More than 600 items from a collection documenting the links between Britain and countries in the former British Empire were stolen from a U.K. museum in September, police said Thursday.
Avon and Somerset police have launched an appeal for information about four men captured on CCTV images on September 25 outside a building in the southwestern city of Bristol which housed items from the collection.
“More than 600 artefacts of various descriptions were taken by the offenders,” police said in a statement about the theft from the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection.
“The theft of many items which carry a significant cultural value is a significant loss for the city,” said the officer in the case, Dan Burgan. “These items, many of which were donations, form part of a collection that provides insight into a multi-layered part of British history.”
Police said they wanted to talk to four unidentified men, all wearing caps or hoodies, seen in the CCTV images carrying bags in the early hours. Authorities released multiple CCTV images, showing grainy images of the men.
We want to speak to the people, pictured, after museum artefacts were stolen in Bristol.
The burglary happened in the Cumberland Road area between 1-2am on Thursday 25 September.
Police said one man was had a stocky build and was wearing a white cap; the second man had a slim build and was wearing a grey-hooded jacket; the third man was wearing a green cap and appeared to walk with a slight limp in his right leg; and the fourth man was wearing a two-toned orange and navy/black puffed jacket.
Police said the burglary happened between 1:00am and 2:00am on September 25 in the city’s Cumberland Road area.
According to the collection’s website, the “unique collection documents the links between Britain and countries in the British Empire from the late 19th century to recent times”.
It contains diverse objects, many of them from the Pacific islands and clothing from African nations.
There are also photographs, films, personal papers as well as sound recordings to provide “insights into diverse lives and landscapes during a challenging and controversial period of history,” the website adds.
The collection had been transferred from the former British Empire & Commonwealth Museum in Bristol when it closed in 2012.
It remained in the care of the city council, as well as Bristol Museums, which encompasses five different institutions, and the city’s archives.
And last month, dozens of ancient gold coins were stolen when a Swiss museum was robbed, police said.
In August 2023 the British Museum in London revealed that some 1,800 items had been taken from its world-renowned collections by a former employee. Items including “gold jewelry and gems of semi-precious stones and glass dating from the 15th century BC to the 19th century AD,” were found to be “missing, stolen or damaged,” the museum told CBS News at the time.
The museum’s director Hartwig Fischer resigned in August 2023 after admitting the institution did not act “as it should have” on warnings that items had gone missing.
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 College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the medical society that owns and operates the Mütter Museum, will start construction next year to expand its campus and create new gallery spaces inside a historic former church next door.
The organization said Monday it plans to unite its current home at 19 South 22nd St. — between Market and Chestnut streets — with the adjacent Swedenborgian Church and Parish House at 2129 Chestnut St. The college bought the property for a reported $9.3 million in 2023 with the goal of making the campus more cohesive for its fellows and the public.
“We are not content to rest on our past,” President and CEO Larry Kaiser said in a statement. “We see a need to move forward with plans for innovation, inclusion, and renewed purpose.”
The college, established in 1787, is the nation’s oldest private medical society and houses a vast historical library used by physicians and public health researchers. The Mütter Museum was founded in 1863 to showcase a collection of more than 25,000 medical specimens, giving visitors a glimpse into the study and evolution of treatments for various maladies.
The Mütter Museum’s core gallery will get a “significant expansion” into the church that will allow for the display of thousands of more items held in stored collections, officials said. The vast majority of the college’s medical instruments, biological specimens, teaching models, texts and other archival materials are not publicly displayed.
Adding space will allow for new rotating galleries, a larger museum store and more opportunities for school groups to visit the Mütter.
The Gothic Revival church, built in 1881, was designed by renowned Philadelphia architect Theophilus Parsons Chandler Jr. and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It originally served as the Church of the New Jerusalem, an 18th century Christian sect that followed Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. The church closed in the mid-1980s and the building later underwent a renovation that converted some of its space into medical offices.
Provided Image/Mütter Museum
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia purchased the former Swedenborgian Church and Parish House, shown above, for a reported $9.3 million in 2023.
Construction will be carried out in stages to minimize disruptions to the college, its visitors and the surrounding community, officials said. A fundraising campaign has already collected $27 million for the first phase, which includes creating a glass connector between the two buildings and opening up fully accessible entrances to both.
Other plans call for new classrooms and multi-purpose spaces that will serve college fellows, the public and attendees of future medical conferences in the city. The college did not provide a timeline for the completion of its work.
“We are thrilled about the opportunities the campus expansion provides to the Mütter Museum and Historical Medical Library,” said a joint statement from Mütter Museum directors Erin McLeary and Sara Ray. “This is a unique place where our visitors get the chance to see objects that spark curiosity, promote creativity, and encourage engagement with medical history.
The Trump administration has disbanded its federal cultural property investigations team and reassigned the agents to immigration enforcement, delivering a blow to one of the world’s leaders in heritage protection and calling into question the future of America’s role in repatriating looted relics, according to multiple people familiar with the changes.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security established the Cultural Property, Art and Antiquities program in 2017 to “conduct training on the preservation, protection and investigation of cultural heritage and property; to coordinate and support investigations involving the illicit trafficking of cultural property around the world; and to facilitate the repatriation of illicit cultural items seized as a result of (federal) investigations to the objects and artifacts’ lawful and rightful owners.”
Homeland Security Investigations, the department’s investigative arm, once had as many as eight agents in its New York office investigating cultural property cases. A select number of additional agents around the country also worked these cases, including a nationwide investigation into looted Thai objects.
The Denver Art Museum has previously acknowledged that two relics from Thailand in its collection are part of that federal investigation.
Since 2007, HSI says it has repatriated over 20,000 items to more than 40 countries.
But the Trump administration, as part of its unprecedented mass-deportation agenda, earlier this year dissolved the cultural property program and moved the agents to immigration enforcement, multiple people with knowledge of the change told The Denver Post.
Homeland Security officials did not respond to requests for comment.
A few months after Trump took office, a Homeland Security staffer with knowledge of the antiquities field told The Post that they received an email from their bosses. The message, according to their recollection: “The way of the world is immigration. Bring your cases to a reasonable conclusion and understand that the priority is immigration operations.”
This individual, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said they were given no time frame for the new assignment. Leadership, though, was clear that there would be no new cultural property cases.
Instead of conducting these investigations, this individual said they have been driving detainees between detention facilities and the airport for their deportation.
“I just spent almost a month cuffing guys up, throwing them in a van from one jail to another,” this person said, adding that the work doesn’t take advantage of their specialized training.
It’s frustrating, the individual said, because cultural property cases don’t require a lot of agents or resources. They don’t need all types of fancy electronic equipment.
“The juice from the squeeze on these cases is a lot more than people wanna give it credit,” this person said.
Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post
The Bunker Gallery section of the Denver Art Museum’s Southeast Asian art galleries at the Martin Building is pictured on Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2022. Emma C. Bunker’s name was removed from the gallery in the wake of an investigation by The Denver Post. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
Thai objects in Denver under investigation
For years, HSI has been investigating two Thai relics in the Denver Art Museum’s collection after officials in Thailand raised issues with their provenance, or ownership history.
The pieces — part of the so-called “Prakhon Chai hoard” — were looted in the 1960s from a secret vault at a temple near the Cambodian border, The Post found in a three-part investigation in 2022. Villagers told the newspaper that they recall dredging the vault for these prized objects and selling them to a British collector named Douglas Latchford.
A federal grand jury decades later indicted Latchford for conspiring to sell plundered Southeast Asian antiquities around the world. He died before he could stand trial.
But the DA’s office relies heavily on its partnership with HSI, which has federal jurisdiction and can serve warrants and issue summonses across the country. The Manhattan DA’s office only has authority over New York.
“The future for the DA’s office and the (antiquities trafficking) unit is in jeopardy,” said an individual familiar with the Manhattan unit’s dealings, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s unclear who’s going to be swearing out warrants going forward.”
A spokesperson for the Manhattan DA declined to comment for this story.
Department of Homeland Security Investigations agents join Washington Metropolitan Police Department officers as they conduct traffic checks at a checkpoint along 14th Street in northwest Washington, Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
‘Doing the right thing still has power’
These changes in enforcement priorities mean countries seeking the repatriation of their cultural items have fewer partners in the U.S. who can help them deal with museums and private collectors.
“A few years ago, the United States led the world in restoring stolen history — and it mattered,” said Bradley Gordon, an American attorney who for years has represented the Cambodian government in its quest to reclaim its pillaged history from art museums, including Denver’s.
It’s a shame, he said, that federal agencies have stepped back, even as the Manhattan DA continues its work.
“This work isn’t just about art; it’s about security, diplomacy and restoring dignity,” Gordon said. “These looted objects were never meant to be hidden in mansions or displayed in museum glass cases far from their origins. When they are returned, entire communities celebrate with sincere happiness. It’s a reminder that doing the right thing still has power in the world.”
Representatives from Thailand’s government, meanwhile, said they haven’t gotten an update on the Prakhon Chai investigation since Trump returned to office this year.
Cultural heritage experts say these investigations can serve as an important diplomatic tool and use of soft power — a way for the U.S. to strengthen connections to allies or thaw fraught relations with longtime adversaries.
In 2013, for example, President Barack Obama’s administration returned a ceremonial drinking vessel from the seventh century B.C. to Iran. For years, American officials said they couldn’t return the million-dollar relic until relations between the two countries normalized. The move — which NBC News titled “archaeo-diplomacy” — represented a small but important gesture as the U.S. sought a nuclear deal with the Middle Eastern power.
“The return of the artifact reflects the strong respect the United States has for cultural heritage property — in this case, cultural heritage property that was likely looted from Iran and is important to the patrimony of the Iranian people,” the U.S. State Department said at the time. “It also reflects the strong respect the United States has for the Iranian people.”
A lack of law enforcement activity in this space could also mean that museums and private collectors will be less inclined to return stolen pieces, said Erin Thompson, an art crime professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Museums, instead, will maintain the status quo.
“Without the power of subpoenas, knowing what records people have, most of these returns are impossible,” she said. “Without the official stick to back up the carrot of negotiations, it wouldn’t happen. Government presence in these negotiations is absolutely crucial.”
Others wonder what the Trump administration’s realignment would mean for the illicit antiquities market.
Mongolia has spent years fighting for the return of dinosaur fossils from around the globe. HSI has worked on numerous investigations on this front, repatriating a host of looted items that are considered some of the best relics of life on Earth from millions of years ago.
Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, the country’s former minister of culture, tourism and sports, said she always held up the United States as an example of what can be done to crack down on the black market for cultural goods. Before collaborating with the U.S., Mongolia was considered “the weakest country” for losing its own heritage to illegal sellers, she said.
“If ICE is too focused on immigration and less on cultural heritage, it would, of course, be a sad thing,” she said in an interview, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees HSI. “By discouraging the black market of dinosaur fossils, the international market was shattered. If ICE weakens, the black market might surge back. The American (antiquities) market and American collaboration is essential for stopping the black market of illegal cultural property sales.”
The Dia Art Foundation’s annual Fall Night was a celebration of Melvin Edwards and Meg Webster. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
For more than half a century, Dia Art Foundation has redefined how art can be supported, exhibited and preserved—particularly when it comes to large-scale, long-term, or site-specific works that fall outside the confines of traditional museums and commercial galleries. On Monday (Nov. 3), its annual Fall Night once again celebrated that mission with an elegant dinner that drew a remarkable number of artists—far more than most New York institutions can claim—reminding everyone that artists remain firmly at the center of Dia’s vision.
The evening began with a cocktail reception and exhibition viewing at Dia Chelsea, where guests admired 12 + 2—Duane Linklater’s first major U.S. commission. His monumental clay animal forms inhabited the space, evoking a primal connection to matter. These gigantic creatures seemed to emerge from an elemental prehistory, before and beyond civilization’s structural and rational constraints. In one of the rooms, a circular wall relief of swirling clay channeled a sense of cosmic gesture—an improvised cosmology unfolding in earthy motion, connecting the microcosm of human making with the broader entropic order that regulates all forces between energy and matter.
The galleries at Dia Chelsea, 537 West 22nd Street, were open to guests for a special viewing of an exhibition of work by Duane Linklater. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Guests then moved to 547 West 26th Street, where long, white linen-decked tables awaited. Dinner began with welcoming remarks from Nathalie de Gunzburg, chair of Dia’s board. Next, a radiant Jessica Morgan, Dia’s director, then took the dais. “Paris was a blast,” she said, beginning her speech with genuine enthusiasm following her just-concluded art week abroad, where she opened “Minimal” at La Bourse de Commerce in Paris. The show, a collaboration between the Pinault Collection and Dia, brought part of Dia’s holdings to Europe for the first time, pairing them with a rarely seen selection of works from the French magnate’s collection. The show celebrated the aesthetics and philosophy of Minimalism while tracing its global evolution and enduring influence.
The night’s honorees, Melvin Edwards and Meg Webster, both hold deep significance for Dia. Their concurrent presentations Upstate spotlight how each pioneering practice anticipated many of today’s most urgent artistic concerns. Artist Sanford Biggers delivered a heartfelt tribute to Edwards, reflecting on their shared Houston roots and the profound emotional and artistic bond between them. His remarks captured how Edwards has imbued the rigorous formalism of his welded metal assemblage—steel, chain, barbed wire, machine parts—with a uniquely human and political charge: abstract forms that pulse with the weight of history and memory, between oppression and liberation.
Next, architect Steven Holl paid homage to Webster, tracing how her practice infused Land Art and process-based sculpture with a prescient ecological consciousness. Merging nature and culture, matter and energy, her works embrace the entropic principle of impermanence and transformation while prompting reflection on sustainability and humanity’s relationship with the earth. Webster’s art—poised between the elemental and the formal, the human-shaped and the naturally evolving—feels particularly timely today, as she enjoys a long-overdue moment in the international spotlight, from Dia’s Beacon presentation to her installations currently on view in the frescoed rotunda of La Bourse de Commerce.
And of course, no Dia gathering would be complete without members of the gallery world who have long supported the foundation’s mission: Paula Cooper, Lucas Cooper, Arne Glimcher, Alexander Gray, Carol Greene, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, José Kuri, Dominique Lévy, Alex Logsdail, Siniša Mačković, Ales Ortuzar, Sukanya Rajaratnam, Thaddaeus Ropac, Almine Rech-Picasso and Kara Vander Weg were all among the evening’s guests. Below, we offer a glimpse into the night’s most memorable moments.
Precious Okoyomon, Vidar Logi, Miles Greenberg and Marina Abramović
Precious Okoyomon, Vidar Logi, Miles Greenberg and Marina Abramović. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Dominique Lévy and Sanford Biggers
Dominique Lévy and Sanford Biggers. Bre Johnson/BFA.com
Steven Holl
Steven Holl. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Meg Webster
Meg Webster. Bre Johnson/BFA.com
Howardena Pindell and Ann Temkin
Howardena Pindell and Ann Temkin. Bre Johnson/BFA.com
Amy Astley
Amy Astley. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Molly Epstein and Hugh Hayden
Molly Epstein and Hugh Hayden. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Nicolas Party
Nicolas Party. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Maynard Monrow, Julie Hillman and Lucas Cooper
Maynard Monrow, Julie Hillman and Lucas Cooper. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Axel Rüger, Cathy Ho Lee and Scott Rothkopf
Axel Rüger, Cathy Ho Lee and Scott Rothkopf. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Arne Glimcher, Milly Glimcher and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso
Arne Glimcher, Milly Glimcher and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Scott Rothkopf and Shelley Fox Aarons
Scott Rothkopf and Shelley Fox Aarons. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Olivier Sarkozy, Eva Lorenzotti and Charles de Gunzburg
Olivier Sarkozy, Eva Lorenzotti and Charles de Gunzburg. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Eliza Ravelle-Chapuis, Michael Fisch, Brooke Lampley and Sukanya Rajaratnam
Eliza Ravelle-Chapuis, Michael Fisch, Brooke Lampley and Sukanya Rajaratnam. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Li Xin and Thaddaeus Ropac
Li Xin and Thaddaeus Ropac. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Marisa Murillo, Azikiwe Mohammed and Tiona Nekkia McClodden
Marisa Murillo, Azikiwe Mohammed and Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Akio Tagawa and Karen LaGatta
Akio Tagawa and Karen LaGatta. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Sarah Gavlak
Sarah Gavlak. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
David Israel, Maynard Monrow and Julie Hillman
David Israel, Maynard Monrow and Julie Hillman. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Joost Elffers and Pat Steir
Joost Elffers and Pat Steir. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
William T. Williams and Alexander Gray
William T. Williams and Alexander Gray. Bre Johnson/BFA.com
Paul Richert-Garcia, David Lewis and Barry X Ball
Paul Richert-Garcia, David Lewis and Barry X Ball. Bre Johnson/BFA.com
Dana Lee and Heather Harmon
Dana Lee and Heather Harmon. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Vanessa Yoa and Brandon Chen
Vanessa Yoa and Brandon Chen. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Maynard Monrow and Stephanie Ingrassia
Maynard Monrow and Stephanie Ingrassia. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Alex Magnuson, Jacob Proctor and Jillian Brodie
Alex Magnuson, Jacob Proctor and Jillian Brodie. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Tehching Hsieh and Hiroyuki Maki
Tehching Hsieh and Hiroyuki Maki. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
The Paris prosecutor said Sunday that two of the suspects in the Louvre jewels heist had previously been convicted in a theft case together 10 years ago, as three alleged members of the team of four are now in custody.
Laure Beccuau said the DNA of a 37-year-old man who was charged Saturday was found inside the basket lift that was used to reach the museum’s window. He was handed preliminary charges of theft by an organized gang and criminal conspiracy.
His criminal record contained 11 previous convictions, 10 of them for theft, Beccuau said.
The criminal record of a 39-year-old suspect who was handed similar preliminary charges on Wednesday mentions 15 convictions including two for theft, Beccuau said.
“What’s interesting about these records, when we compare them, is that … we see that they were both involved in the same theft case, for which they were convicted in Paris in 2015,” Beccuau said.
Another man aged 34 suspected of being part of the “commando” team, as French media have dubbed the thieves, was also charged this week.
A 38-year-old woman who was handed preliminary charges of “complicity” on Saturday is the longtime partner of the 37-year-old suspect, Beccuau said, noting some “closeness” between all suspects.
All four are being held in custody.
Beccuau declined to answer a question about whether investigators are getting closer to finding the jewels.
“We are examining all the possibilities on the parallel market for selling this jewelry, which I hope will not happen anytime soon. … It could be used for money laundering, it could be used for trade, all leads are being explored,” she said.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said he remains “optimistic” about the investigation, in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper Saturday.
“There are four perpetrators, at least one of whom remains at large, plus possibly the one or those who ordered the crime and the jewelry,” Nuñez said.
“I have great confidence in the work of the police, so I’m optimistic. But my optimism doesn’t extend to thinking that the loot will be recovered quickly,” he added.
The Paris prosecutor said Sunday that two of the suspects in the Louvre jewels heist had previously been convicted in a theft case together 10 years ago, as three alleged members of the team of four are now in custody.
Laure Beccuau said the DNA of a 37-year-old man who was charged Saturday was found inside the basket lift that was used to reach the museum’s window. He was handed preliminary charges of theft by an organized gang and criminal conspiracy.
His criminal record contained 11 previous convictions, 10 of them for theft, Beccuau said.
The criminal record of a 39-year-old suspect who was handed similar preliminary charges on Wednesday mentions 15 convictions including two for theft, Beccuau said.
“What’s interesting about these records, when we compare them, is that … we see that they were both involved in the same theft case, for which they were convicted in Paris in 2015,” Beccuau said.
Another man aged 34 suspected of being part of the “commando” team, as French media have dubbed the thieves, was also charged this week.
A 38-year-old woman who was handed preliminary charges of “complicity” on Saturday is the longtime partner of the 37-year-old suspect, Beccuau said, noting some “closeness” between all suspects.
All four are being held in custody.
Beccuau declined to answer a question about whether investigators are getting closer to finding the jewels.
“We are examining all the possibilities on the parallel market for selling this jewelry, which I hope will not happen anytime soon. … It could be used for money laundering, it could be used for trade, all leads are being explored,” she said.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said he remains “optimistic” about the investigation, in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper Saturday.
“There are four perpetrators, at least one of whom remains at large, plus possibly the one or those who ordered the crime and the jewelry,” Nuñez said.
“I have great confidence in the work of the police, so I’m optimistic. But my optimism doesn’t extend to thinking that the loot will be recovered quickly,” he added.
The Paris prosecutor said Sunday that two of the suspects in the Louvre jewels heist had previously been convicted in a theft case together 10 years ago, as three alleged members of the team of four are now in custody.
Laure Beccuau said the DNA of a 37-year-old man who was charged Saturday was found inside the basket lift that was used to reach the museum’s window. He was handed preliminary charges of theft by an organized gang and criminal conspiracy.
His criminal record contained 11 previous convictions, 10 of them for theft, Beccuau said.
The criminal record of a 39-year-old suspect who was handed similar preliminary charges on Wednesday mentions 15 convictions including two for theft, Beccuau said.
“What’s interesting about these records, when we compare them, is that … we see that they were both involved in the same theft case, for which they were convicted in Paris in 2015,” Beccuau said.
Another man aged 34 suspected of being part of the “commando” team, as French media have dubbed the thieves, was also charged this week.
A 38-year-old woman who was handed preliminary charges of “complicity” on Saturday is the longtime partner of the 37-year-old suspect, Beccuau said, noting some “closeness” between all suspects.
All four are being held in custody.
Beccuau declined to answer a question about whether investigators are getting closer to finding the jewels.
“We are examining all the possibilities on the parallel market for selling this jewelry, which I hope will not happen anytime soon. … It could be used for money laundering, it could be used for trade, all leads are being explored,” she said.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said he remains “optimistic” about the investigation, in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper Saturday.
“There are four perpetrators, at least one of whom remains at large, plus possibly the one or those who ordered the crime and the jewelry,” Nuñez said.
“I have great confidence in the work of the police, so I’m optimistic. But my optimism doesn’t extend to thinking that the loot will be recovered quickly,” he added.
The Paris prosecutor said Sunday that two of the suspects in the Louvre jewels heist had previously been convicted in a theft case together 10 years ago, as three alleged members of the team of four are now in custody.
Laure Beccuau said the DNA of a 37-year-old man who was charged Saturday was found inside the basket lift that was used to reach the museum’s window. He was handed preliminary charges of theft by an organized gang and criminal conspiracy.
His criminal record contained 11 previous convictions, 10 of them for theft, Beccuau said.
The criminal record of a 39-year-old suspect who was handed similar preliminary charges on Wednesday mentions 15 convictions including two for theft, Beccuau said.
“What’s interesting about these records, when we compare them, is that … we see that they were both involved in the same theft case, for which they were convicted in Paris in 2015,” Beccuau said.
Another man aged 34 suspected of being part of the “commando” team, as French media have dubbed the thieves, was also charged this week.
A 38-year-old woman who was handed preliminary charges of “complicity” on Saturday is the longtime partner of the 37-year-old suspect, Beccuau said, noting some “closeness” between all suspects.
All four are being held in custody.
Beccuau declined to answer a question about whether investigators are getting closer to finding the jewels.
“We are examining all the possibilities on the parallel market for selling this jewelry, which I hope will not happen anytime soon. … It could be used for money laundering, it could be used for trade, all leads are being explored,” she said.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said he remains “optimistic” about the investigation, in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper Saturday.
“There are four perpetrators, at least one of whom remains at large, plus possibly the one or those who ordered the crime and the jewelry,” Nuñez said.
“I have great confidence in the work of the police, so I’m optimistic. But my optimism doesn’t extend to thinking that the loot will be recovered quickly,” he added.
The Paris prosecutor said Saturday two new suspects were handed preliminary charges for their alleged involvement in the crown jewels heist at the Louvre museum, three days after they were arrested by police as part of the sweeping investigation.
Laure Beccuau, the prosecutor, said a 37-year-old suspect was charged with theft by an organized gang and criminal conspiracy. He was known to authorities for previous thefts, the statement said.
The other suspect, a 38-year-old woman, was accused of being an accomplice. They were both incarcerated.
They both denied involvement, the prosecutor said.
The lawyer for the woman, Adrien Sorrentino, told reporters his client is “devastated” because she disputes the accusations.
“She does not understand how she is implicated in any of the elements she is accused of,” he said.
Jewels have not been recovered
Officials said the jewels stolen in the Oct. 19 heist have not been recovered — a trove valued around $102 million that includes a diamond-and-emerald necklace Napoleon gave to Empress Marie-Louise as a wedding gift, jewels tied to 19th-century Queens Marie-Amélie and Hortense, and Empress Eugénie’s pearl-and-diamond tiara.
Five people were arrested by police on Wednesday in connection with the case, including one tied to the heist by DNA. That person is suspected of belonging to the team of four who used a freight lift truck to enter the Louvre. The prosecutor did not specify whether the person was among those charged on Saturday.
The three others have been released without charges, Beccuau said.
Two earlier suspects, men aged 34 and 39 from Aubervilliers, north of Paris, were charged this week with theft by an organized gang and criminal conspiracy.
Beccuau said both gave “minimalist” statements and “partially admitted” their involvement. The two are believed to be the men who forced their way into the Apollo Gallery. One was stopped at Charles-de-Gaulle Airport with a one-way ticket to Algeria; his DNA matched a scooter used in the getaway.
About 100 investigators involved
Neither names nor extensive biographical details about the suspects have been made public.
Information about investigations is meant to be secret under French law, to avoid compromising police work and to ensure victims’ right to privacy, a policy known as “secret d’instruction.″ Only the prosecutor can speak publicly about developments, and violators can be prosecuted.
Earlier this week, Beccuau praised an “exceptional mobilization” — about 100 investigators seven days a week, with roughly 150 forensic samples analyzed and 189 items sealed as evidence.
It took robbers less than 8 minutes to steal the jewels. The team of four used a freight lift, allowing two of them to force a window and cut into two display cases with disc cutters, before the four fled on two scooters toward eastern Paris. Only the “near-simultaneous” arrival of police and museum security stopped the thieves from torching the lift and destroying crucial evidence, the prosecutor said.
Investigators said there is no sign of insider help for now, though they are not ruling out a wider network beyond the four on camera.
In a separate case, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said six people were arrested on Thursday soon after a robbery at a gold refining laboratory in the city of Lyon during which thieves used explosives. The loot, which was estimated to be worth 12 million euros ($13.9 million) has been recovered, Nuñez said on X.
The hunt is still on for the four thieves who stole $102 million worth of French crown jewels from the Louvre on Oct. 19, right after the museum opened.
Cairo – Egypt’s government will host dozens of foreign leaders and dignitaries on Saturday as it holds an official opening ceremony for the Grand Egyptian Museum, a $1 billion project decades in the making that was plagued by multiple delays and a ballooning of the budget.
The GEM is one of the largest museums in the world, and the largest dedicated to a single civilization: ancient Egypt. Its subject matter spans some 7,000 years, from prehistory to the end of the Greek and Roman eras around 400 A.D.
The initial cost for the more than 5-million-square-foot, triangular-themed structure about a mile from the iconic pyramids of Giza was estimated at $500 million, but the final price tag was more than double that. Costing over $1 billion, the project was funded through Egyptian resources and international cooperation.
In front of the main entrance stands the imposing 53-foot-high Hanging Obelisk, the only such structure in the world. The obelisk itself is about 3,500 years old, but it sits suspended overhead on a modern structure with a glass floor, so visitors can peer up and view its ancient inscriptions from an angle never before possible.
The Obelisk of Ramses II is pictured before the facade and entrance of the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza near Cairo late on April 6, 2025.
LUDOVIC MARIN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Beyond is the Grand Staircase, with 108 steps bringing people up the equivalent of six floors to the main galleries, with colossal statues on view the whole way up.
The GEM has 12 primary exhibition halls, covering about 194,000 square feet.
The number of artifacts on display has nearly doubled initial expectations thanks to Egypt’s wealth of antiquities, with officials saying about 100,000 items will be housed in the halls.
To put that in perspective, if a visitor were to spend one minute looking at each artifact on display in the museum, it would take almost 70 sleepless days to view the entire collection.
The museum’s triangular architecture radiates outward from its entrance toward the three main pyramids of Giza, aligning perfectly with their positions. Its walls and sloping ceilings follow the same lines, rising toward the pyramids’ highest points, but not exceeding the height of the ancient structures, out of respect for their builders.
A view of sunlight pouring into the Grand Egyptian Museum’s main hall, illuminating a row of colossal statues of pharaohs seated in regal poses at the Great Egyptian Museum, on October 15, 2024 in Giza, Egypt.
Mohamed Elshahed/Anadolu via Getty Images
The museum’s interior offers stunning panoramic views of the pyramids. The concept may sound simple, but it required a significant reshaping of the local topography, including the excavation and removal of some 79 million cubic feet of sand, which took workers seven months.
King Ramses II was there first
In the entrance courtyard of the GEM, stands a massive, 3,200-year-old statue of King Ramses II. The statue was moved in 2006 from a busy square in central Cairo to a site near the Great Pyramids, where it stood awaiting the new landmark museum’s construction.
A view of the main atrium with a statue of Ramses II as people visit the Great Egyptian Museum, on October 15, 2024 in Giza, Egypt.
Mohamed Elshahed/Anadolu via Getty Images
The 83-ton statue’s journey took 10 hours, processing slowly through the streets of Egypt under heavy security as people watched on TV.
Later Ramses was moved to a new permanent home, about 400 yards away, and the museum was built around it.
King Tut’s complete collection
The GEM’s main attraction, it could be argued, is the complete collection of the famous King Tutankhamun, the golden boy.
All 5,398 items from the tomb of the 13th pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty of ancient Egypt, who ruled from around 1333 to 1323 B.C., will be displayed together in one place for the first time since they were discovered by Howard Carter in 1922.
The new showroom is six times the size of the one that previously housed much of the Tut collection, at the old Egyptian Museum in central Cairo.
King Khufu’s Boats
The GEM also boasts the King Khufu’s Boats Museum, showing the 4,500-year-old the boats that were designed to be used in the journey to the afterlife.
The two royal boats were discovered in 1954 near the Pyramid of Khufu. It took experts more than 10 years to reassemble the first boat. It is now fully reconstructed and was moved to the museum in 2021. Visitors of the museum can also view the conservation work underway on the second one.
Tourists enjoy a sunset at a restaurant next to the Great Pyramid of Khufu, ahead of the Grand Egyptian Museum’s official opening next Saturday, in Giza, Egypt October 27, 2025.
Mohamed Abd El Ghany / REUTERS
Scholars believe they were either used in Khufu’s funeral procession or they were intended for his journey with the sun god Re in the afterlife.
The long road to the Grand Egyptian Museum
The idea for a grand museum on this site in Egypt dates back more than 32 years. The government first allocated 117 acres for the project at the location in 1992.
At the very beginning of 2002, Egypt launched a massive international architectural competition to find a winning design for the museum. A total of 2,227 architects from 103 countries applied to submit designs, and by August of that year, 1,550 from 83 countries had submitted conceptual drawings.
A couple months later officials had whittled the options down to only 20 designs to put forward for a second stage. In July 2003, the prize – and the massive contract – was awarded to the Irish architectural firm Heneghan Peng.
Tourists view the site of the great Pyramids from the rest zone of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, Egypt, Friday, May 23, 2025.
AP Photo/Amr Nabil
The plan was originally for the museum to open in 2010, but a series of events including financial crises, political uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and regional wars delayed the curtain raising.
A government spokesperson said the opening ceremony would draw an unprecedented number of world leaders, with as many as 40 heads of state, including royalty, expected to attend, along with a large number of other senior officials from around the world, though no names have been confirmed.
Egyptian officials hope the new museum will boost the country’s tourism industry, and with it, the still-struggling economy. They have predicted that the GEM will attract some 5 million visitors per year.
Five more people have been arrested in the investigation into the theft of crown jewels from the Louvre Museum, but the treasures remain missing, the Paris prosecutor announced Thursday.
The five were detained late Wednesday night in separate police operations in Paris and surrounding areas, including the Seine-Saint-Denis region, Prosecutor Laure Beccuau told RTL radio. She did not release their identities or other details.
One is suspected of being part of the four-person team that robbed the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery in broad daylight Oct. 19, the prosecutor said. Two other members of the team were arrested Sunday and given preliminary charges Wednesday of criminal conspiracy and theft committed by an organized gang. Both partially admitted their involvement, according to the prosecutor.
“Searches last night and overnight did not allow us to find the goods,” Beccuau said.
It took thieves less than eight minutes to steal the jewels valued at 88 million euros ($102 million), shocking the world. The robbers forced open a window, cut into cases with power tools and fled with eight pieces of the French crown jewels.
French police have acknowledged major gaps in the Louvre’s defenses, turning the dazzling daylight theft into a national reckoning over how France protects its treasures.
One of those who has been charged is a 34-year-old Algerian national who has been living in France since 2010, Beccuau said. He was arrested at Charles de Gaulle airport as he was about to fly to Algeria with no return ticket. He was living in a suburb north of Paris, Aubervilliers, and was known to police mostly for road traffic offenses. His DNA was found on one of the scooters used by robbers to leave the scene, she said.
The other suspect, 39, was arrested at his home in Aubervilliers. The man was known to police for several thefts, and his DNA was found on one of the glass cases where the jewels were displayed and on items the thieves left behind, she added.
Video surveillance cameras showed there were at least four people involved, Beccuau said.
Four of the suspects arrived onboard a truck equipped with a freight lift that two of them used to climb up to the museum’s window. The four of them left onboard two motor scooters along the Seine River toward eastern Paris, where they had some other vehicles parked, she said.
Beccuau said nothing suggests that the robbers had accomplices within the museum’s staff.
She made a plea Wednesday night to those who have the jewels: “These jewels are now, of course, unsellable … Anyone who buys them would be guilty of concealment of stolen goods. There’s still time to give them back.”
Information about investigations is meant to be secret under French law to avoid compromising police work and to ensure victims’ right to privacy. Only the prosecutor can speak publicly about developments, and violators can be prosecuted. Police and investigators are not supposed to divulge information about arrests or suspects without the prosecutor’s approval, though in high-profile cases, police union officials have leaked partial details.
Five more people have been arrested in the investigation into the theft of crown jewels from the Louvre Museum, but the treasures remain missing, the Paris prosecutor announced Thursday.
The five were detained late Wednesday night in separate police operations in Paris and surrounding areas, including the Seine-Saint-Denis region, Prosecutor Laure Beccuau told RTL radio. She did not release their identities or other details.
One is suspected of being part of the four-person team that robbed the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery in broad daylight Oct. 19, the prosecutor said. Two other members of the team were arrested Sunday and given preliminary charges Wednesday of criminal conspiracy and theft committed by an organized gang. Both partially admitted their involvement, according to the prosecutor.
“Searches last night and overnight did not allow us to find the goods,” Beccuau said.
It took thieves less than eight minutes to steal the jewels valued at 88 million euros ($102 million), shocking the world. The robbers forced open a window, cut into cases with power tools and fled with eight pieces of the French crown jewels.
French police have acknowledged major gaps in the Louvre’s defenses, turning the dazzling daylight theft into a national reckoning over how France protects its treasures.
One of those who has been charged is a 34-year-old Algerian national who has been living in France since 2010, Beccuau said. He was arrested at Charles de Gaulle airport as he was about to fly to Algeria with no return ticket. He was living in a suburb north of Paris, Aubervilliers, and was known to police mostly for road traffic offenses. His DNA was found on one of the scooters used by robbers to leave the scene, she said.
The other suspect, 39, was arrested at his home in Aubervilliers. The man was known to police for several thefts, and his DNA was found on one of the glass cases where the jewels were displayed and on items the thieves left behind, she added.
Video surveillance cameras showed there were at least four people involved, Beccuau said.
Four of the suspects arrived onboard a truck equipped with a freight lift that two of them used to climb up to the museum’s window. The four of them left onboard two motor scooters along the Seine River toward eastern Paris, where they had some other vehicles parked, she said.
Beccuau said nothing suggests that the robbers had accomplices within the museum’s staff.
She made a plea Wednesday night to those who have the jewels: “These jewels are now, of course, unsellable … Anyone who buys them would be guilty of concealment of stolen goods. There’s still time to give them back.”
Information about investigations is meant to be secret under French law to avoid compromising police work and to ensure victims’ right to privacy. Only the prosecutor can speak publicly about developments, and violators can be prosecuted. Police and investigators are not supposed to divulge information about arrests or suspects without the prosecutor’s approval, though in high-profile cases, police union officials have leaked partial details.
In 2019, Birmingham cafe owner Charlie Clarke was walking through a field in Warwickshire with a metal detector he’d purchased some six months earlier. His hobby walk resulted in the discovery of a heart-shaped pendant now called the Tudor Heart. A beep alerted Clarke to the presence of something near a drained pond, so he decided to start digging. He thought it would be the usual coins; instead he unearthed a chain and an ornate pendant, all made of solid gold. It’s a find that Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the British Museum where the heirloom is currently on display, called the piece “perhaps one of the most incredible pieces of English history to have ever been unearthed.”
There are many mysteries surrounding the Tudor Heart, including how that pendant got to that field, a question that may never be answered. After being painstakingly analyzed in every detail from a scientific as well as historical point of view, the relic has been confirmed as a genuine one of the era. It may have been created for the couple’s daughter, Princess Mary, with markings representing both her parents and their love for one another.
The heart-shaped locket pendant is attached to a 75-ring chain through a fist-shaped clasp. Everything was made with pure gold. On the front is an enameled decoration depicting a pomegranate bush, the emblem of Catherine’s family and a symbol of fertility, on which a red and white Tudor rose, Henry’s symbol, stands out while behind are the initials of the two, “H” and “K” (Katherine, Catherine in English).
Portrait of Catherine of Aragon by an anonymous person. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Portrait of Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
It reads “tousjors” on the ribbon engraved on both sides. That means “always” in Old French, but Rachel King, the scholar who curates the European Renaissance section at the British Museum, suggested that it may also be meant as a pun between “tovs” and “iors,” which would be to say “all yours” in Old Franglais, a language melding French and Old English.
Many hypotheses have been made to contextualize the jewel, and not all of them are so romantic. The British Museum theorized that the heart-shaped pendant could have been created at a tournament held in 1518 to celebrate the betrothal between Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, who was just two years old, and the Dauphin of France Francis of Valois, only eight months old. The match would make Mary the first reigning queen, ruling England in her own right.
Museums are a workout for our attention. They ask us to be intentional about what we are looking at, how we respond and why we respond. “CBS Evening News” co-anchor John Dickerson explains.
Side by side, Golden State (2024) and Turbulence (2024) strike a stunning dichotomy; both are abstracted landscapes, but while one appears composed of sunlight, the other is composed of shade. Courtesy of Zheng Chongbin
Ut supra, sic infra. As above, so below. This is the ethos of Zheng Chongbin’s design philosophy. Based in San Francisco’s Bay Area, Chongbin creates paintings by layering swaths of ink and paint upon one another, transforming canvases into topographic elements. He lets his canvases breathe; he lets them react naturally to the paint—his work is peeling, pitting, cracking, seeping into the canvas. His paintings bear likeness to natural formations from mountain peaks, riverbeds and fault lines to blood capillaries, skin matrices and synapses. They bear witness to the viewer as much as the viewer does to them. Chongbin furthermore embraces the entropic movements of the paint upon the canvas and, in doing so, instills his work with an interiority that, although invisible to the viewer, is instinctually felt by them.
Through his holistic practice spanning painting, light-and-space installation and digital media, Chongbin has graphed ecologies and vitality across his work, muddling our perception of sentience and life. In “Zheng Chongbin: Golden State,” his solo exhibition at LACMA, he casts his eye upon California’s expansive geography. Comprising the artist’s earlier works alongside newer offerings, the exhibition is a systematic symphony of image and composition that privileges experience and temporality over didactic interpretation.
“It’s an environment I’m dealing with. It’s a living thing,” Chongbin told Observer, explaining how his practice revolves around the unique, organic quality behind each subject. “My sensibility—in extension to [art]—is it feels like a part of your body… not in the traditional way, but the habitual way, in a way that you interact with your body extensions. And so you feel like dealing with and collaborating with living things… You’re not the protagonist. You are actually facilitating what happens.”
A still from Chimeric Landscape (2015), which renders a particularly social vision of blood cells as they migrate and mingle. Courtesy of Zheng Chongbin.
Born in Shanghai in 1961, Chongbin was brought up during China’s Cultural Revolution and thus trained in classical Chinese art forms, particularly within the ink tradition. In 1978, China’s Open Door Policy allowed an influx of Western ideas, materials and art forms that had previously been forbidden. Among these Western art traditions, Chongbin was most influenced by Abstract Expressionism, German Expressionism and the Light and Space movements, along with specific artists such as the visceral figuration of Francis Bacon, the conceptual installations of Robert Irwin and the sculptural forms of Larry Bell.
These inspirations are easily perceptible in Chongbin’s work, which shares a visual kinship with modern Western art movements while maintaining dialogue with the ink traditions in which he was classically trained. In this vein, Chongbin intentionally grants his work its own psychology, allowing art to have its own internal world that extends beyond himself, the peripheries of art movements and the borders of countries, and instead arrives directly in front of the audience, whomever and wherever they are. His physical practice, of course, reflects this dynamic—his final pieces, regardless of medium, are often beset with texture and kineticism. They share a palpable lifeblood.
One of Chongbin’s few paintings to utilize color, Golden State (2024), with its bright yellow swaths of color, by strokes of black, gray and white, represents the intense sunlight of California, banded with belts of trees, rain fog, fire scars and earthquake fault lines. For this painting, Chongbin chose to paint on shrimp paper, a light material made from the bark of sandalwood, and in doing so gave Golden State a unique, breathable quality. Chongbin gives his materials agency, allowing the paint to crack and fissure as new layers are applied while still maintaining its bold presence and—in the case of Golden State—its brilliant color.
“It feels like ecologies,” Chongbin said, recalling the effect of the paint penetrating microfibers, coursing color through the paper’s delicate veins. “Everything [that goes] through is my skin… things not only happen on the top, but also happen in the middle of space [and] into the other side. It’s very much a living organism. The space changes and the surface becomes a space… You have this kind of indexical trace of the classic methodology of the work.”
Though, as noted, Chongbin rarely paints with color, his paintings are often in dialogue with one another, not only in form and context but in composition as well. Turbulence (2013) and Golden State are operational foils of one another. While Golden State primarily looks to the skies of California, reproducing its dappled sunlight through elements of nature, Turbulence looks to the earth; its bands of black paint, puddled by various ink blots, resemble mountain basins, rocky ridges, igneous extrusions and cooling magma. Both paintings, as well as most of Chongbin’s work, consider the spatial experience of the environment. Both are monumental pieces, climbing eight, nine or ten feet high, enveloping the viewer in the sublimity of their ecologies.
“I always explore… what’s happened on the surface [and] what’s happened underneath,” Chongbin said. “All of those bold lines are a cast of what’s happening underneath. The water is actually like rushing down through the themes, through the slope and goes underneath and pushes out. I want to instantiate nature rather than depicting it.”
His light-and-space installation Mesh (2018) filters natural, medical and abstract imagery through refracted light. Courtesy of Zheng Chongbin.
Chongbin regaled us with stories of his adventures on hiking trails in the foothills of Marin County and wandering the steely beaches of Northern California. He saw “the dead things come alive.” His installation, Chimeric Landscape (2015), was inspired by one such encounter. Chongbin described looking at a sand dollar awash on the shore and seeing a multitude of lifeways. He remarked with wonder at the creature’s iridescence as it shimmered in the sunlight. He marveled at its respiration—its “millions of little lights flickering” as the sand dollar’s velvety matrix of pores undulated gently.
With Chimeric Landscape, he weaves short clips of water, ink, cell functions and other ephemera into Euclidean geometries that twine and break only to reform again. The installation celebrates the little breaths of life that these inanimate objects take while deconstructing their spatial differentiation. “The structure of Chimeric Landscape is obviously a non-linear narrative,” he explained. “The one visual dominance that we encounter is the ink flow, it’s used as the symbol of the water, but water is reflected in a lot of the formations and the emerging qualities that I think are essential elements for everything—our bodies and the earth.”
This natural essence echoes throughout the work in the LACMA show, invoking atmospheres that range from the monumental to the microscopic. Whether constructing a cosmos out of ephemera or a simulacrum out of geographies, Chongbin places equal emphasis—equal importance—on his art and his viewer. He collaborates with both material and mind, allowing one to inform the other, ensuring that what lies above reflects below.
In 1839, a 53-year-old American woman wrote from Paris, “I am now in distress, in ill health and in an a foreign country.” Stranded and desperate, she pled: “Save me from utter ruin.” Rescue would take more than 180 years to arrive. “CBS Evening News” co-anchor John Dickerson explains.
A Chinese woman has been arrested and charged over the theft of gold from the Natural History Museum in Paris, in one of several recent high-profile break-ins targeting French cultural institutions, a prosecutor said Tuesday.
The theft — by what the museum’s director at the time said was an “extremely professional team” — took place on September 16, a little over a month before an audacious jewelry heist at the world-famous Louvre museum on Sunday.
A 24-year-old Chinese woman was arrested in Barcelona on September 30 over the Natural History Museum break-in and theft of gold worth more than $1 million, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said.
The suspect was handed over to French authorities on October 13 and was charged with theft and criminal conspiracy and put in provisional detention the same day.
Investigations showed she had left France the day of the break-in and was preparing to return to China.
At the time of her arrest, she was trying to dispose of nearly one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of melted gold pieces, the prosecutor said, without providing more details.
The Natural History Museum curator discovered the theft of exhibited gold nuggets after a cleaner reported debris on site.
The stolen items included nuggets from Bolivia donated in the 18th century, from Russia’s Ural region gifted by Tsar Nicholas I in 1833, and from California dating to the gold rush era.
A five-kilogram nugget from Australia discovered in 1990 was also taken, Beccuau said.
Nearly six kilograms of native gold was stolen, with damages estimated at 1.5 million euros ($1.7 million), she added, noting that the historical and scientific value of the pieces was “priceless.”
Native gold is a metal alloy containing gold and silver in their natural, unrefined form.
Investigators found two museum doors had been cut with a grinder and the display case breached using a blowtorch.
Tools including a blowtorch, grinder, screwdriver, gas cylinders and saws were recovered nearby.
Surveillance footage showed a lone intruder entering the museum shortly after 1:00 am and leaving around 4:00 am, according to Beccuau.
The investigation is ongoing, she added.
Police are also still on the hunt for thieves who stole priceless royal jewels from the Louvre museum in a spectacular daylight robbery on Sunday. Officials said Tuesday the jewels are worth an estimated $102 million not including their historical value to France.
The heist has reignited a row over a lack of security in France’s museums, which have suffered a spate of break-ins in recent months.
In early September, thieves snatched three porcelain works worth millions of dollars and classed as national treasures in a heist at the Adrien Dubouche National Museum in Limoges in central France.
Last November, four men with axes and baseball bats smashed the display cases in broad daylight at the Cognacq-Jay museum in Paris, making off with several 18th-century works. That heist resulted in an insurance payment of over $4 million to the Royal Collection Trust, BBC News reported.
The next day, jewelry valued at several million dollars was stolen during an armed robbery at a museum in Saone-et-Loire in central France.
