A report commissioned by the Netherlands’ Foundation for the Royal Private Collections examining about 1,000 objects found that a small number of items in the Dutch royal family’s holdings—such as a...
Hyperallergic highlights Matthew Campbell’s 2026 book The Man Who Stole the Gods, which details how British dealer Douglas Latchford trafficked looted Cambodian (Khmer) antiquities on a large scale...
Hyperallergic reviews Matthew Campbell’s 2026 book The Man Who Stole the Gods, which traces how British dealer Douglas Latchford allegedly trafficked looted Cambodian (Khmer) antiquities on a large...
A Paul Cézanne watercolor, La Montagne Sainte Victoire (ca. 1888), shown in a recent Cézanne exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel may have been lost by its Jewish owner due to Nazi-era...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
A provenance researcher working for the heir of Jewish businessman Gustav Schweitzer says a Paul Cezanne watercolour shown at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel may have been lost due to Nazi...
A federal jury has found Daniel Sikkema guilty of arranging the murder-for-hire of his estranged husband, New York art dealer Brent Sikkema, according to Hyperallergic. Brent Sikkema, 75, was stabbed...
Artnet News reports that Studio 54 Fine Art, founded in Milan in 2016 by director Gary Williamson, is pursuing a flexible gallery model without a permanent brick-and-mortar space. The gallery stages...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
Spain’s 2022 law has begun enabling restitutions of art seized during the Spanish Civil War, decades after dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 and nearly 90 years after the 1936 conflict began....
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office under Alvin Bragg announced that it returned 657 looted antiquities valued at nearly $14 million to India at a ceremony at India’s consulate in New York City....
Hamburg has renamed its long-running Senator Biermann Ratjen Medal after evidence emerged that its namesake, Hans Harder Biermann-Ratjen, confirmed Nazi Party membership in a 1943 application to a...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
Guatemala’s cultural ministry has formally requested the repatriation from Mexico of a Maya limestone lintel that Mexico officially repatriated on 16 April after an unnamed US businessman brought it...
Constantin Brâncuși’s Danaïde (1913), a bronze head formerly owned by media magnate S. I. Newhouse, sold at Christie’s on Monday for a $93 million hammer price, totaling $107.6 million with fees and...
Catalonia’s government has formally demanded €791,000 (about $920,000) from Aragón to recover costs tied to the value and upkeep of 56 artworks from the Royal Monastery of Santa María de Sigena that...
London’s Wellcome Collection announced plans to transfer 2,000 Jain manuscripts to the Jain community, with the materials moving to the University of Birmingham’s Dharmanath Network in Jain Studies...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
Art detective Arthur Brand announced that Toon Kelder’s painting Portrait of a Young Girl has been found hanging in a home near Utrecht in the possession of heirs of Dutch SS commander Hendrik...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
Russia is reorienting Moscow’s Gulag Museum away from documenting Stalin-era repression, a shift reported by independent outlet Verstka on 13 April as exhibitions were packed up and removed. The...
A miniature wood-panel portrait by Lucas Cranach the Elder depicting Friedrich III (“Frederick the Wise”) has been returned to the State Art Collections of Dresden after disappearing at the end of...
Open Restitution Africa (ORA) launched its ORA Open Data Platform on March 31, providing a French- and English-language database focused on the restitution of African artifacts and ancestral remains,...
Artnet News reported on 10 May 2026 that the Aspen Art Fair will return to Hotel Jerome from 29 July to 1 August 2026 for its third edition, featuring more than 35 exhibitors including Albertz Benda,...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
The Art Newspaper reviews international efforts to curb the wartime looting and illicit trade of movable cultural property, focusing on legal tools and their limits. It highlights the 1954 Hague...
On April 28, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., announced the repatriation of 657 trafficked antiquities to India, valued at nearly $14 million, following investigations by the D.A.’s...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
Erwin Bankowski and his daughter Karolina Bankowska of Lawrence, New Jersey, pleaded guilty on April 28 in federal court in Brooklyn to a five-year scheme that sold more than 200 counterfeit artworks...
An Artnet News report dated 1 May 2026 says the United States returned hundreds of looted antiquities to Italy. The excerpt provided does not specify the exact number of objects, the institutions...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
Brighton & Hove Museums in southern England is returning 45 artefacts to Botswana, including clothing, accessories, and hunting implements collected by the Reverend William Charles Willoughby in the...
Robert Dunlap, 55, a Houston man, was sentenced to 23 years in federal prison for a cryptocurrency fraud scheme that claimed to be backed by masterpieces by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Vincent van...
Christie’s New York will auction 16 works from the collection of late publishing magnate S. I. Newhouse (died 2017) on May 18 at Rockefeller Center, with the group expected to total about $450...
Erwin Bankowski and his daughter Karoline Bankowska of New Jersey pleaded guilty in federal court in Brooklyn on April 28 to wire fraud conspiracy and misrepresenting Native American-produced goods...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie has completed digitising a high-resolution archive of glass negatives documenting hundreds of paintings destroyed in May 1945, when two fires swept the Friedrichshain flak...
A Dutch government-appointed Committee on Heirless Jewish Looted Art recommended transferring guardianship of “orphaned” Nazi-looted objects in the Netherlands Art Property Collection (the NK...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
The Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles is seeking to restitute an Asante drum and an ivory trumpet looted by British troops in late-19th-century Kumasi, Ghana, but both...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
The Emil Bührle Collection has been completely rehung at the Kunsthaus Zurich, where it has been on long-term loan since 2021, with 205 works on view in a display opening this week. The rehang...
The Denver Art Museum has returned to Turkey a marble head of a bearded man that was stolen from the ancient city of Smyrna (present-day Izmir), an object Turkey says was unearthed in the city’s...
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has launched a free online digital catalogue raisonné, Access O’Keeffe, allowing the public to browse more than 2,000 works by Georgia O’Keeffe,...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
On 13 April, the French parliament adopted a new framework law allowing the deaccession and restitution of cultural items plundered from former colonies, nine years after President Emmanuel Macron...
Artnet News reported that Greece approved a new law in January creating a specialized art-crime department within the Ministry of Culture to address forgery and antiquities trafficking, with tougher...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) launched a new webpage on 8 April (International Provenance Research Day) titled “How have objects come to be in the V&A?” to highlight provenance research...
A proposed French restitution law advanced after the National Assembly’s Cultural Affairs Committee approved it on Wednesday, following unanimous approval by the Senate’s Cultural Affairs Committee...
The Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York has acquired Wifredo Lam’s Portrait of a Boy (1927), marking the first painting by a Cuban artist to enter the institution’s permanent collection....
A New York Supreme Court judge, Joel M. Cohen, ruled in early April 2026 that the estate of Jewish art dealer Oscar Stettiner is the rightful owner of Amedeo Modigliani’s 1918 painting Seated Man...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, has been accused by two former employees, speaking anonymously to Politico’s Irie Sentner, of altering language and programming...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
The New York Supreme Court ruled that Lebanese billionaire art dealer David Nahmad must return Amedeo Modigliani’s Seated Man With a Cane (1918), a painting estimated to be worth up to $30 million,...
Two former employees of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) told Politico that the Washington, D.C., institution altered website content and canceled or renamed programming in ways they believed...
ARTnews.com reports that an 11-year restitution dispute over Amedeo Modigliani’s Seated Man With a Cane (1918) ended with a New York ruling against billionaire dealer David Nahmad and his family....
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
Canada returned 11 Ottoman-era artefacts to Turkey—seven manuscript pages, two printed-work pages, and two modern calligraphy works—in what Turkey called the first official repatriation of cultural...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
The Bavarian State Paintings Collections announced it will restitute Lesser Ury’s 1883 painting "Interior with Children (the Siblings)" to the heirs of Curt Goldschmidt, a Jewish banker and art...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
The Jewish Museum in New York opened "Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds" on 20 March, but without its intended centerpiece, Paul Klee’s "Angelus Novus" (1920). The work, owned by the Israel Museum...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
On 30 March, the German federal government and the country’s 16 states agreed to create a new body to oversee restitution of cultural property and human remains held in public collections that were...
The Pinakotheken in Munich announced it will return Lesser Ury’s painting Interior with Children (The Siblings) to the Jewish heirs of its original owner, Berlin banker Curt Goldschmidt, after...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
The US House of Representatives passed an expanded Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act of 2025 on March 16, 2026, after the Senate, and the bill is awaiting President Donald Trump’s...
The Basque regional government has asked Spain’s Ministry of Culture to approve a temporary loan of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which would be the painting’s first...
In the ARTnews opinion piece “The MAGA Theory of Art,” the author argues that a long-standing idea—articulated by figures such as Susan Sontag in “Fascinating Fascism” and theorized by Walter...
Hyperallergic reviews two feature documentaries about artificial intelligence that screened amid AI-focused programming at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, described as the festival’s last year in...
Zurich has transferred ownership of 11 Benin Bronzes held by Switzerland’s Museum Rietberg to Nigeria, following a restitution claim submitted two years earlier by Nigeria’s National Commission for...
Hyperallergic reports that Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” (1920) is missing—temporarily replaced by a reproduction—from the Jewish Museum’s exhibition “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds” because the...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
Mexico’s Ministry of Culture urged eBay to halt the sale of 195 pre-Hispanic archaeological objects that it says are illegally being offered by a U.S.-based seller, according to The Art Newspaper....
The US House of Representatives approved an extension of the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act, a 2016 law intended to help families pursue claims for art stolen during the Holocaust,...
ARTnews reported that a 350-year-old Vrindavani Vastra tapestry will return to India on loan from the British Museum. The textile, associated with Vrindavan and devotional narratives, is being lent...
ARTnews.com reported that France has returned a looted “talking drum” to the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire as part of ongoing efforts to repatriate cultural objects taken during the colonial era. The...
Newly surfaced materials in the so-called Epstein files have highlighted connections between financier and major arts patron Leon Black and an antiquities dealer who has faced criminal scrutiny....
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
A collection of 666 works by 135 Afro-Brazilian artists was voluntarily repatriated from a private collection in Detroit to Brazil’s National Museum of Afro-Brazilian Culture (Muncab) in Salvador,...
Portugal has returned looted antiquities to Mexico in what ARTnews described as a first for the country. The repatriation involved cultural objects identified as having been illicitly removed from...
Christie’s will headline its London 20/21 Spring Evening Sale with a Wassily Kandinsky painting estimated at $21.3 million, according to ARTnews. The same sale will also feature a work by British...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
The Los Angeles exhibition “Monuments,” presented at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick, brings nine Confederate monuments into dialogue with works by 19 artists and received a five-star...
ARTnews reported that a Belgian museum holding colonial-era records related to the Congo is facing a request for access from a minerals company seeking historical documentation. The article centers...
"Relooted" is a new video game in which players join a group of vigilantes who reclaim looted African artifacts from Western museums. The game’s premise centers on the real-world issue of African...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
In an Art Law Corner column published 11 February 2026, Alexander Herman of the Institute of Art and Law examines how the legal principle of “inalienability” restricts museums—especially in...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
On 10 February 2026, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art (NMAA) in Washington, DC, announced it will deaccession and return three bronze Hindu sculptures to India after a provenance review...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology will return around 100 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria within months, The Art Newspaper reported on 9 February 2026, following a 2022 claim by...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
An open letter published amid controversy at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto calls for the resignation of trustee Judy Schulich, who is reported to have instigated a committee decision to...
Jewish heirs filed a lawsuit in a French court challenging the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s ownership of a painting by Camille Pissarro, according to ARTnews. The case seeks to contest the work’s...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
The documentary Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild] (2026), directed by Adam Khalil and Zach Khalil, follows Indigenous efforts to repatriate ancestors’ remains from US...
ARTnews reported that a bill backed by French President Emmanuel Macron to facilitate the return of artworks looted during France’s colonial era has passed the French Senate. The measure is intended...
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art has returned three sculptures to India after determining they were looted. The repatriation is part of ongoing efforts by museums to address gaps in...