collector reinhard ernst on championing the legacy of helen frankenthaler

German collector Reinhard Ernst, 79, opened Museum Reinhard Ernst in Wiesbaden last year to house his collection of nearly 1,000 abstract works. The museum recently launched “Helen Frankenthaler. Move and Make,” the first major solo show of the Abstract Expressionist painter in Germany in two decades, featuring works from Ernst’s extensive Frankenthaler holdings. Ernst, who built his wealth through high-precision gear manufacturing, discusses his collecting journey, noting that 80% of his purchases come from auctions.

anna weyant gagosian tefaf new york

Gagosian Gallery will present a new body of work by artist Anna Weyant at TEFAF New York, featuring intimately scaled paintings of jewelry rendered with trompe l’oeil precision. The booth, designed with lavender walls and pine-hued carpet, showcases pieces like "Pearl Earrings" (2025) and "Pearl Bracelet (Sold)" (2025), some with cheeky price tags and red dot stickers. Weyant, represented by Gagosian since 2022, has seen her market soar, with her auction record set at $1.6 million for "Falling Woman" (2020) at Sotheby’s in 2022.

mark rothko dutch museum scratched

A large Mark Rothko painting, *Grey, Orange on Maroon, No. 8*, was removed from display at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam after a young visitor scratched it during an "unguarded moment." The 1960 work, measuring over 7 by 8 feet, is one of only two Rothkos in Dutch collections. The museum has sought conservation expertise in the Netherlands and abroad, and expects the painting to be shown again after treatment. The work was on view at the museum's open storage facility, the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, while the main building undergoes renovation until at least 2030.

alejandro pineiro bello neuendorf residency

Cuban-born, Miami-based artist Alejandro Piñeiro Bello arrived at the Neuendorf Residency in Mallorca with plans to use art supplies shipped from mainland Spain, but they never arrived. Undeterred, he worked with only watercolors and paper he had packed, drawing inspiration from the surrounding cliffs, sea, and plant life. The residency, housed in a minimalist building designed by John Pawson and Claudio Silvestrin and commissioned by Artnet founder Hans Neuendorf, offered him solitude to create memory-based paintings of swimmers and landscapes.

howard castle completes restoration

Castle Howard, the historic North Yorkshire estate known for its role in Netflix's *Bridgerton* and the 1981 film *Brideshead Revisited*, is reopening to the public after major restoration work. The centerpiece is the tapestry drawing room, which had stood as an empty shell since a 1940 fire devastated much of the house. The room has been fully reconstructed with a new ceiling, floor, fireplace, paneling, and window casings, overseen by architect Francis Terry. Four 18th-century tapestries by John Vanderbank, depicting the seasons, have been restored and reinstalled in their original locations for the first time since the early 1700s. The restoration also prompted a rehang of the Long Gallery and a reimagining of the grand staircase, which now displays artifacts collected by the earls of Carlisle.

why did leonardo and michelangelo have beef

Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, two of history's most celebrated artists, had a well-documented rivalry rooted in competition for commissions, class differences, and artistic disagreements. Their first known encounter occurred when Leonardo served on a committee deciding the placement of Michelangelo's *David* (1501), where Leonardo reportedly mocked the sculpture by sketching it as the sea god Neptune. Their rivalry escalated when both were commissioned to paint opposing murals in Florence's Salone dei Cinquecento—Leonardo's *Battle of Anghiari* and Michelangelo's *Battle of Cascina*—neither of which was completed. The artists traded insults over the years, with Michelangelo criticizing Leonardo's view of sculpture as inferior to painting, and Leonardo deriding Michelangelo's muscular figures as resembling "a bag of walnuts."

renaissance painting feast of the gods

The article examines Giovanni Bellini's painting *The Feast of the Gods* (1514–29), a mythological scene depicting Roman deities at a feast, which was later reworked by Dosso Dossi and Titian. Commissioned by Duke Alfonso d'Este for his private gallery, the work is notable for including what is believed to be the earliest painted example of Chinese porcelain in European art. The painting draws from Ovid's 'Fasti' and was Bellini's last completed work, finished when he was in his 80s.

megastar artist kent monkman is rewriting colonial narratives on canvas

Kent Monkman, a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation and a leading contemporary painter based between Toronto and New York, is the subject of a feature article discussing his career and his first major U.S. museum exhibition, "History is Painted by the Victors," opening at the Denver Art Museum. Monkman is known for epic, genre-bending canvases that subvert classical European painting traditions, particularly 19th- and 20th-century history painting, to expose colonial distortions and omissions. Central to his work is Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, his time-traveling alter ego who queers history and repositions Indigenous presence and agency. The article includes an interview where Monkman reflects on his upbringing in Winnipeg, his relationship to museums, and how painting serves as both a political tool and a method for processing historical trauma.

museums bet major paintings on super bowl win

The Seattle Art Museum and the Clark Art Institute in New England have placed a wager on the Super Bowl, each betting a major landscape painting from their collection on their respective home teams. Seattle Art Museum director Kimerly Rorschach has offered Albert Bierstadt's "Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast" (1870), while Clark Art Institute director Michael Conforti has put up Winslow Homer's "West Point, Prout's Neck" (1900). The losing museum will loan its painting to the winner for three months, covering all shipping and expenses.

jack whittens 9 11 01 moma

Jack Whitten's monumental mosaic-painting "9.11.01" (2006) is the focus of this article, which examines the work on view at the Museum of Modern Art. The painting, created in response to the September 11 attacks, uses abstract forms—a cracked black pyramid with dagger-like spines and bootprints—to evoke the trauma of that day. Whitten, who witnessed the first plane strike from his studio in Manhattan, embedded ash and wreckage fragments into the surface, blending abstraction with historical memory.

american civil liberties union of texas artists in residence

The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas (ACLU of Texas) has named Houston-based painter Vincent Valdez and Austin-based author KB Brookins as the recipients of its artists-in-residence program for 2025–26. Each artist will receive $30,000 to fund individual projects and will collaborate with the ACLU of Texas and community leaders to advocate for civil rights. Valdez plans to paint portraits of local community leaders and create poster packets combining Know Your Rights information with archival research for statewide distribution. Brookins will address pretrial detention in Texas jails through original compositions, workshops, and public presentations, focusing on mass incarceration issues in Harris County. The pair were selected from roughly 200 applicants following a statewide open call, succeeding artist Kill Joy, who led an immigrants' rights tour with large puppets.

top 6 accidents in museums

This article from Artnet News compiles a list of notable accidents in museums, where visitors, children, or even curators have inadvertently damaged valuable artworks and artifacts. Incidents include a four-year-old boy shattering a $15,000 Lego sculpture of a Zootopia character, a 12-year-old boy punching a $1.5 million Baroque painting by Paolo Porpora at Huashan 1914 Creative Park in Taipei, a Cy Twombly sculpture knocked over at the Menil Collection in Houston, and a visitor breaking a 4,000-year-old Minoan vase at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum in Crete. The article is framed as a lighthearted yet cautionary look at the fragility of museum objects and the human errors that lead to their damage.

kevin beasley storm king acoustic mirror

Kevin Beasley has created a large-scale acoustic mirror for Storm King Art Center, opening May 7. The 11-foot-tall, 100-foot-wide four-part sculpture is inspired by World War I–era concrete acoustic mirrors used for detecting enemy aircraft. Unlike those obsolete relics, Beasley's work is made from recycled clothes cast in resin and will amplify visitors' voices and outdoor sounds. The piece engages with the history of the Hudson River School painters and themes of colonialism, Manifest Destiny, and contested land, while also celebrating agricultural cycles through its seasonal titles: Proscenium| Rebirth, Growth, Harvest, and Dormancy.

emily fisher landau picasso sothebys

Pablo Picasso's 1932 painting *Femme à la montre*, depicting his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, sold for $139.4 million (including fees) at Sotheby's New York during the highly anticipated Emily Fisher Landau sale. The work, estimated at $120 million, was the centerpiece of the auction, with bidding starting at $95 million and concluding after a two-minute standoff among three phone bidders, including one from Asia. Brooke Lampley, Sotheby's head of global fine art, secured the winning bid on behalf of a client. The sale was handled by Sotheby's, which won the right to auction the estate of Landau, a longtime Whitney Museum board member and private collector.

child scratches mark rothko dutch museum

A child made small scratches on Mark Rothko's painting *Grey, Orange on Maroon, No. 8* (1960) at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The incident occurred in the museum's Depot, a publicly accessible storage facility, during an unguarded moment. The work sustained superficial but visible damage to its unvarnished paint layer, and the museum is consulting conservators within and outside the Netherlands for treatment.

caraggio rome barberini review rare

A major exhibition titled "Caravaggio 2025" at Rome's Palazzo Barberini brings together two dozen of the artist's roughly sixty known works, drawn from Italian and international collections. The show spans Caravaggio's career from his arrival in Rome in 1595 to his death in 1610, and includes rediscovered paintings such as *Ecce Homo* (c. 1606–1607), which resurfaced at a Spanish auction in 2021, and a newly attributed portrait of Maffeo Barberini (c. 1595). Visitors can now see nearly two-thirds of Caravaggio's surviving oeuvre in a single trip to Rome, with the exhibition running through July 6.

kent monkman interview

Kent Monkman, a contemporary artist from the Fisher River Cree Nation, is preparing for his first major U.S. museum exhibition, “Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors,” at the Denver Art Museum. In an interview, Monkman discusses his career-long practice of reimagining Western art history from an Indigenous perspective, using beauty, humor, and theatricality to expose colonial violence and systemic injustices. The exhibition, which began planning in 2018 and was delayed by the pandemic, will later travel to Canada, and Monkman reflects on the rare opportunity to see his dispersed works reunited and the liberating experience of trusting curators with the presentation.

rare basquiat sothebys contemporary auctions in new york

Sotheby's will auction a rediscovered early Jean-Michel Basquiat painting from 1981, unseen for 36 years, with a $10–15 million estimate at its Contemporary Evening Auction in New York this May. The sale also features major works from three tightly held private collections: the estate of Barbara Gladstone, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, and Daniella Luxembourg's 'Im Spazio' group, alongside top lots by Lucio Fontana, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Ed Ruscha. The Modern Evening Auction includes a Pablo Picasso musketeer portrait and a Georgia O'Keeffe painting, with combined estimates for both sales reaching up to $525.2 million.

re air how textiles took over the art world

This episode of Artnet News's podcast "The Art Angle" re-airs an interview between host Ben Davis and curator and writer Elissa Auther, author of "String Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art." They discuss the recent surge in interest in fiber art, from textile-based works at the Venice Biennale to the major traveling exhibition "Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction," which has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Auther, chief curator at the Museum of Arts and Design, provides historical context on how tapestry was once as revered as painting and explains the factors driving the current boom.

bloomsbury group wild child dora carrington

The article examines the life and work of Dora Carrington, a painter associated with the Bloomsbury Group, whose bohemian lifestyle and complex relationships—particularly with writer Lytton Strachey—have long overshadowed her artistic output. A new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery, the first dedicated to Carrington in three decades, aims to refocus attention on her paintings, including early pencil studies and academic female nudes, which impressed her peers but received little critical acclaim during her lifetime.

mauritshuis museum rembrandt paintings copies

The Mauritshuis museum in The Hague has reclassified three paintings previously attributed to Rembrandt as copies or studio works: *Portrait of Rembrandt with a Gorget* (ca. 1629), *Study of an Old Man* (ca. 1655–60), and *‘Tronie’ of an Old Man* (ca. 1630). The first was identified as a copy in 1999, the second was found to be by a student despite a genuine signature, and the third may have been painted by a student or Rembrandt himself. The museum now lists 11 works as authentic Rembrandts, including *The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp* (1632), and seven works whose authenticity has been questioned.

kehinde wiley sexual assault ogechi chieke lawsuit

Artist Kehinde Wiley has been accused of sexual assault by fellow artist Ogechi Chieke in a lawsuit filed in New York Supreme Court on February 28, just before the expiration of an amendment to New York’s Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law. Chieke alleges that Wiley assaulted her at a New York restaurant in 2007, including grabbing her buttocks and vagina and making a lewd comment. Wiley denies the allegations, stating he has never met Chieke and calling the lawsuit a "blatant money-grab." This is the first legal filing among multiple sexual assault allegations against Wiley, which previously surfaced on Instagram from several men, including Joseph Awuah-Darko and Terrell Armistead.

roman villa villajoyosa wall fragments

Archaeologists in Villajoyosa, Spain, have uncovered over 4,000 fragments of painted wall plaster from the Roman villa of Barberes Sud, a palatial complex dating to the reign of Emperor Trajan (98–117 C.E.). The fragments were found in a collapsed room, and the team from the Alebus Historical Heritage Company and the Municipal Archaeology Service has catalogued and photographed each piece to enable digital reconstruction. At the Vilamuseu restoration laboratory, 22 fragments have already been reassembled into a panel featuring floral garlands, birds, and painted moldings.

canada giant van gogh easel fate

In 1997, artist Cameron Cross installed The Big Easel, a 75-foot-tall sculpture of an easel displaying a reproduction of Vincent van Gogh's sunflower paintings, in Altona, Canada, to honor the town's status as the Sunflower Capital of Canada. After a windstorm on February 28 blew off a panel of the painting and further damage occurred on March 15, the town removed the four-ton painting and conducted a survey to gauge public support for restoration. A majority of respondents (68%) voted to save the artwork, with 60% preferring a hand-painted canvas over a printed replica and 61% wanting to keep the Van Gogh sunflowers. Cross plans to rebuild the fiberglass canvas from scratch and repaint the image in 2026, with costs estimated at CA$70,000 ($50,500) for a durable marine-grade plywood version.

rashid johnson guggenheim museum retrospective review

Rashid Johnson's mid-career retrospective, "Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers," has opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, filling the rotunda with paintings, sculptures, photographs, and films. Curated by Naomi Beckwith and Andrea Karnes, with Faith Hunter, the exhibition includes Johnson's well-known "Anxious Men" works alongside lesser-seen films like *Threeness* (2005), which challenge viewers' expectations. The show features recurring target motifs, as seen in the outdoor sculpture *Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos* (2008), and explores themes of looking, being looked at, and the fluidity of Black identity.

egon schiele secret niece revealed

A group of Egon Schiele scholars and curators recently discovered that the artist had a secret niece, Gertrude "Gerti" Peschka, born to his sister Gertrude and fellow artist Anton Peschka before their marriage. The revelation came from a previously unexamined box of documents in the archives of Rudolf Leopold at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, including letters from Schiele's mother about the pregnancy and a note from Schiele congratulating his sister. Gerti died tragically of starvation in a Nazi-run psychiatric hospital. The discovery was made by Verena Gamper, then head of the Egon Schiele Documentation Center, and has been incorporated into the exhibition "Egon Schiele: Last Years" at the Leopold Museum.

Ary Scheffer en 2 minutes

Ary Scheffer (1795–1858) was a Dutch-born Romantic painter who became a central figure in Parisian artistic and cultural life during the July Monarchy. He was the official portraitist of the Orléans family and created deeply melancholic, spiritual works inspired by Dante, Goethe, and the Gospels. His studio at 16 rue Chaptal, in the Nouvelle Athènes district, hosted legendary Friday gatherings attended by Chopin, Liszt, George Sand, and Dickens, and now houses the Musée de la Vie romantique. Key works include *Le Dévouement patriotique des six Bourgeois de Calais* (1819) and *Les Femmes souliotes* (1827), both acquired by the French state.

Memories Bathed in Color

In Farbe getauchte Erinnerungen

The Fondation Luma in Arles, France, has opened three exhibitions exploring memory and archives, headlined by Gerhard Richter's "Overpainted Photographs." The show features 120 works from Richter's private archive, some exhibited for the first time, created since the mid-1980s by dragging photographs through leftover paint in his studio. Richter, now 94, personally selected and hung the works chronologically starting from the fall of the Berlin Wall, reflecting his lost homeland and the passage of time. The exhibition also includes early sketches and oil paintings by the late architect Zaha Hadid, previously shown at London's Serpentine Gallery in 2016.

I think I didn't understand many artists

"Ich glaube, ich habe viele Künstler nicht verstanden"

Adrian Searle, the long-standing chief art critic for The Guardian, is stepping down after three decades at the publication and nearly 50 years in art criticism. In a reflective interview, Searle discusses his transition from a practicing painter and educator to a critic, noting that his early interactions with students like Peter Doig and Isaac Julien helped him realize his true strength lay in writing rather than art-making. He recounts his experiences navigating the British art scene, from the decline of Greenbergian abstraction to his encounters with formidable figures like Richard Serra.

Drawings Dominate at a Chicago de Kooning Exhibit

The Art Institute of Chicago is presenting an exhibition focused on the drawings of Willem de Kooning, marking a rare departure from the typical painting-centric blockbuster shows dedicated to the artist. The exhibition highlights de Kooning's mastery in drawing, offering a focused look at this often-overlooked aspect of his practice.