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During the past 12 months, the art world lost some of its most dedicated collectors, who were known for the outsize holdings as well as their patronage of institutions, many of which benefited from their largess. Agnes Gund and Barbara Jakobsen were longtime trustees of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Dorothy Vogel was a librarian whose holdings of postwar art transformed the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Susan Marx helped make the Aspen Art Museum what it is today. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston would be 700 artworks less rich without the generosity of John P. Axelrod, and the Blanton Museum of Art can now tell a fuller story of Latinx art thanks to a donation of 5,000 works from Gilberto Cárdenas. To hear more about the impact that these six collectors had on the institutions they supported and the people they met, ARTnews spoke with curators and fellow collectors about the times they spent together. ...

Funding trouble has been brewing at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam since at least 2023, when the museum began negotiating with the Dutch Ministry of Culture over the budget for a much-needed building renovation. In the summer of 2025, two years into the negotiations, museum director Emilie Gordenker told the New York Times that the current situation was “dangerous for the art and dangerous for our visitors.” The necessary repairs were so urgent that Gordenker worried the museum—one of the top tourist destinations in Amsterdam—might have to close. On October 8 came news that the museum has reached an agreement with the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science following mediation talks that both parties entered into in order to avoid a public court case. The Van Gogh Museum will now be able to proceed with the planned three-year renovation, set to begin in the fall of 2028. During this time, the museum will remain partially open to the public, and the perma...

Three years ago, dealer Thaddaeus Ropac started to question the health of the art market in London. The mixed auction results of 2022 and 2023 reflected what he saw as a stagnant period. And Paris, with the recent premiere of Art Basel, seemed to be emerging as the dominant location. “London lost part of the market because Paris became very attractive,” he told ARTnews in a recent interview. Still, Ropac is bullish on London: his gallery has just renewed its lease there for another 10 years. And he isn’t the only one. Global behemoth Hauser & Wirth, which has had a presence in the city since 2003, has planned a 15,000-square-foot gallery on Mayfair’s South Audley Street that is currently under construction. In today’s uneven market, dealers and advisers are being especially picky about which fairs to attend. But as Europe braces for a double round of art fairs—Frieze in London from October 14–18, followed by Art Basel Paris from October 21–25—London is hav...

Plucked from an estate sale in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for $30, Gertrude Abercombie’s Alderman Merriam’s Shells (1951) sold for $1.35 million at Freeman’s auction house on October 1. The final bid far surpassed the lot’s $250,000 estimate, setting a new auction benchmark for the late Surrealist painter. For Freeman’s New York, success was almost guaranteed. Alderman Merriam’s Shells arrived on the block buoyed by its sensational rediscovery : the enigmatic still life of seashells scattered in darkness had vanished for decades, much to the dismay of Abercrombie’s ravenous market. In reality, it languished in Michigan until a sharp-eyed shopper rescued it from an estate sale. “As happy as we are to have recaptured the record sale price for an artist we have long championed, we are even happier for our eagle-eyed consignor who saved this masterpiece,” Zack Wirsum, Freeman’s senior vice president, said in a statement. Its eventual consignor, a collector ...

To mark the 10-year anniversary of Zaha Hadid’s death , the Zaha Hadid Foundation is reopening the architect’s former headquarters on October 29. The former Victorian schoolhouse, located at 10 Bowling Green Lane in Clerkenwell, will be repurposed as a public cultural space for architecture, design and the related arts. The newly-refurbished space will include galleries, a learning space, lecture hall and collection display. The spaces will be used to host exhibitions, talks, workshops and creative residencies. “It was Zaha’s wish for the foundation to preserve her legacy while carrying her ideas forward: advancing education, supporting future generations and contributing to the wider field of architecture,” said Rana Hadid, chair of the trustees of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, in a statement. She added, “At the heart of that mission is her extraordinary archive, a profound record of her work, imagination and intellectual life. This next step will all...

Sotheby’s may have been hoping that the dinosaur skeleton known as “Jodi” was, in fact, a youthful T. rex , given the name recognition and resulting price tags that have accompanied this species of sought-after dinosaur. Instead, the auction house’s latest high-profile specimen is a Nanotyrannus , a mid-size tyrannosaurid genus that, according to Artnet , had previously been for sale for $20 million at Frieze Masters in 2023. At the time, the skeleton was called “Chomper” and was being sold by the London gallery David Aaron. According to a statement from Sotheby’s, “Jodi” is one of only three known Nanotyrannus specimens. Named for Jodi Pierson, the rancher who discovered the fossil on her land in Montana in 2019, “Jodi” is the first Nanotyrannus to be put up for sale at auction since the new genus was confirmed in a study published in Nature magazine last fall. The Nature article, which refers to “Jodi” as NCSM 40000, further identifies two subspecies...