Hidden Hoards, Public Fury, and Forgery Wars

A Swiss museum gift just got bigger—because more portfolios got opened. The Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds says a donation from Swiss collector Philippe Bodenmann, first thought to be 150 works, turned out to be 218. Director David Lemaire explained that when the museum first presented the project to political authorities in 2025, the inventory wasn’t complete and the 150 number reflected only what was visible at Bodenmann’s premises. The full collection is now on view in Voyages en zigzag: La collection de Philippe Bodenmann, running until 3 January 2027. It spans Anglo-American conceptual art, Zurich Concrete art, and the Swiss Neo-Geo scene, and it’s being shown in its entirety for the first time.

Over in London, a major exhibition weekend became a protest site. On Saturday, a few days after the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition opened at the British Museum, the group Energy Embargo for Palestine staged an action in the museum’s Great Hall. The protest focused on the museum’s long-running relationship with British Petroleum and its collaboration with Igor Tulchinsky. Middle East Eye reported last week that Tulchinsky spent six dollars million to support the tapestry’s journey from France to London, and that he also funded a yurt in a community center in Efrat—an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank that is now under UK sanctions. The group is calling for the museum to sever BP ties, rename the BP Lecture Theater, and change how it handles funding and partnerships.

Staying with the protest, the details were deliberately visual. The September 10 action involved unfurling what Energy Embargo for Palestine calls “the people’s tapestry,” made in collaboration with A Space for Us Now and Camden Friends of Palestine. It’s made of stitched-together images created by community members, including messages like “stop fueling genocide” and “welfare not warfare.” In addition to cutting ties with BP, the group wants the British Museum to end all funding linked to fossil fuel and BDS-listed companies and to empower staff through an ethics committee that can help decide partnerships and events. On Instagram, the group argued that the museum is the only prominent institution in London that has yet to sever ties with BP.

A Warhol forgery case is now stretching across borders and courtrooms. Real estate investor Richard Perlman and his family have filed a multinational lawsuit alleging they were duped into buying more than six dollars million worth of fake Andy Warhol paintings and prints. The suit was filed September 9 in a Miami state court and first reported by the Wall Street Journal. It accuses roughly half a dozen individuals and companies across Florida, Philadelphia, and Peru of acting as “suppliers, fake authenticators and distributors,” describing an alleged pipeline from a painter employed in Peru, to smuggling into the US, to false provenance—including fabricated documents and even a label for the canvas. The suit says the forgeries came to light in 2023 after experts from Christie’s raised authenticity concerns.

That lawsuit also connects to people already entangled in other legal trouble. The dealer at the center of Perlman’s earlier lawsuit, Leslie Roberts, sold the works from his Coconut Grove storefront. Perlman sued Roberts in 2024, and the Wall Street Journal reported that case was resolved in January under undisclosed terms. Roberts has admitted to wire fraud charges related to the alleged scheme, pleaded guilty, and is scheduled to be sentenced September 24. He said he believed the works were authentic when he sold them, and noted he invested three dollars million of his own money. The new complaint also names Philadelphia dealer Nathan Isen; FBI agents raided his gallery, Dane Fine Art, in July, and Isen has denied involvement in the alleged Warhol forgery.

From court filings to the auction calendar: Sotheby’s is preparing to sell about 50 works from the collection of Seattle real estate developer Richard “Dick” Hedreen, in sales expected to bring at least ninety dollars million. The sale comes two years after Hedreen pledged his and his late wife Betty’s collection to Seattle University, plus twenty five dollars million in seed money for a new art museum. The family says the auction isn’t a reversal—it’s meant to help make the museum happen. Around 350 works are earmarked for the university, including paintings by Willem de Kooning, Rashid Johnson, Amy Sherald, Cecily Brown, and Jonas Wood, and Old Masters by Bronzino, Jacopo Pontormo, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Thomas Gainsborough.

The top lots are a mix of Pop power and Old Master gravity. Leading Sotheby’s group is Roy Lichtenstein’s Reflections on “Painter and Model” (1990), estimated at twenty dollars million to thirty dollars million, owned by the Hedreens for more than three decades and riffing on Picasso’s 1928 Painter and Model at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Another major work is Cecily Brown’s 12-foot-wide Untitled (Shipwreck), 2017, estimated at seven dollars million to ten dollars million, part of a series engaging 19th-century Romantic painting like Delacroix’s The Shipwreck of Don Juan and Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. The Old Masters will have their own Sotheby’s New York sale in February, including works by Georg Pencz and Bartolomeo Cavarozzi.

In Washington, President Donald Trump is targeting a very specific artwork outside a very specific museum. He wants to replace José de Rivera’s Infinity (1967)—a kinetic stainless steel Möbius strip outside the National Museum of American History—with a statue of George Washington. In a Truth Social post on Friday, September 11 criticizing the Smithsonian’s “ideological activism,” Trump called for a 30-foot-tall Washington statue and a five-year exhibition on “America’s Greatest Hero.” He derided de Rivera’s work as a “strange modernist sculpture” that “tells visitors nothing about America, inspires no one, and honors none of our Great American Heroes.” Infinity rotates on its axis every eight minutes and was the US government’s first abstract art commission, standing there for almost 60 years.

Trump tied the proposal to specific dates and specific complaints. He called for the Smithsonian to display an existing 11-foot-tall statue of Washington outside the National Museum of American History’s Flag Hall for a Constitution Day celebration on Thursday, September 17. He also pitched an urgently produced exhibition about Washington’s life and work, framed in anticipation of Washington’s 300th birthday in 2032. Trump claimed the museum had failed to celebrate Washington and other Founding Fathers in its America 250 programming under the Smithsonian’s “recently ended” leadership, referencing Secretary Lonnie Bunch III’s retirement announcement. He also criticized the museum’s now-defunct Center for Restorative History and its Decolonization Working Group for focusing on those who have been oppressed.

In London, Tate Britain is making a case for James McNeill Whistler as a painter of harmony, not just atmosphere. A long-awaited Whistler retrospective argues that every brushstroke, color choice, and omission serves the pursuit of aesthetic effect over iconographic content. Whistler—born in 1834 in Massachusetts, with childhood years in St. Petersburg before moving to Paris and then London—often confined works to limited palettes and used musical titles like harmonies and symphonies, including his 1871 portrait of his mother: Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1. James McNeill Whistler at Tate Britain is the first major solo exhibition of his work in the last 30 years and has been five years in the making, shaped in part by loan restrictions from major bequests like those at the Smithsonian and the Hunterian.

The exhibition gets unusually technical about how Whistler painted. Curators Carol Jacobi, Isobel Muir, and James Finch open with a pseudo-reproduction of his studio—complete with theater windows—and even show his brushes and palette to explain his physical process. Captions point to details like how he created folds with a stiff, flat-ended brush, pressing harder to deepen shadows. One distinctive Whistler technique is using a loaded brush with excess paint spilling at the edges, creating thicker framing ridges on either side of a stroke—an efficient way to outline and fill at once. The show highlights his discipline, from pared-down early watercolors to the 1870s Nocturnes, where tiny punctuations of red or white sit inside saturated nighttime river scenes.

Across Europe, museum thefts are exposing vulnerabilities far beyond headline institutions. A recent wave includes two thieves breaking into the Renoir Museum in southern France and taking two paintings in under five minutes. Earlier this year, three paintings by Renoir, Cézanne, and Matisse and four priceless Renaissance works were stolen from two museums in Italy. These thefts follow the brazen daytime jewelry heist at the Louvre in Paris, but the broader point is that extraordinary cultural value isn’t confined to national giants. Europol warned last month that museum robberies were becoming “almost a weekly occurrence,” with offenders using increasingly violent and forceful methods, even though the report doesn’t provide data to establish a long-term increase.

The reporting also pushes back on easy explanations. There’s been speculation that the Louvre heist sparked copycat robberies, or that some thefts were commissioned or tied to insurance payouts—but there’s little evidence yet for either. Donna Yates, UNESCO Chair in Cultural Heritage and Emerging Crime at Maastricht University, notes there’s been little systematic research comparing frequency, targets, methods, and perpetrators. What the thefts do highlight is chronic underfunding: smaller municipal and regional museums hold objects of immense cultural and scientific significance while operating with far fewer resources. Yates put it bluntly: “Most museums are increasingly underfunded and the fantasy security measures people propose… are laughable to anyone who knows museum budgets.” Removing treasures from display would protect them—but at the cost of the museum’s public purpose.

Archaeology meets AI in a study that tries to rebuild not just what tombs looked like, but how they felt. Researchers examined Etruscan painted tombs in Tarquinia, Italy—famous for vivid iconography and preservation—using AI, acoustic science, and modeling to explore how sight and sound affected mourners. Focusing on two 5th-century BCE tombs, the Tomba del Gallo and the Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri (“Tomb of the Blue Demon”), Maurizio Forte of Duke University and Jacqueline Ortoleva of the University of Oxford published findings in August in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. Their acoustic survey used recorded handclaps measured in different locations, while AI helped map movement routes and imagine candlelight conditions.

The conclusion: these tombs were designed as sensory environments for the living. Forte and Ortoleva argue the architecture produced “somatic and affective responses,” with the dromos entrance passage creating a liminal, body-orienting transition into the chamber. They describe torchlight flickering across painted dancers, incense and libations layering smell onto sight, and sound—lamentation, music, movement of offerings—completing an immersive environment. The two tombs may have induced different reactions: the Tomba del Gallo seeming calmer, while the Tomb of the Blue Demon may have produced disembodiment and disorientation. The authors also note it’s unclear whether these effects were intentional or emerged from materials and space, but they argue the implications extend beyond Tarquinia.

Back in Washington, the Kennedy Center is facing a financial and infrastructural crisis that leaders have framed in dire terms. A Washington Post report says the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is on the brink of bankruptcy, and that leaders—largely appointed by President Donald Trump—have argued the only way to avoid “certain fiscal collapse” is to put the President’s name on the building’s facade to support fundraising. A 57-page packet reviewed by the Post warned trustees ahead of a special meeting on Tuesday, where the board is expected to consider finances and the building’s crumbling infrastructure. Officials reportedly said they may soon be unable to make payroll or pay routine maintenance contracts, and they recommended closing the main building after a recent ceiling collapse.

The details in that report are concrete and alarming. Trump has offered to “raise the necessary funds to keep the Center from bankruptcy” during renovations, but the Post reports he’s unlikely to provide oversight or financially rescue it without “appropriate recognition.” Ticket sales have declined in the 10 months since Trump’s takeover, with the venue projected to fall nearly one hundred dollars million short of its revenue target; officials predicted total revenue would miss the budget by 70 percent and contributed revenue by 25 percent. Executive director Matt Floca reportedly told trustees a roughly four-by-five-foot ceiling section fell about 60 feet in the concert hall’s entrance, and inspectors identified at least seven more areas with water-related deterioration.

The politics are colliding with the legal and structural reality. Kennedy Center spokeswoman Roma Daravi said the collapse stemmed from decades of neglect and deferred maintenance by previous leadership, calling it an example of the urgent need to close for renovation and “revitalization,” which she said Trump has championed. Trump first proposed a two-year closure in February; the board approved in March, but US District Judge Christopher Cooper blocked it in May, finding trustees lacked sufficient information and allowing reconsideration. Cooper also ruled only Congress can rename the Kennedy Center and ordered Trump’s name removed. On August 13, the board again approved a two-year shutdown and two hundred fifty dollars million renovation. The Reach is expected to remain open, with programming continuing at alternate venues.

In Philadelphia, a Keith Haring mural is at the center of a decision that could reshape how the city protects outdoor public art. “We The Youth” (1987) was painted by Haring and 14 high school students on a residential building wall in Point Breeze, a historically Black neighborhood. Haring chose a quieter pocket of South Philadelphia instead of higher-traffic areas. Today, after two restorations over 39 years, it’s the only one of his collaborative murals still in its original location. At a public meeting this Wednesday, September 16, the Philadelphia Historical Commission will hear public comments and discuss whether to recommend adding the mural to the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places, with a full commission vote scheduled for October 9.

The ownership and stakes are unusually complicated—and unusually important. The wall is co-owned by the Neighborhood Gardens Trust (NGT), which preserves Philadelphia community gardens, and OCF Realty, a controversial real estate company often blamed for rapid gentrification in Point Breeze. Almost every key stakeholder has publicly supported the historic designation, including the Keith Haring Foundation, which said it would preserve the mural as a “unique cultural icon” and provide necessary legal protections against its loss. If the commission approves it, this would be the first time an outdoor mural in the “Mural Capital of the World” receives protection from the Philadelphia Historical Commission—setting a precedent for how street-facing art gets treated when development pressures arrive.

That’s the download for today—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more art-world headlines with teeth. Chinga la migra

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