The head of Foreign Missions of the Egyptian Antiquities Service accused the museum in a leaked email of “falsifying history” due to the “Afrocentric” lens of the show’s storytelling, the Dutch news site NRC reported on Monday. The news was confirmed by the museum’s managing director, Wim Weijland, in a statement to CNN.

Saqqara, a sprawling burial site some 20 miles south of the capital, Cairo, is home to Egypt’s oldest pyramid, the pyramid of Djoser. The museum has been consistently excavating Saqqara for more than 40 years, and most recently returned in February for a monthlong dig.

“The Rijksmuseum van Oudheden has been working at Saqqara since 1975,” Weijland told CNN. “For the upcoming season, the museum has been denied the permit to excavate here.”

Weijland added that the museum is attempting to “open the dialogue” with the Egyptian Antiquities Service about the ban. The aim of the “Kemet” exhibition, according to Weijland, was to “show and understand the depiction of ancient Egypt and the messages in music by black artists,” and to “show what scientific, Egyptological research can tell us about ancient Egypt and Nubia.”

The ancient Nubian empire in northeast Africa extended from Aswan, Egypt, down to Khartoum, the modern-day capital of Sudan. Nubia hosted several significant empires, the most important being the Kingdom of Kush, whose so-called “Black Pharaohs” ruled Egypt in the 8th century BCE in the 25th Dynasty. Per the museum’s website, the “Kemet” show examined “the influence of ancient Egypt and Nubia … in the works of a multitude of musicians of African descent, including icons of jazz such as Miles Davis and Sun Ra and contemporary artists such as Beyoncé and Rihanna.”

The show was met with criticism almost immediately upon opening. The Leiden National Museum of Antiquities’ social media accounts were bombarded with negative comments, some of which expressed veiled or explicit distaste over the show’s imagery of dark-skinned ancient Egyptians. In response to the backlash, the museum added a note on its website with additional information on its curatorial goals, as well as a warning that any offensive or racist comments posted to its social channels will be deleted.

After a long conversation with the Israel-born, London-based artist it’s more appropriate to replace notions of contradiction with those of fluidity. For more than 40 years, Arad has designed museums, like the Holon Design Museum, that look like works of art; coiling sculptures that, in his words, should be comfortable; and cars that will never meet a street. Some of Arad’s “Big Easy” chairs have sold at auction for six figures, while others are perched in his backyard; another, loaned to the Centre Pompidou for a recent retrospective but now back in his home, serves as the world’s priciest cat bed. 

Is there a difference between design and art? In a world where art fairs carry Lichtensteins and lamps, does anyone cares? It’s more interesting to interrogate the relationship between objects and their containers, or the visual semantics at play when an object heads to auction. Arad’s solo exhibition at Opera, called “Don’t Ya Tell Henri” offers a good opportunity to mull over those matters. Its title is after Henri Matisse, whose radical cutouts collages have been a longtime touchstone for Arad. Many pieces in the show, including new iterations of his Big Easy Chair and Tube sofas, traveled to New York from the gallery’s Geneva outpost. 

It was not, to put the situation lightly, the smoothest installation process: Arad, 72, fell into a coma days before the opening, leaving his fate, and that of the show, in a suspended state. Thankfully, he did recover (though he missed the opening), and later sat down with ARTnews via zoom for a chat about his practice. The conversation has been condensed. 

ARTnews: Not to ask a loaded question, but how are you?

Ron Arad: I’m feeling better everyday. I wish it was a faster improvement, really my family suffered more than me. I was in a coma for three days and they were giving me 50/50 from the doctor. But I missed all that, like I missed the show.

I’ve always wondered, do you dream when you’re in a coma? 

No, not then. It was like they flipped a switch when I woke up. I wasn’t aware I had been asleep, intubated—nothing. Absolutely nothing. The intensive care unit is like science fiction, full of amazing people from all over the world. It was like the Tower of Babylon. It makes you think, what am I doing? [laughs] They’re doing such important, amazing things. But it was good to be released from there into the world, to home. And here I am.

I haven’t been to New York to see the show yet. Well, I’ve seen the first show we’ve put on in Geneva. The title of the show, “Don’t Ya Tell Henri,” I stole it from Dylan, he has a song in the basement tapes. I’m sure Henri would be very happy with what I did. I really loved it in Geneva, it really cheered me up. Ideas are never a problem, the problem is which one you give your time too, and which one. 

How much of the show is in dialogue with Matisse or Dylan?

There are older pieces in the show, like the “Big Easy”, it’s a piece that I first did many years ago. This shape kept coming back to me. Every time I had an idea or started a new process the Big Easy would volunteer, “Me!”. I’ll show you. There’s one in my garden, you see it?

I’ve always been interested in how an object changes when in a gallery or outside or a museum.

I can’t claim the credit for the beautiful places these pieces are in, nature just happens. But I didn’t spoil it at least, that’s my contribution. But let’s see what happens, there’s your intention, and then what actually happens. But more than anything I’m very grateful for what the material does. There are so many things I couldn’t have done myself. 

Can you see my screen? 

Mhm.

My first piece of furniture was the “Rover Chair”, I went into a scrapyard and made it a domestic piece of furniture. Then, what I had in mind were readymades and found objects more than furniture; this is my first chair. When I had my retrospective at the Pompidou Center I lent them this piece. When they wanted to move it I shouted not without white gloves! 

So you always intend for your furniture to be used?

Yes, if you make a chair, you have to sit on it. When you sit on it or see someone sit on it the work is completed. This is a belief that has followed me through the years. But this has a problem, you know? The art world and the auction house, everyone wants to compartmentalize everything. If you can sit on it, it’s not art.

Recently about a year ago a prototype of [the D Sofa] sold at Phillips for an estimated for $1.7 million. In Europe, when a piece sells in an auction, there’s a small percentage that goes to the artists, but it’s not like that in America. The auction house said because it’s design, it’s not art—despite the fact that I did it in my studio.

They didn’t want to give you a percentage of a sale?

Because you put your bum in it, because they can’t see that that’s part of the art. But they had to see in the end. I don’t like people to tell me what to do. They may say it needs to be beautiful, but what I enjoy is using sophisticated technology to make the product look less machine-like. They will say to me: The last thing I want my clients to see is a video [of the piece being built by a machine]. They want to imagine me like Michelangelo, with a chisel and a hammer.

So what do you say when people ask you to define yourself as an artist, a designer, or a craftsperson? Or, is the question itself reductive?

I don’t kid myself, when I do a piece for a [furniture company], there are different criteria, different destinations. It’s the cost of production, the quantity—all sorts of things. But for me, the production does matter—if it’s a chair it needs to be comfortable. But I don’t need a passport to go from one discipline to another; I also build towers, and museums. I’ve been designing a cancer ward right now. A friend once told me to be taken seriously as an architect, you have to stop doing furniture. I don’t agree. 

People like to compartmentalize you. Maybe people that write about architecture don’t always know much about art; people that know art might not know architecture. 

To return to the resin works at Opera: They have this dynamic relationship with light and space. I understand this was your first time working with the material. What was the process like?

I worked with this amazing guy in Madrid, named Jesús. A lot was done online. The first time I actually saw one it was at the Royal Academy. There is nothing I would do differently, but like before, it is a dialogue between the will of the artist and what the process and material will do for you. 

I think you once said you had to “exert your will” on the works, and earlier you said you “drag” what the pieces will look like out of the material. It all sounds like an antagonistic relationship.

No no, it’s a love affair. I did a piece recently [inspired by] walking in the street and seeing the cars covered. You want to imagine what’s under the cover. So I thought I would draw what I don’t see. I did a sketch of a Morgan car—a very British sports car, very iconic—and I was going to show it at the Royal Academy summer show, but, you know, the pandemic. 

Whether I work with technology or I work with artisans and it’s handmade, neither is better than the other. I love them equally.

And I trust [the artisans and installers] completely, they also are the producers of the pieces. I wish I was there to organize the show, maybe it would be slightly different, or maybe it’s best I wasn’t there. 

Do you feel a pressure to defend your ideology?

Here is a debate, and we respond to it. I don’t have a battle with anyone, I don’t do things as a reaction to anyone, but when you do a big piece of marble you have to think about where it is going. It’s not going to be sold in IKEA; it is very costly to make. Oscar Wilde said that “Art is quite useless, a work of art is as useless as a flower is useless”. That is something with a function. 

Another quote of his talks about tedious people and charming people. I say the same thing about objects, boring objects or exciting objects.

So what about an object makes it exciting?

Sometimes it’s the material, sometimes the shape. The best idea—the ‘do I do it, do I not’—the biggest test, is: if I went to a gallery and saw this piece, would i be jealous? If the answer is no, I let the idea go. If we concentrate on the reason we’re talking to each other, the crystalline resin, that entire experience was exciting.

The resin has this complex refraction. I try to work too on some that have light in it, not waiting for the sun. I like the light. The pieces in the gallery—I’m not going to tell you—some I like more than others. 

I won’t push, but I’d love to know your favorite. 

Okay, it’s the black one. But maybe some like others more, that’s fine too.

The study, titled Atlas der Abwesenheit, or Atlas of Absence, was carried out over two years by researchers from Germany and Cameroon and with the support of curators across 45 German museums. The prodigious number of Cameroonian heritage objects in German museums—a startling figure compared to the 6,000 objects in possession of Cameroonian museums—are mostly in storage. The study excluded items in private collections, natural history museums, and archaeological finds in museums of prehistory.

Seeking to expand its trade routes, Germany claimed Cameroon as a colony from 1884 to 1920 and sustained its power over the native population through violent means. The period was marked by brutal “punitive expeditions” during which the occupying forces would pillage villages and farms to secure the country’s rich natural resources, and destroy and loot cultural heritage. Germany lost control of the territory during World War I after which it was split between the British and French until the early 1960’s.

Cameroonian embassy officials, speaking at the presentation of the study in Berlin, have stressed their intention to reclaim the objects held in German museums. “Germany is full,” Maryse Nsangou Njikam, culture advisor to the Cameroonian embassy in Germany, said, as quoted by the Art Newspaper. “Cameroon is empty. We must have these objects back. We need them to build the future. Restitution is the cherry on the cake, the goal we are heading for.” Nsangou Njikam also shared that a restitution commission has begun meeting with museum directors in Germany, though it will likely be a long process.

“Confronting one’s own acts of brutality requires more political and psychological work,” Savoy said.

The artifacts listed by the study include ritual masks, textiles, manuscripts, royal thrones, and musical instruments. A beaded stool taken from Bagam as a war trophy, for example, is now in the Linden Museum in Stuttgart; another object looted during a punitive expedition, a wooden carved drum, is held by Berlin’s Ethnological Museum.

The museum confirmed in a statement first reported by the Guardian that “there are no other contracts or agreements in effect between the museum and BP.” The latest five-year contract between the two parties expired in February, and in the preceding months, dozens of academics and museum workers called on the museum to use it as an opportunity for a meaningful divestment.

In the new disclosures, obtained by attorneys acting for the environmentalist group Culture Unstained, the British Museum said that “certain terms” of the previous deal will remain in effect because it has a verbal agreement to allow BP exercise its “supporter benefits” through the end of the year. The disclosure did not specify what supporter benefits entail, though none relate to programming or museum projects.

ARTnews has reached out to BP for comment.

The British Museum’s BP sponsorship has been a perennial controversy among museum professionals, artists, and activists, with groups like BP or Not BP? leading a slew of protests at the museum over the past few years.

In 2021, dozens of academics and museum workers denounced London’s British Museum in an open letter for its resistance to ending the financial arrangement with BP. “Refusing further sponsorship from BP would send a strong signal that fossil fuel corporations—like tobacco and arms companies—are no longer welcome in cultural life,” the letter read. “By diminishing BP’s ‘social license to operate’, it would help to support our society’s transition away from fossil fuels.”

In 2016, the Tate museum network said it would no longer receive funding from BP, putting an end to its 26-year partnership, and in 2019, the National Galleries of Scotland stopped taking BP sponsorship for a recurring portraiture exhibition. In 2020, the Southbank Centre, a London arts complex that includes the Hayward Gallery, ended its relationship with Shell.

Updated 6/5/2023: A British Museum spokesperson shared a statement with ARTnews: “In times of reduced public funding, corporate sponsors like bp allow us to fulfill our mission to deliver unique learning experiences to our visitors.

“We have not ended our partnership with bp. bp is a valued long term supporter of the Museum and our current partnership runs until this year.”

The Algeria-born Bouaziz was arrested in May 2022 for his involvement in the operation to defraud customers, following an FBI raid of one of his Palm Beach galleries, Danieli Fine Art, in December 2021.

Per the indictment, Bouaziz’s enterprises purchased cheap reproductions from online auction sites and marketed them as originals at exorbitant prices. He provided misleading provenance documents to create the appearance of authenticity, as well as “false assertions and appraisals,” with a stamped signature block that read “Daniel Bouaziz, Certified International Fine Art Appraiser,” according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida’s statement in 2022.

Among the counterfeit works believed to have been peddled by his gallery was a “Basquiat” that he bought on LiveAuctioneers for $495, and later flipped to an undercover FBI agent for $12 million. A member of the Basquiat estate’s since-disbanded authentication committee identified the painting as a forgery, according to the criminal complaint affidavit.

Bouaziz was also accused of selling numerous artworks falsely attributed to Andy Warhol—and supposedly signed by the artist—priced between $75,000 and $240,000, and a “Roy Lichtenstein” print to an undercover agent for $25,000. A comparison of the Lichtenstein reproduction to an image of the original in the artist’s catalogue raisonné revealed several discrepancies in the color schemes. 

Authorities were first contacted after clients of Bouaziz began to demand the return of their payments, without success. “Other victims, who also reported concerns to Bouaziz about the authenticity of their purchased work, both before and after the execution of the gallery search warrants, received some repayment from Bouaziz,” the complaint stated.

Bouaziz has also been ordered to pay a $15,000 fine.

In March, Van Dyke, who has no tribal enrollment or heritage, pleaded guilty to violating the Indian Arts and Crafts Act—a federal truth-in-marketing law administered by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board (IACB) to curtail the proliferation of counterfeit Native American artworks. 

The Indian Arts and Crafts Board received a tip in February that Van Dyke had claimed to be a member of the federally recognized Nez Perce Tribe, whose ancestral lands are in present-day Idaho. Undercover investigators from the US Fish and Wildlife Service then entered a gallery in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, where they purchased carved pendants made by Van Dyke but advertised as the work of a Native American artist named Jerry Witten.

“When non-Native artists falsely claim Indian heritage, they can take sales away from true Indian artists working to support themselves with skills and techniques handed down for generations,” U.S. Attorney Nick Brown said in a statement. “Stores and galleries need to partner with artists to ensure those artisans and craftsmen advertised as Indian Artists truly have tribal status.”

Upon being questioned by agents, Van Dyke admitted that he knowingly misrepresented masks and pendants—made of antlers, wooly mammoth ivory, and fossilized walrus ivory—as authentic works made in the artistic tradition of the Indigenous people of northern Alaska and the Bering Sea. Through the gallery, Van Dyke had sold more than $1,000 worth of counterfeit Native American artwork. 

Van Dyke was first charged in December 2021, together with another Washington-based artist who had falsely claimed Native American ancestry, Lewis Anthony Rath.

“Prosecuting cases of fraud in the art world is a unique responsibility and part of our work to support Tribal Nations,” Brown, said. “I hope this case will make artists and gallery owners think twice about the consequences of falsely calling an artist Native and work Native-produced. They should consider the damage to reputation, the legal fees and ultimately a criminal record.”

Matisse lived and worked out of the palatial apartment, situated on the top floor of the iconic Régina in the city’s Cimiez neighborhood, for some 10 years, starting in 1938. It’s obvious why he was in no hurry to leave: the space boasts soaring ceilings, a delicately carved fireplace, and bow windows that open to the ultramarine French Riviera. The pictures provided by Côte d’Azur Sotheby’s International Realty are enough to make one’s own Brooklyn apartment seem like a rat trap of no release.

“Most come here for the light and the picturesque beauty (or scenery),” Matisse wrote in 1952. “I am from the North. The large colorful reflections in January, the brightness of the day are what attracted me to settle here.”

Matisse relocated to Cimiez around 1917, and rented rooms in various apartments around the city before purchasing his flat in the former Regina hotel. There, he pursued a languid variation on the neoclassical painting; World War I had recently ended, and with it his appetite for avant-gardism.

Instead, he painted sumptuous still-lifes, nudes, and interiors, and, after a trip to Morocco in 1922, he became enthralled with the odalisque tradition, a genre of Orientalist art featuring eroticized depictions of harems and (presumed) sex workers. Among his most famous from this series is Odalisque Couchée aux Magnolias, painted a year after his return from North Africa. (The work was once owned by Peggy and David Rockefeller and sold at Christie’s New York in 2018 for $80.8 million.)

Matisse spent the final decade and a half of his life as an invalid following an abdominal surgery—a “second life,” he called it. From within his hotel room, he developed his most radically innovative art form: the cutout. Gouache-painted paper was cut into organic and geometric shapes and arranged into dynamic compositions that sometimes laterally wrapped the length of his apartment and spilled into the dining room at the Hôtel Régina. Matisse died in 1954, with Nice proving to be his last, longest love affair. 

“Do you remember the light that came through the shutters? It came from below like a theatre ramp,” he wrote of the Hôtel de la Méditerrannée, one of his many homes, in 1952. “Everything was fake, absurd, amazing, delicious.”

Norm Werthman and Pete Mechalas returned the items in a handover ceremony at the Mexican consulate in San Diego on May 16. The restituted objects date back to the Preclassic, Classic and Mesoamerican Postclassic periods, and originate from locations across the Central Mexican Plateau and along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

The group includes a clay pedestal from the Mesoamerican Classic period (100-900 CE) and clay bowl or cajete decorated with delicate red dots and line motifs n the artistic tradition native to the Shaft Tombs, large underground burial chambers native to common to pre-Hispanic Western Mexican communities.

“I thank these citizens of San Diego for the generous and selfless gesture of returning these pieces to the people of Mexico,” González Gutiérrez, the consul general, said in a statement. “This is part of the permanent effort of the Mexican government to reintegrate pieces of historical and archaeological value that are part of the nation’s heritage.”

The artifacts will be returned to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), where they will be inspected, according to Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Mexican President Andres Manual Lopez has made the restitution of objects made by the ancient cultures that once inhabited the lands of present-day Mexico a focus of his administration. The movement, called “My Heritage is Not for Sale”, is continuously making requests for restitution, and has campaigned to halt the sale of such artifacts at auction houses worldwide.

More than 5,000 archaeological objects from Mexico have been recovered in the last several years, the Mexican government has estimated.

“The action of these people, from the San Diego community, sets an example that we hope will encourage the restitution of objects and assets of historical value that legitimately belong to Mexico,” added González Gutiérrez.

In 2019, Sotheby’s said in a statement that it did not known the ownership history of the painting, St. Francis of Paola Holding a Rosary, Book, and Staff. The auction catalog only stated that it came from a “distinguished private collection” and had once been owned by the Galerie Wolfgang Böhler in Bensheim, Germany. But a petition filed in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan on Friday claims that the painting actually passed through the hands of Julius Böhler, an unrelated art dealer in Munich who was accused by the American government in 1946 as being “implicated in art looting activities.” 

The three heirs of the Austrian gallery owner, Otto Fröhlich, said in the filing that Sotheby’s intentionally obscured the work’s true provenance to aid the sale, thus “perpetuating the very cycle of injustice and exploitation that began in 1938 and that the international and national restitution laws and policies were designed to prevent.”

Sotheby’s has refuted the allegations, telling the New York Times last week that the 2019 provenance attribution was a “human error.” In a statement, the auction house said that it ordered new provenance research after being contacted by Fröhlich’s heirs and, in the process, identified the original owner of the painting who faced Nazi persecution, Adele Fischel. Under international law, the descendants of Fischel may even have grounds to pursue its ownership.

Sotheby’s added in its statement that it is “committed to reaching a just and amicable solution in the restitution of this work to its rightful heirs,” however, “additional research and evidence is needed to ascertain who the correct claimant should be in this instance, with current evidence supporting a possible claim by the heirs of [Fischel].”

The painting is believed to have been painted sometime in the 1730s. It was valued in the 2019 Sotheby’s catalog between $70,000 and $100,000.

The Times reported that records maintained by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum state that a Viennese woman named Adele Fischel was deported to the Theresienstadt camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, where she was killed.

Fröhlich allegedly purchased the Tiepolo in 1938 from Fischel, which the petition filed by Fröhlich’s heirs maintain was made “in good faith” and was not looted. However, they maintain that circumstances “forced” Fröhlich to transfer the Tiepolo to another gallery before fleeing Vienna for Britain. If not for Nazi persecution, Fröhlich would not have closed his gallery or sold the painting at a price well below its market value, according to the filing. Additionally, documents compiled by the heirs show that Fröhlich attempted to recover the painting after the war. 

Fröhlich’s heirs have petitioned Sotheby’s to reveal the names of the parties involved in the 2019 sale, which is typically against the auction house’s policy. 

“We return to work with our heads held high and with a strong contract,” the union wrote today in an Instagram post. The two-and-half year contract will “raise salaries by over 18%, establish contributions to a new 403(b) plan and preserve fully paid health benefits. The contract also calls for a labor management committee, health and safety protection, severance pay and professional development funds of up to $500 per year per worker.”

A Hispanic Society representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The strike began in March after a year of stagnant negotiations between the institution’s small staff and administration.

According to the members of the union, who are represented by the local United Auto Workers (UAW) 2110, the contract proposed by administration removed health care coverage and pension fees without an increase in wages to offset the new expenses. The union also said that wages at the Hispanic Society are already lower than those at comparable institutions explicitly because these benefits were offered in employment contracts. 

In the subsequent weeks, the union maintained a picket outside the museum. On April 26, workers even protested outside the home of Philippe de Montebello, the chairman of the Hispanic Society’s board and former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

The union sought a 5 percent retroactive wage increase, guaranteed future wage increases, and guaranteed minimum salaries for all union positions, ranging from a $52,000 to $95,000, “depending on the salary grade of the position, and on par with other museums in the city.”

The strike had received support from several elected New York City officials, including city council members Carmen De La Rosa and Shaun Abreu.

On April 28, the Society for Iberian Global Art (formerly the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies) released an open letter directed at the failed negotiations, writing that its community has been “unsettled by a situation that threatens not only the institution and its collection, but the livelihood of our esteemed colleagues and what we consider to be a living landmark of our field.”

The Hispanic Society is home to one of the largest and most precious collections of Latin American, Spanish, Portuguese, and Philippine art and writing in the world. Its holdings contain more than 900 paintings, including masterworks by El Greco, Velázquez, and Goya. The museum building has been closed for a major renovation since 2017. It was set to reopen last month, but construction delays and the strike postponed the reopening indefinitely.

Employees at the Hispanic Society voted in 2021 to join the UAW Local 2110, which also represents employees at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum.

“We are elated about the new contract,” said Patrick Lenaghan, a curator who has worked at the Hispanic Society for 28 years, said in a statement. “It provides the security we never had before. With this, we can concentrate on the work we love and dedicated so many years to.”