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      Heirs of Jews Who Fled the Nazis Return Art to Heirs Whose Family Could Not

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      An Egon Schiele drawing was returned on Friday at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. The heirs said in a statement that relinquishing the work was “the right thing to do.”“Seated Nude Woman,” a drawing by the Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele, was returned on Friday to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish art collector and Viennese cabaret performer who was killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.The drawing had been held by the heirs of a Jewish couple who fled the Nazis just before World War II and later unknowingly bought the work, which investigators for the Manhattan district attorney’s office say were among dozens looted from Grünbaum by the Third Reich.The return took place at the district attorney’s office in Manhattan. The grandchildren of the couple, Ernst and Helene Papanek, said in a statement that relinquishing the work was “the right thing to do” in the face of evidence it had been looted.Since September, five museums and four private owners have handed back 11 works once owned by Grünbaum in what has become the largest Holocaust art restitution case in the United States.One museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, has challenged an order from investigators to turn over a 12th Schiele, “Russian War Prisoner,” that was once owned by Grünbaum, who died in a concentration camp in 1941. The museum has contested the evidence cited by investigators and a legal battle over the work is proceeding in New York State Supreme Court.A Grünbaum descendant, Timothy Reif, responded to Friday’s return in a statement that said the recovery of the work sends a message “that crime does not pay and that the law enforcement community in New York has not forgotten the dark lessons of World War II.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Brazilian Art Student Switches Coin at the British Museum With a Fake

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      The artist aimed to use sleight of hand to point to what he described as the museum’s problematic legacy of colonial-era acquisitions.A Brazilian artist strolled into the British Museum last month and approached a table where visitors are allowed to interact with historic objects. After handling a 17th-century British coin for a moment, he seemingly returned it and moved on, like thousands of other visitors.Only last week did the museum discover — through the artist’s Instagram page — that he had replaced a genuine coin with his own replica and discarded the real artifact in the museum’s donation box on his way out.The act was the culmination of a more-than-yearlong project by Ilê Sartuzi, an art student at Goldsmiths, University of London. To briefly steal the coin, he used the type of sleight of hand often associated with magicians to draw parallels to what he called the “trickery” of the museum’s display of objects with contested provenance.“The gesture of stealing as a central part of the project brings back the heated discussion about the role of looting in the museum’s foundation,” Mr. Sartuzi said.The museum has long faced criticism regarding its acquisition methods. Several nations have sought the return of particular objects in the museum’s exhibits and questioned the legitimacy of its collections. This latest stunt did not seem to resonate with the museum.“It’s a tired argument,” said Connor Watson, the museum’s spokesman. “We’re quite open about what is looted and what is a contested object.” We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Test Your Focus: Can You Spend 10 Minutes With One Painting?

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      Our attention spans may be fried, but they don’t have to stay that way. In a modest attempt to sharpen your focus, we’d like you to consider looking at a single painting for 10 minutes, uninterrupted. Our exercise is based on an assignment that Jennifer Roberts, an art history professor at Harvard, gives to her […] More

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      The Art Forger Had Fooled Thousands. Then He Met Doug.

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      When a man obsessed with woodblocks began to do business with a man obsessed with medical antiques, their relationship flowered — until it soured.Earl Washington loves wood.He loves maple wood from Wisconsin and boxwood from Turkey. He loves running his hands on its surface, feeling its heft and texture. But most of all he loves carving it. Thoughts about carving, he says, consume his waking moments.“If I’m looking at your face when I’m talking to you, I’m literally looking at how I’m going to carve your eyes and carve your nose on a piece of wood,” he said in an interview.For decades, beginning in the late 1990s, Washington, 62, created thousands of ornate woodblocks and used them to make intricate prints of all kinds of things: biblical imagery, erotica, anatomical illustrations, the stark motifs of German expressionism.Mastery was never enough for him, though. To profitably sell woodblocks — which can be an oddity in the art market — Washington decided he also needed myth. So he created elaborate origin stories for his pieces. Some, he claimed, had been made or acquired by his great-grandfather. Others he promoted as rare creations from the 16th and 17th centuries.Thousands of people bought them unquestioningly, but a few became suspicious and raised concerns online and to the authorities. The F.B.I. fielded some complaints, but was not aware, it said later, of the “depth and the breadth” of Washington’s scheme, so he continued to sell his creations, having mastered the craft of carving and the art of fooling others.Until one day in 2013, when he met Douglas Arbittier.Everything Earl Washington feels about wood, Arbittier feels about medical antiques.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ford and Mellon Foundations Name 2024 Disability Futures Fellows

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      The 20 recipients, including a Broadway composer, a Marvel video game voice actress and a three-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, are the initiative’s final cohort.The Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations on Wednesday named the 2024 Disability Futures Fellows — the latest class of disabled writers, filmmakers, musicians and other creative artists who will receive unrestricted $50,000 awards.This year’s recipients include Gaelynn Lea, a folk artist and disability rights activist; Natasha Ofili, an actress and writer who in 2020 became one of the first Black deaf actors to portray a video game character — Hailey Cooper — in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales; Warren Snipe, a.k.a. Wawa, a deaf rapper and actor who performed in sign language at the 2022 Super Bowl; and Kay Ulanday Barrett, a three-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and essayist whose work focuses on queer, transgender people of color.Lea said she almost missed an email telling her she got the award. “Because the email said, ‘We’re excited to offer you $50,000,’ it went to my spam,” Lea, 40, said in an interview. (She later received a follow-up email.)“It’s very validating that I’m doing this stuff I really care about, and now it’s being recognized,” added Lea, who won NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016, and composed and performed original music for a Broadway production of “Macbeth” starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga. Lea plans to use the award to fund the writing of a memoir to be published next year.The initiative, which is administered by United States Artists, named its inaugural class of fellows in 2020, with the goal of increasing the visibility of disabled artists and elevating their voices. (About one in four adults in the United States has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) The second class was announced in 2022, and this is the last cohort in the program. The fellowship supports people at all stages of their careers.Elizabeth Alexander, the president of the Mellon Foundation, said in a statement that the program reflected the foundation’s support of the “work, experiences and visions of disabled artists — both in their individual practices and in the collective power they wield in the arts at large.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Painter of Revolution, on Both Sides of the Atlantic

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      Born into slavery, Guillaume Lethière became one of France’s most decorated painters. For the first time, a major exhibition gives us the full view of his scenes of love and war.Liberté, égalité … and that third one, what is it again?On July 14, 1789 (exactly 235 years ago this Sunday), some idealistic Parisians stormed a not especially crowded prison. They overthrew the king’s guard. They set in train a three-pronged revolution: for individual liberty, for civil equality, and, last and rarest, for communal obligation. That July fraternity passed from the realm of genealogy into politics — and this July’s startling French legislative election, fought over race, migration and national belonging, confirms how agitated that third virtue remains. Who is my brother? In the National Assembly of 1789 and the National Assembly of 2024, some questions never get a final answer.Far from the Bastille, at the Clark Art Institute in the Berkshires, one of the most remarkable exhibitions I’ve seen in years punches right at the heart of today’s altercations over nationality and democracy, culture and politics, and what it means to be a citizen. Guillaume Lethière (1760—1832) was a Neoclassical painter of mixed race who has never, until now, been the subject of a solo museum show. Born in the French Caribbean, almost certainly into slavery, he reached the summits of artistic achievement in Paris and Rome. As rebellions and revolutions shook both France and the Caribbean, he painted massive history paintings of heroes in togas, and portraits of men and women from Europe and the Antilles. It was Lethière’s calling, in an era where no bonds seemed stable, to give form to fraternité.“Woman Leaning on a Portfolio,” circa 1799, oil on canvas, at the Clark. Our critic celebrates “the aloof precision of Lethière’s line” in this portrait, which pictures his stepdaughter clutching an artist’s papers. Richard Beaven for The New York TimesThis groundbreaking show was organized over five years by Esther Bell and Olivier Meslay of the Clark, along with Marie-Pierre Salé of the Musée du Louvre in Paris, where the exhibition will travel in November. Bell and Meslay have also edited an imposing 400-page catalog, bulky with contributions from leading scholars of French and Caribbean history. But “Guillaume Lethière” is not — this point is critical — a corrective exhibition, highlighting some marginal figure excluded from a white, European establishment. Lethière couldn’t have been more central to the Paris art world of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He ran one of the leading academies. He painted the empress Joséphine, a fellow Creole. Ingres drew him and his family. In a 1798 painting depicting France’s celebrity artists of that age of revolution, Lethière stands in the most prominent position, bathed in light.Even today, at the Louvre, he is hiding in plain sight. If you’ve ever fought through the throngs in the Italian painting wing, you may remember being spat out of the Mona Lisa gallery into a grand chamber with a concession selling magnets, mugs and other souvenirs. In all my years I never really looked up in that room — but right there, hanging above the Leonardo Rubik’s cubes and Eiffel Tower figurines, are two giant paintings by Lethière, two stentorian 25-footers of antique virtue and death. A consul orders his sons beheaded for betraying the Roman Republic. A centurion stabs his daughter to save her from enslavement.That’s our guy! As weighty as marble. As serious as the law. What you are going to see in this show is the cold beauty of Neoclassicism: a style predicated on Greek and Roman examples that found favor during the French Revolution, everywhere from painting and architecture to fashion and furniture design. Neoclassicism frowns on pleasure. It sneers at ornament. Its greatest exponent was Jacques-Louis David, the Jacobin artist/terrorist and Lethière’s great rival, who painted Roman history and myth as moral lessons for the new French republic.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rencontres d’Arles Points the Camera Below the Surface

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      There’s always more to a photo than what we see, as shown by standout exhibitions at this year’s Rencontres d’Arles in southern France.Deep beneath the town hall in Arles, France, past some unassuming service counters and down several flights of narrow steps, the artist Sophie Calle has buried some things that she can’t bear to part with.Her show, called “Neither Give Nor Throw Away,” is a standout exhibition at this year’s Rencontres d’Arles, an annual summer photography festival founded in 1970 that presents group and solo shows of new and old photographic works in museums, churches, repurposed storefronts and parks across this Provençal city of 52,000 residents.This year’s edition of the Rencontres, which runs through Sept. 29, is titled “Beneath the Surface,” and Calle’s contribution takes place in a labyrinthine series of underground caverns bisected by long arched balustrades. The shadowy walkways and damp, moldy atmosphere are ideal for her project, in which she displays works from her storeroom that were damaged in a storm. Advised by restorers to destroy them, she decided instead to give them a subterranean afterlife. And so, the works are now “buried” in Arles, where they continue to decompose, but have not, at least, been forsaken.Sophie Calle’s exhibition “Neither Give Nor Throw Away” is in a series of underground caverns beneath Arles’s town hall.Teresa Suarez/EPA, via ShutterstockCalle — a photographer, writer and conceptual artist — is one of France’s most lauded and prolific contemporary art makers. Family, absence, death, romance and archives are themes that recur in her work, which often pairs images and text. In Arles, water-damaged photographs show a charred and discarded bed, formerly Calle’s own, in which a man who was renting a room from Calle’s mother burned to death, and a series of modest grave plots with stark markers: Mother, Sister, Child.Others come from a series titled “The Blind,” which matches modest black-and-white portraits that Calle took of blind people with her photographic interpretations of their responses, also present as framed texts, when she asked them what they imagine to be beautiful. (Answers include the sea, the color blue and Alan Delon.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Wide, Wide World of Judy Chicago

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      The 84-year-old American is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking feminist installation “The Dinner Party,” but she is an artist with a formidable range.Like all women and all art, Judy Chicago contains multitudes. This summer, the 84-year old American artist’s lifelong interest in excavating and subverting female history through storytelling, activism and overtly feminine aesthetics and materials is on display in two bold and affecting European retrospectives.Across venues in Britain and France, six decades of Chicago’s distinctly feminist oeuvre show a remarkable range. Minimalist sculptures; psychedelic spray-painted car hoods; landscapes billowing with bright plumes of smoke; and paintings of swirling, hallucinatory flowers fill the galleries with Chicago’s hallmark bright colors and undulating line.Many works incorporate personal texts in tidy, looping cursive about gendered rejection, shame, longing and anger. And tapestries, wall hangings and monumental drawings on black paper present female bodies, including the body of the artist herself, in states of ecstasy, abandon, dissolution — being born, giving birth, dying and evanescing into the ether in rainbow sweeps and spirals. These works foreground the female nude, its life-giving properties and implicit connection to the natural world.One of the shows, “Herstory” — which ran at the New Museum in New York this past fall and is now on show at the LUMA Foundation in Arles, France — is a classic chronological display of Chicago’s work from the early 1960s to the present; the other, “Revelations,” at the Serpentine Galleries in London, focuses on the artist’s drawings. The catalog for the London exhibition also includes an illuminated manuscript of the same name from the 1970s that Chicago produced while creating her best-known work, “The Dinner Party” (1974-1979), an installation that imagines a ceremonial banquet for 39 pre-eminent women.“In the Beginning,” from “Birth Project” (1982), on display at the Serpentine Galleries in London.Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via Judy Chicago and Serpentine; Jo UnderhillNow a mainstay of art history studies, “The Dinner Party” has dominated understanding of Chicago’s career despite her prolific and wide-ranging output. The vast triangular table with elaborate ceramic and embroidered place settings was the product of years of collaborative work with female artisans, and it distilled a decade of research in archives and libraries, where Chicago unearthed figure after figure who had made groundbreaking discoveries across disciplines but whose contributions had been erased from history. Each place setting at the banquet is devoted to one of these women, each with her own special embroidered cloth and ceramic plate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More