A statue of a Confederate general that was toppled and burned in Washington, D.C., amid Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 will be reinstalled, the National Park Service said. 

The federal agency shared on Monday an image of the bronze work memorializing Confederate General Albert Pike being scrubbed of corrosion and graffiti. “The restoration aligns with federal responsibilities under historic preservation law as well as recent executive orders to beautify the nation’s capital and re-instate pre-existing statues,” stated the release. 

In June 2020, protestors tipped the artwork over using two ropes and then doused it with lighter fluid, ultimately setting it ablaze on live TV. Capitol police extinguished the flames after several minutes, per local reporting. The incident drew the ire of President Donald Trump, who criticized the police’s failure to immediately arrest the vandals as “disgrace to our country.” 

According to the Park Service, the statue is expected to return to public view in October. “Site preparation to repair the statue’s damaged masonry plinth will begin shortly, with crews repairing broken stone, mortar joints, and mounting elements,” the statement said.

Dedicated in 1901, the Pike statue has in more recent decades occupied an uneasy place in public opinion. Pike was a revered leader of the local chapter of the Freemasons, who lobbied Congress for a public plinth on the condition his likeness be depicted in civilian clothes, not a military outfit. D.C. officials began calling for the statue’s removal in 1992 as accusations arose that Pike had been a chief founder of the post–Civil War Ku Klux Klan. Local masons have refuted any affiliation between Pike and the white supremacist organization. 

This March Trump issued an executive order that deemed the targeting of monuments dedicated to historical figures linked to colonial projects or the Atlantic slave trade “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

Trump stated that his administration would determine whether the so-called “revisionist movement” aimed to “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.” His Secretary of the Interior, a position with power over federal resources including parks and publicly accessible land, was tasked with the reinstating the felled monuments.

Philip Falcone, the disgraced former hedge fund manager, has lost a fraud and breach-of-contract judgment in a case brought by New York-based pawnbroker BLCE over a series of art-backed loans. The ruling, issued July 25 in a New York Supreme Court, stems from a complex scheme involving a $6.3 million 20-carat Harry Winston diamond engagement ring and four artworks by Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, and Pablo Picasso.

Falcone, the founder of Harbinger Capital and the one-time majority shareholder of the New York Times, was once thought to be worth $2 billion. He made his fortune in 2007 by betting against subprime mortgages. In 2013, he was effectively barred from financial services industry after reaching a $18 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This came after charges of market manipulation, misusing customer funds to pay his taxes, and favoring certain clients over others.

Court documents suggest that Falcone double-pledged artworks for loans with two different lenders, then kept those pieces in his possession. He also allegedly used a limited liability company to hide them from searches by other potential creditors.

According to court documents filed by the law firm Grossman LLP, which represented BLCE in the lawsuit and specializes in art law Falcone and his wife, Lisa Maria, took out a $92.5 million loan with Melody Business Finance in 2013. The loan was secured with various assets, including 12 artworks. Soon after, the couple set up a new entity called “First Street LLC,” to which they transferred ownership of the artworks. By 2018, the Falcones had defaulted on the loan with Melody.

Court documents show that Falcone then tried to raise money through a series of other secured loans, including several from BLCE. One loan for $600,000 secured by his wife’s Harry Wilson diamond ring, which had been valued by BLCE at  $6.3 million.

Between September 2019 and October 2020, Falcone entered into a succession of further loans with the pawnbrokers, which were secured by Picasso’s Deux Nus, Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy), and Hirst’s I love you, love buds and A Playful Bubblegum Kiss. Falcone even personally delivered them himself to BLCE, Grossman LLP said. He then signed contracts claiming that he personally owned the Picasso, Prince, and Hirst artworks and that they were not subject to any personal property mortgage, security agreement, or pledge agreement. “But those representations and warranties were false,” Grossman LLP said in a statement on its website.

Falcone boldly proclaimed that double pledging the artwork “was the equivalent of taking a second loan on a home and giving a second mortgage.” Falcone also said this was a “rather common practice” in supporting documents on February 7. In Grossman LLP’s memorandum of law on March 7, it stated, “But here, the first loan expressly prohibited taking a second loan, and the second loan expressly denied the existence of any prior loan. So no equivalency can be drawn to a second mortgage; this was fraud, plain and simple.”

In February 2020, Melody Finance sued Falcone for reneging on the 2013 loan and sought to foreclose on the artworks. However, Falcone refused to hand them over before using them as collateral in the loans he took out with BLCE. He also defaulted on his loans with BLCE shortly afterward.

As a result, BLCE sold Bubblegum Kiss and Untitled (Cowboy) at auction. In June 2021, Melody Finance then sued BLCE, claiming to have superior title to the four artworks. At that point, it became clear that Falcone had lied about his title and ownership of them to BLCE. “Our client then settled that dispute with [Melody Finance],” Grossman LLP said.

“In late 2021, Falcone filed a lawsuit claiming that our client should not have foreclosed on the loans and sold the collateral,” the law firm stated. “Our client, in turn, filed counterclaims against Falcone on the basis that he had committed fraud and breach of contract by misrepresenting his ownership and legal status of the artworks. After securing dismissal of Falcone’s usury and replevin claims on a pre-discovery motion for summary judgment in 2023, we moved for summary judgment on our client’s fraud and contract counterclaims.”

In court documents, BLCE said it didn’t know about “First Street LLC” and its ownership of the artworks, which is why they didn’t show up in searches on databases for Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) filings. UCC filings note when specific assets like artworks have been used as collateral for a loan or other obligation in a secured transaction.

On July 25, Judge Lyle E. Frank agreed with BLCE’s claims that Falcone made material misrepresentations “clearly intended on their face to induce Defendant to issue the loans that later resulted in substantial financial injury”. The judge ruled in favor of BLCE’s counterclaims of breach of contract, indemnity, and fraud, and ordered the loan company “be granted a money judgment in an amount to be determined at the time of trial or other such resolution of this matter.

In response to the verdict, Grossman LLP stated, “We are pleased to have achieved this favorable outcome for our client, and proud to continue our record of litigation victories in the complex arena of art-backed loan transactions.” 

The law firm declined to comment to ARTnews.

John Lonuzzi, the attorney representing Falcone, did not respond to a request for comment.

If you have any tip-offs or art world stories, write to me at gnelson@artnews.com. All correspondence will be confidential.

A provocative new reading of 3,800-year-old inscriptions found in an Egyptian turquoise mine has reignited one of archaeology’s thorniest questions: Was Moses a historical figure?

According to Archaeology Magazine, Independent researcher Michael S. Bar-Ron believes the answer may be inscribed on the rock walls of Serabit el-Khadim, a mine in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. After nearly a decade of study using 3D scans and high-resolution photos from Harvard’s Semitic Museum, Bar-Ron claims to have deciphered two phrases in early Hebrew: zot mi’Moshe (“This is from Moses”) and ne’um Moshe (“A saying of Moses”).

If his reading is correct, these would be the oldest known extra-biblical references to the leader of the Exodus, predating even the earliest known Hebrew texts and the Phoenician alphabet.

The inscriptions are part of a larger group of Proto-Sinaitic writings first uncovered by famed archaeologist Flinders Petrie in the early 1900s. Scholars believe they were etched by Semitic-speaking laborers during the reign of Pharaoh Amenemhat III (around 1800 BCE), making them some of the oldest alphabetic writings on record.

Bar-Ron’s interpretation, however, is controversial. In a draft thesis, he argues that many of the inscriptions may have come from a single author, possibly a Semitic scribe fluent in Egyptian hieroglyphs, who used Proto-Sinaitic script for religious and personal reflections.

Some of the nearby inscriptions mention “El,” the early Hebrew name for God, while others invoke Baʿalat, a Semitic counterpart to the Egyptian goddess Hathor. In several cases, Baʿalat’s name appears scratched out hinting at a theological schism. A burnt temple to Baʿalat, along with inscriptions referencing “overseers,” “slavery,” and what Bar-Ron believes is a plea to depart (“ni’mosh”), add fuel to speculation that the site contains echoes of a real-life Exodus.

But scholars remain skeptical. Thomas Schneider, an Egyptologist at the University of British Columbia, told The Daily Mail that the findings are “completely unproven and misleading,” warning that “arbitrary identifications of letters can distort ancient history.” Proto-Sinaitic script is difficult to decipher, and academic consensus remains elusive.

Bar-Ron’s research is not yet peer-reviewed, and he acknowledges it’s still a work in progress. But his adviser, Pieter van der Veen, has endorsed the findings and encouraged further study.

Amy Sherald’s portrait of a Black transgender Statue of Liberty has now officially graced the cover of the New Yorker after she said in July that National Portrait Gallery leadership objected to it, leading her to cancel that museum’s planned iteration of her traveling survey.

The portrait of model and performance artist Arewà Basit, titled Trans Forming Liberty (2024), is currently on view at the Whitney Museum’s iteration of her survey, which is nearing the end of its run.

According to Sherald, the museum began discussing the possibility of replacing the painting with a video of reactions and a discussion of trans concerns that would also include anti-trans views. She pulled the show, accusing the museum of censorship.

The Smithsonian explained in a statement that it was trying to contextualize rather than replace the work. The Trump administration, however, criticized the show in a statement to the New York Times, saying that the “removal of this exhibit is a principled and necessary step” in restoring the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibitions and programming, which have been under review.

For her part, Sherald told the New Yorker that Trans Forming Liberty “challenges who we allow to embody our national symbols—and who we erase.” She added, “It demands a fuller vision of freedom, one that includes the dignity of all bodies, all identities. Liberty isn’t fixed. She transforms, and so must we. This portrait is a confrontation with that truth.”

Sherald’s survey, “American Sublime,” features some 50 works, including her official portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama. The show was originally organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and traveled to the Whitney Museum, where it is on view through August 10.

The iteration set for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery would have marked the first solo presentation of its kind by a Black contemporary artist at the institution. The show was slated to open in September.

The Smithsonian has been the subject of repeated scrutiny since a Trump executive order that accused its museums of disseminating “anti-American ideology.” Last week, the Smithsonian was revealed to have removed a placard from the National Museum of American History that initially included information about Trump’s two impeachments. On Saturday, the Smithsonian publicly addressed its removal, promising an “updated” version of the presentation “in the coming weeks to reflect all impeachment proceedings in our nation’s history.”

This is the second time Sherald’s work has been featured on the cover of the New Yorker this year. Sherald’s portrait of a young Black woman drinking from a tea cup, titled Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), 2013, covered an issue in March.

The Headlines

ATTENDING TO CRITICISM. The director of the Tate museum network,Maria Balshaw, hit back at the critics who blamed Tate’s programming on its footfall decline. In the Guardian’s Letter pages, she writes that it would “be fairer” to compare Tate’s visitor numbers with its annual attendance pre-Covid, as opposed to against its most visited year in 2019. “The number of UK visitors to Tate’s galleries has returned to 95 percent of pre-pandemic levels,” she states. She conceded that “demographic changes in European visitation have had an impact,” but she also wrote that shows for Pablo Picasso, J. M. W. Turner, Tracey Emin, and others have “given us a stronger platform than ever for future growth.” Those comments are not likely to quell the complaints of disgruntled readers such as Catherine Bliss, who, writing the Guardian from Tonbridge, Kent said, “Since the heady years of the noughties and teens, it seems that the Tate has failed to really capture the imagination with its exhibitions offer. . . . Apart from the Lynette Yiadom-Boakye portrait show at Tate Britain and the El Anatsui pieces in the Turbine Hall, there has been little, in terms of contemporary art, to set the pulse racing of late.”

ARE CHINA’S PRIVATE ART MUSEUMS IN CRISIS? That was the question the South China Morning Post asked, writing, “A wave of closures and cutbacks is sweeping through China’s private art museums, ringing alarm bells about the sector’s sustainability and raising questions about the outlook for one of the world’s biggest art markets.” Shenzhen’s Jupiter Museum of Art shut down in June, and days later, Qingdao’s TAG Art Museum followed suit. Others museums, like the Ennova Art Museum in Langfang, founded by the company behind Hong Kong-listed ENN Energy Holdings, “have been dormant for months.” The UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, one of the most well-known institutions in China, also appears to be facing financial difficulties. What’s to blame for this crisis? Apparently, it’s a result of corporate backers tightening their belts, consumers “curtailing their discretionary spending” and rising costs. Plus, there is the government’s “unwillingness to provide backing for art that does not fit in with the range of artforms that the Communist Party condones.”

The Digest

After removing a display that mentioned Donald Trump’s two impeachments from the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian Institution said it would create an “updated version.” The removal did not come at the behest of “any Administration or other government official,” the Smithsonian said. [ARTnews]

Two artists have been left “heartbroken” after vandals broke in and destroyed their gallery days before it was set to open. Laura Robertson and Theodore Godfrey-Cass were set to launch the Market Gallery at a former Wilko store in South Shields, but discovered on Tuesday their hard work had been ruined overnight. [Shields Gazette]

Sotheby’s has revealed the headline lots for the blockbuster sale of British socialite and arts patron Pauline Karpidas’s collection, which is due to hit the auction block on September 17, 18, and 19 in London. [ARTnews]

London-based artist Lucy Sparrow has opened a fish and chip shop where everything is made from felt. The interactive creation includes hand-stitched fish and chips in sewn-together boxes, bottles of vinegar and mayonnaise, tubs of salt, ketchup sachets, and menus. There are a total of 65,000 individually hand-crafted pieces including 15 different chip shapes in five different colors. [BBC]

The Kicker

IFTED SANCTIONS RAISE HOPE FOR SYRIAN HERITAGE. In May, Donald Trump’s surprise announcement to lift sanctions on Syria brought hope to cultural workers like Rima Khawam,chief curator of the Damascus National Museum. Years of war and sanctions had left Syria’s museums in disrepair, starved of resources and international support. The sanctions, imposed since 2011 to pressure Bashar al-Assad’s regime, also hurt cultural institutions. But Khawam now sees a chance for real collaboration to restore Syria’s damaged heritage, the Art Newspaper reports. The Damascus Museum suffers from cracked walls, damaged ventilation, and overcrowded storage, housing items rescued from six other museums. Bénédicte de Montlaur of the World Monuments Fund (WMF) says that conflict and sanctions severely limited funding and support. Syrian professionals have shouldered the protection of heritage alone, often under dangerous conditions. With sanctions possibly easing, WMF is preparing to re-enter Syria to support restoration efforts. Meanwhile, local initiatives like Syrians for Heritage are already at work. Salam Al Kuntar, a founding member, says funding has long been difficult to secure, especially from Europe. Ayman Al Nabo of the Idlib Antiquities Center recalls years of delays in receiving support. Now, both see renewed interest and partnerships emerging. “It feels like a breakthrough,” says Al Nabo.

Sotheby’s has revealed the headline lots for the blockbuster sale of British socialite and arts patron Pauline Karpidas’s collection, which is due to hit the auction block on September 17, 18, and 19 in London.

The day, evening, and online auctions, comprising the contents of her “one-of-a-kind” London home, have been described by the house as the “greatest collection of Surrealism to emerge in recent history.”

René Magritte’s oil painting La Statue volante (1940-41) is the showstopper and estimated to fetch £9 million–£12 million ($12 million–$16 million). The work was first acquired directly from the artist by the late Greek American gallerist Alexander Iolas, who inspired Karpidas to start collecting 50 years ago after a chance encounter. Sotheby’s said that, before entering her collection in 1985, it featured in two shows “that were instrumental to Magritte’s international success, at Iolas’ New York gallery in 1959 and as part of Magritte’s first-ever museum retrospective in the US, at the Dallas Museum of Art, in 1960.”

With the auction’s 250 items expected to bring in £60 million ($81 million), the highest estimate ever placed on a single collection at Sotheby’s in Europe, a lot rests on La Statue volante selling well.

There are 10 more Margritte works in the sale, including La Race blanche, from 1937 (estimate: £1 million–£1.5 million); a vibrant blue bust titled Tête, from 1960 (estimate: £300,000–£500,000), that occupied Karpidas’ bookshelf; and Les Menottes de Cuivre, from 1936 (estimate: £300,000–£500,000). The latter is a reproduction of the Venus de Milo, which was probably created for inclusion in the seminal “Surrealist Exhibition of Objects” held in Paris in 1936.

Four works by Andy Warhol, who became a close friend of Karpidas, will also go under the hammer. “Surrealism’s unlocking of the unconscious laid the groundwork for contemporary artists to rethink how they perceive and portray the world around them,” Aleksandra Ziemiszewska, Sotheby’s head of contemporary day sales, said in a statement. “Its echoes are present in Warhol’s work, particularly in his preoccupation with mortality and the exploration of his existential fears.”

Warhol’s Madonna and Self-Portrait with Skeleton’s Arm (After Munch) and The Scream (After Munch), both 1984 and estimated at £1.5 million–£2 million and £2 million–£3 million, respectively, were inspired by Edvard Munch, his favorite artist after Henri Matisse. “These paintings hail from Warhol’s ‘Art from Art’ series, where he transformed some of art history’s most recognizable and iconic images to become unmistakably his own through his signature Pop aesthetic—from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper,” Sotheby’s said.

Oliver Barker, the house’s chairman of Europe, will helm the rostrum next month. “Pauline is imaginative, bold, daring, and she’s also the embodiment of the great collector, which means that every single work she’s ever acquired has something special about it,” he told ARTnews. “It’s either best in kind, carries with it the most amazing history of ownership, was made especially for her by an artist or designer she enjoyed a true friendship with, or a combination of all those things.”

Barker said that Magritte’s La Statue volante “has to be one of the greatest works by the artist ever to surface on the market.”

The sale also includes furniture and design pieces. Barker pointed to the “unique structure végétale bed” by the late French sculptor and designer Claude Lalanne. “It so brilliantly incorporates Pauline’s signature motif, the owl,” he said. ‘Every time I see it, I’m reminded of Peggy Guggenheim and the bed that Alexander Calder made especially for her. Pauline and Peggy—two extraordinary patrons, both of whom didn’t just live and breathe art, they slept in it too.”

Works by Pablo Picasso, Niki de Saint Phalle, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning will also be on the block. Tanguy’s Surrealist landscape Titre inconnu (1929) has an estimate of £1-1.5 million ($2 million–$2.6 million), while Dalí’s Portrait de Gala Galerina (1941), estimated at £350,000-£450,000, or $465,000–$600,000, is a rare pencil drawing of his wife and muse, Gala, whom he met in 1929 in an encounter that he described as love at first sight.

“One of the things I find endlessly surprising about Karpidas is just the person she is,” Barker said. “You could say she’s a ‘grand dame’ of the art world, but she’s also a magnetic force: feisty, fun, energetic, intelligent, endlessly curious. The sort of person you want to be around—which is definitely one of the reasons so many great artists and designers chose to be. The first day I met Pauline, I was immediately drawn to these very qualities. I have learnt so much from her and it’s truly an honour to be a part of her world.”

Barker said being involved in the sale has been one of his “career highlights.”

Karpidas, who is known for building close friendships with many of the artists she collected, was born in a modest house in Manchester before she moved to Athens in the 1960s, where she met her future husband, Greek shipping magnate Constantinos Karpidas.

In October 2023, Sotheby’s Paris sold works from the couple’s home on the Greek island of Hydra. The two-day auction realized more than €35 million ($40 million), marking the highest single-owner sale in France that year.

Last year celebrated the centennial of the birth of Surrealism. Major shows were put on at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, among other museums, while auction prices for Surrealist artists have soared recently. In 2024, Christie’s sold Magritte’s L’empire des lumiéres (1954) for $121.2 million in New York, a record for the painter at auction.

If you have any tip-offs or art world stories, write to me at gnelson@artnews.com. All correspondence will be confidential.

It is difficult to convey the giddy joy I felt one day in Berlin—that gray grid of a city—upon opening an unsuspecting gate and feeling in my hand no ordinary doorknob, but iron in the shape of a Belgian endive. Its smooth curve fit elegantly in my hand, yet its form was so specific and silly. Three years later, I still look at pictures of it on my phone, longingly.

The gate, should you wish to track it down and feel the same small magic, is outside the Bröhan Museum, which collects Art Nouveau—as well as Jugendstil, the German (and, I’d argue, more beautiful) branch of the movement better known by its French name. Broadly speaking, the Germans leaned toward geometric abstraction and stylization, while the French favored facsimile, committed more firmly to oragnic forms. It was at this Bröhan gate that I realized I had perhaps been wrong to write off Art Nouveau, which I had long found sickly sweet—particularly in its tendency to merge women, nature, and domestic objects into those girl-tree-candelabra hybrids that set off feminist alarm bells in my mind.

I was not the first skeptic. In fact, I soon felt validated if not smug when I learned that my unease echoed a famous argument between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, who quickly became the angel and devil on my shoulders. Benjamin was firmly critical of Art Nouveau, while Adorno’s feelings could best be described as ambivalent.

Much like the slightly earlier Impressionist movement, Art Nouveau was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, which was visible on the horizon—literally, in the form of trains and steamships and smog. It also came about at a time when Baroque art, with its fancy ornament and decadent drama, was having a moment of rediscovery in the French art scene. This was Art Nouveau’s wager: in the late 19th century, technology was taking over, and daily life was becoming more divorced from nature than ever before. Art Nouveau’s exponents seemed to say: Let’s bring nature inside, lest we forget it exists and ruin it all. The movement also wagered that, as nature was becoming in some ways a luxury, with crowds flocking to cities and crowding apartment buildings, one might mass produce the organic world in nonperishable form and give some to everyone. Looking at all the ruining we’ve done in the intervening century-and-a-half-ish, it is tempting to wish we’d had more reminders to appreciate the beauty that we were slowly destroying.

Which is why Adorno defended Art Nouveau. He saw the movement as expressing a genuine, utopian, and worthwhile desire to reconcile art, nature, and technology. He just didn’t think it did so successfully. In Aesthetic Theory (1970), Adorno clarified that he preferred modernist forms that did more than simply smooth over social contradictions. For Benjamin it was worse: Art Nouveau lied, and merely proved “the impotence of that generation in the face of technical progress.” It dressed up mass-produced doorknobs but did little to alter their means of production, or to break down the doors, offering instead a feeling of connection to nature that wasn’t real.

I SUSPECT THAT PRODUCING more leafy doorknobs would have done little to stave off climate disaster. But I admire the human longing they betray, the longing to belong in an ecosystem. Today, Art Nouveau is probably one of the best known and most popular artistic movements of all time. It helps for its popularity, but hurts for its critics that the style is pleasant and pretty.

Still, hoping to quiet the German men arguing in my head, I was pleased to discover that Art Nouveau is having a micro-moment. On view in the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is one of the most iconic Art Nouveau designs, that green wrought iron Parisian Métro entrance, the one with curlicues and the sign that says METROPOLITAN. Designed by the Frenchman Hector Guimard at the fin de siècle, it features two sinuous flowers growing tall and thriving, with lights appearing where their buds would be. The Métro was the second subway system ever to exist, and the idea behind Guimard’s entrance was to soften the shock of the new by borrowing forms from the natural world.

Recently opened across the pond, in Prague, is a whole new museum dedicated to Alphonse Mucha, who was born in what is now Czechia in 1860 but spent a good deal of his career in France. The museum, run by the Mucha Foundation, is complemented by the touring exhibition “Timeless Mucha: The Magic of Line,” which recently traveled from the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, to the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. I visited both the Mucha Museum and the traveling show, and initially, I winced at the idea of Mucha being “timeless”—his depictions of sensuous, nymph-y women, all doe-eyed, pouty-lipped, and impossibly long-haired certainly feel of their time. It didn’t help that the exhibition opened with a photo of Mucha with his studio mate Paul Gauguin, along with Gauguin’s teenage “mistress,” to quote the wall text, named Annah la Javanaise.

Still, I forced myself to stay with Mucha, in part because he is easily the most famous Art Nouveau artist, and I was curious what made him resonate so widely. I stayed, too, because, somewhat paradoxically, I also think some dismissals of Art Nouveau as unserious for its floral, domestic, crafty sides are misogynistic, too. (The feminist critic Rosalind Galt takes such criticisms to task in her 2011 book Pretty). Art Nouveau flattened hierarchies between high art and interior design in pursuit of a Gesamtkunstwerk, and much of the art it produced is pretty with pastel palettes—which is part of why, I suspect, there is little serious writing on it still today.

Staying with Mucha, I learned some things—as one does when they leave their mind open. I learned, for example, that some women seemed to like Mucha quite a lot in his day, because who wouldn’t enjoy being seen and drawn so beautifully? The artist’s first breakthrough was in 1894, when he made a poster for the starlet Sarah Bernhardt. She loved it so much that the gig turned into a six-year contract: he made her theater posters, stage sets, costumes, and jewelry. That first poster was inspired by her elegant, flowing movement onstage, and would inform his quintessential swirling, Q-shaped compositions. The radius of Mucha’s ripple effect was large. In the exhibition, one finds everything from manga artists to psychedelic posters clearly riffing on his style. And it’s not hard to see why: his drawings are totally graphic—made to be reproduced—and yet incredibly intricate. The man knew better than most what a line could do.

THE THING ABOUT STYLES is that the worthwhile ones embody bigger beliefs. For Mucha, the belief was that art should be for everyone—hence the graphic quality, the reproducible prints, and the lovely lines. The artist grew up in a family of grape-growing peasants in Bohemia and lived above the jail where his father was employed. Before moving to Vienna, then Paris, his dad had gotten him a job as a stenographer, and as his great-grandson Marcus Mucha, now executive director of the Mucha Foundation, told me, he didn’t last long: he was fired for drawing all the time. Soon he was off to art school, eventually joining the echelons of fancy Parisians, yet there, he remained committed to his belief that art was for everyone. When, near the end of his life, he dedicated himself more fully to painting over making prints that could be wheatpasted around the city, he did so in order to make The Slav Epic (1910–28), a monumental series of 20 paintings depicting various Slavic customs that were then under threat by Imperialist takeover. He made this homage back in Prague, intending it for the Slavic people; currently, Thomas Heatherwick is designing a building in the city where it will soon be on permanent view.

But this idea—that styles betray beliefs—was introduced in the 19th century by one of the founders of the discipline of art history, Aois Riegl, in writings that would inform the Viennese version of Art Nouveau. Riegl called the concept Kunstwollen, or artistic will. In Art Nouveau, it is easy to see how ethics and aesthetics are one in the same, and it is for this reason that he called the movement the “precursor of modern art.”

The most beautiful beliefs stemming from this era and ethos come, in my opinion, come from William Morris. The Englishman’s involvement in Britain’s slightly earlier Arts and Crafts movement helped pave the way for Art Nouveau ideals. Morris was a socialist designer and writer best known for his lush botanical wallpapers—patterns he dreamed might someday even line tenement walls. Morris believed beauty was for everyone, because he believed art could remake the world—that it could show us a better way forward while also providing the nourishment and desire we’d need to realize revolutions. In his socialist utopia, as imagined in his 1890 novel News from Nowhere, craftsmen take pleasure in making things, not for profit but for joy. That joy then radiates outward—into everydayy objects, and then into the wider world. His was a hopeful, world-building vision, but Morris was never able solve the central problem that plagued his mission: his wallpapers remained expensive, far beyond the reach of the people he most wanted to share them with. Making them affordable would have required a revolution larger than his art alone could spark—another point, I’m afraid, for Benjamin.

And yet, the pleasure of Art Nouveau did at times radiate outward to extraordinary effect. In 1939, when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, Mucha was one of the first people they came for. He had devoted much of his work to celebrating Slavic traditions at a time when Germanic hegemony sought to erase them, and he had openly advocated for Czechoslovak independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Nazis eventually released him, but he died of pneumonia shortly afterward. In an unlikely twist, one Gestapo officer secretly preserved Mucha’s works after his house was ransacked, hiding them in his office simply because he loved them. He returned them after the occupation ended, and now, at last, they have their own museum.

The Smithsonian Institution has publicly addressed the removal of a display at the National Museum of American History that mentioned President Donald Trump’s two prior impeachments, saying the presentation would return to view—in an “updated” version.

How the display would be changed and when those changes might be instituted were not detailed in the statement, which was posted Saturday to the official Smithsonian X account. The statement merely said that the presentation will “be updated in the coming weeks to reflect all impeachment proceedings in our nation’s history.”

As the Washington Post reported several days earlier, the display had been on view at the Washington, D.C., museum since 2021 and had mentioned Trump’s impeachments alongside those of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, as well as the resignation of Richard Nixon, who would have faced impeachment proceedings as well if he had not left his position on his own.

But, as the Post reported, a placard in the display had recently been altered to note that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal.” A Smithsonian spokesperson told the Post that the placard was returned to its 2008 version, which predated Trump’s first term by eight years.

“Because the other topics in this section had not been updated since 2008, the decision was made to restore the Impeachment case back to its 2008 appearance,” the spokesperson said in a statement to the Post.

This weekend, the Smithsonian tried to set the record straight, saying that the display addresses “all impeachment proceedings in our nation’s history.”

“The placard, which was meant to be a temporary addition to a 25-year-old exhibition, did not meet the museum’s standards in appearance, location, timeline, and overall presentation,” the Smithsonian statement said. “It was not consistent with other sections in the exhibit and moreover blocked the view of the objects inside its case. For these reasons, we removed the placard.”

Moreover, the Smithsonian said, “We were not asked by any Administration or other government official to remove content from the exhibit.”

The Smithsonian’s board does include one prominent member of the Trump administration: Vice President J.D. Vance. Trump, who is not on the board of the Smithsonian, has previously made attempts to target the institution, writing in one executive order of “anti-American ideology” in its various museums.

Earlier this year, Trump also said he fired Kim Sajet, who was at the time the director of the Smithsonian-run National Portrait Gallery. She continued to report to work, then resigned on her own.

The museum was roiled again by controversy in July when painter Amy Sherald canceled the National Portrait Gallery’s version of her traveling survey, which includes an image of a Black trans woman posing as the Statue of Liberty that some museum staffers feared might generate pushback from the Trump administration. Sherald said she was urged to remove the work, which does appear in the current Whitney Museum iteration of the show, so she pulled her exhibition.

A donation of 500 guitars to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this past May was perceived as a particularly exciting addition to the collection—so exciting, in fact, that the donation even announced via a long-form profile in The New Yorker. But that donation may include one object that may have made it into the donation by ill means.

In a New York Post story published July 10, a manager for former Rolling Stones musician Mick Taylor claimed that the Met was now in possession of his stolen Les Paul guitar. That guitar was taken from the Rolling Stones’s French villa, in Nellcôte, in 1971, the year thieves reportedly absconded with nine of Keith Richards’ guitars, among other instruments.

The Met initially did not comment on Taylor’s claims, but on August 1, The New York Times published a report that added another twist to the story: The museum claimed that Taylor did indeed play the guitar but that he never actually owned it.

“This guitar has a long and well-documented history of ownership,” the museum told the Times.

The 500 guitars were given to the Met by collector Dirk Ziff. At the time, Met director Max Hollein said the guitars composed “a trailblazing and transformative gift, positioning the Museum to be the epicenter for the appreciation and study of the American guitar.”

The museum plans to open a permanent gallery in 2027 about American guitars, with some works from the gift on view here.

It isn’t clear from the Post story how Taylor discovered his guitar was held by the Met. The guitars are not currently on view, and a complete checklist of them has not been released to the public. The Met’s release did mention Keith Richards, another Rolling Stones member, but the museum said it had a 1959 Les Paul he played in 1964. Taylor was not mentioned in that announcement.

But Taylor’s manager, Marlies Damming, claimed that the Met did have Taylor’s guitar. “There are numerous photos of Mick Taylor playing this Les Paul, as it was his main guitar until it disappeared,” Damming told the Post. “The interesting thing about these vintage Les Pauls (from the late 1950s), is that they are renowned for their flaming . . . which is unique, like a fingerprint.”

The report also cited an unnamed source, who said, “Taylor says he never received compensation for the theft and is mystified as to how his property found its way into the Met’s collection.”

The Times report stated that Richards did own the guitar and that the instrument was never stolen. By 1971 Adrian Miller was listed as the guitar’s owner, but the Times reported that it was unclear, based on the Met’s provenance, how and from whom Miller bought it.

This article was originally published July 16, 2025, at 12:04 p.m., and has now been updated with more details about the Met’s response.