To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.
The Headlines
DIARY OF ORPHAN ART. Nazi-looted artworks known as “orphaned” or “heirless,” brought back to the Netherlands from Germany after World War II, should be managed by a new Jewish foundation rather than the Dutch government, a panel has announced, reports The New York Times. The collection, worth millions, comprises some 1,500 oil paintings, including works by Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens, though their rightful owners remain unknown. The Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency currently oversees the collection, primarily storing the works or loaning them to museums and government buildings. A new government-commissioned report recommends that the Dutch Jewish community be entrusted with the collection, to be managed by a newly established foundation at Amsterdam’s Jewish Museum. The panel also advised allocating a state-funded budget of $471,000 for exhibitions that would foreground provenance, with a “visible reference to this sorrowful history.” However, some critics argue the proposal risks keeping the collection in the Netherlands rather than intensifying efforts to locate possible heirs—or even selling works to benefit Holocaust survivors.
HELMET HEADS HOME. After being snatched from a Dutch museum in a shocking raid earlier this year, a 2,500-year-old golden helmet has been returned to Romania, reports The Associated Press. This time, it traveled under the close watch of heavily armed, masked guards. The Coțofenești helmet, associated with the Dacian civilization, is one of Romania’s most prized treasures. It was stolen along with three gold bracelets from the Drents Museum in January 2025 while on loan. Two of the bracelets have since been recovered in perfect condition, and authorities are still searching for the third, as the trial of three suspects continues. Few expected this outcome, since the ornate helmet in particular would have been virtually unsellable without being melted down. The national treasures are seen “not as simple patrimony items, but as relics of our historical memory, as the legacy of a civilization that continues to define us,” said Cornel Constantin Ilie, interim director of the National History Museum in Bucharest, which will conserve the objects. “For us, this is a moment of joy, but also of contemplation,” he said. “For months, we have lived with the fear that part of our past could be lost forever.”
The Digest
Taiwan’s National Culture and Arts Foundation has stripped its most prestigious National Award for Arts from Sakuliu Pavavaljung, following his conviction of sexual assault. [ArtAsiaPacific]
Top collector John Phelan was fired as Navy Secretary following months of infighting at the Department of Defense over the Navy’s shipbuilding program, which Phelan had pitched as a “Golden Fleet” of “Trump-class” battleships. [ARTnews]
The Kent County Council in southeast England “quietly” removed a key sculpture from a public site by Antony Gormley and sold it back to the artist to reportedly lighten “financial pressures.” [The Art Newspaper]
Monumental Edvard Munch paintings known as the Freia Frieze, long hung in an Oslo chocolate factory, where they were exposed to cacao dust, are leaving for the first time and will be on view at the Munch Museum in an exhibition about art and industry. [Artnet News]
The completion of a major Modern art museum near Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, has been postponed again due to moisture damage and is now due to open later in 2030. [dpa]
The Kicker
GET THEE TO A NUNNERY. The Venice Biennale is around the corner, but there are about 200 biennale-type festivals worldwide today. The Guardian takes us to a more unusual entry: Anozero – Coimbra Biennal of Contemporary Art, in Portugal. Its organizers have been exploring today’s so-called “biennale identity crisis,” and ask what makes these events more meaningful both for visitors and the locals left behind after the well-heeled crowds have flown home. In response, they are calling for biennales as places of experimentation for communal living, as well as new uses for historical sites, rather than focusing on visual art production. This year, that has translated into a theme of anarchism through mutual cooperation, inspired by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. The approach is also part of a battle to save the festival itself, which is threatened by a private developer’s government-granted plans to turn the biennale’s central exhibition space, a 17th-century convent, into a hotel. As the organizer’s own manifesto pronounces, the biennale should produce art “which can only happen here and nowhere else.” And to these art workers, that inevitably includes the beloved hilltop convent.
