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THE HEADLINES
MORE LOUVRE THEFT ARRESTS MADE. Five additional suspects have been arrested in connection with the audacious Louvre heist, according to Paris’ public prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, the BBC reports. The arrests took place on Wednesday night in the Paris region and included one of the main suspects, AFP reported. Earlier that day, two men had partially admitted involvement in the theft, believed to have been carried out by a four-man team captured on CCTV. Three of them are now in custody, while the fourth remains at large. Authorities have released few details, but Beccuau told RTL radio that DNA evidence from one of the newly detained suspects could link him directly to the crime scene. The roles of the other four suspects remain unclear, though investigators hope they may reveal new information about how the theft was orchestrated. The Louvre heist, which happened on October 19 in broad daylight, saw thieves steal jewels valued at €88 million ($102 million) from the world’s most-visited museum. The missing items have yet to be recovered. The suspects can be held for up to four days before being charged or released.
MFA RETURNS DRAKE POTS. In an unprecedented agreement, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) will return two ceramic works made in 1857 by the enslaved Black potter David Drake (1800-1870) to his descendants. The Art Newspaper reports that Drake, renowned for signing his name and inscribing poems on his jars despite anti-literacy laws in South Carolina, created these works while enslaved. Under the agreement, one vessel will remain on loan to the MFA for at least two years, while the other, Drake’s celebrated Poem Jar, has been repurchased by the museum for an undisclosed amount. It now bears a “certificate of ethical ownership.” The MFA acknowledged that Drake was “deprived of his creations involuntarily and without compensation,” marking the first time the museum has restituted art taken under slavery in the 19th century United States. Attorney George Fatheree, representing Drake’s descendants, called the deal “groundbreaking,” noting it applies ethical restitution principles to art made by enslaved Americans for the first time. Ethan Lasser, chair of Art of the Americas at the MFA, said the museum drew on experience from Holocaust and cultural repatriation cases, emphasizing that Drake’s works were also “stolen property.” The resolution sets a new ethical standard for addressing art created under the conditions of enslavement.
The Digest
Talladega College, Alabama’s first private historically Black college, has sold four of six murals painted for the institution by renowned Black painter Hale Woodruff in order to shore up its $5 million endowment and make payroll. [New York Times]
A long-lost Baroque painting has been revealed as a rare alchemical masterpiece by Fedele Fischetti after it was rediscovered by art dealer Christopher Bishop. [Artnet News]
The lashing winds and storm surge of Typhoon Halong devoured dozens of feet of shoreline belonging to the Yup’ik community near the edge of the Bering Sea last month, washing away scores of unearthed artifacts. [Phys Org]
The nonprofit Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco will leave its downtown home, a Modernist onetime banking hall known as “the Cube,” and instead mount exhibitions at various Bay Area locations, beginning in 2026. [Artforum]
The Kicker
CAVEMEN OR CREATIVE BEINGS? Once stereotyped as primitive “cavemen,” Neanderthals are now recognized as capable of symbolic thought and artistic expression, Phys Org writes. Neanderthal artworks include hand stencils made by blowing pigment, finger flutings pressed into soft surfaces, and geometric patterns. Recent research has confirmed that they painted cave walls in Spain and France. Neanderthal are believed to have arranged stalactite fragments into an oval structure, perhaps an early form of installation art. Dating such works is difficult and often controversial. Methods like stylistic comparisons or radiocarbon dating of charcoal pigments have limits, especially when pigments are mineral-based or reused from older material. Despite these challenges, growing evidence shows that Neanderthals were not mindless brutes but creative beings who engaged deeply with their environment through art and symbolism.
