COMMENTS ON THE ART MARKET
WELCOME TO THE JULY 2026 EDITION OF COMMENTS ON THE ART MARKET
VOLUME 307
Happy 250th Birthday, America!
As we celebrate 250 years of American independence, we hope you're enjoying the holiday with family, friends, and a little time to slow down. Before the fireworks begin, we wanted to share what's coming up this month at the gallery — the latest art market trends and news, along with a few exceptional new arrivals that have recently found their way to us.
July has arrived, and with it comes an exciting season for the gallery.
We are delighted to welcome Madeline Kent to the team as our summer intern. Maddie is currently pursuing her Master of Arts degree at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. In just a few short weeks, she has immersed herself in every aspect of gallery life and has been eager to learn more about the art market from the gallery’s perspective. Her enthusiasm, curiosity, and willingness to jump in wherever needed have already made her a wonderful addition to our team. Throughout the summer, she’ll be assisting with exhibition planning, installations, research, and the gallery’s day-to-day operations. If you call us over the next few months, chances are Maddie will be the friendly voice answering the phone - so please join us in giving her a warm welcome!
July is also one of our busiest travel months, as the summer art fair season gets underway. This year, the Seattle Art Fair and the Newport Show fall on the same weekend, so we’ll split up to cover both events. Lance and I will be heading west to Seattle, while Amy, Neil, and Nathan make the scenic drive to Newport.
With much of our team on the road, the gallery will be closed from Monday, July 20, through Sunday, July 26, and will reopen Tuesday, July 28. We’ll continue monitoring emails throughout the week, though responses may be slightly delayed.
Finally, as we celebrate Independence Day, we’d like to wish all of our clients, artists, collectors, and friends a happy, safe, and relaxing Fourth of July weekend. We hope you have the chance to spend time with family and friends, enjoy the holiday, and perhaps even discover a little art along the way.
Thank you, as always, for your continued support. We look forward to sharing an exciting month with you.
THE ECONOMIC CANVAS
We’re now halfway through 2026, and surprisingly, Wall Street continues to thrive despite inflation, ongoing conflicts, and concerns about an AI bubble. This isn’t exactly new information. Inflation has seen a resurgence over the past few months – the most recent data puts it at over 4% in May. Global energy supplies have also been disrupted, affecting both gas prices and energy bills. Sure, there’s been some wild volatility, but we keep reaching new all-time highs.
To be fair, June wasn’t particularly strong for the markets; the S&P dipped about 1%, and the Nasdaq fell by 2.8%. However, looking at the bigger picture, the Dow rose roughly 9% in the first half of the year, marking its best start since 2021. The S&P is up 9.6%, while the Nasdaq has outperformed both with a 12% increase. It’s also worth mentioning the Russell 2000, which tracks around 2,000 small-cap US companies… it is experiencing its best start to a year since 1991, boasting a nearly 22% gain!
When taking a closer look, we’re seeing some mixed signals… two major tech companies had a difficult month. Microsoft dropped about 17% in June – its worst month since the dot-com bubble in 2000. Oracle dropped off a cliff, shedding 35% of its value, making it the company’s worst month since 1990. Some investors seem to be adopting a cautious approach – I’ve read reports of analysts predicting a potential 10-20% decline in the coming months. Meanwhile, big banks are raising their year-end target forecasts.
Now before we move on, I feel compelled to highlight an absurdity from this past month… the SpaceX IPO. Perhaps you’ve heard about some of this already, but Nasdaq aggressively altered its own listing and index seasoning rules to accommodate the company – an index seasoning period is a mandatory waiting time an IPO must trade on a public exchange before it becomes eligible for inclusion in an index. Nasdaq reduced that waiting period from 3 months to just 15 days. For reference, S&P maintains a traditional 12-month seasoning period for the S&P500. Then there was the elimination of the 10% minimum public float… previously, at least 10% of the total shares needed to be available for public trading, but SpaceX only released between 4% and 4.2%, meaning Nasdaq also scrapped this long-standing requirement. Investigative reporting shows that Nasdaq finalized these changes on March 30, 2026, just one day before SpaceX filed its IPO. So what, what’s the big deal? Well, when a company is listed on the Nasdaq (or any major index fund), it receives broad unconditional support – mutual funds that mirror indexes are forced to buy the stock to include in their portfolios; think pension funds and retirement accounts. And when the stock has not yet stabilized, you expose risk-avoidant investors to highly risky assets. At a baseline, regardless of your feelings on SpaceX, this was a terrible precedent to set, and continues to reinforce the idea that in America, you can do what you want if you have enough money. Ok, rant over… moving on.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag with currencies and commodities… both the Pound and Euro weakened relative to the dollar; down 1.4% and 2%, respectively. With that, as expected, the US Dollar closes out the first half of the year in a positive direction… the DXY (US Dollar Index) was up about 2.4% in June. Gold prices saw a significant correction… after hitting record-highs earlier this year, June experienced a 12% slide, dropping prices below $4,000 an ounce. Crude has also come down quite a bit… after stubbornly hovering in the $100/barrel range for the past few months, prices have finally relented – it’s now fallen below $70/barrel; giving up more than 20% in June. While it’s welcome relief for energy prices, the energy sector hates volatility like this as they rely on predictable, long-term pricing models for sector stability.
Over in the Cryptoarena, we saw a bloodbath… everything is down and down bad. Bitcoin has fallen from glory – it gave up more than 20% of its value last month, dipping below $60K. The last time that happened was nearly 2 years ago! Ethereum also had a sizable slide in June, shedding 21.7% as it fluctuates in the $1,500-1,700 range… prior to June, it was holding strong above the $2k threshold, and at the start of the year it was well above $3k. Litecoin and XRP experienced similar movements, turning in 19.5% and 22% losses in June, respectively. And let’s not forget Dogecoin, which fared the worst – down 28.2%. Yikes!
As we turn to the second half of 2026, it’s anything but a clear picture ahead. Nothing makes sense anymore. Stock prices are detached from their fundamentals. Rules don’t matter. AI is taking over the world. NYC is melting in a heatwave. Somebody send help.
Oh... and Happy Fourth of July!
-Lance
THE ART MARKET
At Auction
Christie’s Old Masters & 19th Century Paintings
On Tuesday, June 2nd, Christie’s New York hosted their Old Masters & 19th Century Paintings auction. The expected star of the sale was a bust-length portrait attributed to El Greco. While the painting cannot be definitively attributed to the Greek-born Spanish painter, the composition contains some of his hallmarks. Christie’s specialists note that one eye is rendered in sharper definition than the other, indicating an “asymmetric finish that recurs across El Greco‘s portraits of the late 1570s to 1580s.” The painting first appears on the record in 1970, when the London art restorer John Brealey sent a photograph of the work to the director of the Prado Museum, Xavier de Salas. The work had not been restored, and a chain around the subject’s neck, added at a later date, was visible. Based solely on the photograph, de Salas and another El Greco expert were unable to fully attribute the painting to the artist. However, other specialists have examined the painting in person and reached more positive conclusions. The work was given an estimate range of $500K to $700K. The work ended up selling for its low estimate, or approximately $635K w/p.
A painting of Mary Magdalene kneeling in front of a crucifix with a whip in her hand ready to strike herself.The Penitent Magdalene by Guercino
Next up was a religious work by the Baroque painter Guercino. The Penitent Magdalene depicts Mary Magdalene in a sort of cave, popularly thought to be a grotto at Sainte-Baume in southern France, where she spent the last thirty years of her life. She kneels before a crucifix while holding a knotted cord typically used for self-flagellation. The painting was originally commissioned sometime between 1648 and 1651 by the papal ambassador to Bologna, Cardinal Fabrizio Savelli. By the nineteenth century, it had reached England, where it circulated among several private collections before coming into the possession of Macclesfield Borough Council in the county of Cheshire. The council put it up for auction at Sotheby’s London, where it was purchased by the individual who consigned it to Christie’s this time. The work is part of a series of five religious paintings Cardinal Savelli commissioned from Guercino during his time in Bologna. Estimated to sell for no more than $180K, Guercino’s Penitent Magdalene exceeded its estimate, selling for $300K (or $381K w/p).
A bust-length portrait of a Catholic cardinalPortrait of Cardinal Giacomo Sannesio by Guido Reni
From one Bolognese Baroque master to another, the third-place spot went to Guido Reni’s portrait of Cardinal Giacomo Sannesio. Reni is primarily known for his religious and mythological paintings, making his portraiture rather rare. The 1609 painting offered at Christie’s is, according to specialists, the only verified portrait created by the artist during his time living and working in Rome between 1601 and 1614. The painting has mainly remained in private collections, appearing at auction only once, at Sotheby’s Old Master Paintings auction in December 2004. It was not fully attributed to Reni at the time, with the artist listed only as “Italian School”. It was given a high estimate of £8K, with the final price realized coming out to £26.4K w/p. Following the 2004 auction, German art historian Erich Schleier found a copy of the painting in the town hall of the cardinal’s hometown of Belforte del Chienti, which identified the subject as Sannesio. With the authorship confirmed, this time around the portrait secured an estimate range of $100K to $150K.
Sharing the third-place spot with the Reni was a more modern work by an artist whose paintings we’ve dealt with before. The American Clipper Ship ‘Rainbow’ – Sunset by the British maritime painter Montague Dawson is an example of the artist’s proclivity for recreating historic sailing ships in their prime. The titular vessel, the Rainbow, was built in 1845 for shipping cargo to and from China. She had a short but esteemed career, setting speed records by making the trip from Guangzhou to New York in seventy-seven days. On her fifth voyage in 1848, she left New York heading to Valparaíso, Chile. However, she disappeared at sea, the assumption being that she sank somewhere around Cape Horn. It is not known when Dawson created this painting, but it eventually found its way to the collection of New York governor Thomas Dewey. The Dawson ended up being one of Tuesday’s surprises, shattering its $80K high estimate and selling for the same price as the Reni portrait at $280K (or $355.6K w/p).
A painting of a large sailing ship out on the ocean with a sunset behind it.The American Clipper Ship ‘Rainbow’ – Sunset by Montague Dawson
Of course, the auction was not without its fair share of surprises. Ten of the one hundred twenty-eight available lots sold for at least double their high pre-sale estimates. Some of the more notable surprises included a floral still-life by the nineteenth-century French painter Jean Benner (est. $10K to $15K; hammer $65K), Elijah and the Angel by the seventeenth-century Neapolitan painter Francesco Glielmo (est. $15K to $20K; hammer $90K), and a moonlit Dutch landscape by Aert van der Neer (est. $15K to $20K; hammer $95K). Thankfully, these successes compensated for some of the high-value lots that went unsold. Another Guercino painting, The Blessed Andrea Dotti of Sansepolcro, Reading a Book, initially received a pre-sale estimate of $70K to $100K, yet ultimately failed to garner enough attention during the auction. Similarly, a trompe l’oeil work by Franciscus Gysbrechts, valued at between $100K and $150K, was also bought in.
Of the one hundred twenty-eight available lots, twenty-six sold within their estimates, giving Christie’s specialists a 20% accuracy rate. An additional forty lots (31%) sold above estimate, while thirty-eight (30%) sold below. This left twenty-four lots unsold, giving the auction a 81% sell-through rate. Against a pre-sale total low estimate of $4.58 million, the entire sale brought in $5.48 million, or $6.96 million w/p.
Mitsuru Watanabe Shines at Christie’s
When one of the historical artists we specialize in has a painting come up at auction, we pay extra attention to the results. It offers a bit of a litmus test of the market for their works. However, when one of our contemporary artists comes up at auction, that’s always an extra special occasion. And this past Friday, Mitsuru Watanabe proved his continuing popularity with buyers when his Naoko Explores the Boss’s Hell smashed its presale estimate at Christie’s Hong Kong during their 20th/21st Century sale.
In his work, Watanabe draws on elements from Old Master and nineteenth-century paintings, transforming them with incredibly personal additions. Most notably, he often includes his children Naoko and Shiro in his paintings, inserting them into northern Renaissance masterworks or the paintings of Henri Rousseau.
Naoko Explores the Boss’s Hell uses imagery taken from the central panel of The Last Judgment, a triptych by the Netherlandish Renaissance painter Hironymous Bosch (we believe the title given by Christie’s is an error, and that it should be Bosch’s Hell). In the background, the damned are tortured in an innumerable number of creative ways: impaled, burned, hacked to pieces, force-fed, and other ways that are representative of the sins they committed in life. Meanwhile, Naoko wanders past the viewer’s perspective atop a giant pink teddy bear, which she is operating via switches and levers. She breaks the fourth wall and flashes a peace sign to the viewer. Her presence drastically conflicts with the scenes of torture behind her. The subject and the background only serve to reinforce the former’s innocent nature and the latter’s disturbing nature.
Watanabe has been doing incredibly well in the Asian market. Of the roughly fifty Watanabe paintings sold at auction in the last five years, only two have gone unsold. The remaining works have consistently met or exceeded their estimate ranges, with 70% selling above their high estimates. So the work offered in Hong Kong on Friday was not an exception but rather the norm for the market for Watanabe’s paintings. Christie’s specialists expected the painting to sell for no more than HK$100K. However, several interested parties drove the final price beyond double that number, with the hammer coming down at HK$260K, or HK$330.2K w/p (or $42.1K w/p).
The Lewis Collection at Sotheby’s London
On Wednesday, June 24th, Sotheby’s hosted a prelude to their Modern & Contemporary evening sale featuring pieces from the collection of British businessman Joe Lewis. With his daughter Vivienne, Lewis assembled a collection estimated at a billion dollars, consisting mainly of nineteenth- and twentieth-century works by modern masters such as Caillebotte, Degas, Schiele, and Bacon.
There was no doubt that the evening’s star would be one of the two works by Amedeo Modigliani. Nu assis au collier was created around 1918 and passed through several private collections before Lewis purchased the work at Christie’s in May 1985. Sotheby’s specialists describe the work as “one of the most subtle and intimate” of the artist’s female nudes. Despite being an incredibly modern take on the subject, Modigliani also shows his admiration for the past masters. The pose is reminiscent of the Venus pudica, or the modest Venus, in which the subject is nude yet attempts to cover herself with her arms and hands, a motif originating in classical sculpture and later emulated by Botticelli, Rubens, and Manet. The woman also wears a coral necklace, similar to those worn in several works of Renaissance portraiture. The work offered at Sotheby’s is one of three paintings depicting the same subject in different poses; one is at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and Oberlin College owns the other. Despite failing to reach its £45 million estimate, the Modigliani maintained its title as the sale’s star, achieving a final bid of £41.5 million (or £48.2 million / $54.6 million w/p). This places it in the top ten most expensive works by the artist ever sold at auction, and the most expensive Modigliani painting sold since his 1919 portrait Elvire en buste sold at Sotheby’s Paris last October for €26.98 million w/p.
A portrait of a young woman in white and purple dress.Portrait of Gertrud Loew by Gustav Klimt
The second place lot, one of three with a minimum estimate exceeding £20 million, was Portrait of Gertrud Loew by Gustav Klimt. The Loew family was incredibly important to Klimt’s career and to the Vienna Secession in general as prominent collectors. Painted in 1902 when the subject was nineteen years old, specialists believe the portrait was commissioned by the sitter’s mother, Sophie, as a gift for her father, Dr. Anton Loew. The colors used seem rather monochromatic, reminiscent of James McNeill Whistler’s 1862 portrait popularly known as Symphony in White. However, in the 1890s and into the 1900s, Klimt often employed a reserved color palette, especially in his portraits. This can be seen in similar paintings of Serena Pulitzer Lederer and Hermine Gallia. Bidding lasted just over six minutes. The painting exceeded its £30 million high estimate, with Oliver Barker bringing the hammer down at £31 million (or £36.16 million / $40.9 million w/p).
And finally, for something slightly more recent, the third-place lot that evening was Sleeping by the Lion Carpet by Lucian Freud. The painting shows a corpulent nude woman reclining in a leather chair. Freud created several nude paintings of this particular subject, a woman named Sue Tilley, whom he used as a model from 1993 to 1996. For a portrait, the work is enormous, slightly larger than life-size, measuring nearly seven-and-a-half feet by four feet. Freud frequently returned to nude figure painting throughout his career, with many, including the specialists at Sotheby’s, describing the Tilley paintings as “the pinnacle of this endeavor, the zenith of his engagement with the trope.” The art critic Martin Gayford wrote of the Tilley portraits, “A body as extreme as this gives [Freud] painterly scope that other bodies might not offer. If a nude of ordinary proportions might be likened to a parish church, Sue is a whole baroque cathedral of flesh, real and fantastic at the same time (just as the rug in the background is simultaneously prosaic and exotic)”. The painting is both the Venus of Willendorf and Picasso’s La Rêve. There was considerable interest in the piece on Wednesday evening, with several interested parties bidding through the phone banks. The hammer eventually came down right on the £25 million low estimate (or £29.26 million / $33.1 million w/p), making it the fifth most expensive work by the artist ever to sell at auction. Another one of the Tilley paintings, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, sits right above it in the number four position, having sold at Christie’s New York in May 2008 for $33.6 million w/p.
A portrait of a large, nude woman sleeping in a leather chair with a carpet hanging in the background.Sleeping by the Lion Carpet by Lucian Freud
In these blue-chip, single-collector sales, it’s very rare that any lot sells for anywhere close to double its high estimate. But in the Lewis collection, there was one work that proved so popular that it achieved over triple what Sotheby’s initially expected. La Belle promenade by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte features one of the artist’s most iconic motifs: the man in the bowler hat. Most famously seen in the 1964 painting Son of Man, the figure was also extensively used in a series in which his silhouette offers a window onto an image or scene against an unrelated background. In the work offered at Sotheby’s, the silhouette features a bright, cloudy sky, which stands in contrast to the deep, verdant background. Skies, stone walls, and bells are also elements that Magritte frequently included in his work. The combination of all these motifs makes it unsurprising that the painting did very well on Wednesday evening, surpassing the £4 million high estimate and hammering at £13.5 million (or £16 million / $18.15 million w/p).
Of the twenty-five lots that crossed the block on Wednesday, eight sold within their estimates, giving Sotheby’s specialists a 32% accuracy rate. An additional twelve lots (52%) sold above their estimates, while three (12%) sold below. Only a single lot, Edgar Degas’s 1880 painting La Loge, went unsold, giving the auction a 96% sell-through rate. The auction’s success led to an impressive total of £249.35 million (or £296.32 million / $335.34 million w/p), just shy of the £253.6 million pre-sale high estimate. This makes the Lewis collection one of the most expensive sales of the year, behind the Newhouse Collection and the 20th Century Evening Sale at Christie’s on May 18th. It is also the most expensive single-collector auction ever sold in Europe.
Beyond the Frame
Exhibitions, discoveries, and cultural commentary
First-Edition Wuthering Heights Appears at Christie’s
Those interested in revisiting Wuthering Heights following the recent film adaptation may wish to take note of the Christie’s auction on June 30th, The Exceptional Sale: Masterworks Across Cultures, which included many significant works of art. Among the lots was a first edition copy of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in its original binding.
This marked the first time that a textually complete first edition of Brontë’s acclaimed novel in its original binding has come to auction since 1908. Most copies from the first print run have since been rebound for private and public collections, making this an exceptional find for any rare-book collector. While the exact size of the first edition print run is unknown, Charlotte Brontë suggested it numbered no more than 250 copies. This first edition offered at Christie’s comprises two well-read volumes of Wuthering Heights, together with a third volume containing an immaculate copy of Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë.
The first edition was rushed into print in December 1847 by Emily Brontë’s publisher, Thomas Cautley Newby, following the immediate and resounding success of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, published by the rival house Smith, Elder & Co. in October 1847. Although Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey had both been accepted for publication earlier, Jane Eyre reached the printers first. Newby was content to let the public believe that Charlotte was also the author of Wuthering Heights. Indeed, the title page of the first-edition copy held at the Bodleian Library states that the text was written “by the author of Jane Eyre.” This confusion was compounded by the sisters’ shared use of male noms de plume to circumvent the gender prejudices of the Victorian era, with Charlotte writing as Currer Bell, Emily as Ellis Bell, and Anne as Acton Bell.
The edition offered at Christie’s is bound in diagonally-ribbed green-grey cloth, its cover stamped with floral patterns and arabesques, and its spine lettered in gilt. Copies surviving in the publisher’s original full-cloth binding represent the rarest state of the first edition, with at least five variants recorded. By contrast, copies intended for circulating libraries were bound in boards backed with cloth, and are considerably more common than full-cloth copies such as this one. The full-cloth bindings themselves are distinguished from one another by variations in cover color, the direction of the cloth’s diagonal ribbing, the central stamp on the cover, the number of blind-stamped lines in the border, and the style of gilt lettering on the spine. A first edition gifted to the University of Leeds in 2022, for instance, is bound in maroon cloth; like many other known variants, it has pale yellow endpapers, a four-line border, diamond-shaped and plain-ruled bands on the spine, and a gilt title. By contrast, the present copy is distinguished by the particular shape of its blind-stamped arabesque markings, the inclusion of blind-stamped corners, its green-grey cloth, and the absence of a full stop after the volume number on the spine.
Copies of this first edition are sought after by collectors not only for their rarity but also for the numerous spelling and grammatical errors they contain. Emily and Anne had both died from tuberculosis in 1848 and 1849, respectively. Their surviving sister, Charlotte, republished Wuthering Heights in 1850 with the errors corrected and an added preface.
Only five other copies are known to survive in the publisher’s full-cloth binding: one each at the University of Leeds, the University of Oxford, and the British Library; one at Princeton University, annotated by Anne Brontë; and one in a private collection, last sold by Christie’s in December 2009. This one was Charlotte Brontë’s own copy, annotated with her marked editorial changes, yet unfortunately missing some pages.
A rebound first-edition copy of Wuthering Heights was sold by Christie’s London in July 2020; estimated at £70K to £100K, it realized £87.5K w/p. Consigned by the trustees of an undisclosed aristocratic private collection, the present copy is complete, unrebound, and in its original publisher’s binding. Christie’s estimated the book to sell for £400K to £600K ($540K to $800K). It ended up exceeding specialists’ expectations, hammering at £950K (or £1.21 million / $1.6 million w/p).
by Madeleine Kent
Giacometti in the Temple
Last Friday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened a small new exhibition that places two very different artworks in the same space: several sculptures by the twentieth-century Swiss master Alberto Giacometti and the museum’s Roman-era Egyptian temple.
Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur explores the two-thousand-year dialogue between ancient Egyptian art and Giacometti’s work. Alongside non-Western art, ancient art exercised a substantial influence on modernism. Ancient reliefs excavated just outside Seville became as great an inspiration for Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as African masks. This becomes apparent for Giacometti’s work in the presence of an ancient temple complex.
The seventeen bronze and plaster sculptures on display, all but three of them being loans from the Fondation Giacometti in Paris, have been placed around the temple in the Metropolitan Museum’s Egyptian wing. While living and working in Italy and France, Giacometti felt drawn to ancient Egyptian sculpture, frequently visiting museums to see examples. The artist’s colleagues also linked his work to Egyptian sculpture, with Jean Genet comparing some of Giacometti’s work to sculptures of Osiris at the Louvre. The Met curators’ placement of these works in relation to the temple makes the influence of ancient art more apparent to the casual museum-goer. Placing a work from the artist’s Walking Woman series between the columns of the main temple entrance might evoke the aesthetics of Fourth Dynasty sculpture. In fact, this influence is so apparent that museum curators did not necessarily need to place Giacometti’s works in the temple complex. They could have just as easily placed the sculptures in the ancient Greek wing and conveyed the same message. A four-thousand-year-old marble figure from the Cyclades islands could easily be mistaken for a twentieth-century work of modernist sculpture.
A bronze sculpture of a walking man rendered in a rough, craggy mannerAn example from Giacometti’s Walking Man series, one of which is on display at the Temple of Dendur
Writing for ArtNews, Ben Davis further notes that the sculptures’ placement alongside the ancient structures not only highlights this dialogue but also shapes our interpretation of Giacometti’s work. Davis writes that the temple as a background “does bring out a different side of Giacometti.” When isolated, his work reflects “fragility and alienation”, while the temple and many examples of ancient art evoke “total solidity”, carrying an “eternal presence.” This is consistent with curators becoming more confident in blurring boundaries and drawing connections between disparate concepts. This is most prevalent in the recent rehang of the Met’s European painting galleries. But while Met curators could have gotten their point across with any kind of ancient art, the Temple of Dendur is one of the most popular attractions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, making it an ideal place for visitors to view a small exhibition such as this.
The temple complex dates to the first century BCE and was commissioned by Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. In the 1960s, Egypt, under the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser, embarked on a campaign to become more self-sufficient, including the construction of the Aswan High Dam. One of the consequences of the dam’s construction was the creation of Lake Nasser, formed by the dammed river flooding a 2,000-square-mile area in southern Egypt. Project planners realized that this reservoir would flood dozens of archaeological sites and destroy countless artifacts. To prevent this, an international effort successfully disassembled and relocated many of the temples, tombs, and other structures that would have been affected by the flooding. The salvaged sites include the temples of Abu Simbel and Philae.
While most of the archaeological sites were moved to higher ground near their original locations, the Egyptian government also gifted several small temples to countries that provided significant aid. The Temple of Debod, for example, was gifted to Spain, which erected it in a park in Madrid. The Temple of Taffeh was gifted to the Netherlands and can now be seen at the National Antiquities Museum in Leiden. And, in 1965, the Temple of Dendur was gifted to the United States. President Lyndon Johnson chose to give the structure to the Metropolitan Museum, which added a large, purpose-built wing for the temple, which opened in 1978.
Though a small exhibition, many hope that Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur is an indication of how the museum may curate its new modern and contemporary wing, set to open in 2030. Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur will be open to the public through September 8th.
Italian Senate Displays Caravaggio’s Barberini Portrait
The papal Caravaggio portrait purchased by the Italian state for €30 million earlier this year will now go on public display at the Italian Senate.
Starting on May 28th, Michelangelo da Caravaggio’s 1598 painting Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini will be displayed at the Palazzo della Minerva, which houses the Senate library. This is the first time the painting has been displayed to the public since the Italian government purchased it earlier this year. The painting first came to public attention through the Palazzo Barberini’s Caravaggio retrospective, which ran from March to July 2025. It became a blockbuster exhibition due to its size. With twenty-four of the Baroque master’s sixty-five surviving paintings included in the show, it became the largest Caravaggio exhibition since the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Age of Caravaggio in 1985. But the show attracted large crowds partly due to the Barberini portrait. After the exhibition closed, over 400,000 people had visited. The Italian government decided to buy the painting for €30 million (or about $34.7 million). It is one of the largest sums ever paid by the state for a work of art.
At the time the portrait was created, Maffeo Barberini was a young man starting a successful career in the Church. He had earned a law degree in Pisa and would be named the papal ambassador to France in a few years. In due time, he would ascend to the papacy in 1623 as Urban VIII. While his nepotism and lavish spending left the Church in considerable debt, Urban VIII’s papacy marked the height of Baroque art and its patronage by the Church. He was especially known for commissioning works by artists such as Bernini, Poussin, and Lorrain.
The Barberini portrait is now on display alongside selections from the Italian State archives pertaining to the troubled life of Caravaggio. The artist had frequent run-ins with the law and sometimes had to flee to escape prosecution. Included alongside the painting is an interrogation record written the same year as the portrait’s creation. Caravaggio had been detained for carrying a sword. The authorities noted that at the time, he was a painter in the service of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who provided him with rooms at his palace in Rome, the Palazzo Madama. This building is now the seat of the Italian Senate. The Senate’s president, Ignazio La Russa, noted that bringing the Barberini portrait to the Senate library in the Palazzo della Minerva is a sort of “temporary homecoming.” Italy’s culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, further commented on the state’s purchase of the portrait, saying that the purpose was to acquire “works of exceptional importance before they are absorbed by the circuits of international private collecting”.
This is not the first time that the Senate has displayed a painting acquired by the state. Most recently, the Italian government bought a painting by the Renaissance master Antonello da Messina from Sotheby’s. Created around 1460, Ecce Homo was intended to be featured in Sotheby’s Old Masters Week at the beginning of February. However, the painting was withdrawn, and soon after, the Italian government announced that it had bought the work for $14.9 million. The state displayed the painting at the Palazzo della Minerva from March 27th to April 19th. There was also a good amount of controversy over the culture ministry’s decision to select the National Museum of Abruzzo as Ecce Homo’s final destination. Many thought that the more appropriate choice would be a museum in Messina, the Sicilian city where the artist came from. The fact that the current government is primarily composed of right-wing parties from the more prosperous north may provide some insight into why a Sicilian treasure would be kept far from the island of its creation. Giuli explained that the National Museum in L’Aquila seemed like an obvious choice given its status as the 2026 Italian culture capital. Ecce Homo will be taken on a tour of Italy, where it will be briefly exhibited in Messina before being sent to L’Aquila.
Caravaggio’s Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini will be on display at the Palazzo della Minerva through June 21st.
London Exhibition Features Lost Carrington Work
A lost work by the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington will be put on display for the first time since its creation in a Spanish psychiatric hospital.
The Freud Museum in London is currently hosting an exhibition on Leonora Carrington, subtitled The Symptomatic Surreal. The show opened on March 25th and will run through August 10th. Located in the borough of Camden, the Freud Museum is located in the house where the Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life. He relocated there after the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. His daughter Anna continued to live in the house until she died in 1982. The house and its contents were later turned into a museum in 1986.
The Carrington exhibition focuses on the artist’s life and work between 1938 and 1941. During this time, she and her partner Max Ernst moved out of Paris to a small town in southern France. When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, the Gestapo arrested Ernst for being a “degenerate” artist. Carrington managed to escape to Spain, while Peggy Guggenheim secured Ernst’s release and safe passage to the United States. Ernst and Guggenheim would later marry, while he and Carrington would never see each other again.
Due to these events and several other traumatic incidents, Carrington suffered from a psychotic break in Madrid, leading her to be sent to a sanatorium in the northern coastal town of Santander. There, she was subjected to shock therapy and was made to take barbiturates. However, her doctor, Luis Morales, also encouraged her to continue drawing and painting. This resulted in what became known among Carrington specialists as the Santander sketchbooks, which she entrusted to New York gallerist Julien Levy before she moved to Mexico. They remained in the Levy family’s possession until 2004, when they were sold and scattered among several private collections.
The exhibition at the Freud Museum reunites many of these drawings and paintings for the first time in decades, exploring the works Carrington created while institutionalized. Curators focus on the recurring motifs drawn from mythology and esotericism, while also displaying these works alongside art and antiquities owned by Sigmund Freud. These works also feature human-animal hybrids, a recurring image in Carrington’s work. It is the first exhibition dedicated to Carrington to be held by a British museum since 1991.
One latecomer to the exhibition is the painting Villa Pilar. Along with another painting entitled Down Below, Villa Pilar presents a reimagining of Carrington’s time in the hospital using her iconic figures and hybrids. Carrington’s biographer, Joanna Moorhead, comments that in both paintings, “she blended her actual surroundings with the psychological turmoil she was going through, making it a fascinating time in her story and in her output.”
A museum dedicated to Sigmund Freud may be an unusual venue for an art exhibition. However, it’s important to remember that Freud’s psychoanalytic teachings proved an invaluable source of inspiration for surrealist artists. They sought to liberate the subconscious mind by blurring the barrier between dreams and reality. Carrington’s work, drawing from trauma, also connects her work to Freud’s writings. Furthermore, exhibition curator Vanessa Boni mentions how, with Freud escaping to London and Carrington escaping to Spain, both the Austrian neurologist and the British artist had a “shared context of displacement”.
Villa Pilar will be added to the exhibition on July 1st, while both paintings will appear together when the exhibition moves to the Faro Santander on September 8th.
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