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Can a Play Capture an Artist as Enigmatic as Henry Darger?

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Henry Darger left behind one of the strangest imaginative monuments of the twentieth century: a vast private cosmos teeming with angelic child armies, sadistic empires, blizzards, tornadoes, serpentine sky-beasts, and wars fought over the fate of enslaved children. After his death, the whole sprawling kingdom surfaced at once, like an inheritance no one knew to claim. Critics, encountering the hoard, have naturally reached for labels. “Outsider artist” is the one that tends to get slapped on him; others follow close behind—visionary, naïf, crank, madman. Each explains something and misses more. Henry Darger repels labels the way condensation repels paper on a soda bottle: the harder you press, the quicker it lifts. The perennial temptation is to treat him as a puzzle to be solved. How did a menial worker in Chicago, working in near-total obscurity, produce a 15,145-page epic and hundreds of sweeping, panoramic paintings ? What species of solitude allowed him to incubate armies of chi...
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Canada Accelerates Defence Innovation with $900 Million Investment Through National Research Council

Canada’s defence industrial ambitions are entering a new phase. With geopolitical tensions rising and technological competition intensifying, the federal government is moving to reinforce the country’s domestic defence innovation ecosystem—placing research, industry partnerships, and advanced technologies at the heart of its strategy. On March 9 in Ottawa, the Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Industry and Minister responsible for Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions, joined the Honourable David J. McGuinty, Minister of National Defence, and the Honourable Stephen Fuhr, Secretary of State (Defence Procurement), to announce that the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) will invest more than $900 million under Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy. The investment signals a major push to accelerate the development of next-generation defence and dual-use technologies while strengthening Canada’s domestic industrial base. The goal is clear: ensure the Canadian Armed Force...
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Senators Whitehouse and Schumer Call for ‘Proactive Measures’ to Protect Philip Guston and Ben Shahn Murals

On Wednesday, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) and Chuck Schumer (D-New York) sent an open letter to Ed Forst , administrator of the General Services Administration questioning the organization’s management of its Fine Arts Program and the Fine Arts Collection. The GSA cares for over 26,000 artworks and artifacts owned by the US government, including murals, paintings, sculptures, and environmental artworks by artists from Mark Rothko and Louise Nevelson to Jacob Lawrence and Philip Guston. In the letter, the senators note that the GSA has posted 46 buildings that have been identified for “accelerated disposal,” a process that expedites the sale of the properties, which are home to numerous artworks. Of particular concern to the senators is the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which contain several murals celebrating the Social Security Act of 1935, a landmark piece of New Deal legislation. Among them is a suite of murals by Ben Shahn titled The Meaning of Social Secur...
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A Superior Salvator Mundi, and 5 Other Strange and Wonderful Masterpieces at TEFAF Maastricht

The little Dutch city of Maastricht (population about 125,000), boasts an incredible masterpiece-to-resident ratio each March, when the TEFAF fair comes to town. This year, 276 dealers from 24 countries have brought many thousands of objects, arranged in sections devoted to paintings, antiques, jewelry, modern and contemporary art, design, ancient art, arts of Africa and Oceania, and more.  Speaking to ARTnews ahead of the fair, which opened Thursday and runs a full six days, New York Old Master dealer David Tunick likened TEFAF to “a museum for sale”; indeed prices range as high as $9.85 million, for a Pierre Auguste Renoir at New Orleans gallery M.S. Rau. Tunick’s impression was borne out in a day of hobnobbing with dealers at the crowded fair, where groups with financial institutions like Bank of America and museum directors including Max Hollein of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art were prowling the aisles, feasting on oysters and sushi at the various bars, and competi...
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Italy Purchases Rare Caravaggio Portrait for $34.7 M.

Italy has purchased a rare Caravaggio portrait for €30 million ($34.7 million), one of the largest sums ever paid by the state for a work of art, according to the country’s culture ministry. The painting, depicting the cleric Monsignor Maffeo Barberini—who would later ascend as Pope Urban VIII—was described as being of “exceptional importance,” Alessandro Giuli, Italy’s culture minister, said in a statement. The portrait had been kept in a private collection in Florence and was first shown publicly in 2004 in Rome. Following its purchase by the Italian state, it was transferred to the permanent collection of the Palazzo Barberini, the historic residence of the Barberini family, where it will be exhibited alongside other works by Caravaggio. The master Baroque artist painted Barberini around 1598. The composition anticipates his eventual rise to power: draped in a resplendent green cleric’s cloak, his right hand is outstretched, casually issuing orders to an unseen figure outside th...
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Chicago, Meet Your New ‘Neighbors’: Expo Gets a New Satellite Fair, In a Luxe Gold Coast Apartment

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Collector Mirka Serrato was walking her dog through Chicago’s affluent Gold Coast neighborhood when she came across Ramiro Verdugo, the groundsman tending to the garden at an imposing neoclassical residence. Both Latin American, they hit it off. She was looking for a place to live, and an apartment was available. She ended up living there very happily for about three years before she moved to Dallas, where she’s closer to her family, in her native Mexico. But she wasn’t ready to let go of the Windy City, not entirely. “Leaving Chicago was not an option,” she told ARTnews in an interview. “Seeing the place empty after all it gave to me was torture.” Serrato has a day job in PR but studied at the Sotheby’s Institute, and she resolved to turn the place into a venue for an art show or event. Then she went looking for the right person to help her. She met Jonny Tanna, founder of London’s Harlesden High Street gallery (the rare such business that has a manifesto ), at a party at the Fonda...
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Collective Climate Action Implemented by Los Angeles Arts Institutions

In part a reaction to the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles just over one year ago, a number of the city’s most significant arts institutions issued a collective pledge to follow climate-minded guidelines known as the Bizot Green Protocol. Initiated in 2015 by the Bizot Group, a network of art museum directors from institutions around the world, the protocol has been amended and revised in the decade since, as catastrophes attributable to climate change have intensified. Institutions behind the newly issued pledge include the Getty, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the Hammer Museum, and the blue-chip gallery Hauser & Wirth. “This is the first time that Los Angeles art institutions have announced together their commitment to these recommendations, and it is our hope that it will motivate others to commit as well,” Camille Kirk, sustainability director at Getty, said in a press release. A joint statement from the collectiv...
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