The museum, one of two institutions run by Plattner in Potsdam, opened in 2017 and is now well known for its Impressionist art collection, with paintings on view by Monet, Renoir, and others of note. Plattner, who has previously appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, has distanced himself from the corruption proceedings, according to the German press agency dpa.

The Museum Barberini did not respond to ARTnews’s request for comment.

The court’s decision rested on events that allegedly took place during 2014 and 2015, before the museum opened to the public.

One of the defendants, a technical adviser on the museum’s building, received a suspended sentence of one year and two months in prison. The other, a subcontractor, must pay 216,000 euros, or around $22,700.

According to the court, the technical adviser, a 57-year-old referred to only as Karsten D., got a friend to work on the project, allegedly with the aim of sharing proceeds with him. D. was accused of having sent competitor construction companies insider information about the project and of having made attempts to cover up having done so.

D. must now forfeit 113,000 euros ($122,000) and pay 20,000 euros ($21,600) to a Potsdam children’s charity.

The subcontractor, a 61-year-old named Andreas L., is accused of having conspired in D.’s alleged scheme. He must pay his fee of 216,000 euros in 120 daily installments of 180 euros each.

During that protest, a group of students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago called on the university to “divest from all entities and individuals financially supporting the Zionist occupation of Palestine.”

The school had reportedly asked the protestors to move an encampment they had set up, but they did not do so. A museum spokesperson said that some protestors “surrounded and shoved a security officer and stole their keys to the museum, blocked emergency exits and barricaded gates.”

The museum called the police, and sixty-eight arrests on counts of trespassing followed. The institution previously said that the protestors were “given many opportunities to leave.” Shortly afterward, the museum requested that the charges be dropped.

According to ABC’s Chicago affiliate, the Illinois Attorney’s Office ultimately decided to drop the charges because the protests were peaceful, echoing the terminology used by the museum itself to describe the how it negotiated with demonstrators. The report included a quote from a police admiral who disputed this, accusing the protestors of vandalism and “assault,” and alleging that “several police officers were physically attacked.”

Jeffrey Sun, one of the student protestors who took part in the demonstration, told ABC, “They did not have a case against us; I think on some level they just did not want to actually engage with considering what protesting genocide means.”

“Commandeering the North Garden of the museum without permission, locking gates, barricading emergency exits, and refusing to leave constitutes criminal trespassing and will not be tolerated,” a museum spokesperson said in a statement. “Ultimately, whether charges are prosecuted is up to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office and they decided to drop the charges against all protesters involved on May 4.”

“As a born-and-raised Angeleno, I seek for my gallery to embody the creative spirit of Los Angeles and its rich artistic traditions,” Mulrooney told ARTnews in an email. “I’m eager to cultivate a space that fosters community and intergenerational dialogues, bringing together established and emerging artists to showcase not only their varied practices, but their curatorial visions as well.”

Nino Mier Gallery shuttered the LA spaces earlier this year after the Art Newspaper published a report accusing dealer Nino Mier of underpaying artists. The gallery subsequently said it would investigate the claims.

Then, not long afterward, Mier announced he would close his LA galleries, writing that the move was “a strategic business decision that has been under careful consideration for some time, and has nothing to do with recent media reports.” His gallery continues to operate spaces in New York and Brussels.

Mulrooney’s gallery will be sited in three of the four spaces previously run by Mier, whose gallery she joined as a director in 2018. She was later promoted to senior director in 2022.

At Nino Mier, Mulrooney spearheaded the opening of the gallery’s West Hollywood space, as well as the launch of an artist residency program in Cologne, Germany. She had previously also held positions at Paddle8 and Sotheby’s.

A spokesperson for Mulrooney told ARTnews that Mier is in no way involved with her new gallery, to officially be called Megan Mulrooney Gallery. Its first exhibitions, solo show for artists Piper Bangs and Marin Majic, will open on September 14.

The new six-person selection committee is comprised of Yilmaz Dziewior, Sergio Edelsztein, N’Goné Fall, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Mami Kataoka, and Yasmil Raymond, all but one of whom have previously curated at least one major biennial.

This group notably includes three people based in Germany (Dziewior, Edelsztein, and Raymond), whereas the prior committee included none.

And there is one Israeli, Edelsztein, a gesture that will be seen as a response to the ongoing fallout over Documenta 15 in 2022, which faced widespread allegations of antisemitism. There was also an Israeli artist on the prior committee, but she resigned in response to the situation facing her country after the October 7 Hamas attack.

Within Germany, Dziewior and Raymond are already well-known, the former for directing the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the latter for leading the Portikus museum and the famed Städelschule art school in Frankfurt until earlier this year. Edelsztein, who splits his time between Berlin and Tel Aviv, was the longtime director and chief curator of the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, which he also founded.

Fall previously served as editorial director of Revue Noire, an important journal devoted to African art. Gaweewong is artistic director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok. Kataoka is director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.

The six curators are now filling in six others who abruptly departed this past November. Around the same time that the Israeli artist Bracha L. Ettinger left, Indian poet Ranjit Hoskote became the subject of controversy after the German press resurfaced a BDS letter that he had signed; he also resigned as a result.

Then, decrying what they called a lack of “an open exchange of ideas and the development of complex and nuanced artistic approaches that documenta artists and curators deserve,” the four other curators—Simon Njami, Gong Yan, Kathrin Rhomberg, and María Inés Rodríguez—also left.

The mass resignation only added to fears that Documenta may never be able to recover from the scandals that beset 2022’s Documenta 15, which spurred scrutiny over artworks that contained antisemitic imagery and pro-Palestine politics. But Documenta leadership has assured that the next edition, planned for 2027, will still happen, albeit at a date that was not specified in Wednesday’s announcement.

Yet even amid those assurances, statements from Documenta’s leaders have caused some to worry about what form the next show will take. Although Documenta will not enforce a code of conduct for its next artistic director, it will expand its supervisory board to include greater representation for the city of Kassel, where Documenta takes place once every five years, and the state of Hesse, where Kassel is located.

There will also be a Scientific Advisory Board of experts and a requirement that the next artistic director give a talk about “their understanding of respect for human dignity and how this is to be ensured in the exhibition they are to curate.”

Of the new selection committee, Documenta managing director Andreas Hoffmann said, “I am certain that the expert and multi-perspective make-up of the new Finding Committee will lead to a forward-looking proposal for the Artistic Direction. This lays the foundation for the international art world to once again be a familiar and welcome guest in Kassel.”

It is virtually impossible to boil down Leaf’s oeuvre to a specific set of interests, simply because it took so many forms: off-kilter remakes of famed art-historical images, surreal monuments to women, drawn self-portraits, mechanized sculptures of cloistered people in tiny spaces, and a whole lot more. Binding it all was a commitment to the human figure, even during times when abstraction was prized by critics.

Although Leaf’s work almost always generated acclaim, she never fit cleanly within the dominant artistic modes of the moment, and that may have cost her greater visibility. But she seemed not to care much whether people knew how to categorize her.

For some, Leaf’s art was most significant because it was so invested in the possibilities of figuration. “What constitutes June Leaf’s genius,” critic Barry Schwabsky once wrote, “also makes her something of a throwback or an anomaly, an artist whose work looks back, through that of Giacometti and Picasso, to the primitive impulse to make images.”

Leaf herself may have concurred with that statement, telling Hyperallergic in 2016, “I work with these figures until I am released from them. At least, I think that is how it goes. I’ve been making art since 1948, and I haven’t got a smooth theory.”

Among Leaf’s most well-known works are her sculptures that jump into motion when activated by their viewer. Some of these works contain triggers that, when pulled, enact quotidian scenarios—a woman walking, for example, represented here by a plainspoken cut-metal figure. Others took the form of scrolls that can be turned using a crank. Still other pieces zeroed on specific body parts: hands, heads, torsos, and the like. Leaf’s goal, as she once stated, was to “make people, from the inside out.”

Asked once about her fascination with the body, Leaf seemed to suggest it was intimately related to her experiences as a dancer. “I think of myself as a dancer making art,” she said. “Or an aviator making art.”

June Leaf was born in 1929 in Chicago. She said her earliest artistic memory dated to when she was 3 years old, when she was playing with a piece of fabric and decided she was going to make everything with her hands. Then she asked her mother to draw her a shoe, and the resulting image instilled in her a love for drawing.

When Leaf was 18, she attended the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she learned experimental drawing strategies engineered by artist László Moholy-Nagy, who had founded the school. Although she thrilled to the techniques being taught, she found herself more interested in the artists who visited school than the actual classes, so she left the Institute, planning to become an artist herself.

She set off for Paris in 1948. There, much to her own surprise, people began to praise her work, emboldening to take up more experimental projects, such as a painting done on the tiles of a bathtub. Some thought she was mentally unwell—she was not, as a psychiatrist confirmed—but she plugged on, realizing she had now found her calling.

Leaf then returned to Chicago, where her work began to receive local attention from artists such as Leon Golub, who personally confirmed to Leaf’s mother that she was on the right track. Leaf ultimately received an MA from the Institute in 1954. Four years later, she received a Fulbright grant and went to Paris a second time. She took life classes at the Louvre, but she feared inadequacy in the face of the Old Masters she was copying.

In 1965, Leaf made her first sculpture, Vermeer Box, a three-dimensional re-creation of an actual Vermeer painting with some contemporary additions, including a coin. “I couldn’t make that in painting, so I had to try to use some other dimension,” Leaf told Hyperallergic. “That defines why I work with materials. I am a painter who had to have a tactile experience with the world. I had to go a circuitous route to get to what I am – a painter.”

That decade, Leaf met photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, who by that point was already famous. They married in 1971. Frank subsequently sent Leaf on a mission to find for them a home in Nova Scotia, and she located one in Mabou, where they remained based for the entirety of their careers. (They had two children, Andrea and Pablo, and remained married until Frank’s death in 2019.)

Although Leaf had a Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago survey in 1978, her work has largely not received widespread recognition. A modestly scaled 2016 survey of her drawings at New York’s Whitney Museum is one of the few significant institutional shows Leaf has had in recent years.

Much of Leaf’s art was dedicated to finding new ways of seeing the world, a project she made literal in a group of sculptures that take the form of eyeglasses. But whereas eyeglasses are intended to clarify vision, Leaf’s sculptures distorted sight, putting yellow cones or mirrors where the lens might typically be.

“I think of myself as an inventor,” Leaf once said. “Even though I’ve never really invented anything, except maybe the glasses.”

Dealer Louis K. Meisel, whose New York gallery showed Flack’s art before she gained representation with Hollis Taggart, announced her death on Monday.

Flack’s art knowingly flouted the traditional standards of good taste, blurring the boundaries between high and low, painting and photography, and kitsch and avant-garde. Her work, though not always appreciated by critics, who sometimes scorned it for being out of step with artistic trends, gained her a cult following that has in recent years grown much wider.

“Now 92, Flack is having a moment,” Karen Chernick noted in a 2024 ARTnews profile of Flack. “This wasn’t a given, considering she’s always gone against the grain. She was figurative when abstraction and minimalism were ascendant; she used airbrushes when fine artists wouldn’t touch them; her still lifes of lipstick, roses, and beaded necklaces didn’t match the cars and trucks that her fellow Photorealists were painting. And when she decided to be a sculptor all of a sudden, her sculptures were polychrome.”

She died the same year that a memoir, With Darkness Came Stars, was released. Meanwhile, in October, the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, is due to mount a survey of her art.

Among Flack’s most notable series is her “Vanitas” paintings, produced between 1976 and 1978. These works, often done at a gigantic scale, allude to the centuries-old tradition of vanitas still lifes, which are intended to remind viewers of their own mortality, placing skulls alongside an assortment of objects that often denote the passage of time. Flack’s “Vanitas” paintings may function similarly, but they are even more excessive than those of her Old Master forbears; hers burst with pictures of Marilyn Monroe, necklaces, burning candles, fresh cut flowers, juicy fruits, pocket watches, and lipsticks.

Some found these paintings to be aesthetically offensive. Critic John Russell, writing in the New York Times, called Flack’s paintings “irredeemably hideous.” Flack seemed to pay that critique no mind, continuing to produce dozens of Photorealist works.

A feminist undercurrent ran through Flack’s Photorealist paintings, as they differed from that of many male Photorealists, who generally focused on cars and the like. But at the time, her work faced an unusual conundrum. Some female observers felt that it was too excessive and too self-consciously feminine to fully be considered feminist. Yet in time, that debate subsided. Her work currently figures in a gallery devoted to feminist art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., which acquired a work from the “Vanitas” series in 2022.

Audrey Flack was born in New York in 1931. Her parents kept reproductions of Old Master paintings around their Washington Heights home; Flack came to think of those images as her “friends.” But she didn’t think she would become an artist until she was admitted to Cooper Union in 1950.

At the time, Abstract Expressionism was still considered the pinnacle of art-making by New York critics. Flack disagreed with the “testosterone-fueled aggression and out-of-control drinking” that characterized the lives of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others, and sought a different path.

Once she graduated, Flack attended Yale University for graduate school, studying under artist Josef Albers, and then moved back to New York, where her friends ended up including Philip Pearlstein, Alice Neel, and other painters working in a figurative mode. She began to paint from photographs that she herself took, even using her own personal darkroom, constructed in the bathroom of her studio, to develop these images.

In her memoir, she recounted having received a postcard from curator Marcia Tucker in the 1970s that featured 17th-century Spanish artist Luisa Roldán’s sculpture of the Virgin of Hope of Macarena. Flack didn’t know Roldán, an important Baroque sculptor, had produced the piece until she visited the Seville church where it is housed.

“I didn’t care that this art was dismissed as lower-class kitsch,” Flack said of that piece. Her own paintings, too, seemed to run against masculinist expectations for what art ought to be.

During the 1980s, Flack felt she had reached a dead end with her paintings and paused art-making for a couple years. Then she returned as a sculptor, creating monumental works depicting goddesses with flowing robes and lithe figures.

Flack heralded these works as a way forward for art writ large. “I do go back to the ancients and to Neoclassicism, but my work is very contemporary,” Flack told the New York Times. “It’s postpostmodern.”

Toward the end of the career, she tacked on another “post-” to her work, creating paintings that she labeled “Post-Pop-Baroque” that featured accumulations of horses, text, fantastical beings, and more, all cramped together. “I like bringing back the masters,” she said.

When Flack was profiled by ARTnews, she said she had more work coming—and that these new paintings would be hard to ignore. “They’re not going to be over-the-sofa paintings,” she said.

That split-open peeper appears in this season’s ninth episode, during a montage that also features footage from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and other famed movies. The eyeball shot is also appropriated from a storied film, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, a 1929 short that is considered a cornerstone of Surrealism.

Un Chien Andalou, like many other Surrealist works, deploys a dream-like logic, drifting freely between a range of memorable, grotesque images, with no obvious cause-and-effect structure to bind them. It has been celebrated in particular for one shot in which a man runs a razor blade across a woman’s eye. This action is, of course, simulated, although a quick cut to a shot of a blade slicing through an actual animal’s eye makes it appear real.

In fact, according to Surrealist lore, the image of a knife cutting through the moon, “like a razor blade slicing through an eye,” was one that Buñuel had dreamed and even told Dalí about. That conversation drove the two to make the short, which recently ranked at #169 on a Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time, as selected by critics. (Though there are still another six months before the film enters the common domain in the US, full versions of it proliferate online.)

In The Bear, the eyeball shots come during a sequence intended to communicate the value of magic and entertainment. Marcus, a chef played by Lionel Boyce, is shown watching on his laptop an edit of movie clips that feature card games and alien invasions, which he marvels over.

Voiceover from Martin Scorsese communicates how the everyday can be tweaked by filmmakers ever so slightly to offer an alternate perspective on life. “Something else is existing here, I don’t know what,” Scorsese says over images from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). “Something is happening that’s not part of our normal day, in terms of the nature of how we live, but we’re trying to create something different.”

“During our time working together, she was a constant source of good humor and cutting brilliance,” wrote her New York gallery, Ortuzar Projects, in its announcement of her passing. “Her spirit and influence will live on through her peers, friends, and family, of which we are honored to be a part.”

De Jong’s subjects ranged widely, from the covers of French pulp fiction novels to billiards, from the Gulf War of the 1990s to Israel’s current war in Gaza. Across her various bodies of work, she challenged the very basics of her medium, painting on unconventional materials and luring “low” imagery into “high” art.

For many, her claim to art historical fame has long been her ties to the Situationist movement, led by a group of leftist artists and writers who were active in 1960s France. Those artists sought to fight the cascade of images that proliferated in the bourgeois mass media; de Jong published some of their writings in the Situationist Times, a short-lived publication that she founded.

But in the later stages of her life, de Jong preferred to talk less about her Situationist days than what followed. Speaking of her turn toward figuration at a time when abstraction still reigned supreme, she told ARTnews earlier this year, “People like images, and people like to make images. That means artists like to make images. Which means figuration was lacking.”

Much of de Jong’s art thus placed a focus on figurative imagery, which she seemed to take seriously, even when the work itself was humorous. Sly feminist critique courses through much of her painting, as does a more explicit antiwar sentiment. But de Jong never committed to a single style or subject matter, and that was in some way born of her omnivorous mind.

Jacqueline de Jong was born in the Dutch town of Enschede in 1939. Her parents collected works by Kurt Schwitters, Diego Rivera, and others, and that instilled in de Jong a fascination with art early on.

Because her parents were Jewish, she was forced to lead an itinerant childhood, moving between the Netherlands and Switzerland while the threat of the Nazis loomed. After the war, during the 1950s, she studied theater at the Guildhall School in London with plans to become an actress. “I absolutely wanted to be on the stage,” she told Frieze in 2017. “Luckily, we can say, I failed.”

She moved back to Amsterdam and took a part-time job at the Stedelijk Museum, an institution known for its deep holdings of modern art. This put her on the path to becoming an artist—and to meeting Asger Jorn, who cofounded CoBrA, an avant-garde movement that upheld childish, naive painterly techniques as a riposte to accepted artistic standards. The two embarked on a decade-long romantic relationship. De Jong was 19 at the time; Jorn was more than 20 years older.

Jorn’s artistic network was rich and extensive, and helped put de Jong in contact with Guy Debord, a founding member of the Situationist International. “What I was interested in, quite simply, was changing the world,” de Jong told Frieze of her involvement with the Situationists.

The artist, who was by then based in Paris, parted ways with the Situationists amid an internal dispute between warring factions within the movement. Technically, her founding of the Situationist Times was a response to being ejected from its ranks. But the publication lasted only a few issues because de Jong ran out of money to continue printing it.

De Jong’s painterly at the style at the time was CoBrA-like, with paintings cramped with toothy, monstrous figures jostling in space. But by the end of the decade, her figures became more clearly defined, and she began referring to things seen in mass media, from dinosaurs to astronauts. Her rejection of abstraction should have aligned her with Narrative Figuration, a French movement that placed an emphasis on allegory, but de Jong felt they did not accept her, since she was a woman. Besides, she was more interested in artists like Peter Saul, an American artist whose crass paintings have been related to the Pop movement.

Having participated in leftist movements around the time of the May ’68 protests, de Jong would go on to move to Amsterdam during the 1970s. While she had already experimented with multipart paintings by then, she continued to push that mode even further, creating a series of works that could even be folded up and toted around à la suitcase. Later on, she would test the medium even more when she painted on long stretches of sailcloth, showing that the traditional oil-on-canvas format was effectively a thing of the past.

While de Jong is highly regarded within the Netherlands, with some of her paintings currently on view at the Rijksmuseum, she has only recently begun to receive fame abroad. In 2018 Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, France, gave her a retrospective; another followed in 2020 at the Stedelijk Museum, and yet another followed in 2021 at the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels. A survey of her work will appear this year at the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Yet even in her final years, de Jong seemed unfazed by the renown her art had finally received. As she told ARTnews earlier this year, “Painting is always out of style.”

The institution, one of several international satellites run by the Paris-based modern art museum, was first due to begin welcoming visitors in 2024 before its opening date was pushed back a couple years.

Formally called the Centre Pompidou x Jersey City, the 58,000-square-foot museum would be the first Centre Pompidou satellite to open in North America. Others are already open in China and Belgium.

The total cost of the Centre Pompidou’s Jersey City institution has been a matter of debate, but one year ago, Republican politicians in the state began to suggest it could take more than $200 million to open it, with more than $50 million coming out of taxpayers’ pockets. Then, earlier this year, state entities began to raise concerns about the recurring costs of keeping the museum open.

On Saturday, the New Jersey Monitor reported that the state’s Economic Development Authority had formally written to the Centre Pompidou, saying that it would no longer fund the Jersey City museum, which chief executive officer Tim Sullivan declared defunct.

“While we are honored that Jersey City was selected as the first North American location for a Centre Pompidou facility, we have decided to pause this project indefinitely,” Sullivan wrote, in a letter obtained by the New Jersey Monitor. “Due to the ongoing impact of COVID and multiple global conflicts on the supply chain, rising costs, an irreconcilable operating gap, and the corresponding financial burdens it will create for New Jersey’s taxpayers, the Legislature has rescinded financial support, leaving us to determine that this project is unfortunately no longer feasible.”

Also on Saturday, the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency said it would no longer provide $18 million toward the museum. The agency called on the Centre Pompidou to return $6 million in state funding it had already received.

“The Centre Pompidou acknowledges the State of New Jersey’s decision,” a museum spokesperson said. “It remains committed to ongoing discussions with the Mayor of Jersey City to jointly determine the project’s future direction.”

Update, 7/1/24, 11:50 a.m.: This article has been updated to include a statement from the Centre Pompidou.

At Glastonbury, Banksy sent an inflatable raft into the crowd during a set by the British band Idles. Per the Guardian, which first reported news of the raft, the band was not aware of Banksy’s stunt until it happened.

Banksy’s latest was an inflatable raft meant to mimic the kind typically used by migrants to cross oceans. In the raft were a grouping of dummies meant to mimic those very migrants.

The raft reportedly made an appearance during the song “Danny Nedelko,” which explicitly deals with immigration and includes lyrics such as: “Fear leads to panic, panic leads to pain / Pain leads to anger, anger leads to hate.”

On Sunday, Banksy posted video of the raft during the Idles set, effectively confirming that he had made the piece.

The anonymous artist has in the past made art about immigration, at one point even emblazoning a ship used to transport rescued refugees with one of his signature images, a girl reaching upward toward a balloon, this one resembling a heart-shaped life float.

His latest work comes as UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak continues to face scrutiny over his immigration policy. Through one particularly controversial law, Sunak’s government plans to deport asylum seekers who arrive in the UK illegally to Rwanda, which some Conservative politicians in England view as a safe destination.

Update, 6/30/24, 2:45 p.m.: This article has been updated to include Banksy’s confirmation that he made the raft.