Recently displayed as part of the Fondation Beyeler’s Cézanne exhibition in Basel among 78 of the artist’s other works, an 1888 watercolour of Montagne Sainte Victoire has come under provenance scrutiny. Instructed by the heir of Jewish businessman Gustav Schweitzer, provenance researcher Willi Korte has found evidence in the public archive suggesting that the Cézanne left Schweitzer’s ownership, who fled Nazi Germany in 1935, under unknown circumstances. While documentation for a 1936 exhibition loan of the work to the Kunsthalle exists, correspondence halts after 1939, and Korte thus concludes it was either sold under duress or looted. As the work in question was merely loaned to Fondation Beyeler for the 2026 exhibition, the foundation stated it has notified the unnamed private lender to whom it is due to be returned of the suspicion, highlighting the absence of legal authority to retain loaned works. This follows closely on a 2024 publication about the Bührle Collection at Kunsthaus Zürich, which flagged Vincent Van Gogh’s 1885 Head of a Peasant Woman, also formerly owned by Schweitzer, as a work whose loss through persecution could not be ruled out and which warranted further research. Read more here. [EA]

The Koenigs Collection will remain in the possession of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in the Netherlands after the institution refused to participate in an investigation following another restitution claim issued by a new group of heirs. The disputed collection, originally comprising 2500 drawings, has already been the subject of numerous restitution claims by Koenig’s heirs. The museum denies that it either inhibited research or refused to cooperate in the heir’s claim to the works and subsequent investigation. Read more here. [IS]

With support from the ALIPH (International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage) Foundation and in collaboration with the Government of Mali, in 2021, UNESCO commenced a project to help restore villages and architecture serving important cultural functions within the Cliff of Bandiagara, a World Heritage Site home to the Dogon, Fulani, Bozo, Bambara, and Songhai communities. The rehabilitation project became necessary after communal violence in the Mopti region led to the targeted destruction of these communities’ dwellings, undermining the social cohesion and centuries-old traditions that characterize these places. After much success in its first stage, the undertaking will continue to its second phase, which will continue to focus on protecting the heritage of the site through an effort to mitigate the effects of climate change in the area. Read more here and here. [RA]

The 2022 Democratic Memory Law has prompted restitutions of art looted during the Spanish Civil War more than fifty years after the death of Francisco Franco. While the law has broadened reparations for victims and provided for investigations into confiscated cultural property, it has not provided a formal legal mechanism for restitution. Complutense University professor emeritus Arturo Colorado Castellary has identified more than 26,000 seized objects to date, with approximately a third constituting items never returned and over 3,300 missing entirely. The Museo del Prado has led the restitution efforts identifying 166 seized works within its collection, and in April 2026 restituting two panel paintings, including Maestro de Lupiana’s Christ before Pilate, to the parishes of Yebes and Pareja located in Castilla-La Mancha. Read more here. [EA]

After passing through both the House and Senate, President Donald Trump signed the HEAR Act of 2025 into law on April 13, 2026. The 2025 Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act extends the original 2016 HEAR Act and eliminates several common defenses against restitution claims in the United States. These include the defenses of laches and the assertions made under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act by plaintiffs pursuing restitution claims against art possessors outside the United States. This expansion of the HEAR Act has been celebrated by some and reviled by others. Read more here. [IS]

Italian police have seized 143 counterfeit artworks that were previously attributed to artists Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Banksy, intended to be the centerpiece of an exhibition titled “Pop to Street Art: Influences” in Calabria, Italy. Initially, 133 artworks were identified as forgeries, but subsequent collaborations with Belgian officials revealed 10 additional counterfeit works, with 11 others still under assessment by authorities. This collection of paintings, prints, and sculptures had been on loan to The Academy of Fine Arts in Calabria from a Belgian company for a fee of €50,000. Further investigations into three Belgian men’s residences and three companies revealed additional incriminating evidence suggesting that these individuals operated an established criminal network specializing in the mass-production of fake works attributed to prominent pop art figures. Read more here. [KH]

On May 29, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. announced the return of 20 cultural objects, collectively valued at over $100,000, to the people of Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Vanuatu, and New Zealand. This marks the first-ever repatriation of antiquities to the Pacific Island Nations by the office. The objects were found to have been laundered through museum donations as part of an alleged tax-fraud scheme by indicted antiquities trafficker Subhash Kapoor, revealed after a multitude of concurrent criminal investigations. The office returned the objects in six separate repatriation ceremonies. Ten antiquities were returned to Papua New Guinea alone, including a suspension hook dating to the early 20th century depicting a bird and a bowlegged male figure. Kapoor was convicted in India in 2022, and his extradition to the United States remains pending. Each nation has expressed extensive thanks for the return of such culturally significant objects. This work is part of the broader mission of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan DA’s Office. Read more here. [KH]

Artnet investigator and journalist Judd Tully purchased two works attributed to Jim Nutt and Christina Ramberg through an eBay listing offering them at a suspiciously low price. After buying the pieces, Tully discovered they were forgeries. Upon this realization Tully reached out to Chicago dealer Karen Lennox confirmed the works did not match the artists’ known styles or documentation, and New York dealer David Nolan called the Nutt piece “a total forgery.” Nutt himself denied ever creating it. Tully traced the listing to a seller in Walton, New York, and traveled upstate to confront her, but received only a vague email denial in response. Days later, the eBay store vanished, and a separate federal indictment was unsealed the same day, charging a father-daughter duo with running a $2 million counterfeit art scheme involving similar artists. Read more here. [DC]

On June 26, 2026 former New Orleans Police Officer, Christian Claus, was found guilty of federal corruption charges. The jury found Claus guilty on five counts including wire fraud, conspiracy to facilitate bribery and making a false statement to a federal agent. Claus was alleged to have facilitated staged meetings with local restaurant owner Fouad Zenton, pretending to investigate the theft of roughly a dozen paintings. These interactions were recorded on Claus’ police body cam in order to portray them as legitimate. Claus falsified police reports about the supposed thefts and then had Michael Schofield, an art appraiser, inflate the painting’s value to support a larger insurance claim. Both Zenton and Schofield pleaded guilty and subsequently testified against Claus at trial. The case also has ties through Zenton to the scandal surrounding former New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell. Zenton’s phone record was used in court to show evidence of bribery. Read more here. [VC]

Marine artist Robert Wyland is suing FIFA, its affiliates, and the owners of the building where his mural, “Ocean Life,” has been located since 1999. He claims that the mural was painted over without notice or consent in preparation for World Cup-related advertising. Over the past twenty-seven years, the mural has become a beloved part of Dallas’s skyline. Wyland is seeking $25 million in damages for the destruction of his artwork and for violations of the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. Read more here. [IS]

In the early afternoon of Saturday, May 30, news of a theft emerged from the Centre Pompidou-Metz. The small museum in eastern France released two photographs: one showing Italian visual artist Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian from 2019, a ripe banana taped to a white wall with silver duct tape, and another showing only a lone, mangled strip of tape. The banana was gone. This edition of Comedian was on display as part of “Endless Sunday: A Living Exhibition in Perpetual Motion,” the Cattelan-curated exhibition set to run through January 25, 2027. Curators emphasized that little was lost in the theft of the conceptual artwork, and museum staff moved quickly to replace the missing fruit. This is not the first incident involving Comedian, which sold for $6.24 million in 2024 and has been stolen, eaten, and repeatedly replaced. The Centre Pompidou-Metz says it has filed a legal complaint against the persons involved. Read more here, as well as the Centre Pompidou-Metz press release here. [SBM]

Scientists at the Polytechnic University of Hauts-de-France in Valenciennes published a study in the June 2026 issue of Surface Topography: Metrology and Properties on a new art authentication method derived from surface metrology, a technique historically applied in industrial and engineering contexts. Studying van Gogh works and fakes, researchers used high-resolution scans to convert the painting surfaces to 3D topographical maps, determining minute variations in the textured brushstrokes. Results suggest that, much like a fingerprint is a unique identifier of an individual, these variations may serve as plausible identifiers of an artist’s unique application of paint. Researcher Francois Berkmans said that he intends this technology to not replace, but to be a non-invasive supplement to existing authentication methods. Read more here (and read the study here). [CI]

Dutch court artist Petra Urban received damages after Maikel Boon, an MP from the Dutch far-right Party for Freedom (PVV), manipulated her court sketch using AI to make the subjects appear more menacing. The doctored image appeared in a video posted by the PVV’s Noord-Brabandt region to Instagram and Facebook, and has since been taken down. Boon told De Telegraaf he had thought an altered image would no longer be subject to copyright, but that it was a “very stupid act” regardless. This is not the first time the official has been accused of manipulating images for campaign purposes—about Boon’s use of AI, Urban stated, “You need to be able to assume that journalistic work is written, drawn, photographed or filmed as neutrally as possible. If this is manipulated, then the flood gates are open. There’s no knowing where it will end.” Read more here. [CI]

The District Court of The Hague has ruled that the Mauritshuis will retain 25 artworks involved in a dispute between the museum and a donor’s heirs. This collection includes five Rembrandt works. The dispute focused on the will of Abraham Bredius, the museum’s former director. His heirs claimed that he donated the 25 works with the expectation of them remaining on permanent display. The court found that the will did not require this stipulation and that the Mauritshuis could keep its pieces in storage. Read more here. [HG]

Two paintings by Lucas Valdés have been seized by Spanish police and returned to the historic Hospital of the Venerable Priests. Painted at the end of the 17th century, the paintings were part of the central altarpiece in a downtown Seville church. They were likely stolen in the 1920s during the Ibero-American Exhibition of Seville. The Spanish Historical Heritage Brigade found the works after they were listed for public auction. The Brigade reports that the consignors have helped return the paintings to the Archdiocese of Seville. Read more here. [HG] 

The US House Appropriations Committee, responsible for drafting legislation allocating funds to government agencies and organizations, has advanced a budget proposal that would cut funding to the Department of Education’s only arts grant. The Assistance for Arts Education program offers grants to support arts educators, expand programming for underserved students, and facilitate community outreach. Erin Harkney, CEO of Americans for Art, stated that the budget cut would limit crucial resources that students and teachers depend upon. The report that was issued by the House Appropriations Committee asserted that funding should instead be focused on core subjects such as math, reading, and writing. Whether funding will be cut depends upon the budget proposals to be issued by the Senate, which will then be drafted into a cohesive budget bill with the house. Read more here. [VC]

President Donald Trump’s “National Garden of American Heroes” has faced further delay as several historic preservation and cultural heritage groups filed a lawsuit to stop its construction. The garden is intended to feature approximately 250 prominent American figures in West Potomac Park, within the National Mall. The filing argues that the construction of the garden cannot go forward without first receiving congressional approval. The plaintiffs assert that Congress codified protections in order to preserve the National Mall and give the American people a voice in what happens to public land. In response, the Trump administration has dismissed the plaintiff’s concerns, questioning how anyone could find fault with an exhibition of American greatness. Read more here. [VC]

Art Basel’s prestigious Swiss art fair was held from June 18–21, 2026, but not all those who created work for the event were allowed to attend. The 55th edition of the fair featured 290 premier galleries from 43 countries, including Africa Basel’s Umoja Art Gallery from Kampala, Uganda. Workers affiliated with the Ugandan gallery were denied Swiss entry visas the week before the fair opened and were absent for the duration of the event. The gallery’s booth remained empty throughout the fair, displaying a sign that read, “not everyone is granted the same freedom to participate…An empty booth stands as a reminder that, despite the ambition of a global art ecosystem, physical borders and administrative barriers still determine whose voices can be present.” Read more here. [SBM]

On Monday, June 29, Swiss authorities returned 18 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria during a formal handover ceremony. Until June, the objects had been held by three Swiss museums: the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich, Museum Rietberg Zurich, and the Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève. While this return joins the hundreds of African cultural objects repatriated by Western institutions in recent years, many more remain in museum collections across Europe and North America. The 18 returned objects are expected to go on display at the National Museum in Lagos. Read more here. [SBM]

In a recent drug trafficking raid in Paris, French police discovered what turned out to be a stolen Pablo Picasso painting. It reportedly depicts his iconic lover and model Marie-Thérèse Walter, placing it in a period some consider to be one of the most significant moments of Picasso’s career. The work has been authenticated and police have shared it to be worth tens of millions of euros, with a similar portrait having sold in 2018 for £49.8 million. The stolen painting was owned by a woman in Singapore, and one of the six figures arrested during the raid confessed to having taken the painting while he worked as a security guard at an art storage firm in Paris, apparently to expose their security weaknesses. The piece was found on the property of a suspected drug dealer, alongside luxury clothing, cash, and cannabis. The trial of four of the suspects involved is set for August 19. Read more here. [LR]