The museum calls it “narrative art,” defined as art “created to tell stories through images.” George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, have also described their collection as “the people’s art.” - Los Angeles Times
The suit, one of four recently brought by contractors alleging nonpayment, claims the museum “actively promoted, contracted, and labeled the construction as a ‘private, non-profit development’ to bypass the rigorous administrative, registration, and bonding mandates of the California Public Contract Code, Civil Code, and Labor Code.” - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
Hungary’s new government has scrapped plans for a New National Gallery that was to form part of a development in Budapest’s City Park (Városliget) aimed at elevating the capital’s cultural standing. - The Art Newspaper
That language has been removed from the website, and the marker in the cemetery has been replaced by a new sign that omits wording critical of slavery and the Confederacy. - Washington Post
"Mayor Roberto Gualtieri presented the recently restored ‘Painted City’ fresco and ‘Great Mosaic’ that were discovered in an underground gallery during excavations in the 1990s of the Baths of Trajan on the Oppio hill near the Colosseum.” The sites are opening on a trial basis, only on weekends, strictly for small groups. - AP
Like Balanchine, de Kooning made images for the mind about the body as it was expressed in the streets of the city. Sometimes, when I watch Balanchine’s choreography, I can’t help imagining “Monumental Woman” and other drawings from the “Women” series flashing behind the dancers as they embody de Kooning’s symphony of flesh. - The New Yorker
Just a few days after the question of whether Pierre-Auguste Renoir was even a good artist re-entered public discussion, some “well-equipped” and “well-informed” burglars made off with two paintings from Renoir’s home in Cagnes-sur-Mer. (In their rush to escape, the thieves left two other works in the garden.) - AP
David Rubenstein, the billionaire philanthropist who was chair of the Kennedy Center’s board until Trump ousted him in early 2025, has purchased the Joel Shapiro sculpture Blue, which was carted away from the Center’s grounds last week. Rubenstein will loan the work to the National Gallery’s Sculpture Garden. - The New York Times
The British Museum will lend two fragments of the Parthenon sculptures to an exhibition in Frankfurt, Germany, while Greece has rejected a request to lend nine Parthenon fragments from the Acropolis Museum for the same exhibition. - Greek Reporter
It would be easy to describe the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which opens Sept. 22, as “unconventional,” a description the museum’s leaders seem to favor, though “oppositional” also comes to mind. - Los Angeles Times
“Everyone experienced the attacks on 9/11 as this really, really intense television event, and bringing a piece of steel from the World Trade Center ... allowed people to lay hands on these artifacts and to really feel this kind of deep expression of complex and lingering grief.” - NPR
Of course, “while the museum and the Walton family espouse natural connections between art, community and general well-being (see also recent major investments in healthcare), the urge to collect continues apace.” - KC Studio
"Among the French, the mood is anxious. The tapestry’s early life is shrouded in mystery, but it seems to have led a fameless existence in Bayeux for hundreds of years.” - The New Yorker
“Portrait of a Lady by Italian baroque painter Giuseppe Ghislandi was missing for eight decades before being photographed in 2025 hanging in the home of the daughter of a senior Nazi officer who had fled to Argentina after the second world war.” - The Guardian (UK)
