The Headlines

ANNUAL REVIEW. Only moments remain in 2023, and ARTnews is looking back with a “Year in Review” package. Gameli Hamelo charted developments in African art, Francesca Aton examined the most important archaeological discoveries, and Daniel Cassady charted signs of an art market that is “no longer easy-breezy.” There is a great deal more: Karen K. Ho on the trials and tribulations of the beleaguered British Museum, Tessa Solomon on how the Israel-Hamas war is “reshaping . . . the art industry in real time,” and Alex Greenberger on the bevy of Pablo Picasso shows that were tied to the 50th anniversary of his passing. It’s “safe to say we learned just about nothing in the process,” Greenberger writes. And there is still more—with more to come today at the ARTnews site. The full lineup is here. Have a great end to your year.

RESTITUTION WATCH. A painting by the Dutchman Cornelis van Haarlem (1562–1638), Adam and Eve, which was looted by the Nazis from the storied Dutch-Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, has been returned to his heir, the Art Newspaper reports. The work was identified as stolen after it was offered to the Musée Rolin in Autun, France, as a donation. Goudstikker’s family has been trying for years to recover material plundered from him during World War II. More than 1,300 paintings were taken, according to a law firm working for the family. The Dutch government restituted 200 almost two decades ago; more than 800 stolen by Nazi Hermann Göring are believed to be at large.

The Digest

South Korea’s culture ministry said that it will revamp its grant system for artists to award larger sums to fewer projects. It anticipates that the average funding for a proposal will go from about $23,000 today to $79,000 by 2027. It is also planning an effort to provide young people free access to culture. [Yonhap News Agency]

It is not just big-name museum curators who are decamping to commercial galleries, Julia Halperin reports. Registrars, educators, video editors, and more are also making the switch from the nonprofit to the for-profit realm. “I felt underpaid but not overworked,” one job mover said. “I felt under-appreciated.” [The Art Newspaper]

Critic Jason Farago has a clear-eyed essay on the rise of AI-generated art. “If you believe that culture is an imaginative human endeavor, then there should be nothing to fear, except that—what do you know?—a lot of humans have not been imagining anything more substantial,” he writes. [The New York Times]

Writer Nicholas Day has penned a book for young readers about Vincenzo Peruggia’s 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. It’s called The Mona Lisa Vanishes. “I think everyone has this sort of weird soft spot for art theft,” Day said in an intervew. [New England Public Media/Maine Public]

Actor and painter Pierce Brosnan is accused of going out-of-bounds in a thermal area of Yellowstone National Park near the border of Wyoming and Montana. He reportedly has a court date at the park next month and has not commented. [The Associated Press]

Behold, a guide to many of the luxe properties owned by members of the Rockefeller family over the years, including the art-rich Kykuit manor north of New York City. [Architectural Digest]

The Kicker

IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK. Back in July, ARTnews reported that actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie had taken a lease on 57 Great Jones Street, the Downtown Manhattan building once owned by Andy Warhol, where Jean-Michel Basquiat lived and worked, for her fashion venture, Atelier Jolie. The business has since moved in, and in the New York Times, reporter Alex Vadukul has a deep dive on the long history of the place. One choice anecdote: Back in 1905, it was apparently home to a rowdy saloon, where one John Ratta was wounded in a gunfight. Declining to cooperate with the police, Ratta apparently said that he “slipped and fell so hard on a bullet on the floor that it entered his flesh,” according to the Times. Hate it when that happens! [NYT]

The Mona Lisa (1503–19) is a Renaissance painting of the Florentine woman Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, by Leonardo da Vinci.

The Isleworth Mona Lisa, as it has been dubbed (because it was previously owned by an art dealer in the London suburb), shows Lisa in the same position as the original. There are, however, a few key differences. Namely, the Isleworth iteration depicts a younger version of the sitter with a thinner face.

Experts appear unconvinced that the painting is an authentic da Vinci work. As Jonathan Jones, an art critic for The Guardian, pointed out on Wednesday, da Vinci worked on the Mona Lisa layer by layer for years perfecting his masterpiece. It is unclear how or why there would be a prequel to the Mona Lisa or why the artist would have abandoned the canvas. Jones went so far as to call it a “bad copy” or a “deliberate fake.” Meanwhile, Martin Kemp, a professor of art history at the University of Oxford and a da Vinci expert, told Artnet News that he believed the work to be a copy.

Still, the Mona Lisa Foundation, a Zurich nonprofit founded in 2011 to establish the Isleworth Mona Lisa as an authentic da Vinci work, is championing the privately owned piece as the first of two iterations of Leonardo’s masterpiece. For those interested in seeing it for themselves, the painting in question is currently on view in an exhibition at Promotrice delle Belle Arti gallery in Turin, Italy.

Though the work is privately owned and not currently for sale, it raises a lot of market–related questions. The controversial Salvator Mundi painting, for instance, which was marketed as a rediscovered masterpiece by da Vinci, fetched $450.3 million six years ago at auction. Despite looming questions surrounding its authenticity, it still holds the record for the most expensive painting ever sold. Should the Isleworth Mona Lisa ever hit the market, it could surpass that record.

Scientists recently used X-rays to inspect the chemical structure of a speck of the painting, and the findings suggest that Leonardo da Vinci may have been experimenting with his style during its creation. 

Per research published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the oil paint used by the Italian Renaissance artist in the base layer of the Mona Lisa has a chemical composition distinct from his other works—and even those made by his famous contemporaries. 

The presence of the rare chemical compound, named plumbonacrite, has confirmed a long-held theory among art historians that Leonardo utilized lead oxide powder to thicken and dry the paint layers of the Mona Lisa. 

“He was someone who loved to experiment, and each of his paintings is completely different technically,” Victor Gonzalez, the study’s lead author and a chemist at France’s CNRS, told the Associated Press. Scientists at CNRS, a prominent research body, partnered with art historians on the project. “In this case, it’s interesting to see that indeed there is a specific technique for the ground layer of Mona Lisa,” Gonzalez added.

The paper stresses how incredible it was to even detect the plumbonacrite, given its minuscule remnants: the speck of paint was nearly invisible to the naked eye and slimmer than a strand of hair. The scientists examined its atomic structure using X-rays produced by a synchrotron, a machine that accelerates charged particles through magnetics until they reach nearly light speed. 

While rare, this isn’t the first time plumbonacrite has been detected in the work of Old Masters. Gonzalez and his team have found a painting by Rembrandt, suggesting that the same, or very similar, paint recipes have been passed down through the centuries. 

“There are plenty, plenty more things to discover, for sure. We are barely scratching the surface,” Gonzalez said. “What we are saying is just a little brick more in the knowledge.”

The researcher Silvano Vincenti said the bridge was the Romito di Laterina, an Etruscan-Roman structure in the Italian province of Arezzo. Vincenti’s theory was based on historical documents, drone images, photographs of the area, and noticing the same number of arches, four, in Leonardo’s painting and the Romito.

Previous theories about the background of the 16th-century oil painting have identified the bridge as the Ponte Bobbio, in the northern city of Piacenza, as well as the Ponte Buriano, which is also in the Tuscan province of Arezzo. However, both of these bridges have six arches, compared to the Romito’s four.

According to the Guardian, only one arch remains at the Romito, which stretched across the Arno river, as well as the foundation of the bridge on the opposite riverbank.

Historical documents belonging to the Medici family in the state archives of Florence showed that the Romito bridge was functioning and busy between 1501 and 1503, Vincenti told reporters at a foreign press association in Rome. During this period, da Vinci was also in the area at the service of a cardinal from a noble family and then for a statesman from the Republic of Florence.

“The distinctive form of the Arno along that stretch of territory corresponds to what Leonardo portrayed in the landscape to the left of the noblewoman depicted in the famous painting,” Vinceti said.

The mayor of Laterina, Simona Neri, said Vinceti’s theory about the bridge was a source of excitement for many of the residents in her town of 3,500 people, with hopes for more tourism in the area from admirers of the Mona Lisa painting. “We need to try to protect what’s left of the bridge, which will require funding,” Neri said.

The Headlines

FAIR PLAY. For the first time, Art Basel’s fair in beautiful Basel, Switzerland, will have a dedicated director, Maximilíano Durón reports in ARTnews. That leader will be Maike Cruse, the director of Gallery Weekend Berlin, who will take up the job in July, shortly after the event’s run in June. It’s a homecoming of sorts for Cruse, who was a communications manager for Art Basel in the mid-2000s. Cruse will be reporting to Vincenzo de Bellis, the firm’s director for fairs and exhibition platforms. Another appointment may be in the offing: Art Basel said that “a search is underway” for a director of its Miami Beach fair, a position once held by Art Basel’s CEO, Noah Horowitz.

BRIDGE TO THE PAST. So beguiling is the Mona Lisa’s smile that it can be easy to miss everything else that Leonardo painting behind her in the background of his masterpiece. Have you ever noticed the tiny bridge with four arches that is behind her left shoulder, at our right? Scholars have in the past proposed various bridges that the Old Master may have been depicting. Now, the Guardian reports, historian Silvano Vinceti has concluded that it is the Romito di Laterina bridge in the Arezzo province, based on his study of drone images, area photos, and other materials. Naturally, the locals are pretty excited about this possibility. One arch is extant, and Laterina’s mayor told the outlet, “We need to try to protect what’s left of the bridge, which will require funding.”

The Digest

Chicago artist Thomas Kong, who took up art in his sixties, using materials that he had on hand in the convenience store that he ran, died on May 1 at 73, Claire Voon reports. With artist Dan Miller, Kong set up a community gallery in the store’s storage space in 2015 that ran until 2019. They called it the Back Room. [The Art Newspaper]

At her current show at Esther Schipper in Berlin, artist Hito Steyerl is selling sculptural works for €1,700–€2,000 (about $1,880–$2,220) to raise funds to create a healthcare center in Jinwar, a village in Syria devoted to protecting women and children. [Ocula]

The Istanbul Modern museum is reopening today in a new building in that city’s Karaköy district. Designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, it has over 100,000 square feet for its permanent collection, a restaurant, and more. [ArtAsiaPacific]

Another new position filled today: Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York, has tapped Melanie Crader to be its first director of visual arts. She was most recently deputy director at the Parrish Art Museum in nearby Water Mill. [Press Release/Guild Hall]

Who’s selling at the big auctions in New York this month? The ARTnewsOn Balance newsletter has answers. For one, the Cigna insurance company is parting with a major sculptural installation by Isamu Noguchi. [ARTnews]

ARTISTS IN PROFILE. Painter Y.Z. Kami is in the New York Times, as is sculptor Rachel Feinstein, sculptor Misha Japanwala is in the Guardian, textile artist Qualeasha Wood is in Cultured, multi-medium artist Julian Opie is inYonhap News, and photographer Sheida Soleimani is in the Financial Times.

The Kicker

CHANGING THE CHANNEL. The Māori artist Hāmiora Bailey has created a web-browser plugin that inserts Indigenous news stories in place of ones about the British monarchy and the coronation of King Charles III, the Guardian reports. “People are sick of it—they don’t care about how much a diamond costs and who’s wearing what dress,” Bailey said. Interest web surfers can find out on the dedicated website for the plugin, which is called Pikari Mai. [The Guardian]

The TikTok, which was posted by a user named @narvanator, shows a succession of police cars going by what appears to be the Arc de Triomphe. “POV: your in Paris when the Mona Lisa has been stolen,” text overlaid on top reads.

Posted four days ago, the video has been played more than 9 million times and liked by 1.9 million users.

Then @narvanator doubled down on the joke, appearing in a follow-up TikTok in which he explained that he had visited the Louvre with his friends. “She’s gone,” he said. “The Mona Lisa is gone. We spoke to the staff there, and they can’t say anything.”

But the Mona Lisa is, in fact, not gone—the Leonardo da Vinci remains at the Louvre, where she has long been exhibited. There have been no reports of the Mona Lisa being stolen.

There was, of course, one time when the Mona Lisa was stolen. That happened in 1911, when Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman, worked with two others to pilfer the painting and bring it back to his home country. He had attempted to sell it to a Florentine dealer and failed to do so, later sending six months in prison for the theft.

In the intervening years, the Mona Lisa has been attacked several times, including last year, when a cake was smeared across it.

Drawing inspiration from the original TikTok, some users pretended that a Peruggia-like figure had struck, bringing the painting back to Italy. One user posted a video of himself in front of the Trevi Fountain in Rome, pretending to be a collector receiving a call from a dealer about the Mona Lisa.

As for @narvanator, he stuck to the bit, posting another follow-up TikTok in which he crosses “MONA LISA GETS STOLEN” off his 2023 bingo card.

The gag revolves around the Mona Lisa, which appears not in the Louvre but in an Elon Musk–like billionaire’s house, where the Leonardo da Vinci painting can be found encased in a transparent frame, bearing witness as a group of moneyed friends and foes squabble over who killed one of their own.

Herein lies the irony: the Mona Lisa, a painting considered to be so valuable that its monetary worth is not known, becomes less important than what happens in front of it, as has periodically happened in real life. In the film, the painting, like all the other art alongside it, is quite literally the backdrop to a crime scene. One museum’s crown jewel becomes a rich man’s window dressing.

Miles Bron, the fictional mogul whose $450 million house in Greece acts as the main setting for Johnson’s film, has obtained the painting because of the moment’s unique circumstances. (Edward Norton plays him.) It is May 2020, and everything has shut down. Amid a spell of boredom, he’s invited, via a set of puzzle boxes, a group of old acquaintances to his gaudy seaside manse, for reasons that remain shadowy until they get there. All of the guests, minus the private eye Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), know Miles personally.

After everyone convenes on the island and is inoculated against COVID-19 with what may or may not be snake oil, they assemble in the house’s atrium, where they stand before the Leonardo painting, which is shown amid a grouping of postwar abstractions, figurative paintings, and chintzy sculptures.

“This place is the Tate Modern,” says Connecticut Governor Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), champagne flute in hand. “Why would you hang a print of the Mona Lisa front and center? It’s like hanging a Che poster in your dorm room.”

Miles smirks and lets his guests figure out that the painting is the real deal. “The Louvre was closed, France needed money, and so I bought myself a little short-term loan,” he says. “You know, it turns out the transport and the security was most of the cost. Check this out.” He holds up a torch lighter and flicks it on, and a shield suddenly covers the painting as everyone looks on agog.

For Miles, the painting is merely a prop used to flaunt his wealth. He doesn’t seem to care much about the Mona Lisa‘s history, and when he does briefly touch on its significance, he claims that Leonardo “invented a technique for brushstrokes that leaves no lines.” That technique is known as sfumato, and Giorgio Vasari, an art historian born nearly a decade after Mona Lisa was painted, even attributed its origins to the Flemish painters, not Italians like Leonardo. Whether that error is the fault of Miles or Johnson himself is unclear.

The Mona Lisa may be the centerpiece in Miles’s home, but there are also a number of other art historically significant works—or, at least, riffs on them. There’s a smeary red abstraction that’s clearly an allusion to the work of Cy Twombly, whose vast paintings can actually be seen right now in the real Tate Modern. There’s a painting of a tear falling out of a woman’s eye, a nod to Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s images of crying women. There’s a canvas showing a cyclopean figure who looks at an entanglement of piping, guts, and hands; it’s similar in style to art by Philip Guston, who’s right now the subject of a traveling retrospective.

No one seems to pay much mind to these works, which may not approach the Mona Lisa in value but, within the film’s world, are bona fide masterpieces unto themselves. Or are they?

There is, for example, no Guston painting that looks exactly like the one in Miles’s collection. It’s a lie that seems just barely convincing, and a false lead just like the ones Blanc investigates during the film’s second hour, after one partier falls through a coffee table while choking on a poisoned cocktail.

Even the paintings that are more closely modeled on real ones are deliberately not given their due. There’s a rendition of Mark Rothko’s 1961 painting Number 207 (Red over Dark Blue on Dark Gray), which features a fiery crimson mass hanging above a barely-there swatch of navy blue. In Miles’s home, the painting is hung upside-down, so that it’s dark blue over red. “I love the idea that Miles has no idea,” Johnson told the Wall Street Journal.

Miles is meant as a dilettante—a smalltime collector with big-time ambitions who wouldn’t know the first thing about Abstract Expressionism, even if a torrent of Clement Greenberg essays rained down upon him. The film suggests he’s not an anomaly in that regard. All rich people, Johnson seems to say, are obsessed with fancy things. They just don’t want to think when they show off their belongings.

But who gets the last laugh here, the viewers of Glass Onion or the wealthy being targeted by the film? Johnson seems to want it to be the former group, as suggested by the ending, in which—spoiler alert—Helen Brand (Janelle Monáe) sets the Mona Lisa aflame upon the revelation that Miles killed her sister and murdered one of his guests. (It’s all part of a conspiracy intended to grow Miles’s fortune that’s too complicated to explain here.) As the Mona Lisa’s smile is reduced to embers, Miles cries out in existential pain, and Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa” plays on the soundtrack.

There’s one shot in which Mondrian and Bacon lookalikes can be glimpsed burning too, but the focus here is really the Mona Lisa, which gets her own movie-star closeups and the requisite reverse shots with an anguished Norton. This implies that Johnson was always most interested in the Leonardo, too, and that that painting is really the most valuable one in Miles’s collection, all the other art on view be damned.

The painting worth the most money gets the greatest attention in Glass Onion, enacting the same misguided art-historical dynamic that Johnson himself wants to subvert. Miles’s place is the Tate Modern. Why would Johnson put the Mona Lisa front and center?

From the Italian Renaissance to the contemporary music scene and beyond, Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of a Florentine woman set against a mountainous landscape has struck a chord with people worldwide. Such is her popularity that some have tried vandalizing her to draw attention to themselves and their causes. And her image has been appropriated by everyone from Marcel Duchamp to Virgil Abloh.

What’s so special about the Mona Lisa, and why do we care so much? History professor and recent Leonardo biographer Walter Isaacson argues that she’s famous because viewers can emotionally engage with her. Others claim that her mystery has helped make her notorious.

Here’s a look at some of the likely reasons for our global obsession with this sepia-toned lady.

Since the start of the 20th century, the painting, which was acquired by France in 1797, has had spray paint and a teacup thrown at it. This week, it was caked. In 1956 alone, two vandals tried to use a razor blade and a rock to defile it on separate occasions. Each time, the Mona Lisa has emerged without damage. (All of this doesn’t count the various artists who have altered the Mona Lisa’s image, among the Marcel Duchamp, who famously put a mustache on a reproduction of the Leonardo painting, or the era during World War II when the painting risked being seized by the Nazis during their occupation of France.)

In short, the Mona Lisa has faced so much potential damage that even Salvador Dalí was once moved to speak on all the vandalism, attributing to the painting “a power, unique in all art history, to provoke the most violent and different kinds of aggressions.”

To look back on this unusual art-historical lineage, ARTnews has charted below five times in which the Mona Lisa was vandalized or stolen.

In what appeared to be video shot immediately following the incident, a person dressed as a woman who was seated in a wheelchair is escorted out of the museum by security guards. The suspect, who has since been identified as a 36-year-old man, was reportedly arrested and placed under psychiatric care.

“There are people who are destroying the Earth,” the man says in the video, speaking in French. “All artists, think about the Earth. That’s why I did this. Think of the planet.”

A spokesperson for the Louvre said that the museum had filed a complaint with investigators regarding the man who threw the cake.

“The museum salutes the professionalism of its agents who reacted immediately during this incident,” the museum said in a statement.

The Mona Lisa is one of the Louvre’s—and the world’s—most widely-seen artworks. Before the pandemic, it attracted as many as 30,000 people per day, according to officials at the Paris museum.

There have been attempts periodically to vandalize the Leonardo painting, sometimes in protest of various issues. In 1974, when the painting traveled temporarily to the National Art Museum in Tokyo, a woman spray-painted the Mona Lisa in an attempt to highlight the institution’s policies for disabled visitors. In 2009, a Russian woman threw a teacup at the painting. The Mona Lisa was not damaged on either occasion.

There have also been attempts to steal the Mona Lisa, most notably in 1911, when an Italian nationalist successfully removed it from the Louvre, only to be apprehended trying to sell it to a Florentine dealer.