Camille Pissarro, Apple Harvest, 1888. Oil on canvas, overall: 24 x 29 1/8 in. (60.96 x 73.98 cm.), dimensions: 33 1/2 x 38 3/4 x 4 in. (85.09 x 98.425 x 10.16 cm.). Brad Flowers, Dallas Museum of Art, Munger Fund
Their paintings might look like greeting cards from a nursing home, but the Impressionists were 19th century punk rockers. They upended the establishment by presenting what was viewed as rough, unfinished artwork by upstarts bent on subverting tradition. And when the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts rejected them, this ragtag group of starving artists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and Berthe Morisot, among others, set up their own group show, a first, and had the audacity to charge admission.
Their work can be seen in the touring show “Impressionism Revolution: Monet to Matisse,” currently at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, alongside the latter’s “Encore: 19th-Century French Art.” The Dallas show will then travel to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario in the summer and, in late 2026, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
“They revolutionized museums and how we encounter exhibitions and who art is made for and who gets to see it,” Dallas Museum of Art curator Nicole Myers tells Observer. “A lot of the things they brought to the table, real innovation at the time, stayed as a proto form of modern art making.”
It’s a short-lived but seminal moment in art history that ran for roughly 10 years, but the stylistic and intellectual offshoots that Impressionism spawned marked a sea change, paving the way for 20th-century art. Beginning with Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), and from which the movement got its name from critic Louis Leroy, Impressionism was maligned by the Académie, a government-run arts organization whose annual Salon show determined which artists might have a prosperous career and which would not.
Popular among the Salon were artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme and Antonin Mercié, academicists who produced Orientalist and historical paintings often depicting scenes from Greek mythology. Impressionist paintings, in both style and subject, were decidedly outré, eschewing tradition-bound standards like a brown wash to prep the canvas as well as the requisite coat of varnish as a final step. They elevated rough subject matter like sex workers, manual laborers and industrialization, presenting them through sketchy brushstrokes unlike the clean application of paint favored by the Salon.
“It was political to them to mount their own show and buck the government in that way. It was a battle they were waging and the stakes were extremely high in France in this period, where no art was not political,” offers Myers, noting how critics like Charles Albert d’Arnoux, known professionally as Bertall, characterized Impressionist works as “awkward attempts, crude in color and tone, without contour and modeling, displaying the most complete disregard for drawing, distance and perspective; colors chucked, so to speak, at random.”
Paul Signac, Mont Saint-Michel, Setting Sun, 1897. Oil on canvas, dimensions: 26 × 32 1/8 in. (66.04 × 81.6 cm.), framed dimensions: 33 × 39 1/4 × 3 1/2 in. (83.82 × 99.7 × 8.89 cm.). Dallas Museum of Art, The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, Inc., bequest of Mrs. Eugene McDermott in honor of Bill Booziotis
Banning black from their palette, Impressionists depicted shadow by deepening the color tones of a subject, while pointillists like Pissarro, Signac and Seurat placed disparate colored dots side by side, relying on the viewer’s eyes to mix them. Using color as shadow set the stage for Fauvists like Henri Matisse and André Derain and even Vincent van Gogh, a contemporary who called himself an Impressionist even if no one else did. Most important was their use of rough strokes rather than detailed clarity to indicate a shape or figure, again relying on the eye to draw conclusions based on context.
“Fauvism, the idea of Divisionism (Pointillism), taking color and applying it in separate strokes, the Impressionists were doing that intuitively,” notes Myers. “They began to divorce color and brushstroke from being descriptors. What makes your brain read the whole thing together as an image is about relativity, what’s next to what.”
Gauguin, whose only work in the Santa Barbara show is a familiar Tahitian scene, Under the Pandanus (1891), paints the ground in an otherworldly burgundy. It converses with the show’s second of two works by Edvard Munch titled Thuringian Forest (1904), which depicts an area alongside a forest road as pink and meaty, more like raw flesh than earth.
“Everything was about the external, objective world, but it should be filtered through the imagination, the subjective, the thoughts, the feelings of the artist to translate what they see or feel about their time,” says Myers, noting that Gauguin, who exhibited in 5 of 8 Impressionist shows, sensed something was missing from the movement early on and began exaggerating color and line. “He was the first to bring this idea of a different kind of spirituality, a lyrical quality, something more meaningful but harder to find.”
Four paintings by Piet Mondrian from the first two decades of the 20th century include a farm, a windmill and a castle ruin, as well as a stab at Pointillism in his The Winkel Mill (1908). Among them is no sign of his signature minimalism of primary colored quadrilaterals that characterize later works like New York City and Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43). Neither looks anything like its title, yet both capture the spirit and feel of the city.
Piet Mondrian, The Winkel Mill (pointillist version), 1908. Oil on canvas, dimensions: 17 × 13 5/8 in. (43.18 × 34.61 cm.), dimensions: 25 × 21 1/4 × 2 7/8 in. (63.5 × 53.98 × 7.3 cm.). Jerry Ward, Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, gift of the James H. and Lillian Clark Foundation
“For Mondrian, it was this spiritual fuzzy religious association with perfect balance and perfect harmony. He felt that if he could just communicate that through lines and grids, you will feel that perfect harmony with the cosmos,” says Myers. “He thought art should convey what cameras can’t capture, because photography had become perfected. What it can’t do is provide mood or thought through color or a line and touch people. It starts with him being exposed and experimenting with Impressionism and post-Impressionism and breaking down these cornerstones of images.”
Most of the Impressionists died before the turn of the century and many didn’t live to see World War I. But Monet, the man who started it all, lived until 1926. While it’s common for artists to do their best work in their youth or prime of life, Monet’s most prescient work came later. The show includes his pre-Impressionist still life Tea Service (1872), highlighting the artist’s technical mastery, as well as two from his decades-long series of waterlilies, which, more than any body of work, best illustrates the transition from Impressionism to Modernism.
The Water Lily Pond (Clouds) (1903) shows the sky reflected in the pond’s surface, disrupted by floating lilies. The far bank of the pond is seen at the top of the frame, helping to orient the viewer (although one critic thought the image was upside down when he saw the sky and clouds reflected in the water). Water Lilies (1908) is a circular composition that has no orienting point. It’s a mass of blue and green, the sky and trees reflected in the pond, with purple patches depicting lilies. It’s not an abstract work but, like the lily paintings that follow, the emphasis is on color and light less on subject matter.
“For Monet, the unifier was the desire to paint light and how it’s interacting with different surfaces,” says Myers. “The circular one, you only have light dancing on the surface of the water or glinting off the plants down below. It is incredibly abstract.”
The other name in the title of the show is Matisse, whose first painting Books and Candle (1890) is the opposite of Impressionism in a way that would have tickled the traditionalist Salon. His one work on display here, Still Life: Bouquet and Compotier (1924), illustrates a drastic departure from his early work, incorporating ideas sprung from Impressionism that stayed with him through his later abstract works before his death in 1954.
“We take it for granted today because it is foundational, the building blocks they set up for different aspects of their production, from color theory to moving away from a kind of illusionistic style, using brushwork to convey more than what something looks like,” Myers concludes. “Feeling and mood, an optical sensation, these are things that artists today are still working with and absorbing.”
Vincent van Gogh, Sheaves of Wheat, 1890. Oil on canvas, dimensions: 20 × 40 in. (50.8 × 101.6 cm.), dimensions: 31 3/8 × 51 1/8 × 5 1/4 in. (79.69 × 129.86 × 13.34 cm.). Ira Schrank, Dallas Museum of Art, The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection
The historic building that houses this Vienna art gallery has undergone multiple transformations before becoming the Galerie nächst St. Stephan we know today. Initially, Otto Kallir-Nirenstein, an art historian and publisher, opened his Neue Galerie here in 1923. During the Nazi era, Kallir emigrated to the United States, and the building passed through multiple hands, with the space serving various purposes until 1954, when Otto Mauer—a Roman Catholic priest and art patron—revived it under the name Galerie St. Stephan. In 1964, the gallery’s name changed once again to Galerie nächst St. Stephan. Since 1978, it has been led by Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, who has largely defined its identity. Galerie nächst St. Stephan has become a cornerstone for Vienna’s post-war avant-garde, with a strong focus on abstract, minimal and conceptual art. The gallery has maintained a consistent curatorial theme over the decades—art that “stands the test of time,” experimental, transnational, and intellectually charged. Its primary focus is on painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video, all framed within a clear conceptual context, from the Neo-Geo movement and post-minimalism to modern visions. Galerie nächst St. Stephan hosts exhibitions in two spaces. The main—and best-known—venue is located on the second floor of a historic building near St. Stephen’s Cathedral (hence the name). This venue consists of a sequence of interconnected, white-walled rooms with even lighting—ideal for large canvases, precise installations and works on paper. The second space, located just around the corner at Domgasse 1, allows the curatorial team to host additional exhibitions and more experimental projects. The gallery’s roster is filled with notable names, including Heimo Zobernig, a giant of Austria’s conceptual minimalism movement; “light” artist Brigitte Kowanz, known for her use of neon, lights, fluorescent tubes and mirrors; Lawrence Weiner, a key figure in the 1960s conceptual art movement; and abstract artist Imi Knoebel.
The Truck Trio as shown in “Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience.” Courtesy Gagosian
Earlier this month, Gagosian debuted a stunning show featuring the work of Walter de Maria at its Le Bourget gallery in Paris. “Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience” was curated by Donna De Salvo and featured at its heart The Truck Trilogy, a trio of vintage Chevrolet pickup trucks outfitted with De Maria’s signature stainless-steel rods. The work was conceived in 2011 and completed in 2017, four years after De Maria’s death at the age of 77.
This was the same year that the gallery launched its “Building a Legacy Program,” which marshals the gallery’s extensive resources to ensure that artists remain in the minds of the public in the future, whether they are young, old, or deceased, through educational efforts and ambitious shows like “The Singular Experience.” The program has been spearheaded by Kara Vander Weg, a managing director at the gallery, whom we caught up with to hear more about its origins and processes.
How did the idea for the Building a Legacy Program originate in 2017, and what gaps in artist or estate planning was it meant to address?
KVW: The catalyst was Walter De Maria, an artist who had been close to the gallery since the 1980s, dying in 2013 without a will. The lack of preparation threw his estate into turmoil but, fortunately, the gallery was able to help address a number of immediate practical needs, including preserving and documenting his archives. Nuanced decisions had to be made about his intentions and his work, including how it was displayed. Walter was incredibly precise and exacting, and to go from his presence, a resource that was always there, to nothing was a profound shock, particularly for Elizabeth Childress, who had managed his studio for decades.
Through our work with the Richard Avedon Foundation, which began in 2011, we learned a lot about the challenges and questions they faced when Dick had died suddenly several decades earlier. It has been instructive to learn about their organization, which is impressive, and implemented processes for decision-making as the artist would have wished.
Through our work with artists and with their subsequent estates and foundations—which is inevitable when working together over many years—we have seen that balancing an artist’s legacy with ongoing operational concerns can be incredibly challenging. As much as the gallery, as an entity outside of the family or studio, can be helpful, we want to be. For all artists, it is ideal to have some plans for legacy decisions in place. And as the value of art has grown, it has become even more important to have detailed wishes outlined, particularly when it comes to decisions like posthumous work, as well as planning for the resources necessary to carry an artist’s legacy forward.
A symposium felt like the right way to address some of these delicate topics and provide a space for knowledge sharing between our artists and others. Peer-to-peer support can be an exceptionally helpful resource, and many of the connections that have been made through the symposia continue to be fruitful for the artists and estates.
The team behind Gagosian Quarterly also saw an opportunity to address many of the questions on people’s minds through thoughtful content in the magazine. We launched an ongoing series featuring conversations with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship who offer insights that hopefully prove useful to artists, their staff, foundations and estates, scholars, and others.
In working with estates like Walter De Maria’s or Nam June Paik’s, what have been the most revealing challenges in realizing an artist’s intentions after death?
KVW: Honoring an artist’s wishes and intentions is always the biggest challenge.
With Walter, we’ve had to make decisions about how to install his work at a level he would have permitted. Fortunately, both Larry [Gagosian] and I worked closely with him and have those experiences to draw on. We also owe a great debt to Elizabeth Childress for her constant counsel. For example, Walter was always incredibly precise about the surface on which his floor sculptures rested; it had to be completely unmarked. For an exhibition at our 21st Street gallery while he was still alive, I remember we had to bring in a trompe l’oeil painter to touch up marks on the concrete floor before he would agree to go ahead with the show. And for the current exhibition at Le Bourget, we had to find solutions to address the floor beneath 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows. These might seem like small things, but we know how critical they were to Walter.
He was also very resistant to putting out too much information about his work, because he wanted viewers to have a focused, unmediated experience of it. The downside is that, as a result, people haven’t really come to understand the thinking behind his practice. That’s why, for the Le Bourget exhibition, curator Donna De Salvo has included a number of drawings, some of which have never been seen before, something that would never have happened during his lifetime. Our hope is that this will offer the wider public a way into Walter’s thinking: his precision, a bit of his humor, and the connections between his early work and the later pieces for which he became known. These are things we believe are important, not only for his legacy, but also for the scholarship around his work.
The circumstances of our work on behalf of Nam June Paik are very different, and my colleague Nick Simunovic is best placed to talk about it. [Writer’s note: They wanted Nick to jump in here so I said why not.]
NS: In the case of Nam June Paik, we partnered with the Estate, who had a clear sense of the artist’s wishes, and we worked tirelessly over a decade to realize a number of important goals.
When we began working with the Estate in 2015, they were keen to work with a major gallery as a way to shine a spotlight on Nam June’s work, particularly given that the last exhibition sanctioned by the artist was 20 years prior. Larry [Gagosian] had noted that he felt that the artist was a bit lost in the market, and that was a view shared by the family. There was also a realization that there were gaps in the holdings of American museums.
We laid out a multi-tiered plan that began with that first show in Hong Kong in 2015 and culminated with a major survey in New York planned for 2020. The opening was delayed by the COVID pandemic but eventually opened in 2022.
We brought in noted curator John G. Hanhardt, who also organized the retrospectives of the artist’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1982), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2011), in addition to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2000). We were able to strategize and execute against the artist’s wishes because we had clear direction from the Estate, including Nam June’s nephew Ken Hakuta, and input from partners like John Hanhardt and Estate curator Jon Huffman.
As a result of those efforts, works by the artist from that 2022 exhibition were placed with major museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, and the Bass Museum of Art, filling a crucial gap in the artist’s canon and legacy.
How do you balance market considerations with curatorial or scholarly fidelity when guiding legacy work inside a commercial gallery?
KVW: The two are interconnected and I don’t think that is a bad thing, work needs to be placed with owners to ensure the highest level of scholarly fidelity. And good curatorial work can help to bolster an artist’s market.
The monograph Gagosian published for Walter De Maria is a great example. Little scholarly work had been done on his life, and through our work preserving the archive, we had an opportunity and the ability to take on the project. We had access to rarely seen archival material from his studio and the result is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s entire oeuvre that explores both his creative career and his personal life.
It was a massive undertaking that was many years in the making, but the publication will support both future sales and exhibitions of his work. It has already served as the catalogue for the Menil Collection’s 2022-23 exhibition, Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work.
The recent symposium in London gathered artists, curators, and foundation directors. What insights or points of friction surfaced about the future of legacy stewardship?
KVW: It was our third symposium on the topic of legacy planning, and there was a fascinating session during which I spoke with Mary Dean, Ed Ruscha’s studio director; Waltraud Forelli, Anselm Kiefer’s studio director and board member of the Eschaton–Anselm Kiefer Foundation; and Vladimir Yavachev, director of operations for the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation. A key takeaway from our conversation was the critical importance of hiring an archivist, ideally while an artist is alive.
Waltraud rightly pointed out that in addition to helping from an organizational perspective, hiring an archivist brought a realization that they couldn’t do everything alone. They needed to plan for a younger generation to continue their work and to take the time now to transfer that knowledge. For Vladimir, who has catalogue raisonné preparations underway, an archivist is particularly important given the volume of material that Christo and Jeanne-Claude retained.
Mary Dean emphasized another important point, the value of openness, even when addressing a sensitive topic like planning for a future one won’t be part of. For Ed, this is a living, evolving process that he actively engages in through the thoughtful placement of his works and archival material with institutional partners. For instance, the Getty Museum is currently in the process of receiving his street photograph archive. All of his films and artistbook archives are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. He has also made significant donations: Ed was born in Omaha, Nebraska, so the Joslyn Art Museum has a substantial collection of his work, and he has donated work to the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Oklahoma City.
Younger artists such as Titus Kaphar are building institutions during their lifetimes. How is the conversation about legacy changing for living artists?
KVW: There is a generation of artists today who are interested in philanthropic endeavors beyond their own artistic practices. Providing space and resources for the creation of foundations and community projects is a big priority and perhaps is an indication of legacy planning taking shape much earlier in artists’ careers.
There is a tradition of artists stepping up and supporting other artists, one example is Theaster Gates, who has devoted the past 15 years to his Rebuild Foundation. It’s a mantle that artists including Ellen Gallagher and Titus Kaphar are taking up with projects like the Nina Simone House and NXTHVN, respectively.
But this process isn’t new, there is a history of artist support with someone like Robert Rauschenberg, who during his lifetime formed an entity to help other artists, as did Roy Lichtenstein.
For galleries, support of an artist needs to evolve to include these priorities, which could be advice around the organization of studio resources or the make-up of a Board of Directors.
With “The Singular Experience” now open in Paris, featuring De Maria’s Truck Trilogy and 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows, what does this presentation demonstrate about Gagosian’s collaboration with the De Maria Estate? What are the lessons there for other artists planning their estate?
KVW: The relationship with Walter has always been very personal, his friendship and working relationship with Larry [Gagosian] stretches back more than 35 years, and it has anchored our long commitment to him and his work.
The approach is methodical and takes time, but the exhibition at Le Bourget is a product of that commitment. It’s his second show in the space and one that we had actually begun discussing before he died in 2013.
Showing Truck Trilogy outside of the United States for the first time is incredibly exciting. It was his last sculpture, conceived in 2011 and completed posthumously in 2017 according to his specific directions, so it touches on a lot of what we have talked about. It’s also wonderful to be showing 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows at the same time as his inclusion in the exhibition “Minimal,” curated by Dia Art Foundation’s director Jessica Morgan at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris. And it’s all taking place in the same month as Walter would have turned 90.
But the exhibitions are just one piece in a broader program that aims to cement and extend his legacy, from placing a group of early sculpture and drawings with The Menil Collection (a family that were early champions of the artist) and working with Dia Art Foundation to help conserve The Lightning Field to working tirelessly to publish his monograph. And the work continues as we try to find a home for his archive.
For artists working today, it can be hard to have the patience to play the long game, but that thought and planning is key. It can also be useful to talk with other artists and studios who are focused on this work. One of the benefits from the symposium was the exchange of ideas and the conversations that happened outside the sessions.
Looking across the gallery’s roster, what qualities distinguish the artists who are most intentional about shaping their own legacies while still alive? What do they have in common?
KVW: They have a clear sense of purpose regarding the direction of their work and its legacy. They like control, either maintaining it themselves or wisely bringing in the right studio leadership. They’ve built strong museum connections and have access to resources in terms of staff and space. It’s a reminder of the symbiotic relationship between the market and legacy, artists need resources to actively plan for the future.
When it comes to gifts for art lovers, wrapping original art is the ultimate power move. But here’s the catch: collectors pour their hearts—and usually their bank accounts—into curating deeply personal collections. If you know your giftee very, very well, a piece of art can be a very, very good gift. You could also treat the collector in your life to a gallery outing or surprise them with a session with an art advisor. But if adding to their collection feels too ambitious, there are plenty of artsy presents for everyone on your list, from the absolute obsessive to the casually cultured. Whether you’re working with a shoestring budget or aiming for extravagance, there’s no shortage of options that are thoughtful, stylish and primed to impress. Enjoy our guide to the gifts guaranteed to thrill any art enthusiast.
A charitable remainder unitrust provides art collectors looking to sell with a stream of income and a smaller tax burden than they would face if they sold a work outright. Observer Labs
For all the good that a fine art piece may do for our spirits and souls, it remains a tangible object that costs money to buy and produces no income while it is owned. Artworks can be sold, but the former owner must then pay hefty capital gains taxes—28 percent to the IRS, plus 12 percent capital gains tax for New York State residents, plus a 3.8 percent federal surcharge for high-income individuals and couples, less the state income tax deduction on a taxpayer’s federal return, for a net combined tax rate of roughly 41 percent. One way a growing number of art and collectibles owners have found to earn income from their art while deferring capital gains taxes is through charitable remainder unitrusts.
Called, somewhat inelegantly, a CRUT, a charitable remainder unitrust allows collectors to transfer tangible objects such as art to a trust and authorize a trustee to sell the artwork when the market appears to be at a high point. The proceeds of the sale are tax-deferred, and the money can be reinvested to grow over time within the trust. If Collector X owns a $1 million painting and sells it outright, that person will pay the 41 percent tax and be left with $590,000. If, however, Collector X places the painting in a CRUT and then sells it, that person will have the full $1 million working for him and will pay capital gains on a deferred basis.
Once a sale occurs, a portion of the proceeds—ranging from five to 50 percent but typically 5-8 percent—will be distributed annually to the beneficiaries, usually the donor and their spouse. Although some CRUTs are designed to last a specified number of years, most charitable remainder unitrusts end at the death of the last individual beneficiary, and the remaining funds become gifts to designated charities.
“This is a tax deferral strategy,” Lawton Leung, a trust and estates partner in the law firm Withers, told Observer. The charitable trust is considered a tax-exempt entity. “Let’s say you’re funding that CRUT with artwork, whatever type of appreciated property, the trust can sell it without a tax hit. The tax would apply when there’s a distribution of the annuity or the unitrust payment. So then the donor or the grantor of the trust will have to pay taxes on that sliver—what he or she gets from the trust every year. The payments from the trust may be made quarterly, annually, biannually or monthly. It depends on the type of frequency you want, but at least once a year.”
The trust functions much like a 401(k) or IRA, as the assets can be reinvested and grow on a tax-deferred basis. “We particularly like to use charitable remainder trusts when there’s an opportunity to defer a large capital gain,” Leung said.
He noted that CRUTs offer collectors a way to take advantage of today’s art prices in a tax-efficient manner, generate income for retirement and satisfy philanthropic objectives. “The charity has to receive at least a 10 percent actuarial value at the time of setting up the trust. The amount that goes to charity at the end of the term could vary. There is some unpredictability to what the charity actually gets, but at least at the start of the trust, it’s intended that the charity would receive at least 10 percent of what was put in.”
Collectors can reduce their capital gains and estate taxes, but it isn’t entirely win-win. Once they place works of art in a CRUT, they cannot keep them in their homes or offices—the rules governing remainder trusts are similar to those for individuals setting up private foundations—so most keep the art elsewhere. That may be at a bank, a law firm or an art gallery willing to hold it; many collectors choose fine art storage facilities. Once an artwork has been donated to the charitable remainder trust, it stays there; the collector cannot change his mind and take it back.
Charitable remainder trusts are typically not created in isolation but rather as part of a broader estate planning strategy for individuals with a range of valuable assets. Still, Leung said, the typical cost of setting up a CRUT is $10,000. The first step is for the donor to transfer art or other personal assets irrevocably to the trustee, usually a lawyer or banker. An IRS actuarial table calculates, based on the age of the beneficiaries, the percentage payout rate and an interest rate, both the amount the beneficiaries are expected to receive over the lifetime of the CRUT and the amount that will go to one or more designated charities. The donor then deducts the calculated percentage gift to the charities at the time the trust is created, based on the original cost of the objects rather than their current fair market value. That deduction may be spread out over five years. For example, if the IRS actuarial table indicates that 70 percent of the trust’s assets will go to the beneficiaries and the remaining 30 percent to a charity, the donor would be entitled to deduct 30 percent of the cost of the assets. A painting purchased for $100,000 and transferred to a CRUT would entitle the donor to a $30,000 deduction.
Every year after the trustee sells the art, the individual beneficiaries will typically receive a fixed percentage of the annual value of the trust assets. If a painting in a CRUT generates $1,000,000 in net proceeds and the payout percentage is set at five percent, the beneficiary will receive $50,000 in the first year of the trust. These distributions, known as unitrust payments, are taxable to the beneficiary in the year they are made, based on the beneficiary’s overall income and the manner in which trust income has been invested. Meanwhile, assets remaining in the CRUT continue to earn income and realize capital gains without immediate tax cost to the trust or the beneficiary. As a result, five percent annual unitrust payments may grow over time as trust assets appreciate on a tax-deferred basis. The collector receives an upfront tax deduction and pays taxes as they receive annuity payments.
There is more than one type of charitable remainder trust. A charitable remainder annuity trust provides the collector with a predetermined payment each year, while a unitrust may pay out varying amounts annually depending on the trust’s performance.
Frequently, those considering a CRUT are planning for retirement, a period in life when they want to maximize income and minimize costs. Long-time art collectors may hold highly appreciated assets that carry high costs for storage, security and insurance and would generate large capital gains taxes if sold. People in that situation often want to simplify their lives by shedding some of their art assets, but they prefer not to incur a large tax bill in the process. A charitable remainder unitrust provides them with a stream of income and a smaller tax burden than they would face if they sold the assets outright, preserving more of their money for one or more charities of their choice.
While trust assets must go to charity, there is no requirement that the charity be designated when the trust is created. People change their minds about which charities they want to support, and that’s fine. The trustee may also name the charity.
Balkan Erotic Epic is Abramović’s largest performance work to date, with a cast of more than 70 performers. Courtesy the artist
More than two hours passed before I surrendered to the plush black turf underfoot, slumping down against the towering penises rooted in a grove between two performances of Sisyphean end zone celebrations. One stage, entitled “Fucking the Ground/Fertility Rites,” featured five weary, wiry naked men joylessly thrusting into grassy hillocks with the intention of fertilizing the barren soil. A field opposite them, “Scaring the Gods to Stop the Rain,” served as a showcase for a melting pot of Balkan maiden-attired gymnasts of all ages, wearing anguished faces ranging from raging Maori war cry to the teary trepidation of a young Amy Adams. All of them repeated their skirt-hiking rite, jumping and collapsing, contorting and thrusting, while exposing their sex, undress rehearsals for an anti-raindance, a stormy showdown with the heavens above.
That final confrontation is one of two climaxes, one fable, one personal, anchoring Marina Abramovic’s latest work, Balkan Erotic Epic. Performance artist Maria Stamenković Herranz is cast in the role of Abramovic’s late unloving mother, decorated Yugoslavia People’s Army officer Danica Rosic. Here, she navigates her daughter’s tortured psyche, manifested as thirteen stages of Balkan folklore rooted in love, marriage, death, sex and power, dated from medieval times through the Cold War and interpreted in film, animation, music, dancing and milk bathing. The four-hour performance continues long after Danica succumbs to the sexual liberation Abramovic impresses upon her mother’s spirit.
I couldn’t check my phone to be sure of what time I finally settled in among the cross-legged and collapsed—ticket holders were required to lock their phones in a pouch before entering the Warehouse at Aviva Studios, where Balkan Erotic Epic premiered in Manchester this October ahead of Frieze London. The North American premiere will take place at New York’s Park Avenue Armory next December.
Marina Abramovic and Kath Fitzgibbon. Photo: Marco Anelli
Support staff had two jobs. One, spot-checking guests to ensure their phones were locked up and two, making sure no audience members encroached on the steps leading to “The Kafana Complex,” an open-plan “pub, restaurant, music venue and public living room,” where avatars of the late Yugoslavian dictator Josip Broz Tito’s grieving widow, all of them resembling a caricature of Abramovic if she were drawn by The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, sat emotionally unmoved and physically paralyzed, clutching their handbags.
There’s no ambiguity about what will eventually take place here before the night is over; the program promises Rosic will find a release she never found in life. “My mother was extremely difficult,” Abramovic told the assembled audience ahead of the performance. “I was forty years old and I asked her, “why do you never kiss me?” She said, “why should I kiss you? I would spoil you.” She wanted to make a warrior of me. She never felt emotions, love, sexual desire. I need to liberate my mother from all this so I can move on after this piece with a different part of my life.”
The problem here, in this show where women whose natural eroticism was trapped across time in ritual, is Abramovic commits her mother to the same fate. No woman here knows liberation and the sexual liberation Abramovic imposes upon her is nonconsensual, an analog Black Mirror moment that brings to mind a new A.I. app that’s made headlines this week—2Wai—which allows for users to record themselves, submitting their voice and body to create a virtual avatar that can be used in the future, per the company’s own example, for a deceased grandmother to speak to their grandchildren. If we wonder what nefarious end these avatars might meet, we only look to Abramovic exposing her mother to endless looping eroticism she chose not to experience in real life.
“No phone,” ushers would shrug when I inquired about the time, before I caught one sporting a wristwatch. She informed me I still had another hour and a half to go before a sudden rainfall started then stopped, after succumbing to the fearsome power of women’s bodies. However, the audience seemed eager to move on. Hundreds of attendees peeled off before the night was over, treating the show as more of a gallery space than a performance space despite Abramovic doing her best ahead of time to assure the conclusion was worth the wait.
Natalia Leniartek and Saskia Roy. Photo: Marco Anelli
“Wait for the rain,” Abramovic said. The night began with the artist occupying a stage in the Aviva lobby, reading the audience into the performance, a cheat sheet for those who didn’t spring for the cost of the program despite the attendees picking bare the gift shop walls of assorted merch—aprons, throw pillows—that didn’t always give the correct impression of a show about Balkan folklore nor embody its intended themes. One bestselling tee shirt featured a program illustration of Abramovic flying on a bridled winged penis, but the show feels devoid of triumph. The show only demonstrates that ritual wears down men and women alike.
“Six pounds for a program is too high a price—it’s not my fault,” Abramovic acknowledged during her pep rally. “I’ll take a look at it, because it’s important for you to see each ritual and what it means. We’re showing thirteen different moments in this space, like thirteen children giving birth at the same time.” And she wasn’t kidding. “A friend told me the other day, you create space that looks like Balkan and smells like Balkan—that’s a big compliment.”
Balkan Erotic Epic won’t always be staged like this however, nor was it intended to be, according to Aviva Studios’ artistic director John McGrath. “[Marina] came to the press night for Free Your Mind,” he told Observer, referring to Manchester native son Danny Boyle’s 2023 modern dance interpretation of The Matrix, which opened Aviva Studios’ inaugural season. “But she’d been looking at the venue even earlier. We’d been in conversation since she visited during the 2019 Manchester International Festival and it was in 2022 or 2023 that she shared Balkan Erotic Epic as a broad idea.”
At that time, McGrath said, Abramovic imagined a seated show. She had just completed The Seven Deaths of Maria Callas on opera stages and considered continuing to explore that format. But after hosting a spring 2023 workshop in Manchester, the scenes evolved, exiting Aviva’s theater for its Warehouse space. In the future, a sequential stage version is planned for Barcelona, while performances in Germany and in New York will receive the multi-stage Manchester production.
Those performances will likely have one site-specific element that defines them. Here, performance artist Elke Luyten plays a Flemish anthropologist outfitted in a white lab coat. She silently holds court in erection alley before intermittently sharing her own takes on “Balkan Magic” while seemingly ad-libbing takes on Manchester’s weather, environment and population.
Rowena Gander and Vanda Hagan. Photo: Marco Anelli
“She doesn’t understand shit about Balkan and she is confused,” Abramovic said of the character, comic relief breaking up the trauma of a nearby grieving bride tasked to marry a dead groom, a mourning dance at times set to opera and instruments that proves the most emotionally and physically taxing of the thirteen performances.
Luyten’s performance meanwhile had the effect of an alarm clock blaring news radio, interrupting Abramovic’s dream with a reminder of when and where we are. She’s trying to wake up Abramovic—a bit player here, coming and going from the pub stage at her leisure—to the reality her mother is dead and this self-flagellating dream of closer intimacy with her mother is long beyond her reach. At the same time, Luyten doubles as a high art Krusty the Klown, ending her insights with the introduction of erotic cartoons.
“The only way to show certain rituals we couldn’t show any other way is animation,” Abramovic explained. “There is no other way to show in our present time with all the restrictions we have in our society.” It’s a statement that comes across as lazy and dishonest.
Animations included recipes for love potions and sexual healing (e.g., the 14th C. Bosnian ritual, “Wedding Day Protection,” in which a man makes three holes in a bridge and penetrates them to ensure he won’t be impotent on his wedding day). It’s an act no more scandalous to recreate than the naked men fertilizing the soil feet away from me. If others come closer to the definition of pornography, that doesn’t preclude the possibility of capturing performers on film. Balkan Erotic Epic also includes a cinematic component, including a wall-length choir of nude men maintaining various states of erection while singing.
The 12th C. Macedonian ritual “Child Delivery” involves a man crossing his erect penis over his wife’s breasts to ease the pain of her childbirth, while a 15th C. Serbian “Love Potion” involves a recipe consisting of hairs extracted from forehead, eyebrow, armpit, nipple and vagina then mixed with menstrual blood and the prick of a woman’s ring finger. A 15th C. Kosovan act of “War Strategy” involves undressing and masturbating before enemy soldiers.
“Everything was created in Manchester, filmed in Manchester, shown in Manchester and one thing about Manchester that’s very important—you’re the bravest, you show new things you can’t show anywhere else in the world. I don’t know if we will finish in prison or in daylight,” Abramovic said with some exaggeration.
Elke Luyten. Photo: Marco Anelli
Maybe she didn’t know where to look. Balkan Erotic Epic proved the highlight of Frieze London was in Manchester, but the roles are reversed this weekend, when London’s Barbican Centre hosts Dirty Weekend, an adults-only weekend of sexual liberation and community outreach, all-gender speed dating and fashion workshops, in conjunction with their new fashion exhibition “Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion,” which runs through January 25, 2026. The looks on display, from Alexander McQueen to Michaela Stark, focus on aesthetics impacted by the natural grime of earth and our own bodies. You can even make your own tee shirt.
When I first saw the animations in Balkan Erotic Epic, I immediately thought it a missed opportunity for Abramovic to partner with Four Chambers, U.K. porn performer, producer, director and sex worker advocate Vex Ashley’s decade-old video project that straddles art porn with A24 aesthetics, prioritizes female empowerment and has on occasion been more forthright in pushing the boundaries between sex and maternity than Abramovic’s Freudian wish fulfillment, an artist statement-cum-fetish to unburden herself of some childhood longing to glimpse her parents through a crack in the bedroom door.
In Four Chambers’ latest film, Some Reddish Work, which premiered earlier this month, maidens dressed not dissimilar to the raindancers showed just how well they would have embodied the Balkan Erotic Epic universe. And for their effort, they aren’t shut out of legitimate art spaces but prove a draw. Their participation in the Barbican’s Dirty Weekend this November 29-30 promises to bring their “living archive that blurs cinema, performance, sexuality and fine art,” and Ashley will participate in a keynote panel on intimacy and censorship. Here, only the debate is animated.
PARIS—French authorities said they’ve detained four more people in connection to the Louvre heist, including a man suspected of being the only thief to remain at large after purloining the nation’s crown jewels.
Paris Prosecutor Laure Beccuau said two men, ages 38 and 39, and two women, 31 and 40, have been taken into custody for questioning. Beccuau said all four detainees came from the Paris region, without disclosing further details.
On November 20, Sotheby’s generated a combined total of $304.6 million between the Cindy and Jay Pritzker Collection, Exquisite Corps and Modern Evening sales. Julian Cassady Photography / Ali
Of the $1.6 billion of art expected to change hands during this year’s November sales, $1.1 billion was secured by Sotheby’s when the evening sales concluded on the 20th. When tallied with the Day sales the following afternoon, the auction house’s fall marquee week sales had generated a total of $1.173 billion—the second-highest total ever after the $1.33 billion achieved in November 2021 at the height of the contemporary and ultracontemporary markets.
Following the success of the Leonard A. Lauder sale, which delivered a $527.5 million Evening total and a clean 100 percent sold rate for the $3.8 million Day sale offering (est. $3.2 million), Sotheby’s completed a full white-glove, three-sale marathon. It opened with The Cindy and Jay Pritzker Collection Evening Auction, which totaled $109.5 million, followed by the $98.1 million Exquisite Corpus sale and a $97 million Modern Evening auction. Driving many of the lots was strong participation from Asia, which accounted for 30 percent of total bidding, a reminder that Asian collectors respond enthusiastically when true quality comes to market.
Most importantly, if 2021 belonged to the contemporary and ultracontemporary frenzy, these marquee sales showed a clear pivot. Buyers turned toward art-historical touchstones by the most established names in Modern art or toward figures long overlooked and now undergoing reassessment. Across the November sales, Sotheby’s sold $843 million of Modern works, the highest total ever for the category in a single season. Prestigious provenance and strong storytelling were key in this inaugural auction round at the Breuer building for Sotheby’s, with single-owner collections accounting for 72.5 percent of the week’s total ($828,244,220 of $1.173 billion). And in the contemporary segment, it was the artists with the strongest institutional foundations who rose to the top.
“After years of uneven seasons, this week’s results demonstrate that the often quoted cliche of the three D’s (death, debt and divorce) powering the art market has never been truer,” Mari-Claudia Jimenéz, partner and co-head of Withers Art & Advisory, confirmed. For the industry’s seasoned expert, the abundance of fresh-to-market, extraordinary-quality estate properties inspired buyers to return with gusto to chase the best-in-class works with impeccable histories.
Sotheby’s evening marathon on November 20 began with the collection of Chicago’s Cindy and Jay Pritzker, who are best known for founding the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979. The sale immediately set the tone of the night, generating $109.5 million across just 13 works against a pre-sale estimate of $73.5 million to $88.5 million.
Leading the auction was Vincent van Gogh’s Romans Parisiens (Les Livres jaunes) (1887), a radiant still life from the artist’s Paris period in which a stack of yellow-bound books becomes a portrait of his voracious intellect and humanist curiosity. Boasting an extensive exhibition history, the canvas was pursued for at least seven minutes by five bidders and sold for a record-setting $62.7 million, well above its estimate of around $40 million and setting a new benchmark for any still life by the artist.
Deep bidding also accompanied the sale of Wassily Kandinsky’s musical watercolor “Ins violett” (Into Violet) from the height of his Bauhaus period, listed as No. 188 in his handlist. Sought by five bidders in a spirited exchange, it more than doubled its high estimate, fetching $2,368,000 (est. $700,000-$1,000,000).
Other Modern masterworks in the Pritzker collection prompted intense competition. Camille Pissarro’s Bords de l’Oise à Pontoise, dating to the beginning of the artist’s second sojourn in Pontoise in 1872, was pursued by four bidders and achieved $2.5 million against its $1.2-1.8 million estimate. Félix Vallotton’s poetic domestic scene, Femme couchée dormant (Le Sommeil), triggered an animated battle between six collectors on the phones and in the room, pushing it above its $1.8-2.5 million estimate to sell for $2.8 million. The canvas had been acquired by the Pritzkers from Wildenstein & Co., New York, in 1985 and remained with them ever since, as did most lots in the sale.
Lot 10, the Cubist Nature morte by Fernand Léger, also sparked back-and-forth bidding from five contenders, driving the work to $2,214,000, nearly double its $800,000-$1.2 million estimate. This was followed by a $9,200,000 result for Max Beckmann’s classics-inspired canvas, sought by five bidders, and Joan Miró’s uncanny sculptural reinterpretation La Mère Ubu, which achieved $5,052,000 after a battle between four bidders, landing near the midpoint of its $4-6 million estimate. The bronze had been acquired by the couple in 1980 from legendary dealer Pierre Matisse in New York.
Another highlight, Henri Matisse’s Léda et le cygne, sold for $10.4 million, meeting its high estimate with fees. One of the very few architectural pieces by the artist—the majority of which are in public spaces or museums—and the first of its kind to appear at auction, the unique work was commissioned in 1943 by Argentine diplomat Marcelo Fernández. Last exhibited publicly during the 1984-85 Matisse exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, it was acquired the following year by the Pritzkers from Feingarten Galleries in Los Angeles. But Paul Gauguin’s La Maison du Pen du, gardeuse de vache from his Nabis period failed to find enough bidders to meet its $6-8 million estimate, selling instead at its reserve for $4,930,000.
Frida Kahlo’s $54.7 million record
The evening continued with a section entirely dedicated to Surrealism, as the movement continues to gain momentum, further ignited by the major Surrealist show that has just opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and as its unsettling aesthetic resonates uncannily with the chaos, sentiments and desire to exorcise it that define our time. In only one night, Sotheby’s placed more than $123 million of Surrealist works, the highest total for Surrealist art ever sold in one evening at Sotheby’s.
Frida Kahlo’s El sueño (La cama) from 1940 achieved $54.7 million with fees, becoming the most expensive work by a female artist. Sotheby’s
The dedicated single-owner sale Exquisite Corpus offered works from one of the most distinguished private Surrealist collections, accumulated over four decades, yet kept rigorously unnamed in keeping with the movement’s aura of mystery. Nonetheless, given that many of the lots appeared in the Guggenheim’s 1999 exhibition “Surrealism: Two Private Eyes,” which celebrated the collections of Daniel Filipacchi and record producer Nesuhi Ertegun—who together assembled the most important grouping of Surrealist art in private hands—we can reasonably speculate that the consignor is most likely the Ertegun estate, especially once noticing that several works list in their provenance that they were acquired from the Parisian dealer Daniel Filipacchi, ruling him out as the consignor. Artnews reached the same conclusion, reporting that the 1940 Kahlo was consigned by the estate of Selma Ertegun, who built the collection with her late husband Nesuhi Ertegun. The session closed with a white-glove result of $98.1 million, with 67 percent of works selling above their high estimates.
The undisputed star of the collection was Frida Kahlo’s masterpiece of mystery and spirituality, El sueño (La cama), which ignited spirited international bidding before hammering at $47 million, or $54.7 million with fees, to Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby’s senior vice president and head of the Latin American art department. The result not only set a new record for the artist but also for any woman artist at auction, surpassing the previous $44.4 million benchmark set by Georgia O’Keeffe in 2014. The mystical canvas had been purchased by the consignor at Sotheby’s in 1980 for $51,000 and remained in the collection since then, marking a return of roughly 107,000 percent.
Depicting a skeleton floating above the artist as she lies in her bed—herself suspended midair as a fragile terrestrial vessel—Kahlo visualizes what art historian Whitney Chadwick describes as the “Mexican belief in the indivisible unity of life and death.” Considered a key work in Kahlo’s career, where she reached the height of her symbolic and psychological resonance, the canvas boasts a major exhibition history, having appeared in “Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti” (1982-83) at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Haus am Waldsee in Hamburg, Kunstverein Hannover, Kulturhuset Stockholm, New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City. It also featured prominently in the Guggenheim’s 1999 show “Surrealism: Two Private Eyes,” and in the Tate’s landmark Kahlo survey in 2005, which later traveled to the Walker Art Center and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007-08.
We will see this masterpiece again soon in a slate of upcoming exhibitions, including “Frida y Diego: The Last Dream” at MoMA in New York (March 22-September 7, 2026), “Frida: The Making of an Icon” at Tate Modern in London (June 25, 2026-January 3, 2027), “Frida Kahlo—The Painter” at Fondation Beyeler in Basel (January 31-May 17, 2027), and “The Autonomous Gaze” at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Kunstmuseum Basel, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art and BOZAR Brussels (December 2026–July 2028).
Another standout of the evening, Salvador Dalí’s jewel-like Symbiose de la tête aux coquillages, captivated several bidders with its hallucinatory power, reaching $4,198,000 (est. $2-3 million) on the phone with an Asian bidder. With a distinguished exhibition history—from the Hayward Gallery’s Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978), to Centre Pompidou’s “Salvador Dalí: rétrospective, 1920-1980 (1979-80),” to the Guggenheim’s “Surrealism: Two Private Eyes (1999)”—the work was acquired from Daniel Filipacchi in Paris in 1977 and remained with the consignor ever since, meaning they were also responsible for these museum loans.
The market for Paul Delvaux also remains strong, with his haunting Composition reaching the high end of its estimate and selling for $3.8 million (est. $2.5-3.5 million).
Female Surrealists remain a bright spot. First exhibited in 1953 as part of her solo show at Alexander Iolas in 1958 and formerly in the collection of William N Copley, Dorothea Tanning’s otherworldly Interior with Sudden Joy sold for $3.2 million (est. $2-3 million), setting a new record for the artist. Her previous record, Endgame (1944), achieved $2.3 million at Christie’s last May.
Dorothea Tanning’s otherworldly Interior with Sudden Joy sold for $3.2 million (est. $2-3 million), setting a new record for the artist. Sotheby’s
Highly coveted among collectors are the extremely rare paintings on masonite by Remedios Varo. Created shortly after Varo fled war-torn Europe, marking a pivotal shift in the artist’s storied practice, her Sans titre from 1943 approached the million mark after fees, landing at $952,500 (est. $500,000-700,000). Her current record, Revelación, was set last May at Christie’s at $6.22 million, surpassing her earlier $6.19 million record for Armonía (Autorretrato Sugerente) in 2020. Reflecting the growing curatorial effort to decentralize Surrealism beyond Paris, the recent major survey celebrating the movement’s centenary dedicates its final room to a compelling dialogue between Varo and Leonora Carrington.
Another striking leap came for the French artist, illustrator and long-underrecognized Surrealist insider Valentine Hugo, whose Le Crapaud de Maldoror climbed to $825,555 after seven bidders pushed it far beyond its $150,000-200,000 estimate. And for those who enjoy the footnotes of Surrealist intrigue, the piece dates from the period when Hugo was also romantically entangled with André Breton.
New attention to Surrealist influences in Latin American modernism also propelled Óscar Domínguez’s La Machine à écrire, which more than doubled its high estimate and sold for $3.7 million (est. $1-1.5 million). More broadly, as institutions work to broaden the canon, overlooked figures outside Surrealism’s Parisian core are gaining the long-overdue recognition they deserve.
One of them is Austrian-Mexican artist Wolfgang Paalen, a member of Abstraction-Création from 1934 to 1935, who joined the Surrealist movement after relocating to Mexico in 1935 and remained a significant figure until 1942. His revelatory, surreal landscape, Fata Alaska, set a new auction record for the artist at $1,016,000 (est. $350,000-450,000).
Another double record arrived courtesy of Hans Bellmer, who broke his auction record twice in one night. First, his uncanny gouache Main et Bras achieved $508,000 (est. $100,000-200,000). Then, a rare and intensely erotic oil on canvas—a medium he rarely used, being far better known for his photographs of dolls—nearly reached the million-dollar mark, fetching a record-setting $942,000 (est. $300,000-400,000). “The starting-point of desire, with respect to the intensity of its images, is not in a perceptible whole but in the detail,” Bellmer wrote in his anatomy of image. “The essential point to retain from the monstrous dictionary of analogies/antagonisms which constitute the dictionary of the image is that a given detail, such as a leg, is perceptible, accessible to memory and available, in short, is real.” It is a reflection that perfectly encapsulates the tension between fascination and horror, erotism and violence that animates all his seductive yet unsettling work.
A $97 million Modern Evening
The evening concluded with the core offering of the Modern Evening auction, which across its 29 lots generated $97 million, surpassing the pre-sale estimate of $71.1-101.9 million. One of the evening’s most anticipated lots, René Magritte’s Le Jockey Perdu, led the sale, achieving $12.3 million after fees. The exquisite gouache encapsulates Magritte’s signature play with visual paradoxes, maintaining the sense of spatial disorientation and uncanniness—alongside the sly playfulness—that runs through his entire oeuvre. First conceived as a papier collé in 1926, the motif was quickly followed by an oil of the same title, which headlined the artist’s first one-man exhibition in 1927 at Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels. Evidently fascinated by the theme, Magritte returned to the image of the lost jockey in multiple gouaches and oils throughout his career. The work came from the collection of the late real estate magnate Matthew Bucksbaum and his wife Carolyn, whose group of works in the sale brought a combined total of $25.2 million.
Despite the nearly three-hour marathon, the Modern session opened energetically with Joan Miró’s oil-on-burlap panel, Personnages et oiseau devant le soleil, also from the Bucksbaum Collection. It prompted a dynamic bidding battle between seven contenders, rapidly pushing it far beyond its $400,000-600,000 estimate to land at $2,368,000. The couple had acquired the work in 1998, when it last appeared at Sotheby’s, consigned by Perls Galleries.
Other top results of the evening included Georgia O’Keeffe’s Large Dark Red Leaves on White, which landed at $7.9 million, just shy of its high estimate. Jean Dubuffet’s Restaurant Rougeit II sat comfortably within its range, selling for $7.5 million. Degas’s pastel of three ballerinas, Trois danseuses, was chased by five bidders and fetched $5.8 million.
René Magritte’s Le Jockey Perdu led the Modern Evening sale, achieving $12.3 million after fees. Sotheby’s
A Modern sale would be incomplete without Monet. One of his famed Impressionistic views, capturing the shifting light around Rouen Cathedral, more than doubled its low estimate, selling for $7.4 million after a lengthy bidding war among six bidders in different geographies. The painting was practically fresh to auction, having remained in the Schlumberger collection for over 60 years, and appeared at auction for the first time last night.
Another artist who inspired strong interest was Childe Hassam, one of the leading American Impressionists and a central figure in what became known as the “Ten,” the group that broke from the Society of American Artists to champion a more progressive, modern approach at the turn of the 20th century. His Newport, October Sundown from 1901 was fiercely pursued by four bidders, achieving $2,002,000 above a $1.8 million high estimate. The painting came from the Sam and Marilyn Fox Collection, two prominent patrons and civic leaders from the St. Louis region, whose group generated a total of $2.7 million, exceeding its high estimate of $2.4 million.
As MoMA finally pays overdue tribute to the work of Cuban artist Wifredo Lam with a show that opened earlier this month, his Ídolo (Oyá/Divinité de l’air et de la mort) drew strong attention in the room, selling for $7.4 million and marking the second-highest auction price ever achieved for the artist. The renewed institutional spotlight clearly reinforced market confidence, positioning the canvas as another highlight of the evening and Lam as a name we will likely see rise further at auction in the coming seasons.
While the Modern section closed with white gloves, several lots still fell below their low estimates. Arthur Garfield Dove’s Rose and Locust Stump, backed by a guarantee and irrevocable bids, sold for $681,000, nearly half its low estimate, despite its extensive exhibition history. Andrew Wyeth’s dark landscape, East Waldoboro, also sold below expectations at $3,588,000 (est. $4-6 million). Jacques Lipchitz’s sculpture Baigneuse assise went for half its low estimate at $381,000, despite its prestigious provenance from the Geri Brawerman Collection, which generated a total of $16.7 million during the night.
Sotheby’s continued with its day sales on November 21, which delivered an additional aggregated total above $51 million, between the $46,404,999 of the Modern Day Sale and the $4,912,868 for the Exquisite Corpus Day session. Sotheby’s Contemporary day sale, held a few days earlier, generated $111.4 million, the highest total ever for a Day sale at Sotheby’s. The white-glove offering for the Lauder day session brought the total for the Lauder collection to $531.3 million.
Ultimately, Sotheby’s was the clear winner this round, generating a solid and unequivocally successful $1.173 billion with its Evening and Day sales. Meanwhile, Christie’s fall marquee sales totaled $965 million, while Phillips brought in $92,139,589 across its various sessions. In total, across all three auction houses, the November marquee sales have generated more than $2.2 billion, a number that suggests the market has rediscovered some of its energy. Miami, however, will be the real litmus test of the season, because what we saw in action and at auction this week was only the very top of the market.
Phillips’s New York Evening Sale closed at $67.3 million—a 24 percent increase from last November. Photo: Jean Bourbon
The auction results of the past few years have confirmed it: dinosaurs are on trend. And not just as prehistoric relics or tools of scientific inquiry, but as symbols of timelessness and taste. More and more, fossil skeletons are being treated as investments—something that is, in some cases, more emotionally and symbolically resonant than contemporary art with which it might share the auction block. Is it the return of Jurassic Park? Or perhaps simply that most of us are captivated by dinosaurs in childhood? In any case, as nostalgia increasingly drives purchasing decisions across collectibles markets, dinos are unquestionably riding the wave.
Phillips has been strategically attuned to this shift—likely thanks to a younger cohort of specialists in its ranks. Instead of competing head-to-head with Sotheby’s and Christie’s single-owner sale narratives, the house has leaned into a different storytelling and marketing strategy, enhancing the symbolic power of artworks not through tales of glamorous collectors but by connecting the works to deep time.
Last night, CERA—a juvenile Triceratops skeleton dated to 66 million years ago and the first of its species ever to appear at auction—fetched $5,377,000 in the Out of This World auction (a specially curated section of the house’s November Modern & Contemporary sales). While that figure may seem modest when measured against the marquee masterpieces of the season, spirited bidding pushed it far beyond its $2,500,000-3,500,000 estimate and confirmed demand for this type of collectible. It also brought Phillips an audience that may never have engaged with the auction house otherwise; representatives confirmed that the skeleton sold to a private American collector new to the house, though global interest had poured in ahead of the sale from both private buyers and international institutions.
According to Miety Heiden, Phillips’ chairman for private sales, the result is a powerful testament to collectors’ evolving tastes. “More than ever, we’re seeing a desire for works that spark curiosity and transcend traditional categories. People are looking for objects that bring wonder and dialogue into a collection,” she said. “This result underscores the appetite for rare and extraordinary pieces that challenge convention and expand the boundaries of what collecting can be.”
At this year’s Frieze Masters—the only segment of the global brand typically reserved for million-dollar modernist and Old Masters works—two of the opening day’s first sales were paleontological. David Aaron placed a Triceratops head from the Late Cretaceous (circa 68 million years ago) within the first hour, followed later by a complete saber-toothed Nimravidae skeleton from the Oligocene (circa 33.7-23.8 million years ago), which sold for a strong six-figure sum. And no one has forgotten the Stegosaurus Apex, which shattered records at Sotheby’s in July 2024, hammering at $44.6 million—more than seven times its $4-6 million estimate—to billionaire Ken Griffin.
Phillips’s Evening Sale on November 19 achieved $67,307,850 across 33 lots, with a robust 94 percent sold by lot (only two passed) and 97 percent sold by value. It was a strong result, particularly considering the momentum already shown by Sotheby’s and Christie’s earlier in the week.
Leaving behind the cutting-edge but highly speculative ultra-contemporary works that once dominated its auction offerings, the evening’s turnout—up 24 percent from last November—was driven by a pairing of institutionally recognized blue-chip artists of the past century with recent market consolidations, presented for the first time alongside natural history highlights under the Out of This World label. The top lot was the highly anticipated Francis BaconStudy for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne and George Dyer (1967), which sold for $16,015,000—neatly within its $13-18 million estimate. Just after came Joan Mitchell’s monumental Untitled (1957-1958), a densely gestural canopy of color from her New York years, which brought in $14,290,000.
Another high-profile lot, Jackson Pollock’s dynamic 1947 work on paper, sold for $3,486,000—just below its high estimate. Mark Tansey’s Revelever (2012) sparked a competitive seven-minute bidding war that carried it to $4,645,000 against its $2,500,000-3,500,000 estimate. The hypnotic, conceptually loaded composition creates an optical push-pull that immerses viewers in a moment of driving toward a mountainous horizon, almost tasting the crisp air in its ultramarine haze.
Meanwhile, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Exercise (1984), a loosely composed, surreal tangle of hallucination and paint, achieved $3,852,000 after a $3-4 million estimate. Another Basquiat from 1982 followed close behind, selling for $1,225,500. Camille Pissarro’s late Impressionist Le pré et la maison d’Éragny, femme jardinant, printemps (1901) surpassed its high estimate, closing at $1,900,000. Max Ernst’s Dans les rues d’Athènes (1960) doubled its expectations with a $1,534,000 result, riding the continued momentum for Surrealism. Rising Colombian artist Olga de Amaral also saw strong results. Her luminous golden textile Alquimia 62 (1987) soared to $748,200, well above its $300,000-500,000 estimate. A few lots later, a red composition from the same series met its estimate midpoint, hammering at $516,000.
Firelei Báez set a new auction record—if only briefly. Her Daughter of Revolutions brought in $645,000 over a $300,000-500,000 estimate before being surpassed by a $1,111,250 result at Christie’s later that evening.
Women artists once again delivered some of the evening’s most compelling results. Amid growing recognition for Alma Thomas, her Untitled collage from 1968—a blueprint for her signature mosaic-like abstractions—sold for $477,300 over a $250,000-350,000 estimate. Ruth Asawa’s Untitled (S.230, Hanging Single-Lobed, Five-Layered Continuous Form within a Form) opened the sale with a burst of energy, doubling its $400,000-600,000 estimate to achieve $1,006,200 as her MoMA retrospective opened. Others performed well too: a Martha Jungwirth fetched $516,000 (estimate $200,000-300,000), and Lucy Bull’s Light Rain (2019) exceeded its high estimate at $490,200.
One of the night’s more surprising passed lots was a vivid 2022 abstraction by record-setting enfant prodige Jadé Fadojutimi, whose $800,000-1,200,000 estimate may have been too ambitious. Also unsold, despite its uniqueness and luxuriousness, was The Thunderbolt, the longest gold nugget ever discovered. Weighing 3,565 grams and measuring 50 centimeters, the 114.6-troy-ounce gold formation was estimated at $1.25-1.5 million but failed to find a buyer. Dug up by accident at Hogan’s Find in Western Australia, the rare natural formation was revealed by sheer chance.
According to Robert Manley, Phillips’s chairman for modern and contemporary art, the success of the evening was due in part to the house’s new priority bidding system, which helped secure early commitments and interest on most lots. That contributed to 91 percent of works selling within or above estimate. “The enthusiasm was made especially clear by the fact that we had 27 times the number of early selling bids for this sale as we had last November, partly a result of our introduction of Priority Bidding,” he told Observer. The results, he said, confirmed not only the enduring draw of blue-chip artists but also the market’s resilience and ongoing global demand. “With strong participation from collectors worldwide and competitive bidding across Impressionist, Postwar, Contemporary and Natural History offerings, tonight’s outcome reaffirms confidence in the long-term strength of this market.”
NAROK, Kenya—Leaders of the Maasai ethnic group are seeking a court order to demolish a new Ritz-Carlton luxury safari camp they say blocks a key route of the famous Serengeti migration.
Meitamei Olol Dapash, a Maasai elder with an American Ph.D., says the camp sits astride a path that some migratory wildebeest and zebra use to cross the Sand River in search of green grass.
There is a direct line between lip fillers and the techno-apocalypse, and Gretchen Andrew draws that line with her latest Universal Beauty series. This series, recently acquired by the Whitney in New York, reveals the preferences of hidden algorithms that define our current beauty standards. Standards not even Miss Universe contestants can meet. In our conversation, Andrew and I discuss how impossible-to-achieve criteria are flattening people’s relationship to their bodies and homogenizing faces around the globe. What is at stake? “The whole diversity of humanity is lost,” according to the artist.
Gretchen, an ex-Googler, is a Silicon Valley dropout. After becoming disillusioned by the way technology was designed to exploit users and experiencing a culture that penalized her for dressing like Cher from Clueless, Gretchen left tech to pursue a career in art. In the art world, she felt free to use technology subversively and wear short skirts as a form of 3.0 feminism. Her previous projects: Thirst Trap Glitch Gifs, in which she used SEO optimization hacks to make her vision board canvases the top search result for “contemporary art auction record,” capture the artist’s drive perfectly.
There have always been beauty standards, Andrew says, but never before has there been a single, universal, international beauty standard. Courtesy Gretchen Andrew, Heft Gallery
Gretchen could have continued further along this line, using her brilliance to expose technological loopholes while promoting her name. However, Universal Beauty marks a departure. Or perhaps an evolution or maturing. Not in Gretchen’s interests, but in her tactics. The focus is less about her explicitly and more about the technology that traps us all. Making us feel forever inadequate. Forever ugly. While keeping us craving more of this feeling. And Gretchen will be the first to admit that she is not above social media addiction. But admission, be it via her work or her words, is always the first step.
First, congratulations on your acquisition by the Whitney. What can you tell us about the Facetune Portraits project, and about the work that was acquired?
In Facetune Portraits, I look at how A.I.-driven beauty standards are impacting how we experience ourselves and how we experience others. I take what is normally an invisible force—whether it’s digital Facetuning or the way it’s impacting things like lip fillers and plastic surgery—and make it visible so that we can talk about it. In my Universal Beauty series, I look at Miss Universe contestants who are from all over the world—they’re completely gorgeous—and yet they’re not good enough for the algorithms, giving the rest of us absolutely no hope. Not only that, but the contestants are from all around the world. They should look completely different, but we see the homogenizing impact of A.I. when we see Miss Jamaica being given the same body as Miss Finland being given the same body as Miss Philippines. It’s compressing all humanity into a single unified look.
Describe the Facetune aesthetic. What does the algorithm think is beautiful?
We’ve grown so used to seeing each other and ourselves on a two-dimensional screen. And because screens are flat, our expectations of how we’re supposed to look are incorporating efforts to mimic that third dimension within the two-dimensional space of the screen. One example is having absurdly big lips. Some people really like the way that those big lips look from the front, but no one thinks that they look great from the side. That’s why we get memes around “duck lip.” There’s this distinct prioritization of making sure we look good on a screen. It reminds me of ancient Egyptian art. The reason why hieroglyphics have bodies that are contorted is that, within the two-dimensional surface, the Egyptians wanted to convey the three-dimensionality of the body. So they represented each body part from its most recognizable angle and sort of stuck it all together. That’s really what’s happening today with our cameras and algorithms: we are attempting to convey three dimensions in the 2D space of a screen.
Gretchen Andrew, Facetune Portrait – Universal Beauty, USA, 2025. Oil On Canvas, 48″ x 24″. Photo by @larufoto Luis Ruiz
What is lost when we do that?
The whole diversity of humanity is lost. There have always been beauty standards, but never before has there been a single, universal, international beauty standard. We’re also losing connections to our actual bodies. We’re prioritizing how people look over what they do. We’re prioritizing how we look over how we feel. Within that prioritization, we lose a really important connection to ourselves. Another thing we’re losing is the celebration of the individual. I see not just a desire to be beautiful, but a desire to be like everyone else. That feels safer to people today than to actually look like yourself.
How is this different than in the ‘90s, before there was social media, when media was dominated by a couple channels or Vogue, and these Western exports were setting the dominant beauty standard around the world?
I think with A.I., the pace and the uniformity of that has increased significantly. Although there has been this Western beauty standard before, maybe there was a slightly different beauty standard in Japan or Kenya. With A.I., there has been an acceleration of this beauty standard convergence. Anybody—they don’t need massive Photoshop skills—can take their image, process it through a Facetune algorithm, and go to a plastic surgeon and say: Make me look like this, which is increasingly happening.
I read a study out of Cornell that 0.2 percent of the data used to train A.I. comes from Africa and South America. Do you know where most of the data that’s training these beauty algorithms is coming from?
We’re in a feedback loop, especially with social media. I’m sure you’ve noticed that if you post a photo of your face or other people, you’re more likely to get engagement. I don’t think that’s because that’s what people want to see. I think these platforms are driving more engagement in order to get more images of faces and bodies for training their algorithms. I think Instagram, by volume, must be Western. It’s also not so much who is using it as it is about the quantity of images that people are seeing. Influencers, for example, have so many more followers and get so much more exposure. It doesn’t matter how many regular people are using the app, the majority of people are seeing images that look like these influencers.
Gretchen Andrew, Facetune Portrait – Universal Beauty, Puerto Rico, 2025. Oil on Canvas, 48″ x 24″. Photo by @larufoto Luis Ruiz
What made you interested in addressing social media and beauty standards in your work?
I like to find seemingly innocuous, frivolous and feminine things and use them as opportunities to have conversations about technology and its impact on our lives. Beauty standards seemed like a ripe area where a lot of people are not thinking about A.I. or the technological apocalypse, and so it became a very wide doorway to have these conversations. On top of that, I think a lot about the physical and metaphorical shapes that we as women contort ourselves into to meet societal expectations, especially as we age. I’m approaching 40, and my friends are getting Botox or plastic surgery. This project is not about shaming women for these things. It’s about understanding where standards come from and making decisions from there.
Can you talk about your decision to turn these digital images into oil paintings via an oil paint printer?
I wanted to create a portrait that shows both who we are and who we’re told to be at the same time. I wanted to represent this in a way that would be part of the history of portraiture. Portraits have always shown what we value at any given time. Look at me and my big family. Look at my jewels. Look at my land behind me. Within this current world of A.I., I wanted to investigate what is important to us, and I think what’s important to us is fitting in. It’s being accepted by the algorithm.
What do you think about celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker who refuse to get plastic surgery?
Celebrities like that are really important. They remind us that beauty can exist outside of the algorithm. But also, she’s not coming up today. She’s already a big deal, and she can make that stand now in a way that I think is very important and interesting. What I really want to see is somebody who’s very young make that same decision and succeed. I think it’s going to be a lot harder.
Totally. I read the memoir Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams. It’s such a damning portrait of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. After I read it, I was so worked up, and I was like, ‘I have to get off social media.’ And then, of course, I didn’t. So my question is, what does awareness do? There’s an idea that it changes things. But my question is: does it?
As far as what awareness does, I think it makes us cognizant that we are making a choice, even if we continue to use filters and get lip fillers. Technology has made things so seamless that we have slipped into an absurd world where people are injecting things into their lips that they have bought on Alibaba, and it happens to be cement. This is becoming normal so fast. I really believe social media is going to be the tobacco of our generation, with the impact on mental health. Here we are, knowing it’s bad for us, still smoking. When I hang up on this phone call, I’ll probably get on Instagram for a second. Awareness is not going to win the war, but it is at least a way to see what’s going on and maybe have a little bit more agency as an individual, even if societally we’re totally fucked.
My last question is, if social media is like tobacco and it’s bad for us, why do you still use it?
Works from “Afrotopias” in Freedom Park Lagos. Courtesy of the AAF. Photo: Ariwodola Ifeoluwa Ayomide
On the rails of a structure in Freedom Park Lagos—situated on what was Nigeria’s first colonial prison—hang several images. Titled “Afrotopias,” the body of work is part of the 15th edition of the international LagosPhoto Festival. The public park is one of the landmark spaces being activated for the event, which marks its inaugural edition as a biennial this year under the theme “Incarceration.” The recently opened Nahous Gallery—located inside the historic Federal Palace complex, where Nigeria’s Declaration of Independence was signed in 1960 and a key venue for the international festival FESTAC77—is also hosting the biennial. But this year, LagosPhoto Festival expands beyond Lagos to Ibadan, with work at New Culture Studios, built in 1970 and designed by renowned architect, painter and sculptor Demas Nwoko, a pioneering figure in Nigeria’s modern art movement.
“There were some specific locations that were quite important to the theme but the spaces had their own charged histories, and so the works showing in them had to be in dialogue with that,” lead curator Courage Dzidula Kpodo told Observer at the offices of organizers African Artists’ Foundation (AAF) in Lagos, which was recently reopened after two years of closure. “That was a very conscious decision, and I think largely comes from my training as an architect and how I think about space and its histories. The works that are exhibited are an activation of the space. People experience it in a very different way than they would if there were no work there. It gave us a very charged canvas for this show.”
César Dezfuli, Amadou S. From the Passengers series. Cesar Dezfuli, Courtesy of the artist and AAF Large
The AAF offices, Alliance Française de Lagos and Didi Museum—founded in 1983 and said to be Nigeria’s first private museum—are also showing work as part of the biennial. The 2025 curatorial team, which includes Robin Riskin, Maria Pia Bernadoni, Vetum Gima Galadima and Kadara Enyeasi under the artistic direction of Azu Nwagbogu, founder and director of AAF, presented the work of around 100 artists speaking to various types and meanings of the “incarceration” theme—be it self-imposed or by others, spiritual, ideological, psychological or political—through solo projects, collaborations, institutional exhibitions and screenings.
The work in the biennial spans photography, film, sound, installation and archives by a wide range of artists—from those who have been practicing professionally for about three decades to emerging artists and those still in school. These include the likes of Shirin Neshat, Ayobami Ogungbe, Cesar Dezfuli, Stefan Ruiz, Nuotama Bodomo, Yagazie Emezi, Fibi Afloe, Jesse Weaver Shipley and Gerald Annan-Forson. The New Culture Studios is activated to examine what the organizers call the urban and architectural dimensions of incarceration. The work on view in the studios also includes commissioned pieces by students at the University of Ibadan.
Gerald Annan-Forson’s photo of Lt. Jerry John Rawlings handing over power to the civilian regime led by Hilla Limann in 1979. Photo: Gameli Hamelo for Observer, courtesy the Didi Museum
The artists whose work is featured in the biennial were selected following an open call, which was “quite successful because we had a very diverse group of work,” shared Kpodo. Previously, the team chose artists primarily through an internal nomination process based on their networks and research, which could be limiting. The open call filled that gap, and they received applications on “projects that we would otherwise not find. [Artists] were able to come to us.”
The 2025 edition of the LagosPhoto extends to the Didi Museum. Courtesy of the AAF. Photo: Ariwodola Ifeoluwa Ayomide
What did they look for in selecting the artists whose work is presented in the biennial? “I think we were looking for works that were layered and not very simple to read or to understand. We were looking for works that were also quite bold in the topics that they chose to examine. I think another big thing we were looking for was experimentation with the medium, and for us it was important to identify it in both established artists or even young and upcoming artists,” Kpodo explained.
The “cross-generational juxtaposition” of work presented in the biennial will be seen as speaking to shifts in perceptions and to the questioning of societies across generations, he added. “I hope people will pay attention to the fact that there’s more to what they are seeing. There’s usually a whole web of stories that gets summed up into what we end up presenting. What you are seeing is actually just a portal into something that’s much more.”
“Eva Helene Pade: Søgelys” is at Thaddaeus Ropac in London through December 20, 2025. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
Hauntingly beautiful… revelatory: these are the adjectives that come to mind when staring at Eva Helene Pade’s paintings. Amorphous bodies move across the canvas like a choreography of spectral dancers, dynamically taking over the elegant architecture of Thaddaeus Ropac’s gallery in London. It’s a spectacle of erotic energy, where the power of attraction and seduction of the femme fatale finds its stage, manifesting through moody, dramatic atmospheres shaped by color sensations and instinctive emotional reactions.
Following the Danish-born, Paris-based artist’s institutional debut at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark earlier this year and multiple new auction records set at auction (the latest at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2024, when A Story to Be Told #14 (2021) sold for $123,417) the exhibition “Søgelys” (on view through December 20, 2025) brings together a new group of paintings in which Eva Helene Pade continues to explore the violent and seductive forces that exist between bodies in space. The body is examined here as both a medium and a filter, a porous psychical, cognitive and emotional membrane through which we negotiate our interactions and relationships with others. Painting becomes a vehicle for a continuous exercise of female embodiment and disembodiment, creating both a dance and a tension that unfolds within the canvas and the surrounding space. “Color is crucial for me; it’s emotional and psychological,” she tells Observer. “The palette often defines the atmosphere of a work before the figures even appear.”
Eva Helene Pade. Courtesy of Thaddeus Ropac.
Pade turns the canvas into a living stage where color and movement try to spontaneously channel and translate the prelinguistic expressions of the human psyche. Her process is deeply intuitive: the figures emerge from the act of painting itself, beginning with an abstract field and moving through a fluid process of identification and alienation. “I start drawing figures into it. At first, they appear as little blobs, and gradually I begin carving them out until the forms start taking shape, only to change again and become something else entirely,” she says. Pade also tunes herself to rhythm, listening to classical music to enter an inner world of narratives and transforming its prelinguistic storytelling into a tool to address universal questions about the human condition.
“I work very instinctively, letting intuition lead. Sometimes it fails; sometimes it surprises me. I rely on that tension,” she says, acknowledging how her influences have shifted over time, though certain painters have always remained with her. The psychological charge of her work recalls the emotional and psychological layering of artists such as Edvard Munch, Amber Wellmann, Nicolas de Staël, Cecily Brown, Marlene Dumas and Miriam Cahn, as well as older masters like Rodin and Rubens, who reveal how much emotion can be conveyed through a gesture or pose.
Still, despite this intuitive channeling through pigment and color, Pade’s works are never autobiographical portraits; they’re personal but not literal. “I don’t paint people from my life, nor do I use photographic references. They’re intuitive, almost dreamlike—images that emerge and shift as I work,” she explains.
Like monsters or ghosts reemerging from the subconscious, these spectral presences probe the porous diaphragm between the inner and outer world, a boundary that painting can reveal. “I’ve always been drawn to painting. I began drawing as a means to process both external reality and my inner world,” Pade says. She never had strict academic training, so she taught herself anatomy, proportion and form, which may be why her figures appear slightly off, existing within her own visual logic. “That wonkiness has become my language.”
In her debut show with the gallery, Pade’s monumental and small-scale canvases are suspended on floor-to-ceiling metal posts, set away from the walls to create dynamic spatial configurations. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
The canvas becomes the stage where the “shadow,” the “removed,” is confronted in a distinctly Freudian and Jungian sense. “I keep molding the surface, working into the face, pulling new elements out of the shadows that I hadn’t noticed before,” Pade confirms. “A dark color might form a symbol or pattern, which I then push back into the composition.” It’s a long, layered process that involves as much waiting and letting the paint dry as it does discovery and transformation.
Still, it’s immediately apparent upon entering the show that this new body of work engages with femininity, sensuality and the position of the female body in space. Painting is for Pade a means of exploring the relationship between self and surroundings, how this dynamic subtly defines and redefines identity between body and soul, between the one and the many. Her figures, often expressionless and featureless, convey emotion through gesture and contortion, resonating with a universality that transcends any autobiographical reading.
What she paints is a potentially cacophonous orchestra of sensations and voices, a confrontation with the chaos of humanity in which the self is continually dissolved and rediscovered. Pade began painting crowds during lockdown, reflecting the strange collective isolation of that time. “They’re images of people together, but not necessarily about any specific moment. They’re more like metaphors of time itself.”
There is always a narrative in her paintings, but it remains open-ended. It’s the drama of human existence in dialogue with the external world that Pade paints. “I don’t want to trap the viewer in a single message. It’s more like a free exploration on the canvas: an emotional and physical response that builds its own logic,” she says.
Once the paintings are presented outside of the studio, they gain new context from the space and from the people who encounter them. In London, Pade wanted to choreograph her own visual rhythm, thinking about how the paintings could occupy the space almost like stage sets. “The exhibition space was so unconventional that I had to respond directly to its quirks—the staircase, the unusual angles—so I began playing with composition almost like orchestration,” she explains. “It all made sense because the project was inspired by a ballet, so I leaned into that theatricality, treating the canvases like backdrops.”
Pade doesn’t have a background in theater but she clearly thinks compositionally, almost like a stage director. The paintings are intentionally life-sized so the figures stand in direct relation to the viewer’s body as they float and dance in these hazy atmospheres, much like in a nightclub or a theater. “I want the experience to be physical, to break the passive distance between viewer and painting.”
Although the works are two-dimensional, they feel animated by their dense atmospheres, where bodies flicker between visibility and occlusion, partially veiled by soft billows of smoke or lit from within by a flaming glow or radiant beams of light. Lifting the paintings off the wall and letting them float through the space isn’t a gimmick; it heightens this emotional rhythm. “For these crowd scenes, it made sense. The figures seem to hover or drift in space, and the installation amplifies that effect,” she notes.
For Pade, the human body is part of a primal, instinctive language, like a brushstroke, a gesture or a dance. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
While staging the paintings outside her studio, she realized that by not hanging them flat on the wall the viewer could see their backs—the wooden stretchers, sketches and raw marks behind the surface. They became living metaphors for the relationship between inner world and external space. “I liked that transparency, that glimpse into process. Light passed through them in interesting ways, giving them a smoldering depth,” she acknowledges. “When people walked around, the paintings seemed to move with them. It became immersive. You could almost walk into the composition.”
In the space, the unified spectral presences of Pade’s choreography found their living essence again, becoming interlocutors with the viewers. And if painting is, first of all, an open conversation, an expansive narrative field where everyone can identify and project their own meanings, the universal power of connection offered by Eva Helene Pade’s painterly storytelling and its endless variations is proof of how her art can still evolve. Even the “failed” works contribute to her evolution, as painting remains for her both a necessity and an urgency, a means to confront and process the multifaceted reality of the world. “You learn technique, rhythm and restraint from them.”
The potentially continuous evolution of the canvases on view reveals Pade’s enduring excitement for painting. “I don’t plan big conceptual changes. It evolves organically with each new piece,” she reflects. “Some paintings fail; I destroy or hide them if they don’t resonate. I think it’s crucial to be self-critical. A work that doesn’t move me won’t move anyone else.”
Installed in the round, fragments of Pade’s images overlap so that characters appear to flit from one scene to another, vanishing and then recurring as in dreams. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
The collection of Robert F. Weis and Patricia G. Ross Weis has an estimate in excess of $180 million. Christie’s
The November marquee sales in New York are among the most anticipated events on the global art calendar and the final litmus test of the market’s health after the London and Paris fairs and auctions. Leading the $1.6 billion New York auction week this November is a concentration of high-end, big-name collections, as single-owner sales have become an increasingly important tool for auction houses to secure major consignments and build momentum around a notable name and provenance. “A well-known individual definitely drives interest,” Elizabeth Siegel, vice president and head of private and iconic collections at Christie’s, told Observer.
Over the past decade these types of sales have accounted for 15.6 percent of total value, according to ArtTactic, reaching a peak of 31.3 percent in 2022 with the Paul G. Allen Collection. In the first 10 months of 2025 they continued to outperform with white gloves and records, reaching 18.5 percent of global auction value. In the final week of November in New York alone, single-owner sales are estimated at $706.8 million of total auction value. “A single-owner sale totally elevates prices. It gives them a real boost,” Lisa Dennison, chairman of Sotheby’s Americas, confirmed.
As New York’s fall auctions approach, here is a breakdown of the most anticipated collections set to appear as single-owner sales or within the marquee offerings, along with the top lots that have made headlines in the months leading up to this pivotal week for the art market.
The Leonard A. Lauder Collection at Sotheby’s
Gustav Klimt, Porträt der Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer), 1914-16. Estimate in excess of $150 million. Courtesy of Sotheby’s
The $400 million Leonard A. Lauder: Collector sale on November 18 is one of the most anticipated auctions of the season, with Sotheby’s presenting a 24-lot evening sale at its new Breuer Building headquarters. Following Lauder’s passing last June, both Christie’s and Sotheby’s reportedly competed to secure what is considered one of the year’s most important consignments. Sotheby’s ultimately won the mandate, securing 55 masterworks from one of America’s great collectors and philanthropists, longtime Whitney patron Leonard A. Lauder, which will be split between the dedicated evening sale and a day session the following morning.
The undisputed star of the sale is Gustav Klimt’s Porträt der Elisabeth Lederer, estimated in excess of $150 million and poised to surpass the artist’s current auction record of $108.8 million (£85.3 million), also set at Sotheby’s with Dame mit Fächer (Lady with Fan) in London in 2023. Executed between 1914 and 1916, the portrait is among Klimt’s most refined full-length depictions, portraying the young Elisabeth Lederer, daughter of two of his greatest patrons. It epitomizes Vienna’s Golden Age, a moment when youth, beauty, color and ornamental splendor merged into a vision of pure elegance, while also revealing the influence of fin-de-siècle exoticism. The composition’s flattened perspective and sinuous lines echo Japonaiserie and Chinoiserie, visible in the Asian-inspired motifs floating around Lederer’s Poiret-style gown, a nod to Klimt’s fascination with Chinese and Japanese art and textiles. Confiscated by the Zentralstelle für Denkmalschutz in 1939 and restituted to the Lederer heirs in 1946, the painting was later acquired from the family by Serge Sabarsky, an early advocate of German and Austrian modernism in the United States, before entering Lauder’s collection in the mid-1980s.
Other exceptional Klimts in the sale are Blumenwiese (Blooming Meadow) (1908), an exquisite example of the artist’s floral-period landscapes with an estimate in excess of $80 million, and Waldhag bei Unterach am Attersee (Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee) (1916), a depiction of an undisturbed lakeside idyll that reveals Klimt’s growing affinity with Van Gogh’s expressive brushwork, estimated in excess of $70 million. The number and high-quality works by artists from the Vienna Secession in the collection can be attributed to Leonard A. Lauder’s connection with his brother Ronald S. Lauder, one of the most notable collectors of the movement and co-founder and president of the Neue Galerie in New York. Both were sons of Estée and Joseph Lauder, founders of The Estée Lauder Companies.
Additional highlights include an emotionally charged, psychologically complex Edvard Munch, Sankthansnatt (Johannisnacht) (Midsummer Night) (1901-03), estimated at $20 million, six bronzes by Henri Matisse expected to realize a combined $30 million and an immaculate graphite grid by Agnes Martin, The Garden, exemplifying her mastery of geometric precision and meditative restraint.
The Collection of Robert F. and Patricia G. Ross Weis at Christie’s
Rothko’s No. 31 (Yellow Stripe), 1958. Estimate on request, in the region of $50 million.
Over more than 50 years, Patricia G. Ross Weis and Robert F. Weis assembled a collection that reflected not only the evolution of 20th-century art between Paris and New York but also the life journey they shared. The 18-lot single-owner Collection of Robert F. and Patricia G. Ross Weis sale on November 17 is expected to generate between $92.35 million and $136.7 million, accounting for more than half of the collection’s total estimated value of $180 million, which includes another 80 works that will be distributed across additional auctions and categories.
The top lot is a vibrant yellow-and-orange Mark Rothko painted in 1958, the same year the artist completed his monumental murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan’s Seagram Building. Acquired by the couple from PaceWildenstein in 1995, the work boasts an extensive exhibition history, including its inclusion in the important AbEx show the Beyeler Foundation staged in 1989. Estimated at around $50 million and backed by a third-party guarantee, the canvas stands as one of Rothko’s most powerful expressions of American abstraction, its layered chromatic fields pulsing with contained, tormented energy and sublime atmospheric depth.
Another star lot in the collection is Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red and Blue (estimate: $20-30 million), signed and dated “PM 39-41.” This rare-to-auction painting belongs to the artist’s transatlantic period, as Mondrian began it in Europe and completed it in New York between 1939 and 1941. Its distinguished exhibition history includes “Mondrian: Nature to Abstraction” at the Tate in 1997. The work exemplifies Mondrian’s rigorous balance of line, color and luminous white ground, an essential yet conceptually intricate dialogue at the heart of his practice.
Other anticipated works include an early Fauvist landscape by Georges Braque, Henri Matisse’s lyrical Figure et bouquet (Tête ocre) from his Nice period (estimate: $15-25 million), and Pablo Picasso’s La Lecture (Marie-Thérèse), a portrait of his muse estimated in the region of $40 million. Another exemplary work, one that justifies the sale title “A Tale Between Two Cities,” is the bold gestural abyssal composition Pierre Soulages painted in Peinture 161 x 200 cm, 14 novembre 1958, offered at $5-7 million, which resonates with the essential black marks on a white ground in Franz Kline’s Placidia from 1961 (estimate: $10-15 million).
Robert F. Weis made his fortune as chairman of Weis Markets Inc., a family-run food company founded in 1912 in rural Pennsylvania, where the couple lived. A lifelong learner and avid reader, he developed a deep appreciation for art. Patricia Weis, born in New York City, shared his passion for art, architecture and design, an interest first sparked by an uncle in the fashion industry. She began collecting after meeting Lucie Rie and Hans Coper on a trip to London. Together, the pair became prominent philanthropists supporting educational, cultural, civic and medical institutions: Patricia served on the boards of Bard College and Franklin & Marshall College, while Robert was a Sterling Fellow at Yale University and sat on its Committee on Buildings and Grounds. They also championed Jewish causes and supported the Lown Cardiovascular Research Foundation, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the Metropolitan Opera.
The Cindy and Jay Pritzker Collection at Sotheby’s
A $40 million Vincent van Gogh, Romans Parisiens (Les Livres jaunes), leads this Sotheby’s sale. Photo: Michael Tropea | Courtesy of Sotheby’s
The other major consignment Sotheby’s has secured for November is the Cindy and Jay Pritzker Collection, which is expected to generate a total in excess of $120 million. Known for founding the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979—often called the “Nobel of architecture”—the Chicago-based couple extended their devotion to creative excellence beyond the built environment, assembling a collection that reflects the breadth and rigor of their cultural philanthropy.
Headlining the November 20 Cindy and Jay Pritzker Collection sale, which immediately precedes Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction at 7:30 p.m., is Vincent van Gogh’s Romans Parisiens (Les Livres jaunes) (1887), a radiant still life from the artist’s Paris period in which a stack of yellow-bound books becomes a portrait of his voracious intellect. Estimated at $40 million, the painting was acquired by the Pritzkers in 1994 through Richard L. Feigen & Co. and boasts an extensive literature and exhibition history spanning major institutions across Europe and the United States, including the show “Van Gogh à Paris” at the Musée d’Orsay (1988), “Vincent van Gogh Paintings” at the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam (1990), and “Vincent van Gogh and the Modern Movement, 1890-1914” at Museum Folkwang, Essen, and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (1990-91). The work last appeared publicly in “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South” at the Art Institute of Chicago (2001-02), “The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2010), and “Van Gogh’s Bedrooms” at the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). The preparatory painting for this canvas is held in the Van Gogh Museum’s permanent collection.
Comparing the present work to Piles of French Novels in the Van Gogh Museum, scholars have described it as particularly revealing of the artist’s stylistic transition. If the earlier study, flatter in tone and more monochromatic, reflects his fascination with Japanese prints through its block-like composition and restrained palette, the painting in the Pritzker Collection reintroduces depth and vitality through rhythmic dashes and loose strokes of the Neo-Impressionist style Van Gogh adopted in his final Paris months.
Among the other highlights of the sale are Henri Matisse’s sensuous triptych Léda et le cygne (1944-46), estimated at $7-10 million, and Paul Gauguin’s La Maison de Pen du, gardeuse de vache (1889), painted during his Pont-Aven period and carrying a $6-8 million estimate. Additional highlights include Max Beckmann’s Der Wels (Catfish) ($5-7 million), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Hallesches Tor, Berlin (1913, $3-5 million), a large-scale outdoor sculpture by Joan Miró ($4-6 million), and a lyrical Camille Pissarro landscape from his second Pontoise period ($1.2-1.8 million).
The breadth of the Pritzker holdings will extend beyond the November sale, with further lots offered next month in Sotheby’s Books and Manuscripts, Sculpture and Works of Art, Chinese Works of Art, and Design auctions. Together, the ensemble is expected to bring tens of millions of dollars across multiple sales.
The Elaine Wynn Collection at Christie’s
Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #40 (1971). Estimate: $15-25 million. Christie’s
Christie’s also secured the remarkable collection of Elaine Wynn, the late philanthropist and “Queen of Las Vegas,” who passed away this April. Celebrated for her discerning eye and the remarkable assemblage she built both alongside and independently of her former husband, casino magnate Steve Wynn, her estate is estimated at over $75 million. Nine of the top works will be featured in the 20th Century Evening Sale on November 17, two in the 21st Century Evening Sale on November 19, with the remainder to follow in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale.
The highlights from her collection span centuries and movements yet share the same standard of excellence that defined Wynn’s collecting ethos. On the Modern side, the top lot is Richard Diebenkorn’s transcendent Ocean Park #40, which will be offered in the 20th Century Evening Sale with an estimate of $15-25 million. The work returns to the rostrum just as Gagosian announces its representation of the Diebenkorn estate and inaugurates a dedicated exhibition at its Upper East Side gallery. Wynn acquired the painting at Sotheby’s in 2021, when it achieved a then-record $27.3 million. Diebenkorn’s auction record now stands at $46.4 million, set by his 1965 Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad at Christie’s New York in November 2023, placing the current estimate well within range yet poised to surpass it amid renewed market attention following Gagosian’s endorsement. Before its last sale, Ocean Park #40 was featured in the traveling museum exhibition dedicated to the series at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Orange County Museum of Art (2011-2012), as well as Acquavella Galleries’ 2018 show pairing Diebenkorn’s California scenes with those of Wayne Thiebaud.
Other top lots include J.M.W. Turner’s poetic Ehrenbreitstein (estimate: $12-18 million) and a refined Parisian scene by Georges Seurat. On the postwar side, headline works are Lucian Freud’s late self-portrait (estimate: $15-25 million) and Joan Mitchell’s sunflower-hued explosion of color and gesture (estimate: $12-18 million).
Also presented as part of Christie’s 44-lot 21st Century Evening Sale on November 19, the Edlis|Neeson Collection is described by the auction house as a rare example of a carefully curated ensemble of postwar icons that together trace the evolution of modern and contemporary art. Austrian-born American collector and philanthropist Stefan Edlis and his life partner Gael Neeson began assembling their collection in the 1970s, gradually filling their landmark apartment on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile with works that James Rondeau, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, once called “one of the most important collections of modern and contemporary art in existence.” In 2015, the couple donated 44 works to the Art Institute, a gift the museum described as transformative. Born in Vienna in 1925, Stefan Edlis fled Nazi-occupied Austria for the U.S. in 1941 and later founded Apollo Plastics Corporation. In 1974, he met Gael Neeson, and together they began a lifelong pursuit of art collecting, mentored by Chicago collector Gerald Elliot. Their first major acquisition, Piet Mondrian’s Large Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (1977), marked the beginning of a collection that evolved toward Pop, Conceptual and contemporary art, featuring icons like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, as well as a later generation similarly engaged with Pop and mass culture, including Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Ugo Rondinone.
One of the top lots is Ed Ruscha’s How Do You Do?, coming to auction amid strong market momentum for the artist following MoMA’s major retrospective last year. Part of Ruscha’s coveted mountain series, this laconic phrase floats diagonally rather than horizontally, suspended over a meticulously rendered alpine landscape, each ridge and summit bathed in deep blue light. Acquired directly from Gagosian in 2004 and shown that same year in the Aspen Art Museum’s Ed Ruscha: Mountain Paintings, the work makes its auction debut with an estimate of $5-7 million, secured by a third-party guarantee.
Another highlight is Andy Warhol’s The Last Supper (Yellow) (1986), acquired from Gagosian in 2002 and now estimated at $6-8 million, also backed by a guarantee from Christie’s. The auction house describes it as the culmination of Warhol’s career, a meditation on the dualities of mass media and mortality. Created just a month before his death and first exhibited in Milan’s Palazzo delle Stelline, directly across from Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, the series was Warhol’s way of “making Leonardo exciting again.” The work reflects his lifelong fascination with the iconography of images, their power, repetition and eventual loss of aura through mass reproduction. As more than 3,000 visitors attended the Milan show, The Last Supper came to embody Warhol’s own final self-reflection, a farewell from the artist who became as famous and as mythic as the masters he reinterpreted.
Also featured in the sale are Warhol’s Skull (estimate: $800,000-1.2 million), which will open the Evening Sale, and his Oxidation Painting (Diptych) (1978), acquired from Skarstedt Gallery in 2017 (estimate: $900,000-1.2 million, guaranteed). Other highlights include a Diego Giacometti bronze table (estimate: $3-5 million), Richard Prince’s Double Nurse (estimate: $3-5 million), and Jeff Koons’s Gazing Ball (Courbet Sleep) (estimate: $600,000-800,000), acquired from Gagosian in 2015. The sale also includes works by Cindy Sherman, George Condo, Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselmann, alongside two Giacometti library tables.
Perhaps the most provocative work from the collection, although not for sale, is Maurizio Cattelan’s Him (2001), which will be viewable by request during the November pre-sale exhibition, a haunting reminder of the collection’s daring and thought-provoking spirit.
The Max N. Berry Collections at Christie’s
Alberto Giacometti, Buste d’homme (Diego), conceived in 1959/cast in 1960-1961. Bronze with brown patina, height: 15.3/4 in. (40 cm.), estimate $5-8 million. Courtesy of Christie’s
Debuting in the 20th Century Evening Sale this November, the collection of connoisseur Max Berry brings to auction one of the season’s most wide-ranging and valuable encyclopedic consignments. Spanning more than 30 categories, the collection, which is expected to generate tens of millions of dollars across several years of sales, reflects Berry’s lifetime of passionate and discerning collecting, driven more by curiosity than by market fashion.
Among the top lots hitting the rostrum during the November marquee evening sale is Calder’s Acrobats (1929), a seminal wire sculpture estimated at $5-7 million. Composed of two delicately balanced figures mounted on a wooden base, the piece dates to the artist’s pivotal Paris years when he began transforming his toy-maker’s ingenuity into formal sculptural language. Acrobats is directly linked to Calder’s famed Cirque Calder (1926-31), the hand-built miniature circus that anticipated his lifelong fascination with movement and performance. Its appearance at auction coincides with the Whitney Museum’s centennial tribute “High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100.”
Also included in the sale is Berry’s Alexander Calder Untitled (1938), a rare yellow hanging mobile estimated at $1.5-2 million. Evoking the artist’s childlike sense of wonder, the sculpture’s continuous motion, no matter how still the air, epitomizes Calder’s mastery of balance, rhythm and levity. Completing the lineup of modern masters from the collection are Giacometti’s Buste d’homme (Diego), a bronze portrait of the artist’s brother, cast and signed 2/6 with an estimate of $5-8 million, and his still life Nature morte (1938), estimated at $1.5-2 million, a testament to the artist’s existential and essential synthesis of form and psychological depth.
Additional works from Berry’s collection, including Judaica, American art and Chinese art, will be offered in stages through 2027, underscoring both the scope and scholarly depth of a lifetime spent collecting with intellect, passion and humanity. As Berry told Observer in a recent interview, his ultimate wish is that the works are enjoyed, whether by private collectors or in institutions. “It will be wonderful if a museum acquires some of them and makes them public, where they can sit alongside other objects of a similar nature to tell the story of their artistry and their times.”
The Schlumberger Collection at Sotheby’s
Claude Monet, Vue de Rouen depuis la côte Sainte-Catherine, 1892. Sotheby’s
Similarly eclectic is the Schlumberger Collection, which Sotheby’s secured for this season. It debuted in Paris during their Surrealism and Its Legacy auction, with additional lots now scheduled to appear in New York during the Modern Evening Auction on November 20 and Modern Day Auction on November 21. Further works will be in the Important Design, Fine Jewelry and Fine Books & Manuscripts sales held between November and December 2025. This singular ensemble, bridging centuries of art and design and reflecting the legacy of one of Europe’s great industrial and cultural dynasties, was founded by brothers Conrad and Marcel Schlumberger, whose pioneering work in geophysics revolutionized the energy industry. The family also became renowned for its refined patronage of the arts. That legacy continued through Marcel’s daughter, Anne Schlumberger, whose discerning eye was shaped by her lifelong engagement with Surrealism, architecture and design.
Among the works coming from the collection is Claude Monet’s Vue de Rouen, a luminous and atmospheric canvas painted at the dawn of his famed cathedral series and set to be one of the top lots in Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction. Fresh to the block with an estimate of $3,000,000-4,000,000, this iconic Monet embodies a pure luminous atmosphere as the artist focuses on the transitory phenomenology of light and color, reaching a level of abstraction close to raw sensorial perception before any codification or formalization. The other highlight of the collection is François-Xavier Lalanne’s Hippopotame Bar (1976), a pièce unique and the first and only example the artist created in copper, serving as the prototype for his later bronze editions.
Property from the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art at Christie’s
Claude Monet, Nymphéas. Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 29 in. (92 x 73.6 cm.). Christie’s
For more than three decades, the works resided in Kawamura’s purpose-built museum near Tokyo, where they brought international visitors face-to-face with the great masters of modern art. Following its closure in March 2025, the institution announced plans to divest around 280 works through auctions and private sales, aiming to raise at least ¥10 billion (approximately $68 million).
Leading Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale from the museum’s collection is Claude Monet’s Nymphéas (1907), one of the artist’s most dazzling depictions of his Giverny waterlily pond, estimated at $40-60 million. Acquired in 1970 from the Estate of Albert J. Dreitzer through Sotheby’s, the painting has been a cornerstone of Kawamura’s galleries ever since, its vertical composition capturing the pond’s luminous surface in an almost abstract symphony of reflection and light.
Other highlights include Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Jeune femme arrangeant des fleurs (estimate: $8-12 million), Marc Chagall’s Le Rêve de Paris (estimate: $4-6 million) and Henri Matisse’s Femme au chapeau bleu (estimate: $3-5 million), which will also be offered in the 20th Century Evening Sale.
WASHINGTON — The White House Historical Association has reclaimed a series of sketches by American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell, spending a whopping $7.25 million at auction on Friday.
The four 1940s-era sketches titled “So You Want to See the President!” were displayed in the West Wing for years, but were removed in 2022 after a family dispute over who owned them.
The sketches show a variety of people — journalists, military officers and even a Miss America Pageant winner and her publicist — seated on plush-looking red chairs as they waited to meet President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They were put up for sale by a grandson of the White House official who had received them as a gift from Rockwell.
“I can’t tell you how personally thrilled I am that the White House Historical Association preserved this piece of White House history,” said Anita McBride, who sits on the association’s board of directors.
The White House Historical Association’s winning bid was $5.8 million. It’s total cost to reclaim the art, including the buyer’s premium paid to the auction house, was $7.25 million.
The price tag is by far the most ever paid by the association, which holds a vast collection of art, furniture and other items as part of its mission to help the White House collect and display artifacts that represent American history and culture.
Before Friday, the most the association had paid for an artifact was $1.5 million for “The Builders,” by African American artist Jacob Lawrence, in 2007, McBride said. That work depicts hard-working men in orange, red and brown tones, and hangs in the White House Green Room.
The sketches sold Friday are Rockwell’s only known collection of four interrelated paintings that he conceived to tell a story, according to Heritage Auctions, the Dallas-based auction house that sold them. The series was created in 1943 and published in the Saturday Evening Post.
The association will share more “about the future of this significant and historic work,” its president, Stewart McLaurin, said in a statement.
“We look forward to utilizing this acquisition to teach White House history for generations to come,” he said.
Matthew Costello, the association’s chief education officer, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview this week that officials had discussed putting the sketches on display at The People’s House: A White House Experience. The association opened the interactive White House education center in September 2024.
The White House Historical Association was created in 1961 by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy to help preserve the museum quality of the interior of the White House and educate the public. It is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that receives no government funding.
Our poll has officially crossed the finish line — and Detroit, you sure burned rubber!
After weeks of honking, hyping, and high-octane competition, the results of the Metro Times Best of Detroit are in. You nominated your favorite taco slingers, dive-bar legends, tattoo wizards, vinyl pushers, and much more — and now it’s time to crown the true kings and queens of the Motor City.
The votes have been tallied and the champions are in the winners’ circle. Here’s the best of Detroit, according to you.
Barely 24 hours had passed since thieves had broken into the Louvre Museum and stolen France’s crown jewels when the mayor of Langres, a walled medieval town in Eastern France, received a troubling phone call.
The director of the town’s museum was on the line to report that it too had been robbed. Thieves had penetrated the Maison des Lumières Denis Diderot overnight and gone straight for a display case housing its collection of historic gold and silver coins.
Arnold Toynbee’s “Cities on the Move” (1970) documents the history of big cities around the world becoming impoverished and insolvent—some never to recover. Many of the patterns he describes apply to New York now.
Real estate contributed roughly $35 billion of the $80 billion in city tax receipts in fiscal 2025, and personal taxes another $18 billion. The financial sector, real estate, construction, tourism and retail trade sectors are the major contributors to these revenues.
Items from Isvy’s collection in his apartment in Paris’s 16th Arrondissement. Courtesy Raphaël Isvy
A new generation of collectors is determined to take control and rewrite the rules of an art system they don’t identify with, finding its hierarchies outdated and its codes sluggish compared to the speed at which they now share information, discover artists and shape their own passions. During a frenetic Paris Art Week, Parisian collector Raphaël Isvy opened his collection to Observer, reflecting candidly on what no longer works in the traditional art world and how things could evolve—much as other markets already have.
Isvy picks us up from the opening of Paris Internationale on his motorcycle—the only sensible way to cut through the week’s gridlocked traffic—and takes us to his apartment in the elegant 16th arrondissement, directly across the river from the Tour d’Eiffel, where his two young daughters greet us at the door. Between the roar of the ride and the quiet of home, he begins not with art but with life: how becoming a father reshaped everything—his outlook, his sense of time and his focus on what truly holds value behind the mirror.
Born in 1989 and raised in Paris, Raphaël Isvy studied mathematics and statistics, worked in finance and asset management and later consulted for major tech firms. He followed the path laid out by family and convention before discovering art—a revelation that slowly but completely redirected his life toward his passion. He began collecting around 2016 and didn’t know much about art, beyond living in a city surrounded by it. “I didn’t grow up in an art-oriented family—everyone around me was a doctor, either a dentist or an eye doctor—I was the only one who ended up working in finance. I’d studied mathematics and statistics, but I had always been very curious by nature,” Isvy tells me. Curiosity is often enough to start someone down the collecting path, but he was also becoming bored with straight finance. “I loved the idea of owning something that others had tried—and failed—to get. I was drawn to the fact that art could be bought online, and I was good at that. I was fast, quicker than most people.”
That’s how Isvy ended up buying an Invader print. “When it arrived and I saw it at home, I completely changed my mind about selling it, even though I was getting crazy offers,” he says. It was an early Invader, but there was already a strong market for his work—though at vastly different price levels than today, when unique mosaics (his large “alias” works, one-offs or very limited editions) sell for hundreds of thousands of euros (one piece recently sold for about €480,000) and at auction for as much as US$1.2 million, while prints now trade in the thousands rather than the hundreds Isvy paid at the time.
Raphaël Isvy. From Instagram @raph_is, Courtesy Raphaël Isvy
What first hooked him was the thrill of opening the tube. “Putting on the white gloves, seeing the number, realizing that this specific number was mine and no one else’s and then framing it,” he recounts. “I even went down the rabbit hole of reading forums about how best to frame it flat. That’s when I realized I was in love with the whole process.”
Isvy freely admits he began collecting art with little knowledge of the Old Masters or anything related to deceased artists. “I’m lucky to live in a city where there’s everything, but I really didn’t know much at all,” he says. Instead, he represents the new generation of collectors identified in the latest Art Basel and UBS report—those who educate themselves and gather information primarily online through forums and social media.
“I taught myself—from Instagram, collectors’ accounts, Facebook groups, forums, whatever was available back then,” Isvy explains. “It all started with buying prints and hanging them on my walls, but when people came over and started talking about the pieces—debating them, arguing whether they were too simple, saying things like ‘my kid could do that’—I realized that was exactly what I loved about art: it sparked conversation.”
From there, Isvy began buying more prints and drawings, learning everything he could online and relying on the only tool he truly trusts—his eyes. “At some point I thought, okay, my wallet can do better than this,” he says as we sit in his living room, where the walls showcase the results of his less-than-decade-long collecting journey: above the fireplace hangs a work on paper by George Condo, paired with a sculpture by Sterling Ruby and a painting by Naotaka Hiro. On the floor, smaller works by once-emerging artists now internationally recognized, such as Sara Anstaiss and Brice Guilbert, sit alongside pieces by established figures like Peter Saul. Hanging in the entryway above a Pierre Paulin sofa is a blue neon by Tracey Emin that reads “Trust Yourself”—a phrase that neatly sums up Isvy’s path into art.
Greeting us at the entrance are a Tomoo Gokita painting and a hanging sculpture by Hugh Hayden, while elegantly nestled between books in the dining room’s library are smaller gems by rising painters who have quickly gained attention—from an early Eva Pahde (who just opened her debut solo at Thaddaeus Ropac in London) to Adam Alessi, Robert Zehnder, Elsa Rouy, Jean Nipon and Alex Foxton. Even the rooms of his two daughters hold small contemporary treasures, including a painting by Tomokazu Matsuyama and a drawing by Javier Calleja, while beside the couple’s bed stands an elegant surrealist figure—a woman with an octopus on her back by Emily Mae Smith.
Isvy exemplifies that ways younger collectors today are determined to claim agency and rewrite the rules of an art system they no longer identify with. Courtesy Raphaël Isvy
Before turning to art, Isvy had already collected sneakers and Pokémon cards, though never on a large scale. When he began collecting art, he approached it with a similarly modest budget. “I used to find artists selling directly from their studios, offering small drawings for $500 or $600,” he recalls. One of his first paintings was by mike lee, purchased from Arsham/Fieg Gallery (AFG)—a small gallery on the second floor of the Kith store at 337 Lafayette Street in New York. Opened in 2021 as a collaboration between Ronnie Fieg and artist Daniel Arsham, AFG was a natural extension of Fieg’s brand and its crossover between fashion, design and art—a combination that perfectly matched the taste of Isvy’s generation. “When it arrived—with the crate, the white gloves and the realization that it was a one-of-one—it completely shifted my perspective. I thought: Okay, I want to do this forever.”
Collecting in a community and growing with it
From that moment, Isvy began connecting with more people. “I think that’s what really defines me and the way I’ve been collecting. I’m someone who connects,” he says. “I talk to everyone the same way, I react to stories, ask questions and exchange views. Because in the art world, if you’re alone, you’re nothing. Without perspective, without taste, without access—even if you’re a billionaire—you’re still nothing without people.”
Convinced that community was essential to both access and understanding, he created a Facebook group devoted to prints and drawings. It became a space for collectors to share advice on buying, selling, framing and promoting new releases and studio drops. Over time, it evolved into a global network that brought people together both online and offline.
“People began organizing meetups in different cities and I remember traveling to Los Angeles to meet fifty collectors, then to New York to meet a hundred and later to Asia to meet hundreds more,” Isvy recalls. His story underscores a growing need for connection and dialogue among young collectors—a desire for shared discovery that drives collectible cultures popular with Gen Z and Millennials but is too often constrained by the rigid hierarchies of the traditional art world. The community he built around him includes collectors aged 18 to 35 who neither identify with nor seek to conform to those old rules. From there, the network grew organically—one introduction leading to another—spanning continents and forming a parallel ecosystem of its own.
Immersed in this community, Isvy began hearing about artists before they reached broader recognition. “When both Asian and American collectors were mentioning the same names, I knew it was a signal worth paying attention to,” he says. Those insights, combined with his instinct, led him to make early acquisitions that proved remarkably prescient: a large Robert Nava painting bought for $9,000 before gallery representation; an Anna Park piece purchased while she was still an undergraduate for $900; and an Anna Weyant work acquired at NADA in 2019 for $3,000. “People often say I got lucky—but it wasn’t luck. I did my homework. I have a process and I’m meticulous about it.”
Isvy’s story reveals the deep need for connection, community and shared discovery that drives a new generation of collectors. Courtesy Raphaël Isvy
When Isvy buys art, it’s never entirely spontaneous—he reads, researches and cross-checks everything. “We see about twenty new artists a day now and most are talented—but the real challenge is spotting the exceptional ones, the ones who will last,” he notes. As seasoned collectors know, that requires more than recognizing talent; it’s about identifying the right combination: an artist with originality, supported by the right gallery, at the right moment. “Those indicators are hard to find, but they form your own recipe—your personal algorithm. That’s what drives me. It’s not luck; it’s preparation meeting opportunity.”
Collecting with a purpose
For Isvy, his goal as a collector soon became clear: to own remarkable works. He first drew inspiration from older collectors—the kind he saw in books, magazines and on Instagram—showcasing homes filled with art. “When you start collecting, you get obsessed with the books, the magazines, the collectors you see online,” he says, explaining that what fascinated him was how art, furniture and architecture could merge to form a complete aesthetic statement. “It’s not about showing off; it’s about assembling design furniture, an apartment and artworks in a way that feels balanced. It’s actually really hard.” But that, he says, is what defines true taste. “You can be a billionaire and still ruin everything with bad lighting or the wrong couch. That’s why I wanted white walls, simplicity, space for the works to breathe.”
Although his collection now includes more than a hundred works (some co-owned with friends) the display in his apartment feels cohesive, with the art integrated naturally into the space, in dialogue with both furniture and architecture. To achieve this, Isvy collaborated with architect Sophie Dries, a close friend, who designed the interiors around the collection rather than the other way around, ensuring it remained a home first—a place where his daughters could live and move freely. The result preserves the apartment’s historic Haussmannian details while infusing it with the lightness and understated elegance of contemporary design.
Over time, Isvy also began selling some works—but always within his community and with full transparency. “The one rule I’ve stuck to is reaching out to the gallery first. Most of the time, when they couldn’t help me resell, I would wait or find a responsible way to do it,” he explains, showing he understands the rules of the game. He recalls one case involving a painting by Anna Weyant that he bought at NADA in 2019 for $3,500. Two years later, as her market soared, he received offers as high as $400,000 from collectors in Korea. Out of loyalty to the artist and her gallerist, he refused to sell privately. “It was still my early years collecting and I was terrified of being canceled,” he recounts. He asked 56 Henry, where he had purchased the piece, to handle the resale, but they couldn’t, as Weyant had since joined Gagosian. He then consigned it to the mega-gallery, which held it for six months without success. “Later I learned they’d doubled the price—asking nearly $400,000 without even showing it properly. Of course it didn’t sell. They never even brought me an offer. They didn’t care; they had other inventory to push.” He eventually took it to auction because the offer was life-changing. Still, this decision caused backlash with the artist, despite the fact that he had followed every protocol.
Isvy is openly critical of how written and unwritten rules often constrain the healthy circulation of art and value in the market. “The art world is an economic cycle like any other asset class. If you want it to stay healthy, you can’t break the links. Every time I sold an artwork, it was to buy another one to keep the cycle moving,” he explains. “When collectors reinject liquidity into the market, it benefits everyone. Instead of shaming people for selling, galleries should teach them how to do it properly, how to reinvest in a way that sustains the ecosystem.”
The aesthetics of living and collecting converge; here, home becomes both gallery and manifesto of a taste grounded in balance and restraint. Courtesy Raphaël Isvy
Isvy believes when a collector consigns a work back to a gallery—choosing to avoid auction and protect the artist’s market—the gallery should reciprocate that gesture. Offering trade-in credit or discounts toward another piece, for instance, would help sustain mutual trust. “That’s how you build trust and keep the wheel turning,” he says.
For him, the cause of today’s stagnation is clear. Between 2019 and 2022, everyone was buying, often under restrictive three-year no-resale agreements, and collectors were afraid to act. No one wanted to break those rules, even as the market overheated. “The fear came not from greed, but from the culture of silence that galleries built around selling,” he notes. Now that those agreements have expired, the market is flooded with works—and many aren’t good. “Galleries were taking everything out of studios instead of curating and showing only what was great. During that period, there was no real filter—no accountability. There was too much abundance,” he says. Even when artists asked galleries not to show weaker works or to limit annual price increases to no more than 10 percent, few listened. “Everyone got greedy. Collectors, galleries, artists—we all played a part in pushing things too far. That’s why the market looks the way it does now.”
When asked if this disillusionment has dulled his enthusiasm, Isvy admits that some of the magic has faded. “When you see how things really work behind the scenes, it’s not as enchanting as you once thought. It’s not disgusting, but it changes your perspective.”
Still, surrounded by art in every corner of his home, he insists the passion remains. He’s simply more deliberate now—more thoughtful and selective. “I still love the emotion of collecting, that instinctive excitement,” he says. “But now I feel like my role is to help others see what needs to change—to make the system better. I have hope because there’s a new generation that wants to do things differently. When the old dinosaurs are gone, we’ll finally have a chance to rebuild.”
Isvy’s role in rewriting the rules
Raphaël Isvy represents a new generation of collectors determined to claim agency by reshaping the system from within. Like many millennials, he sees his role in the art world as deliberately fluid—collector, curator, advisor and connector all at once. “I do deals, I buy, I sell, I help people collect, I introduce them to artists,” he explains. For him, those boundaries are artificial. “In the past, collectors were patrons; today, we can be activators,” he says, recalling how last year he curated a large cultural exhibition in the South of France, set in a vineyard, which received an enthusiastic response. He insists he doesn’t fit neatly into any single label. “I don’t have a defined role. I just love art and people.” Yet, he admits, the traditional art world resists those who refuse to stay in one box. “The truth is, the more dynamic you are, the more everyone benefits; more activity means more liquidity, more buyers, more fairs, more growth.”
For Isvy, even the distortions that have plagued the market reveal that the system’s old rules no longer fit its global scale and speed. With production volumes far exceeding what the traditional model can absorb, he argues, the only way forward is to broaden the collector base and rethink how art circulates.
He finds hope in younger galleries already experimenting with new models. “Many organize events that have an actual purpose—not just hanging a Rothko and waiting for the wire to come through. There’s a sense of responsibility and intent that wasn’t there before.”
If given the chance to introduce concrete reforms, Isvy says he would start with enforceable rules—beginning with banning auction houses from selling works less than three years old. “This rule alone would already make a huge difference,” he argues. “It would bring more stability, discourage speculation and give artists time to grow before being thrown into the market machine.”
In his view, part of the market’s instability stems from its lack of structure and accountability. Auction houses should face stricter limits—fewer sales per year, fewer lots per sale—to prevent oversaturation. Similarly, mega-galleries should adopt principles borrowed from finance, employing in-house risk managers responsible for ensuring artists are paid consistently and reserves are properly maintained. “Setting aside around 30 percent of income for operational stability, salaries and artist payments would bring the professionalism this sector urgently needs,” he explains. These are not radical reforms, he adds, but necessary corrections.
Liquidity, transparency and dialogue are emerging as the values that sustain—not threaten—the collecting ecosystem’s future. Courtesy Raphaël Isvy
At the same time, transparency remains the art market’s greatest weakness. Coming from a background in risk management, Isvy has seen firsthand how chaos unfolds when an unregulated system operates without rules. He recalls helping a friend sell a large painting that set a world record at Christie’s last October. “Everyone was celebrating, talking about millions of euros. What people don’t know is that the work wasn’t paid for in the end. There’s a huge lack of transparency in this market. No one realizes how many auction sales actually fall through, or how many so-called records are never settled,” he says.
While auction data are theoretically the only public numbers the market can rely on, prices are often published without verification and used as benchmarks even when deals collapse. “That work eventually sold for a third of the supposed record price—but in the meantime, that inflated figure distorted the entire market,” Isvy notes. To him, as a former finance professional, the outcome is predictable. “Without a serious purge and some structural reforms, I don’t see how the market can restart.”
He often describes the art market as “an ocean dominated by predators.” “Dealers are the sharks; collectors are the fish,” he says. “It’s almost impossible to navigate without getting eaten along the way. You get layers of intermediaries adding price on top of price and I’ll sometimes get three different offers for the same work, each one higher because it’s passed through multiple hands. It’s absurd. I’ve even had people steal images from my Instagram to pretend they’re selling my pieces.”
Yet he doesn’t exempt anyone from blame. “We can’t really complain about the market’s current state—we all knew what was happening. But what’s different now is that younger collectors aren’t coming in blind. They research, they cross-check and they know the system before they buy. The old guard was drawn by instinct; they lived in a smaller art world, with a handful of galleries and fairs. For us, information is everywhere—and that changes everything.”
A more fluid idea of contemporary culture
For Isvy, the solution begins with greater liquidity and openness. The art market, he argues, must operate as fluidly as other collectible markets, because the old formula of engineered scarcity and opaque pricing—supercharged during the pandemic—has eroded trust.
He compares the art world to the Pokémon card market, where transparency and liquidity keep everything in motion. “In that world, inventory changes hands every day. Payments can be made through crypto, PayPal, cash or trades—it’s fluid. People post story sales on Instagram, with clear prices and everything sells in minutes,” he explains. “Imagine trying that with art—everyone would freak out, say you’re breaking the rules. But it would work.”
For Isvy, this kind of openness could reinvigorate the entire ecosystem. “If someone sells a $3,000 work, that person will probably reinvest that money in another artist. The wheel keeps turning. Liquidity creates opportunity—for collectors, for dealers and for artists who can produce new work. That’s how you sustain an ecosystem, not by freezing it.”
When Isvy brings up this comparison, he leads us to what he calls his “little secret”—a private room that reveals another side of his personality. “The world knows me as a collector, but there’s another part of me. I’m a gamer, a geek. I collect Pokémon cards, NFTs and sneakers. I play PlayStation 5 every night. I love Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Final Fantasy. I couldn’t imagine my home without that side of who I am.”
When he moved in, he told his designer he needed an office for remote work but also a personal space. Since her aesthetic was more classic, his architect introduced him to a younger, eccentric designer known for creating gaming and YouTuber rooms. “He had orange diamonds on his teeth,” Isvy laughs. “I told him my story and we figured out how to make a small space work as both an office and a world of my own.” Together, they designed the room from scratch. “He called it The Glitch—like a bug in a video game—because it doesn’t fit with the rest of the apartment.”
The art market’s rigidity contrasts with the fluid economies that younger collectors are familiar with from gaming paraphernalia, sneakers and cryptocurrency. Courtesy Raphaël Isvy
Inside, the space feels like a cross between a gaming den and a cabinet of curiosities. There’s a retro bench upholstered in tapestry, a BS Invader console, manga shelves, Pokémon cards, Rubik’s cubes and a miniature painting by Robert Nava—his favorite artist. The walls are covered in wallpaper that mimics the black-and-white static of an old television screen, paired with ceramic terrazzo tiles forming a custom mosaic floor. “It’s vintage, weird and perfect,” Isvy says.
This hidden office and private room capture the spirit of an entire generation of collectors like Isvy—for whom contemporary art, Pokémon cards, anime and manga, video games and collectible figurines coexist within the same cultural imagination. It’s the universe that shaped their childhood and, ultimately, their identity. For this generation, these objects are not mere toys or décor but artifacts that equally express contemporary culture and their idea of collecting and supporting it.
For Isvy, the space is more than an ode to nostalgia—it’s a statement. “The contemporary art world still struggles to accept that someone can collect a Condo and also Pokémon cards,” he says. “But that’s going to change. Our generation grew up with gaming and pop culture; it’s part of us. You can’t tell people to shut off that side of themselves. That’s how the next generation of collectors will come in—through openness, not hierarchy.” Gesturing toward the Nava painting behind him, he adds, “If I cared only about money, I would have sold it—I’ve had offers. But I paid $9,000 for it and to me, it’s priceless. He’s one of the most important artists of our generation. This room reminds me why I started collecting in the first place.”
After five years in the Olympic Tower, this hub for artists merging X.R., A.I. and performance is set to move to Tribeca. Photo by Ed Lefkowicz.
Launched in 2020 by the Onassis Foundation and NEW INC, the incubator of the New Museum, Onassis ONX Studio has evolved into one of New York’s leading hubs for artists working at the intersection of extended reality (X.R.), A.I. and performance. Closely connected to Onassis Stegi in Athens, the two organizations form a dynamic international channel for creative exchange within the broader Onassis Foundation ecosystem. In New York, Onassis ONX provides an accessible acceleration space for ambitious productions, while at Onassis Stegi—founded in 2010—the focus is on education and professional development, nurturing a rapidly expanding arts-and-technology scene. Rooted in Greece’s long tradition of theater and dramaturgy, this has inspired compelling intersections of theater, dance and technology.
To mark its fifth anniversary, Onassis ONX has announced its relocation from its original venue in the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue, just above the Onassis Foundation’s U.S. headquarters, to an expanded 6,000-square-foot space in the heart of Tribeca at 390 Broadway, which also houses PPOW and Matthew Brown Gallery. Set to open in January, the new facility will continue to operate as a hybrid residency, research lab and production studio, offering additional space for exhibitions and public programming that extend the reach of the work developed within the organization.
The new studio includes a motion-capture stage twice the size of the previous one, a three-wall seamless projection room designed for museum-scale installations and an expanded sound studio—four times larger than the original—equipped with a high-fidelity system for immersive sonic environments. It also features enhanced computational infrastructure, including a new server array designed to support A.I. and generative media.
Onassis ONX is the Onassis Foundation’s global platform for digital culture, championing artists who push the boundaries of new media through the creation, exhibition and circulation of immersive, technology-driven works. Photo: Mikhail Mishin
“It’s been amazing to see how much interest, focus and support for art and technology has expanded in New York City and around the world,” Jazia Hammoudi, program director of Onassis ONX, told Observer ahead of the announcement. “It’s been a long journey for many of us, but witnessing this evolution now feels incredibly rewarding.”
Created as an arm of Onassis Culture—the cultural branch of Greece’s leading philanthropic organization, which has championed “aid, progress and development” since 1975—ONX quickly became central to the foundation’s mission as a cultural innovator and supporter of contemporary art. From the outset, the foundation has operated from a deeply humanist perspective, Hammoudi explained. “It’s an organization that takes its lead from artists rather than dictating from the top down, continually looking to understand what’s actually happening across the cultural and intellectual landscape. It’s about paying close attention to what artists and audiences are thinking about, interested in and in need of. That same responsiveness to artistic and technological innovation is what inspired the foundation’s expansion in both New York and Athens.”
At its core, ONX is first and foremost an accelerator. Its foundation lies in the production space, tools and technical consultation it provides—but beyond that, it functions as an aesthetic and intellectual incubator. “We offer extensive creative consultation and curatorial support to artists, so they’re not only producing work here but also developing its conceptual and public trajectory,” Hammoudi added. “An artist can come to ONX, build their work and we’ll help them find the right platform for it—whether that’s a festival, an exhibition within our own programs in New York or Athens, or through one of our partner institutions.” Onassis ONX also helps artists secure additional funding, either through internal seed grants and commissions or through its global network of partners.
“Tribeca Immersive” is the Tribeca Festival section co-produced by Onassis ONX. AI Ego | Photographer: Mikhail Mishin
Since its founding, ONX has supported an impressive roster of artists and collectives redefining the intersection of performance and technology, including LaJuné McMillian, Peter Burr, Stephanie Dinkins, Sutu (Stuart Campbell) and Jayson Musson. Projects developed at ONX often blur the boundaries between theater, gaming environments, installation and live performance—echoing the Onassis Foundation’s broader mission to explore the future of culture and human experience through technology.
“Our goal is to provide holistic support for artists working in new media because we recognize that many traditional museums and cultural institutions weren’t designed to meet their needs,” Hammoudi said. “Our work is twofold: to provide artists with the resources and infrastructure they need and to help institutions evolve into what 21st-century creativity actually looks like.”
ONX currently supports about 85 member artists worldwide who have full access to production facilities, seed grants, funding opportunities, internal open calls and ongoing staff consultation. This membership model ensures long-term, sustained support for artists working in new media. “We know that this kind of work takes time—and often requires many different minds and kinds of intelligence to bring to completion,” Hammoudi explained. “As advocates and field builders, we see these ongoing relationships with artists as essential to the growth and vitality of the field itself.”
The new space will also enable the organization to deepen and expand its global partnerships. As part of its mission as a field builder, Onassis ONX collaborates with international partners to develop residencies, exchange programs, fellowships, exhibitions, funding initiatives and distribution channels.
Onassis ONX supports artists and creative teams through capacity-building programs, research and incubation initiatives, acceleration services, seed funding, exhibitions, fellowships and collaborative partnerships The Power Loom | Photographer: Mikhail Mishin
For example, Onassis ONX is a partner on Lincoln Center’s Collider Fellowship, runs a residency exchange with MIT’s Open Documentary Lab and maintains a core partnership with NEW INC, where artists track work within the ONX space. Looking ahead, Hammoudi said the goal is to continue expanding these partnerships to support a growing cohort of artists. “It’s important for us to maintain a deep, ongoing connection with our 85 member artists while also creating ways to offer short-term, project-based support to those who come to us with a specific challenge or need. This expansion allows us to do both.”
Notions of hybrid identity beyond biological, mythological and digital limits
Inaugurating Onassis ONX’s new space will be “TECHNE: Homecoming,” an exhibition uniting six visionary artists whose multimedia installations explore hybrid identity shaped through biological, mythological and digital kinships. “The show reflects our belief that technology can deepen the ways we connect—with one another, with our histories and with the stories we choose to tell about the future,” Hammoudi said.
The artist lineup embodies the kind of interdisciplinary, cross-knowledge collaboration the foundation has long supported, featuring works that range from Andrew Thomas Huang’s two-channel video installation and sculptural environment—rooted in a Buddhist folktale and informed by his collaborations with Björk and FKA Twigs—to Tamiko Thiel’s Atmos Sphaerae, a video installation tracing Earth’s atmospheric evolution from primordial void to Anthropocene through a poetic translation of molecular data into visual form that collapses conventional timescales. Meanwhile, Damara Inglês’s “phygital” installation reimagines the afterlife of Queen Nzinga of Angola through the lens of Cyber-Kimbandism, merging Bantu cosmology, A.I. and 3D design to position technology as both a spiritual conduit for ancestral connection and a tool of anti-colonial resistance.
Miriam Simun, Contact Zone (Level 2), 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Onassis ONX
In a similar spirit, Natalia Manta’s looping animations, digital tombs and hybrid sculptures oscillate between the archaeological and the alien, provoking transhistorical reflections on human time across geographies and collective memory. Sister Sylvester presents Drinking Brecht, an experimental work of automated theater and performance-as-installation that functions as a Marxist-feminist laboratory. Finally, Miriam Simun’s generative three-channel projection Contact Zone Level 2 brings the Swiss Alps into collision with the artist’s own intestines beneath an A.I.’s gaze, continuously reconfiguring to explore the symbiosis between organic and artificial life—a visionary intersection of nature, technology and consciousness beyond human perception. “Technology becomes the mediator for this imagining, allowing a hybrid being—a new chimera—to emerge between nature and self. It’s a wild and deeply thought-provoking work,” Hammoudi said.
In each case, technology enables artists to construct more expansive worlds around their practice, extending the reach of their bodies and presence while dissolving the traditional genre boundaries that once defined art-making. “Those old taxonomies—this artist does that, that one does this—are becoming almost irrelevant,” Hammoudi noted, emphasizing that many of these works use digital tools not as spectacle but as instruments for expanding how we sense, perceive and experience reality—or move beyond its human limits.
An installation view of Sister Sylvester‘s Drinking Brecht (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Onassis ONX.
The exhibition will be part of the annual Under the Radar Festival, which this year includes two Onassis ONX performances—We Have No Need of Other Worlds (We Need Mirrors) by Graham Sack and ¡Harken! by Modesto Flako Jimenez—as well as MAMI, a mainstage production conceived and directed by Mario Banushi and commissioned by Onassis Stegi. Together, these works underscore the foundation’s multifaceted support for artists working at the intersection of performance and new technology—an ever-expanding field as creators increasingly experiment with digital embodiment, exploring performance, the shifting boundaries between analog and digital and what it means for the body to exist in real time and space within contemporary digital culture.
Balancing studio production and public programming
Looking ahead, Onassis ONX will continue to balance its mission of providing a dedicated workspace for artists with a growing commitment to public engagement. Beginning in 2026, ONX will host two in-studio exhibitions each year—one in January and another in the fall—along with quarterly public programs developed in collaboration with organizations such as NEW INC, Pioneer Works, Rhizome and Lincoln Center. The foundation also plans to continue its major annual off-site exhibition each June, following last year’s presentation at Tribeca Immersive. “This model allows us to keep the studio primarily a development space while maintaining a consistent public presence through exhibitions and thought-leadership events announced on our website and newsletter,” Hammoudi said.
The move from Midtown to Tribeca doubles the studio’s square footage and puts Onassis ONX at the center of downtown New York’s dynamic contemporary scene. There Goes Nikki | Photographer: Mikhail Mishin
In Athens, the focus remains educational, with ongoing incubation programs such as ONX Futures and the annual A.I. Summer School each July. The Athens space will also present an ONX showcase in May and contribute to the foundation’s broader cultural calendar, which includes the Borderline Festival in April. The foundation also produces Plásmata, its large-scale digital art biennial in Pedion tou Areos Park. Held every two years, it is one of the few outdoor digital art biennials in the world, combining large-scale installations, performances and music with works by both Greek and international artists, including recent participants such as John Fitzgerald, Jiabao Li, William Kentridge and Johan Bourgeois.
Ultimately, ONX’s mission—across both New York and Athens—is to expand the understanding of art and technology not only as mediums but as frameworks for examining how we live today. As traditional genres continue to dissolve, the foundation remains committed to supporting artists working at these frontiers, where art and life increasingly intersect.
“TECHNE: Homecoming” is presented as part of Under the Radar Festival, which this year includes two Onassis ONX performances and one mainstage production commissioned and produced by Onassis Stegi. Photo by Ed Lefkowicz
