These artists don’t typically have the MFA degrees that are required for representation at blue-chip galleries. They are more likely to have members of the clergy, or to have been firefighters or houseless. But as this fair shows, these artists who are just worthy of study as the ones that pass through the nation’s top art schools.

Those who show at this fair have spent decades working to bring to light these makers, who historically have not made into museums. Their work is now paying off.

During the fair’s VIP preview day on Thursday, ARTnews spoke with several exhibitors about the artists they brought to the fair this year.

Resembling armor without a body underneath, shell is made from felt etching blankets from the shop, and, amid a writer’s strike in Los Angeles, she collaborated with a film industry designer in need of work, who was enlisted through Felsen’s connections. The work came to be almost serendipitously “because this is Hollywood, and because of Sidney Felsen,” Hamilton told writer Joan Simon in a 2008 interview.

Enlisting established artists, like Hamilton, to create new work is perhaps what Felsen, now 99, is most widely known for. Having founded Gemini in 1966 with his fraternity brother and art collector Stanley Grinstein, Felsen is now the subject of a monographic exhibition, on view through July 7 at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, that mines 50-years-worth of his photographic archive. The exhibition’s title puts it more succinctly: “First Came a Friendship: Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini G.E.L.” The exhibition’s curator Naoko Takahatake selected images that Felsen took over more than five decades, culled from more than 70,000 images, donated to the GRI in 2019 by Jack Shear, the partner of Ellsworth Kelly, another frequent Gemini collaborator.

Alongside Tamarind Lithography Workshop and Cirrus Editions (both in Los Angeles) and Universal Limited Art Editions (in New York), Gemini G.E.L. was a part of a budding wave of art printers established in the 1960s and ’70s that attracted top artists as collaborators. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, David Hockney, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein who could work through some of their most heady ideas in a different medium than they became famous for. In 1999, Claudine Ise wrote for the Los Angeles Times, that Felsen molded Gemini into “an arterial channel between the Los Angeles and New York art worlds.”

“When he really started getting serious about photography, he switched to a Leica and he preferred the rangefinder because of the quiet shutter,” Takahatake told ARTnews in a recent interview.

Felsen, according to Takahatake, wanted to be a fly on the wall, preferring to be unseen and unheard to avoid disrupting their artistic processes. “He said the two words he felt he needed to live by were silent and invisible. One of the greatest compliments he felt someone could pay him was, when they would say: I didn’t even realize that you were there,” Takahatake said.

In the mid-’60s, Felsen brought in artists primarily on his own instinct, mailing postcards that acted as cold invitations to collaborate. That process would lead him to that building out a personal network with some of the mid-20th century’s biggest creative forces. Critics and historians who have analyzed Gemini’s peak years have emphasized how Felsen and Grinstein, who died in 2014, gave artists unusual amount of freedom to work, seemingly without any financial or material restrictions. A 2010 Artforum review of a Robert Rauschenberg show detailed how critical the shop was to the artist and his peers, providing an atmosphere that gave them “free rein and seemingly unlimited resources.”

There were few other artists who produced as much under Felsen’s tutelage as Rauschenberg. In a 2013 interview, Felsen recalled first meeting the artist, who was looking to make a full-body print using a medical X-Ray, at an airport in 1967. “He wanted one plate—6 feet—of his whole body. We found out there is no such thing in the United States—except that Eastman Kodak in Rochester had a six-foot machine,” Felsen said in the 2013 interview. For another project Felsen took Rauschenberg to a Los Angeles Times printing facility to scour through metal type barrels for material; it was one of some 50 times Rauschenberg came to the shop over the next three decades. Felsen balanced being a close friend, while giving Rauschenberg the space to ideate, often watching in awe at the speed of Rauschenberg’s creative spurts. “He never looked back at his work,” Felsen said.

Because Felsen sought to capture the print shop’s private moments, he never intended to publish his archive of images, which lined the studio’s walls. Until 2003, they went uncatalogued. And that approach allowed him to get a level of candid access that most journalists would dream of. “I can’t work in front of people,” Tacita Dean, a Turner Prize–winning artist who works primarily in photography and film, told the Getty for an essay accompanying the show. “It’s another eye in the room and the sense that somebody’s watching you. But Sidney’s photographs don’t have that.”

There’s a sense of a palpable joy in Felsen’s photographs, in which now famous artists resemble students at play, their expressions mostly candid and unserious. In one, David Hockney tacks drawings of his inner circle to Gemini’s walls, while in another, Richard Serra keeps his heads down, pouring black paint on the floor. “I think something that is quite notable about Gemini is the fact that they had to foster these long-term relationships with artists—it was by invitation,” Takahatake said.

“A lot of my friend were artists or just collectors,” Felsen said in the 2013 interview, describing how he’d put aside his career as an accountant to work with artists. Initially, he focused on LA artists, but he soon found himself nearly at the center of the global art world. In 1966, through chance, Man Ray, ever an enigma of an artist, came to Gemini when he had a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Surrealist had recently relocated from Paris to LA, focusing on commissioned photographs for fashion magazines; the museum arranged for him to stay at Grinstein’s house, bringing him into Gemini’s circle.

Decades later, with a close-knit yet expansive network, Felsen continued to run the shop until 2018, at the age of 93, always with the guiding principle, as Takahatake put it, of “how to be a good friend.”

For young galleries, art fairs like Frieze Los Angeles are a boon, but also a gamble: there’s the chance for exposure to top-notch collectors and a large audience, but without sales, the high cost can be deadly. The fair needs young galleries as much as or more than the galleries need them. After all, the fair burnishes its credibility by showing the most exciting young talent and the hottest galleries, even if it’s the blue chips that sell the most work. Frieze ensures this through Focus, a special section providing dedicated space to emerging galleries and their artists. But, as the art market grows ever more lopsided, so grows the challenge of putting together such a section.

For its fifth edition, which opens to VIPs tomorrow, Frieze LA has tapped Essence Harden to curate Focus. When Frieze director Christine Messineo hired them, Harden was one year into a new role as a curator at the California African American Museum in LA. Since 2017, Harden has built a reputation for organizing thoughtful exhibitions that investigate notions of Blackness and queerness. Working with Harden is a major draw for galleries and artists alike. For Harden, curating Focus allowed them to spotlight West Coast galleries that they felt could benefit from the exposure and that rarely show at fairs. About 60 percent of the galleries in Focus and around 50 percent in Frieze overall are based in LA.

Harden was handed a tough task nevertheless. This year’s Focus features only 11 galleries, compared to 19 last year, as part of a larger reduction in the fair’s size. With some 100 galleries applying, a mere 10 percent make the cut. Those odds are even slimmer when you consider that Harden and their Frieze colleagues reached out to certain galleries to encourage them to apply. This is a common, though little discussed, practice that art fairs use to ensure they show what are, in their view, the best exhibitors.

The pitch to galleries and artists for Focus, Harden told ARTnews, is pragmatic. The section is a dynamic “rotating, shifting” space designed to “move people along.” Harden views the fair as a platform to elevate less-established galleries based in California that aren’t active at large-scale fairs. “For those who really need it, it can serve as this guiding thing,” they said.

That pitch is important. Not only do young galleries have a hard time covering the cost of fairs, they also don’t necessarily favor participating in such overtly commercial events. Some dealers taking part in Focus told ARTnews that they hadn’t considered the commercial space to be right for them in the first place. Here, the words of a curator like Harden, whose reputation is built on elevating less salable but conceptually rigorous art, can make all the difference. Participating gallerists described Harden as a rare candidate in their field, a writer who knows the West Coast scene well and goes slowly when observing an artist’s development.

For Seth Curcio, a director at Los Angeles–based gallery Nazarian / Curcio, the hope is that Focus will increase exposure for photographer and UCLA professor Widline Cadet, who has greater recognition in New York after a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In the Focus section, Cadet is exhibiting high-contrast images of Black models meandering outdoors, their faces often turned away from the camera. Cadet took all the photographs in LA, mostly at night, employing local models to stage scenes that reflect on her familial relationships.

“There’s a video embedded in the central photograph, which is primarily documentation from her family,” Curcio said. “We wanted to build on an institutional project that wasn’t presented here, to help bridge that gap a little.”

Still, participation can be a burden. Two galleries involved in the section told ARTnews that they were invited to Frieze at the last minute, which meant upending plans and budgets.

Brock Brake, who runs Oakland-based gallery pt.2, said he had stopped applying to fairs after rejections from the New Art Dealers Alliance and others, and had no plans to show in one this year. But a day before the application deadline, a Frieze LA official reached out asking the gallery to apply. They gave him and his artist, Muzae Sesay, one day to confirm their participation. Brake said he hadn’t planned for an outlay of $20,000 to $30,000, but the pressure of producing shows while under-resourced is something he and his artists are used to.

“There was never really an impetus to go even outside of Oakland,” Brake said, explaining that in the Bay Area, artists tend to follow a grassroots approach, involving small-scale collectives that aren’t sales-driven.

Having previously written press releases for pt.2, Harden knew the program well and felt that Sesay’s paintings—large-scale dusk-toned depictions of “the energy of blackness,” in the artist’s words—deserved a wider audience outside of Oakland.

Quinn Harrelson, a gallerist still in his early 20s who graduated from UCLA last year, also hadn’t planned to participate in a fair this year. The fair circuit hasn’t been a high priority because of the cost, he said, and his primary focus was on facilitating museum acquisitions.

“So much of what I do is determined by financial possibility. There are no collectors here [in Los Angeles],” Harrelson, the son of Cultured magazine founder Sarah Harrelson, said.

Frieze LA is Harrelson’s first fair. Though still in the early stages of building his program, it leans conceptual. He’ll be bringing work by Ser Serpas, a sculptor whose work is included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Harrelson became friends with Serpas as a teenager in Miami.

Serpas serves as a guide as Harrelson finds his footing on the West Coast. “She deals with the legacies of the artists that made Los Angeles relevant,” he said, seeing references to Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, and Kaari Upson in her work. They combine texture with what Harrelson describes as a “cold blooded conceptual rigor,” saying the era of artistic production feels like it’s no longer active. “I think that not a lot of art like that gets made anymore.”

Harrelson may be reaching toward LA’s art history, but Frieze’s Focus section is also oriented toward the art world’s future, where fashion and lifestyle brands are increasingly a factor. Emily Glazebrook, commercial director at Frieze, told ARTnews, “Focus isn’t oriented solely to facilitate sales, but rather as a space to blend art, content, and commerce.” Frieze is facilitating introductions between the section’s sponsor, the Italian streetwear brand Stone Island, and galleries in the section, in exchange for subsidies on their exhibitor fees. Meghan Gordon, the director of participating gallery OCHI, told ARTnews that Stone Island’s representatives recently visited their Washington Boulevard location to view Lilian Martinez’s work, which the gallery is bringing to Focus. Martinez runs her own brand, BFGF, producing art multiples.

“This is us introducing [Stone Island] to the contemporary art world,” Glazebrook said.

Such an introduction can be just the beginning of a larger process. Gordon said Martinez’s inclusion sparked interest in other gallery artists, leading to discussions about potential collaborations with the brand. Gordon said that Martinez’s portrayal of spaces, particularly those referencing the Yucca Valley, embody a Los Angeles lifestyle, where “leisure, pleasure, comfort, and luxury” are all touchpoints. She described Martinez’s brand as a “symbol of the attainable art object.”

Like that between galleries and fairs, the relationship between art and brands is yet another symbiotic one.

“Certain art fairs provide more visibility than New York Fashion Week,” Robert Liptak, the former creative director at RTA, a Los Angeles streetwear brand that has partnered with Frieze New York, told Vogue in May. He said that the fair franchise brought opportunities to be seen in proximity to other creatives.

This year’s LA fair is the first since media conglomerate Endeavor completed its buyout of the remaining 30 percent of Frieze this past May for $16.5 million, putting its total valuation at $55 million. The gambit for Endeavor is most clear in Los Angeles, where the company is well equipped, as Glazebrook put it, to heighten the fair’s blend of “art and entertainment.”

During the 1960s, a group of young artists working in South Korea emerged from a dark time. The Korean War had taken place less than a decade earlier, and the resulting unrest paved the way for a military coup in 1961 that brought dictator Park Chung Hee to power. Two years later, Park became president. By 1972, the state was monitoring speech and the media with a sweeping policy aimed at keeping the dictatorship intact.

These artists were making a living in a young republic fraught with tension between North Korea and Japan, the country’s former colonizer.

Reckoning with widespread upheaval, the artists set out to challenge the conservative status quo. They gravitated to video, performance, and installation. Some of these works have gone long unseen because they have been lost, despite efforts to conserve them; others have only recently gained an audience in the West amid a new interest in Korean art and its edgier periods.

A new exhibition devoted to these avant-garde South Koreans, “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s,” just opened at the Hammer Museu in Los Angeles, after previous runs at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. Its 80 works attest to the tumult the artists faced and the ways their practices mirrored it.

“Their lives were responding to this period of exceptional change,” said Kyung An, an associate curator at the Guggenheim who organized the show’s iteration in New York. “They were their art.”

ARTnews spoke to Kyung to learn more about the show.

ARTnews: What was the historical context for these works?

Kyung An: It’s a very recent history of trauma, and there’s also an engagement with a very unpopular military involvement in Vietnam. At the same time, it’s a period of rapid urbanization and modernization. You have beginnings of what you call a rise of a middle class. That all collided with a nationalist ideology and increasingly repressive censorship propagated by the state. Park Chung Hee tightened his grip on power. It’s a dark period—I think a lot of people would agree [that it lasted] until his assassination in 1979.

What was going on in the art world in South Korea at the time?

Gestural abstraction had really swept across the Korean art scene in the 1950s, and they were rebelling against that. They saw it as this conservative kind of art-making. They were searching for a new beginning that could reflect the sense of radicality that they had been sensing around themselves.

So, they were breaking away from the art infrastructure already established there, reacting to the abstract painting movement that was baked into their formal education.

If you look at experimental artists, they create their own platforms for exhibitions and create their own circulation of printed materials and journals. They organized their own seminars to discuss the findings of what they were reading about: what was happening contemporaneously outside in Europe, Japan, and America.

This was not organized in conjunction with, but away from, the centralizing force of the academies. The biggest centralizing force, I would say, was the Kukchön,anational annual juried exhibition. If you look at their published conversations, the artists’ writing, and even that of critics and historians at the time, was very critical of the kind of art that’s embraced by the national art exhibition. They were kind of moving away from it.

Why did you focus on young artists?

The radical thing was, when abstraction entered the academic discourse in the 1960s, it was the mainstream. But abstraction was no longer reflective of both the novelty and the newness that these artists were craving. So, this next generation of experimental artists and authors was fighting against that. For me, it took a long time to settle on an exhibition title. A lot of exhibitions in Korea that dealt with experimental art, really, and focused on the quality of rebellion. I kind of wanted to move away from that. A lot of artists and different art movements reflect that. I wanted to really set them apart.

You also wanted to show how the artists were coming of age.

They were in their 20s, and some were in their early 30s. Just to have that courage and acumen and belief in oneself to create something new, to desire something so strongly—I really admired that.

All the documentation of the performances from the 1960s and ’70s is in black-and-white, and a lot of the works are lost. There is a kind of nostalgia that comes, but I wanted these artworks to feel as contemporary as if they were made today, which is how they feel.

There were threats and other material restrictions to them even producing work and finding space to convene. Some artists were the target of censorship.

I think the material restrictions and challenges were real. Remember, it’s a country that’s coming out of war. A lot of the artists had their own businesses. The later generation tried to see them as this kind of elitist, bourgeois conceptual artists. But they were very connected with what was going on because they were working in the field.

The lack of infrastructure becomes part of the practice. Kim Kulim made important works in the face of these structural challenges.

He was very active as part of the Fourth Group. It was a very interdisciplinary group formed by not only artists, but also people in theater, fashion design, and film. They were only formally active for a very short time. They held a series of performances and public arenas that were often stopped by the police. Kim himself had professed to being interrogated with his family in Daegu, where he was harassed and trailed. These were real challenges that they faced, even within the art world. There’s a very famous performance that he did, Phenomenon to Traces (1970). He wanted to tie up the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea with fabric and bury the ends of it in the ground, almost like a tomb. After he did it, he was told to take it down after a day. It was not considered art. What he was saying was: this the death of the old museum. Museum authorities said to dismantle it.

He wasn’t the not the only one. Jung Kangja, another artist whose work is featured here, faced pushback from the press and state authorities.

She was one of the few women artists whose works have survived and are in the show. She had a solo exhibition in 1970 that was promptly shut down. Its venue, the national public information office, where a lot of artists held exhibitions, felt it had lent the space under the misassumption that it would host an exhibition of sculpture. She ended up doing a performance that it didn’t agree with.

She remains a very prominent and interesting figure. A lot of her work deals with this contradiction that I think women faced that at the time. We tend to focus more on her performances, but we should remember that she made a lot of installations and sculptures as well. It’s just that they didn’t survive.

In Kiss Me (1967), a gigantic brightly painted pair of lips, entrapped within these blocky rows of teeth is woman’s severed head and a rubber glove that you use for washing dishes. Women at the time were still forced to adhere to certain Confucian ideals of womanhood: be a good mother, a good wife, a good daughter, and be loyal to your family.

Kim Kulim’s 1969 experimental film The meaning of the 1/24 second figures prominently in the show. It features glimpses of Seoul, which was also a protagonist of sorts for these artists. What was it like to rewatch this film in preparation for this show?

He worked with a few other artists in the actual making of the of the film. For me, it’s like energy and life of Seoul at the time. It’s composed 224 frames individually spliced frames per second. It’s a real montage of the capital city in a state of flux. It juxtaposes images of progress—the newly built expressway, for example—with images of people living their daily lives. You see electrical towers; you see construction workers. What’s interesting about this film is that you can see that Seoul as a city caught between the past and the present. These shots are interspersed with displaced figures sleeping on the street, a very old gate fallen into ruin, an elderly woman selling flowers on the streets. The camera never stops, except for when you sometimes see some of the artists who helped make the work. A repeated figure that appears is a child, dressed in a suit. He interrupts the flow, staring straight into the camera. It’s almost like an interjection into the overstimulation of the city.

The film was supposed to premiere in July 1969. But due to technical difficulties, it was canceled. Kim ended up projected slides of images from it onto his own body.

What happened to the artworks that no longer exist?

A lot of the works don’t exist anymore because when artists moved, they tended to get rid of them. We found a lot of the work from the ’60s really difficult to locate. Thankfully, we had images of them archival materials that indicated what they look like. A general curatorial rule was that we would not fabricate a work for the exhibition.

Lee Kun-Yong, who is now in his early 80s, is another big figure in the show. Logic of Hands, from 1975, shows Lee in four separate black-and-white frames, posing with his hands in different gestures. What made him so critical?

His practice was very diverse. He developed performance-based works that use the body as a way to understand one’s relationship with the surrounding world. In the show, we wanted to really focus on what he called “events-logical.” This is kind of exemplary of his performance work, where the repetition of everyday gestures such mark-making, counting, walking, and standing are made within a particular logical parameter. He removes them from their social conventions.

I think what’s interesting is that this work was created at the height of an authoritarian regime where the state not only affected one’s ideological routes, but also the physical realm, too. Restrictions just became part of your daily life. Lee was never overtly political, but it’s interesting to see these works within that context.

You said that performance doesn’t enter the discourse until the late 1970s to the early 80s. It starts off with happenings. Disappearance, staged in 1973 by Lee Kang-So at Myeongdong Gallery in Seoul, was one of them.

Lee took tables from a local bar he frequented, with cigarette marks or rings left from drinking glasses. The furniture itself embodied all of what was left behind. He loved that the surfaces of the furniture seemed to emit the life of the other people who touched and interacted with those objects. But then they were subsequently lost. I would say he did not know what was happening internationally at the time, with other happenings in New York. If you look at photos, it’s all friends, some strangers, some family members. This is a real reflection on like the fleeting experience of everyday life.

You mean that it came out of his experience, that he wasn’t necessarily reacting to what was happening with art collectives abroad? It wasn’t until 1975 that it was shown publicly.

This was the time of a dictatorship. In 1972, the Yushin Constitution, which banned large gatherings, had just been announced. It closed universities and [introduced] a period of censorship. Disappearance was meant to create a space where artists and thinkers could come together and converse freely. I think that was a very radical move.

The engraved shield is part of a vast cache of royal, religious, and military artifacts looted during the 1868 Battle of Maqdala, and is now headed to auction in the UK.

The battle began when British forces seized a compound of the Coptic Christian Emperor Tewodros II in what was then known as Abyssinia. Released British hostages and British forces looted sites in the northern village where Tewodros was based, taking the objects back to the UK, where many were later circulated for sale.

According to the Art Newspaper, which first reported the news, Abebaw Ayalew, director general of the Ethiopian Heritage Authority, penned a letter to the UK auction house Anderson & Garland calling for the sale to be stopped. In that letter, Ayalew said the shield had been “wrongfully acquired.”

In a statement provided to the Telegraph, a restitution committee overseen by Ethiopia’s National Heritage agency, a branch of the country’s tourism board, labeled the sale as “inappropriate and immoral.” The group is calling for the auction house to restitute the shield to Ethiopian officials so that it can be placed on public display in the country.

The shield, engraved with the phrase “Magdala April 13, 1868” and crafted from animal hide and metal, is set to be auctioned this week with a price estimate of £800–£1,200 ($1,000–$1,500). The auction will take place at the house’s Newcastle location, where the object is scheduled to be offered alongside a collection of other military antiques on Thursday.

In a cataloging note, the house said the shield was taken in 1868 during “the destruction of Tewodros’ artillery and the burning of Magdala as retribution.” The company did not disclose the shield’s provenance record or details around its current owner.

This call from Ethiopian officials is part of a larger project of recovering Maqdala artifacts held in international museums and private collections. In September 2021, Ethiopia successfully reclaimed a trove of objects linked to the Maqdala raid from the Scheherazade Foundation, a private British nonprofit, in what was seen by repatriation advocates at the time as one of the most significant returns of looted material to an African nation.

The order for the return of Schiele’s Russian War Prisoner (1916) is the latest in a string of disputes carried out by the heirs of the Austrian Jewish collector and cabaret performer Fritz Grünbaum. His surviving relatives are seeking to recover 80 works dispersed from Grünbaum’s collection before he was imprisoned in 1938 and forced to relinquish his assets to Third Reich officials. He died in the Dachau concentration camp in 1941.

Various works from the collection, which included 81 Schieles, circulated among art dealers and entered museum collections in Europe after his death. Recorded sales of the works after Grünbaum’s death date back to 1956, when a Swiss art dealer, Eberhard Kornfeld, offered 63 of them for private sale, after acquiring them from Grünbaum’s relative, Mathilde Lukacs-Herzl.

Heirs have disputed the legality of Kornfeld’s transactions with Lukacs-Herzel. In the late 1990s, Kornfeld, who died in August 2023 at the age of 99, was questioned about the sale and in 2011, during a case involving another Schiele work owned by Grünbaum, a federal court in Manhattan found Kornfeld’s account credible and ruled the collection had not been “looted” by Nazis, but sold legally by his surviving relatives.

The museum has denied the order’s arguments that the work was looted, saying that it has researched the work extensively, citing the 2011 ruling that the Grunbaum collection was sold legally as evidence of its rightful ownership.

“Federal court has explicitly ruled that the Grünbaum’s Schiele art collection was “not looted” and “remained in the Grünbaum family’s possession” and was sold by Fritz Grünbaum’s sister-in-law Mathilde Lukacs in 1956,” Megan Michienzi, executive director of public affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago, said in a statement to ARTnews. “If we had this work unlawfully, we would return it, but that is not the case here.”

The 160-page order, filed in Manhattan on February 22, details the trafficking of artworks illegally procured by Nazis to the United States. The argument, penned by Matthew Bogdanos, a New York assistant district attorney, and reviewed by ARTnews, centers Kornfeld, the deceased operator of a Swiss auction house, and Otto Kallir, the owner of a New York gallery who died in 1978, as parties in a criminal network. The state argues the two concealed details around Nazi-inventoried art sales as part of their business dealings.

The document states the work’s current value is $1.25 million.

In September, after Manhattan authorities first secured a warrant to recover the artwork, the Art Institute requested a seizure-in-place, allowing the work to be kept in the museum for a period of 60 days. Prosecutors granted an extension ahead of the latest order, giving the museum a several-month window to respond ahead of an oral argument hearing scheduled to take place this spring. The date of the oral argument has not yet been disclosed.

Grünbaum’s heirs filed a previous civil suit over Russian War Prisoner in a Southern District New York court, but were unsuccessful in getting the work restituted. The Art Institute litigated the claim in a federal court, where a judge ruled in its favor in November 2023. 

The Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the district attorney’s officially opened its investigation into the fate of the collection in December 2022, and has since seized 10 Schiele drawings from various museums and private collections. Seven of those works were returned in September 2023.

Event, a large-scale canvas produced between 2004 and 2007, will be offered during a New York evening sale dedicated to work made during the 20th and 21st centuries. If the work reaches its low estimate, its sale will set a new record for Marden.

Born in Knoxville, New York, Marden managed studios in Hydra, Marrakesh, Nevis, Tivoli, and Manhattan until his death. Event is part of the series “The Propitious Garden of Plane Image,” a group of six paintings that contain his signature squiggled forms.

Similar works brought him fame in New York and led to career retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum in 1975 and the Museum of Modern Art in 2006.

Event left Marden’s New York studio in 2007, when it was acquired by a private collector, who never lent the work to an exhibition where it could be displayed publicly.

Ahead of the sale, the canvas will go on view during the opening days of the 17th edition of Art Dubai, a major fair in the Middle East, where it will be exhibited to the public for the first time since Marden completed it 17 years ago.

The May sale will take place in the same week as other evening sales at competing auction houses, Sotheby’s and Phillips.

Marden’s current record stands at $30.9 million, set by the sale of Complements (2004–7) at Christie’s in 2020.

The British designer Erdem Moralioglu used the museum’s Duveen gallery, where the Parthenon Marbles are on permanent display, to launch the autumn winter 2024 collection of his namesake label Erdem. Photographs of the runway show, scheduled in the opening days of fashion week in the UK capital, circulated on Saturday.

For the collection, according to the label’s show notes, Moralioglu used American-born Greek soprano Maria Callas and her portrayal in the Greek tragic opera Medea, as reference, tapping the marbles as the show’s setting for its links to Athenian culture.

“By organizing a fashion show in the halls where the Parthenon Sculptures are exhibited, the British Museum, once again, proves its zero respect for the masterpieces of Pheidias,” Mendoni, the Greek minister, said in a statement. “The directors of the British Museum trivialize and insult not only the monument but also the universal values that it transmits.”

Mendoni’s critique of the museum continues a centuries-long dispute by cultural experts and government officials over whether the Parthenon Marbles should be returned to Greece or stay in the collection of the British Museum, where they have been housed since 1832. The sculptures entered the museum’s collection in the early 19th century after British diplomat Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin, took portions of the Parthenon temple in Athens and brought them to England.

Greek officials have argued that the marbles were stolen, denying the UK’s claims that they were acquired legally. For decades, the museum has relied on a 1963 law prohibiting British museums from deaccessioning culturally significant objects, as the reason for not repatriating the marble monument to Greece.

In 2023 tensions between the two countries over the contested works continued to escalate. In January of last year, Mendoni failed to negotiate a long-term loan agreement with the British Museum. Subsequently, in November, the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak canceled a planned meeting with the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to discuss a potential resolution.

By December, Mendoni pressed for the monument’s return, promising a trade agreement that would ensure the vacant gallery space where the marbles are located would be able to continue to display Greek antiquities. In a statement, Mendoni remained firm on Greece’s position, saying it doesn’t recognize the British Museum’s “jurisdiction, possession, and ownership” of the marbles.

On January 28, the organization updated its policies to include a new section titled “Considering Reputational Risk,” which encourages institutions not to voice “activist” sentiments.

Funding recipients are urged against “activity that might be considered overtly political or activist and goes beyond your company’s core purpose and partnerships with organisations that might be perceived as being in conflict with the purposes of public funding of culture.”

A range of authors and filmmakers, including Matt Haig, Asif Kapadia and Nikita Gill, have expressed concern online over these new policies. In a post on X, Haig called the implications of these new guidelines “scary.”

After facing criticism online, ACE clarified its position, publishing a statement on Wednesday in which the organization said it supports free speech. “We wanted to clarify the reason for the changes we made, and – for the absolute avoidance of doubt – our position on freedom of expression, for artists and organisations,” ACE said.

“The context in which artists and organisations are currently working is more polarised than ever before, and that conversations, particularly on social media, can lack nuance,” it added. The group argued that the guidance aimed to set out a series of steps for organizations to “mitigate” activities that “might be viewed as controversial.”

In the statement, ACE also indicated that the latest guidelines were directed at leaders in cultural institutions, particularly those in top positions, who are subject to higher levels of public scrutiny. It emphasized that individuals such as artistic directors “might have their personal positions taken to be those of the wider organization.”

The talk was between director James Snyder and Cherkassky. Protestors who said they were “anti-Zionist Jews” claimed that Cherkassky’s exhibition was “imperial propaganda” and that the museum’s programming was a means to “manufacture consent for genocide.”

Cherkassky’s show, which opened in December and runs through mid-March, features 12 works on paper that depict the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel. Around 1,200 people were killed in the attack, and more than 200 hostages were taken.

A video posted to Instagram by the group Writers Against the War on Gaza appears to capture Monday’s protest, during which the demonstrators said, speaking in unison, “As cultural workers, as anti-Zionist Jews of conscience, as New York City residents, we implore you to confront the reality.”

In the video, security guards can then be seen struggling to remove activists mid-chant. Audience members can be heard shouting “antisemite” at the protestors, booing, and tearing scripts from activists’ hands. Some attendees applaud after the protestors are removed.

Flyers distributed in the talk’s auditorium featured a cartoon titled The Zionist Artist at Work (2024), depicting an artist painting a missile. Text on the leaflet’s back page further condemned the institution’s leadership, claiming the museum “propagates the Zionist tropes and IOF (Israel Occupation Forces) propaganda upon which the current genocide of Palestinians hinges.”

The Jewish Museum and Cherkassky did not immediately respond to ARTnews’s requests for comment.

The protest was the latest in a series of pro-Palestine demonstrations in New York, with ones held inside the Museum of Modern Art and in front of the Brooklyn Museum over the weekend. Both protests intended to raise awareness for the killing of around 28,000 Gazans since October 7, according to the local health ministry.

Meanwhile, an open letter signed by more than 100 employees from institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum is circulating. That letter criticizes their workplaces for a “disgraceful silence” regarding the war in Gaza.

According to Hyperallergic, one employee resigned over the Cherkassky exhibition at the Jewish Museum. Hyperallergic reported that that employee was present at the demonstration, and that he called the installation “a pro-war show.” ARTnews could not independently confirm this.

Cherkassky, in a separate interview, has defended the museum’s interest in showing the “Israeli perspective.”

The Jewish Museum is among the few institutions based in New York to have publicly responded to the Hamas attack. On October 8, the museum issued a statement saying that it “condemns the violent terrorist assaults by Hamas against Israeli citizens” and that its staff “stand[s] with the people of Israel.”

Cherkassky was among those who signed an open letter in Erev Rav written as a response to another open letter published by Artforum that called for a ceasefire in Gaza and initially did not mention the October 7 Hamas attack; the Erev Rav letter was critical of this omission. When Cherkassky posted to Instagram that she had signed the Erev Rav letter, she referred to the other letter’s signatories as “ignorant bitches who have no clue about what is going on.”