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The Headlines
GIVING TIME. A few notable museums have just announced landmark donations to their permanent collections. The Vancouver Art Gallery has received a “transformative” gift of 131 artworks from an anonymous Hong Kong collector, reports the South China Morning Post. The donated, “living” collection, meaning that new works can be added over time, is titled Art Continuum Hong Kong (ACHK), and it was assembled over three decades. It includes works by 78 artists associated with Hong Kong, dating from the 1950s to today. Many of the pieces would be difficult to show in the administrative region of China now due to government censorship, and their display at the museum will also boost the international recognition of art from Hong Kong. “Vancouver is the most Asian city outside of Asia,” said Sirish Rao, interim co-CEO and director of the Centre for Global Asias at the gallery. “This collection allows us to better understand and contextualize culture, migration, and exchange, and tell stories that resonate intimately with both our local and international communities,” Rao added. Meanwhile, Barbara Dauphin Duthuit, the wife of Henri Matisse’s grandson, has given 61 Matisse artworks to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, reports Le Quotidien de l’Art. The donation counts seven paintings, one sculpture, 28 drawings, and eight etchings, many of which depict the painter’s daughter Marguerite Matisse, and were recently exhibited at the museum.
MIRACLE OF MIRACLES. A rare, 15th-century illuminated Jewish prayer book, or mahzor, looted by Nazis and recently restituted, is heading to auction at Sotheby’s in February, reports the New York Times. Estimated to bring in at least $5 million, the manuscript was made for the Jewish High Holy Days in 1415 and once belonged to the Rothschild family, before it was seized. The Austrian government restituted the book to the family after it was found on a library shelf, unnoticed for decades. The mahzor contains gold-leafed framed illustrations of birds, unicorns, and double-headed dragons, and its very existence today is miraculous, according to Sharon Liberman Mintz, a Judaica expert at the auction house. “Every time Jewish communities were decimated or expelled, they didn’t necessarily get to take their books with them,” she added. “Between destruction, upheaval and migration, the fact that this has survived 600 years is nothing short of a miracle.” The book will be on display at Sotheby’s in New York from December 11 to 16.
The Digest
Historic England (HE) has unveiled its 2025 National Heritage List of remarkable historic places to be protected, and it includes a range of the curious and the beautiful, from the Tudor Croft gnome-filled gardens, and neolithic cairns, to Cambridgeshire’s Adams Heritage Centre ice-skating hub, with its specialized ironmongers who crafted skates. In all, about 200 new additions have joined the list. [The Times]
A portrait of the 18th-century Corsican independence leader Pascal Paoli, by British artist Sir William Beechey, is up for auction in time for the 300th anniversary of Paoli’s birth. Paoli is an icon of the Enlightenment, credited with giving Corsica a modern, written constitution that also inspired American revolutionaries. [The Guardian]
Right-wing groups in Austria are outraged over an exhibition at Vienna’s Künstlerhaus that includes contemporary, feminist, and queer perspectives on Christian motifs. The English translation of the exhibition title is “You shall make for yourself an image,” and while it received the blessing of several local religious figures, some center and right-leaning politicians have accused the project of blasphemy. [Der Standard]
Archaeologists have discovered 11 submerged, Mesolithic/Neolithic granite structures, believed to be dikes, fish weirs, or protective walls, dating from 5800 to 5300 BCE, off Sein Island, in Brittany, France. The human-built structures are the largest submerged archeological findings to date in France, measuring up to 393-feet in length, and demonstrating advanced building skills for maritime populations on the cusp between a hunter-gatherer Mesolithic culture and early Neolithic sedentary communities. [International Journal of Nautical Archeology]
The Société des amis du Louvre (SAL), a privately run group that helps finance the Louvre museum’s acquisitions via donations, as well as other fundraising means, such as special museum passes that offer easy entry, does not meet standard regulations, and is improperly managed, stated France’s administrative audit institution, the Cour des Comptes. The association, which counts 67,342 members, is in need of “urgent modernization,” the audit found. [Le Monde]
The Kicker
AMERICAN STYLE. Are museums in the UK “turning American?” That is what the Financial Times is asking in their report analyzing how institutions like Tate and the British Museum are adopting a more “American style of private fundraising” as national funding continues to dwindle. Yet for Serpentine’s CEO Bettina Korek, whose perspective accounts for the bulk of the story, “this is old news.” The Serpentine has had American and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg as chairman for more than 10 years. Under Korek, Serpentine has made lucrative partnerships with brands like the Lego Group, Dior, gaming platform Fortnite, but also the FLAG Art Foundation in New York, which is financing the new £200,000 ($267,518) Serpentine x FLAG Art Foundation Prize for living artists. There’s also the Serpentine’s glamorous, “American-style,” star-studded fundraising gala, which has gotten more exclusive over the years (read: pricier tickets and fewer dished out). To grasp Korek’s fundraising success, combined with an inclusive vision for public access, this comment from her sums it up: “I grew up in LA and had a friend in the entertainment world and as he was getting more involved in art, his observation was that [in contrast to art] entertainment doesn’t try to make its audiences feel stupid. I think about that a lot.”
