matisse’s 1947 book Jazz and have been returned to the library, but five works by Candido Portinari taken in the same heist remain missing. The robbery happened 7 December 2025, when two armed men overpowered a security guard and two visitors, stuffed 13 works into a canvas bag, and fled through the main entrance. Security footage helped trace their escape and led to an arrest the next day.

Across the Atlantic, The Art Newspaper reports a repatriation with real community stakes: a Mixtec human skull adorned with turquoise, shell, jadeite, and quartz has been returned from the Wereldmuseum in Leiden to Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). The remains were repatriated in May 2025 following an initiative by the Nchivi Ñuu Savi collective and Mexican artist Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba, with the Yucu Saa Community Museum in Villa de Tututepec, Oaxaca as its planned final destination. Studies cited in a 2013 paper by archaeologist Martin Berger indicate the skull belonged to a male aged 35 to 49 from southern Mexico; the mosaic materials are pre-Hispanic, though 99% of the adhesive is modern. INAH says further study, possibly radiocarbon dating, may follow, and the skull is slated to be exhibited first at the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca.

Now to the United States, where leadership changes shape what audiences see. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego announced Brett Littman as its next director and chief executive, starting in October. He becomes the fifth director in the institution’s 85-year history, succeeding Kathryn Kanjo, who left in January after 15 years to lead the newly merged UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art. Littman was selected after a six-month national search; board president Maryanne Pfister called him a “visionary museum leader” with a personal connection to San Diego as a University of California, San Diego alumnus. Littman’s New York career includes posts at MoMA PS1, the Drawing Center—where he recruited 15 board members and oversaw an eleven dollars million capital campaign—and the Noguchi Museum, where he doubled the budget to nine dollars million in five years and restructured for eight dollars million annual revenue.

Back to the market and mega-fair side: The Art Newspaper says Frieze Seoul will move to a new venue—Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP), the Zaha Hadid–designed cultural centre—for its 2027 edition because its current home, COEX, is being redeveloped. DDP opened in 2014, sits north of the Han river, and is about a mile from Frieze House Seoul, the permanent gallery space the fair established last year. Frieze says DDP’s exhibition halls will give the fair “a more concentrated footprint,” and that the 2027 edition will be “carefully edited,” giving each gallery and presentation greater prominence in a single focused environment. The concurrent fair Kiaf Seoul will stay at COEX, but the organizations will continue working together and visitors will still be able to buy a joint ticket. COEX’s redevelopment is led by Heatherwick Studios and is due for completion in 2029.

ARTnews is following a collectors-versus-gallery dispute in London. Two Swedish-American buyers, Yoed and Natasha Anise, are suing Alison Jacques gallery for breach of contract over three works by Swedish-born artist Monica Sjöö, whose estate Jacques represents. The Anises paid £two hundred sixty four thousand in October 2023 for three 1990s paintings that had been included in “The Great Cosmic Mother,” a Sjöö retrospective that opened at the Moderna Musseet in Stockholm in 2023. One month later, at a dinner tied to the show’s stop at Modern Art Oxford, the estate met the couple; days later, Jacques informed the Anises’ adviser, Marie St. Germain, that the sale was being revoked. In a counterclaim, Jacques alleges the couple intended to use the paintings for decorating their children’s bedrooms rather than promoting wider appreciation, which Natasha Anise disputes, saying she planned to be a good steward, including lending works to museums.

Across the water to Venice, a new column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei looks at “Strange Rules” at the Palazzo Diedo, a show curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist with Adriana Rispoli. The exhibition gathers works described as “strange futurity,” including fortune-telling metal plants, a film intended to be made over a millennium by artificial intelligence, two-headed flatworms, and hyperscans of brains communicating in a pre-verbal state. The curators frame it as “Protocol Art,” defined in the exhibition text as a practice that engages with the underlying rules shaping culture in the digital age—algorithms, AI models, platforms, infrastructure, and social convention—operating at the level of the rule by analyzing systems and seeding new ones. Works discussed include Michael Levin’s Double-Headed Planaria, Trevor Paglen’s Voyager (2026), Ken Stanley’s Picbreeder (2008/2020), Primavera De Filippi’s Plantoid (2014), and Dryhurst and Herndon’s Attention Guild (2026).

We’ll close with a major loss in American painting. The Art Newspaper reports that Mary Heilmann has died, aged 86, on Friday (14 August), from “complications from a fall,” according to an announcement posted on Instagram by her studio director. Born in San Francisco on 3 January 1940, Heilmann became a fixture of New York’s art community after arriving in Lower Manhattan in 1968, later moving to Bridgehampton in 2020. She first trained in ceramics, studying under Peter Voulkos at the University of California Berkeley, earning her master’s in 1967. Though she continued sculpture and furniture, painting defined her practice in New York, blending Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and hard-edged abstraction with visible gesture and a fearless approach to colour. Her first New York institutional exhibition came in 2008–09 at the New Museum with the retrospective Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone, which traveled to multiple venues.

Links to all ten stories are in the show notes—come back tomorrow for another download of what matters in art. Until then, this is Percival Doodlebee signing off.

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