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      Art Basel Returns, Larger, and More French, Than Ever

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      The fair will open in a freshly redone space with a new name. ‘In a way, it’s year zero,’ explained Art Basel’s chief executive.Art Basel Paris returns for its third edition with two big changes: It will be held for the first time in the newly renovated Grand Palais, and its name, formerly Paris+ by Art Basel, has been simplified and brought in line with the organization’s other art fairs.Open to the public Oct. 18-20, 195 galleries will display their wares, an increase of 27 percent from last year, since the Grand Palais can now accommodate more dealers than the former venue, the temporary Grand Palais Éphémère.A new section will debut, too: Premise, for focused presentations of older works that can include those made before 1900, the usual cutoff point for art to appear in the Art Basel fairs. Nine galleries will participate.“In a way, it’s year zero,” Noah Horowitz, the chief executive of Art Basel, said of the fair’s reset.Despite the larger number of exhibitors this year, Horowitz noted that it was still the smallest of the four Art Basel fairs (the others take place in Hong Kong, Miami Beach and Basel, Switzerland) and had the smallest booths. Space is still at a premium.“The selection process for Art Basel Paris was in many ways the most excruciating process I’ve ever borne witness to, only because of the extra amount of demand and the relative paucity of space,” Horowitz said. “There are incredible galleries, all very well deserving, that are not in the show.”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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      Brooklyn Museum at 200 Celebrates Beauty and Art’s Hidden History

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      At 200 years young, the Brooklyn Museum, the second largest art museum in New York City, has begun celebrating the bicentennial of its founding. And it’s doing so in characteristic fashion — meaning in ways that make traditionalists crazy. It is emphatically re-emphasizing what it has, basically, long been: an institution with the heart and soul of an alternative space enclosed in the body of a traditional museum.And it does so with two large-scale season-opening projects. One is a complete rehang and rethink of its American art galleries, filtering centuries of art from two hemispheres through a post-Black Lives Matter lens. The other, less radical, is a community-based roundup of new work by more than 200 contemporary artists living and working in the borough.Let me wedge in some history here. The museum was founded in 1823 as a circulating public library in what was then the Village of Brooklyn, across the river and independent from a rivalrous Manhattan. In the mid-19th century, the library, called the Brooklyn Institute, began collecting, along with books, natural history specimens and art. (Among the first pieces acquired was a painting, “The First Harvest in the Wilderness” (1855), by the Hudson River School artist Asher B. Durand. It’s in the American galleries rehang.)Asher B. Durand, “The First Harvest in the Wilderness,” 1855.George Etheredge for The New York TimesIn 1898, what is now the museum moved into a version of its present McKim, Mead & White home where, over time, it scored some cultural coups. It was among the first United States museum to present African art as art rather than as ethnology. It organized a nervy survey of avant-garde European modernist art in 1926, three years before MoMA existed. The museum was also one of the first in the country to have an art school, and to create a conservation lab.As time went on it also courted controversy by giving space to art unwelcome elsewhere. In 1980, while two other museums backed out of a traveling tour of Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” Brooklyn not only took it in but acquired the installation for its collection. (It’s on permanent view in the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, another Brooklyn first.)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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      Gabriel Sachter-Smith’s Quest for Wild Bananas Around the World

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      Gabriel Sachter-Smith is a banana aficionado who has identified some 500 varieties of banana on expeditions around the tropical world. “It’s like collecting Pokémon,” Mr. Sachter-Smith said at his farm, Hawaii Banana Source, on the North Shore of Oahu. He was walking through rows of young plants, some of the 150 varieties he grows, in a T-shirt splotched with mud and banana sap. His one-eyed dog, Mendel, trotted along at his boots. “My default mode of being alive is ‘What is that banana?’” he said.Mr. Sachter-Smith, 35, caught the banana bug when he was 14, on a trip with his mother to Washington, D.C., where he saw banana plants in her friend’s yard. The friend said they weren’t trees, that she could dig them up for winter, stick them inside and replant them when it warmed. When he returned home to Colorado, he started growing them as house plants. “I was trying to figure out what is a banana plant,” he said. “It’s just been a never-ending quest since then.”Mr. Sachter-Smith left banana-inhospitable Colorado to study tropical plant and soil science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, ultimately earning a master’s degree. His global quest has introduced him to bananas that are egg-shaped and orange, a foot long and pale yellow, sausage-stubby and green. They are eaten fried, roasted, boiled and as is, but also grown for pig feed, decoration and weaving fabric. In Papua New Guinea, where Mr. Sachter-Smith has gone on two expeditions hunting for bananas, their names carry many meanings: “young men” (mero mero), “can feed a whole family” (navotavu), “something that was fought over” (bukatawawe), “breast” (nono).You probably know just one banana: long, yellow, kind of flavorless. You eat it plain, put peanut butter on it, or toss it, overripe, in the freezer to make banana bread someday. (You won’t.) Its name, Cavendish, comes from a 19th-century English duke who was sent a package of the bananas and whose gardener grew them in a greenhouse. The Cavendish now accounts for almost half of all bananas produced globally and nearly all exports. It holds a Guinness World Record as the most eaten fruit.Red bananas in a Sri Lankan market.Anne-Marie Palmer/AlamyThe hairy banana, or pink banana, growing in Assam, India.Florapix/AlamyBut for years, scientists have warned that fungal diseases like black sigatoka and Tropical Race 4 could wipe out this monocrop, just as a fungus annihilated its predecessor, the Gros Michel, in the 1950s and 1960s. Genetic engineering and breeding are the most likely solutions, so scientists have built a stash of backup bananas from around the world, with genes that might someday see action on the global market.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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      For the Rescuer of an Ancient Shipwreck, Trouble Arrived in the Mail

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      The packages were sent to a woman whose work had led to the heralded recovery of the Kyrenia, and to new insights into classical Greek seafaring. But their ancient contents were a problem.In the 1960s, Susan Womer Katzev, a marine illustrator, and her husband, the archaeologist Michael L. Katzev, spent two summers diving with a team beneath the lapping waves of the Mediterranean off Cyprus.Their quarry was an ancient shipwreck on the sandy ocean floor discovered just years earlier by a man foraging for sponge. It would become a startling find.Before it sank in the third century B.C., the Kyrenia had traded food, iron and millstones out of its home port, thought to be the island of Rhodes. After more than 2,000 years underwater, much of its hull and cargo — old plates, coins, amphoras that once held wine and others that still held almonds — were remarkably intact.Mrs. Katzev’s drawings and photographs helped document a discovery that revealed not only ancient trading behaviors but also a wealth of information about how the Greeks built ships. For decades, her and her husband’s efforts have been heralded for their central role in establishing nautical archaeology as a field.This year, some two decades after Mr. Katzev’s death, Mrs. Katzev and a co-editor won plaudits for a definitive account of the ship’s excavation, a 421-page first volume that won a major award in January from the Archaeological Institute of America.The shipwreck became known as Kyrenia because it was found in a part of the Mediterranean that is not far from that town on the coast of Cyprus. Paul Popper/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesWe 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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      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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      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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      Cover Art for ‘Harry Potter’ Sold at Auction for $1.92 Million

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      The watercolor was painted in 1996 by a recent art school graduate from Britain who was working at a bookstore. He was paid $650.The original cover art for the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” sold for $1.92 million at auction on Wednesday, becoming the most expensive item related to the series, decades after its illustrator was paid a commission of just $650.The watercolor painting, which depicts the young wizard Harry going to Hogwarts from Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross station, was part of the private library of an American book collector and surgeon, Dr. Rodney P. Swantko, whose other rare items were auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York this week.The year before the novel came out in 1997, its publisher, Bloomsbury, hired a 23-year-old from England who had just graduated from art school to design the book jacket, the auction house said. The artist, Thomas Taylor, would go on to establish the world’s conception of Harry Potter, with his iconic round glasses and lightning bolt scar.“It’s kind of staggering, really,” he said about the sale of his painting in an interview on Thursday. “It’s exciting to see it fought over.”Mr. Taylor was working at a children’s bookstore when he submitted sample drawings of wizards and dragons for the publisher in London to review, he said in a 2022 podcast interview. When he was selected, he said, “I was over the moon.”The cover was Mr. Taylor’s first professional assignment. And, at the time, “J.K. Rowling was as unknown as I was,” he wrote in his blog, referring to the novel’s British author.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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      Collectors Line Up in London as King Charles Bank Notes Are Released

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      A steady stream of people lined up at the Bank of England on Wednesday to get what they hoped would be collector’s items: the first bank notes featuring the portrait of King Charles III.Bank notes can still be exciting in our increasingly cashless society.On Wednesday morning, in front of the Bank of England headquarters, a queue — that’s a British line, which is the same as an American line but more orderly — formed, as people walked out with collector’s items: the first bills with King Charles III’s portrait on them.In the queue were avid coin collectors, people with nostalgic feelings toward the new bank note (the first in their lifetime showing a new monarch) and the odd tourist who happened to need old money changed.The bank has issued 5, 10, 20 and 50 pound bills with the new designs, which are similar in color scheme to the bills in circulation with Queen Elizabeth II on them. Bills with the Queen’s portrait on them will remain in circulation across the country, alongside the ones with King Charles.Although Brits are accustomed to seeing the monarch on their money, it wasn’t always the case. The Bank of England began printing bank notes in 1725, but it was not until 1960 that bills featured the monarch. Until that time, Britannia — the personification of Britain — had been the only character on the bills.The modest but steady line moved along swiftly on Wednesday, with people spending no more than 20 minutes to exchange their money.An orderly line outside the Bank of England headquarters in central London, on Wednesday.Claire Moses/The New York TimesWe 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