shows to see art basel

Art Basel returns to its Swiss namesake city from June 19 to 22, with VIP previews on June 17 and 18. The article recommends stepping outside the fair to explore top-tier exhibitions across Basel, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's rediscovered painting 'Tanz im Varieté' (1911) at Kunstmuseum Basel, a major survey of Medardo Rosso at the same museum, and a solo show by Thomas Ott at Cartoonmuseum Basel. It also highlights Clearing gallery's off-site project 'Maison Clearing' in a private house with works by over 40 artists.

unseen jean antoine watteau christies paris

A rare Jean-Antoine Watteau drawing, never before publicly exhibited, and a major Jean-Honoré Fragonard painting will be auctioned at Christie’s Paris on March 25. The works come from the collection of the late Arthur Georges Veil-Picard, a banker and absinthe magnate who assembled a world-class trove of 18th-century French art over 40 years. The Watteau, *Actor Holding a Guitar Under His Arm*, was previously known only from a black-and-white photograph in the artist’s catalogue raisonné and is estimated at €600,000–800,000. The Fragonard, *The Happy Family*, from the 1770s, carries an estimate of €1.5–2 million. The sale also includes works by Hubert Robert, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Marie-Suzanne Roslin, with total estimates reaching €5–8 million.

joan miro constellations 3 things to know

Spanish Surrealist Joan Miró created the "Constellations" series of 23 paintings on paper between January 1940 and September 1941, during the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Fleeing to Normandy and later Palma de Mallorca, Miró used oil and tempera on small sheets, producing joyful, abstract works filled with floating forms reminiscent of music and the cosmos. The series was shipped to New York in 1944 and exhibited in 1945 at Pierre Matisse's gallery, where it captivated exiled European artists and may have influenced Jackson Pollock's all-over drip painting style.

gagosian reunites with richard diebenkorn

Gagosian has announced representation of the late American painter Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993), marking the artist's return to the gallery more than thirty years after his final solo exhibition there during his lifetime. To celebrate, the gallery will mount a career-spanning exhibition at its Madison Avenue flagship opening November 8, curated by Jasper Sharp in collaboration with the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation. The show will feature works from every period of Diebenkorn's six-decade career, including early California landscapes, wartime watercolors, and the celebrated Ocean Park abstractions, with highlights such as a 1943 watercolor, a monumental 1960 canvas, and late works on paper.

See Inside the Long-Lost Lee Miller and Cecil Beaton Album Full of WW2-Era Photographs

The Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford has acquired a rare photographic "daybook" compiled by Roland Haupt, a former darkroom assistant at British Vogue. Created between 1943 and 1949, the annotated scrapbook contains hundreds of original photographs and clippings by legendary photographers Lee Miller and Cecil Beaton. The acquisition, brokered by dealer Michael Hoppen, ensures that the album—which includes iconic images of Miller in Hitler’s bathtub and portraits of Picasso—remains intact as a singular historical record rather than being sold piecemeal at auction.

Despite Uncertainty, Gulf Art World Projects Normalcy

Galleries and museums in Gulf states like the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are reopening and projecting normalcy despite the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran, which has entered its fourth week. Major events like Art Dubai have been postponed, and institutions like the Sharjah Art Foundation have delayed gatherings, but many cultural venues are operating with adjusted formats or by appointment.

Picasso’s Guernica is the ultimate emblem of the horrors of war. It has no place in Spain's partisan squabbles | María Ramírez

A political dispute has erupted in Spain over the potential temporary relocation of Pablo Picasso's iconic anti-war painting *Guernica*. The president of the Basque Country, Imanol Pradales, has formally requested the work be moved from Madrid's Reina Sofía museum to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao for several months in 2027, framing it as a form of "reparation" for the Basque people. The Spanish government has rejected the request on conservation grounds, while conservative politicians have used the proposal to attack Basque nationalism.

joseph beuys daniel spaulding honigpumpe

Joseph Beuys remains one of the most polarizing figures in 20th-century art, a former Nazi soldier who reinvented himself as a shamanic healer and a founding member of the Green Party. A new monographic study by art historian Daniel Spaulding, 'Joseph Beuys and History', re-evaluates the artist's legacy by confronting his refusal to apologize for his wartime past and his use of ambiguous materials like fat and felt. Spaulding argues that Beuys’s work should be read through the lens of 'bad faith,' where his utopian slogans masked a deep, unresolved engagement with the horrors of the Holocaust.

scarcity rarity artnet 20th century art auction

Artnet Auctions has launched its "20th Century Art" sale, featuring works by blue-chip masters including Joan Miró, Yves Klein, and Andy Warhol. The auction, curated by specialists Sylvie François Sturtevant and Jason Rulnick, highlights the distinction between "rarity"—objects that are unusual due to limited production or historical loss—and "scarcity"—where high market demand outstrips the available supply of editioned works.

parlez vous le francais french old masters glossary and museum list

Artnet News published a French-language glossary of Old Masters terminology and a list of French museums dedicated to Old Masters. The article defines an Old Master as a European painter who worked before 1800, then provides an A–Z bilingual glossary covering terms from Baroque to Venetian Renaissance. It also profiles two museums: the Musée du Louvre in Paris, highlighting its history, collection size, and a wartime anecdote about Théodore Géricault's "Le Radeau de la Méduse," and the Musée du Louvre-Lens, a branch museum opened in 2012 on a former mining site.

norman rockwell thanksgiving freedom from want three facts

Norman Rockwell's iconic painting "Freedom From Want" (1943), known as the quintessential Thanksgiving image, is examined through three lesser-known facts. The painting was part of a series responding to FDR's "Four Freedoms" speech, initially rejected by the military's Office of War Information before being embraced for a war bond campaign that raised over $132 million. Rockwell used friends and family as models, including his wife and the family cook, who actually prepared the turkey depicted. The work has recently returned to the spotlight: a four-panel Rockwell suite sold for $7.2 million at Heritage Auctions to the White House Historical Association, while Rockwell's family criticized the Department of Homeland Security for using his art in divisive social media posts.

sothebys to sell rene magritte work bought by family of nazi executed wwii resistance fighter

A René Magritte painting, *La Magie Noire* (1934), will be auctioned at Sotheby’s Paris on October 24 with a high estimate of €7 million ($8.1 million). The work has remained in the same private collection for nearly a century, having been acquired directly from the artist by the family of World War II resistance heroine Suzanne Spaak, who was executed by the Gestapo in 1944 for helping Jewish children escape Nazi persecution. The painting depicts Magritte’s wife, Georgette Berger, and is the first of ten portraits in which the female body merges with sky, stone, and spirit.

artists resisted fascism comrades in art andy friend

A group of British artists, frustrated by the Great Depression and inspired by socialist ideologies, founded the Artists International Association (AIA) in the early 1930s. Initially a Communist-inflected agit-prop group, it rebranded in 1935 to broaden its anti-fascist coalition, a move that sparked internal debates about ideological purity. The article, reviewing Andy Friend's book *Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism, 1933–1943*, highlights key episodes such as the AIA's 1940 exhibition 'The Face of Britain,' which opened amid the Blitz after bombs damaged the gallery.

liz collins fiber art risd museum venice biennale

Liz Collins created two monumental 16-foot-long tapestries for the 2024 Venice Biennale, titled *Rainbow Mountains: Moon* and *Rainbow Mountains: Weather* (both 2023). Initially conceived as a single 40-foot weaving, the project proved too ambitious and was split in two. Collins worked at the TextielLab in Tilburg, Netherlands, switching to a lighter yarn after a failed trial, and ultimately brought the finished works to New York in duffel bags before curator Adriano Pedrosa selected them for the Biennale. The textiles depict mountain ranges emitting rainbows through dark skies, exploring themes of duality—danger and joy, precarity and euphoria.

philadelphia museum boom 1940s art design

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has opened "Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s," a major survey featuring over 250 works including painting, photography, jewelry, ceramics, fashion, and furniture. The exhibition draws entirely from the museum's own collection, with around 40 percent of the works never exhibited before. It includes early pieces by celebrated figures like Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, as well as works by queer artists such as Paul Cadmus, Beauford Delaney, and Romaine Brooks, alongside self-taught artist Horace Pippin. Chief curator Jessica Smith emphasizes that the show aims to present a more complex, multivalent narrative of the decade beyond the dominant story of Abstract Expressionism.

leonard lauder mfa boston postcards

Leonard Lauder, the 85-year-old chairman emeritus of Estée Lauder Companies, has amassed a collection of approximately 130,000 postcards, many of which are a promised gift to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A selection of 350 propagandist postcards from the World War I and World War II eras is now featured in a new exhibition at the MFA titled “The Art of Influence: Propaganda Postcards from the Era of World Wars” (through January 21), accompanied by a publication. Lauder began collecting as a boarding school student in Miami Beach, drawn to the idealized images and vibrant colors of Art Deco hotel postcards, and later expanded to historical and propagandist cards that he describes as “living history.”

Ruth Asawa: Retrospective

A major retrospective of the Japanese-American artist Ruth Asawa is touring internationally, organized through a partnership between SFMOMA and MoMA. The exhibition spans six decades of her career, featuring her iconic suspended looped-wire sculptures alongside tied-wire pieces, bronze casts, drawings, and archival materials. The show traces her journey from her formative years at Black Mountain College to her influential role as an arts advocate and educator in San Francisco.

‘Lust for Life’: The Van Gogh book designed to fit in pockets of US soldiers during the Second World War

Irving Stone's 1934 novel *Lust for Life*, a fictionalized biography of Vincent van Gogh, was published as an Armed Services Edition during World War II for U.S. soldiers. These pocket-sized books, measuring 11cm by 17cm, were designed to fit in uniform pockets and withstand harsh conditions. Over 123 million copies of various titles were printed from 1943 to 1947, with distribution including parachute drops to troops on Pacific islands and handouts to soldiers before the Normandy Landings. The surviving copies are scarce and often damaged, with browned pages and covers marked as U.S. government property, not to be resold.

Revealed: how Van Gogh's nephew exchanged two of the artist's drawings for butter and bacon

In early 1945, during the Dutch 'Hunger Winter' at the end of World War II, Vincent van Gogh's nephew, Vincent Willem van Gogh, exchanged two of the artist's drawings for 35 packets of butter and some bacon. The swap was arranged with the help of artist Charley Toorop and involved the cheese business Visser Kaas in Heiloo. One of the drawings, *Head of a Peasant Woman, left profile* (December 1884–May 1885), is now being offered at Sotheby's on 25 June with an estimate of £400,000–£600,000, suggesting the pair would be worth around £1 million today. The nephew's family was suffering from starvation and tragedy, including the execution of his eldest son by German forces.

Richard Diebenkorn | Untitled (For Harvey Gantt) | For Sale

Artsy is offering for sale Richard Diebenkorn's work "Untitled (For Harvey Gantt)", a piece by the renowned American painter associated with Abstract Expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative movement. The artwork is listed on the online platform, making it available to collectors and art enthusiasts.

War-time exhibition: Yaacov Dorchin’s iron angels and sculptural language

Renowned Israeli sculptor Yaacov Dorchin, recipient of the 2004 Emet Prize and the 2011 Israel Prize for Visual Arts, opened his latest exhibition "Decapitated Fish and Additional Sculptures" at the Gordon Gallery in Tel Aviv on March 12, 2026—his 80th birthday and two weeks into the war with Iran. The exhibition, held without a large opening night due to the conflict, features about 15 sculptures spanning from 1993 to the present, including works in iron, steel, basalt, and other industrial materials. In an interview interrupted by an air raid siren, Dorchin discussed his approach to sculpting, the lyrical names of his heavy works, and how he reorganized the exhibition to create dialogues between older and newer pieces.

Orsay inaugure une salle destinée aux œuvres « MNR »

The Musée d'Orsay in Paris has opened a new dedicated gallery, Room 10b, to display works from its MNR (Musées nationaux Récupération) collection—artworks looted or acquired under dubious circumstances during the Nazi era. The room features detailed labels and educational texts, with some works shown verso to reveal provenance labels. The initiative is funded by the American Friends of the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée de l'Orangerie with €1 million over four years, and includes a fake Monet, a Degas subject to a restitution claim, a Rodin sculpture, and a debated Cézanne. The museum's provenance research team, led by Inès Rotermund-Reynard, collaborates with the French Ministry of Culture's M2RS mission.

Lee Miller in Wide Angle

Lee Miller en grand angle

The Musée d'Art moderne de Paris (MAM) has opened a major retrospective of photographer Lee Miller (1907-1977), featuring nearly 250 prints—many vintage and previously unseen. The exhibition originated at Tate Britain, where it drew over 250,000 visitors, and was co-organized with MAM and the Art Institute of Chicago. Curated by Michal Goldschmidt (former Tate Britain curator) and Fanny Schulmann of MAM, with new research led by Hilary Floe, the show emphasizes Miller's ties to Paris, her technical mastery, and her wartime reporting, including contact sheets from Dachau and Buchenwald never before shown in France.

met repatriates painting korea buddhist temple korean war

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has returned an 18th-century Korean painting, *The Tenth King of Hell* (1798), to Sinheungsa Temple in Sokcho, South Korea. The work, part of a ten-panel series called *Siwangdo* depicting kings of the afterlife, was illicitly taken from the temple in 1954 during the U.S. military presence after the Korean War. The Met purchased the painting in 2007 from a collector via an LLC linked to Bonhams’s Chinese art head. The repatriation was coordinated with the Sokcho Committee for the Return of Cultural Heritage and the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism. Six other panels were previously returned by LACMA in 2020; three remain abroad.

From The Drama to Malcolm in the Middle: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead

The article is a weekly entertainment guide covering cinema, gigs, art, stage, streaming, games, albums, and other cultural events. In the art section, it highlights two major exhibitions in London and its surroundings: a solo show of new paintings by British artist Cecily Brown at the Serpentine Gallery, created in response to Kensington Gardens, and a display of Henry Moore's iconic Shelter Drawings at his studio in Perry Green, focusing on his depictions of Londoners during the Blitz.

"The Palestine Pavilion Exists, and It's in Turin": Interview on the Exhibition Dedicated to the History of Gaza at the Merz Foundation

“Il Padiglione della Palestina esiste, ed è a Torino”. Intervista sulla mostra dedicata alla storia di Gaza alla Fondazione Merz

The Merz Foundation in Turin is hosting the exhibition 'Gaza, il futuro ha un cuore antico. Materie e memorie del Mediterraneo' (Gaza, the future has an ancient heart. Matters and memories of the Mediterranean). The show, created in collaboration with the Egyptian Museum and the MAH – Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva, juxtaposes ancient archaeological artifacts from Gaza with contemporary artworks. It aims to present Gaza's history as a Mediterranean crossroads, moving beyond its current wartime representation. The exhibition features artifacts from a collection of about 500 pieces, temporarily held in Geneva, alongside works by contemporary artists like Samaa Emad, Mirna Bamieh, and Wael Shawky.

‘Street Nihonga: The Art of Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani’

The Spencer Museum of Art has opened 'Street Nihonga: The Art of Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani,' a major spring exhibition featuring 170 works by the Japanese American artist, many never before displayed. The show traces Mirikitani's extraordinary life from his birth in Sacramento in 1920, his childhood in Hiroshima, formal training in traditional Nihonga under masters Kawai Gyokudō and Kimura Buzan, to his forced incarceration at Tule Lake during World War II after refusing to sign a loyalty oath. After years of statelessness and homelessness in New York City, Mirikitani developed a deeply personal, politically charged mixed-media practice that blended Japanese techniques with American street art.

Three artists, three questions: Immersed in colors

Three Israeli artists—Vera Kunis, Avraham Kan, and Tal Tenne Czaczkes—are featured in a column exploring their use of color amid the ongoing war with Iran. Kunis, a data engineer and artist, opened her first solo exhibition, "Imagination Algorithm," at the Global Art Gallery in Tel Aviv on March 10, 2026, during the conflict. The interview was conducted remotely due to war conditions, with a siren interrupting the conversation. The artists discuss their inspirations, definitions of art, and what makes their work unique, emphasizing resilience and optimism through color.

Remembering John Sailer, the gallerist and champion of Austrian art, who has died, aged 87

John Sailer, the founder of Vienna's Galerie Ulysses and a key champion of Austrian avant-garde art, has died at age 87. Sailer opened the gallery in 1974 with Gabriele Wimmer in a garage space before moving to its permanent location at Opernring 21. Over five decades, the gallery showcased Austrian artists such as Hans Hollein, Maria Lassnig, Walter Pichler, Arnulf Rainer, and Fritz Wotruba, alongside American greats like Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Helen Frankenthaler. Sailer also worked to promote Austrian and German artists in US museums, notably organizing a Rainer exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum and the Menil Collection, and successfully introducing Lassnig to the New York market at age 70.

Paul Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’ Joins Show at Jewish Museum in New York

Paul Klee's iconic watercolor 'Angelus Novus' (1920) has been added to the exhibition "Paul Klee: The Visible and the Invisible" at the Jewish Museum in New York, after being delayed due to wartime complications. The work, which was famously owned by philosopher Walter Benjamin and inspired his concept of the angel of history, joins over 70 other works in the survey of Klee's career.