“We were all waiting. We were watching the auctions very intently, and they did well. We didn’t know how this was going to go,” Samanthe Rubell, the president of Pace, told ARTnews.

Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz, similarly, noted the art market’s “period of recalibration” and the atmosphere of caution these days. However, he told ARTnews that the energy of the crowd on Art Basel’s first day was evidence that “the market is very much still here, and very strong.”

Horowitz may not be far off. By the end of Tuesday, it was apparent that not only had the worst been averted, but there was enough sales activity to consider the day successful. Dealers told ARTnews with some surprise that, unlike previous years, more purchases were made in-person, rather via presale PDFs, suggesting a real desire to experience artworks in person and all that the fair and its surroundings have to offer.

Perhaps the most direct, and colorful, message about the market’s resilience was sent to press by Hauser & Wirth cofounder Iwan Wirth. “In spite of the ‘doom porn’ currently circulating in the art press and along gossip grapevines, we are very confident in the art market’s resilience and the first day of Art Basel has confirmed our perspective,” Wirth said in a statement.

“The advantage of the market returning to a more humane pace is that the most discerning international collectors are committing here and now to the very best of the best,” he continued.

There were certainly collectors galore taking advantage of that “more humane pace”—in other words, a time for good deals—including mega-collector Steve Cohen, who made the rounds with a colleague dressed in paraphernalia from the New York Mets, the baseball team Cohen bought in 2020. Despite Cohen’s prodigious art collection, he not a usual sight at the fair.

Other dealers, too, were seeing some excitement in the air. By afternoon, news spread through the crowded halls that David Zwirner gallery had sold a Joan Mitchell diptych titled Sunflowers (1990–91), for $20 million. (ARTnews has heard disputing reports from well-placed sources that the actual selling price was closer to $18 million.)

“I would call that a very strong fair,” Zwirner told ARTnews, before pointing to works throughout the booth repeatedly saying “sold.” 

He continued, “And it really happened today. People want to see [the works], experience, talk about them. So, it’s happening here, much more this year than last year.”

Zwirner noted that, in some cases, advisers came on behalf of collectors from all over the world and used FaceTime or messaging to close deals.

“There’s been a narrative out there that the art market is weak and I feel like, when we do well, other galleries do well,” he said. “I assume this will be a very successful fair for the galleries. If the art market is not performing well in the auction environment, that’s one problem, but it’s certainly performing well right here.”

Zwirner also sold Gerhard Richter’s 2016 Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting) for $6 million, and Yayoi Kusama’s giant Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart (2023) for $5 million in the fair’s Unlimited section.

For what it’s worth, secondary market markups seemed more reasonable than usual. At Gagosian’s booth, an Ed Ruscha painting, Radio 1, which last sold at Sotheby’s in May of last year for $2.1 million, was on offer for $2.8 million. Also at Gagosian, Andy Warhol’s Hammer & Sickle (1976), which last sold at Sotheby’s in 2017 for $5.5 million, was on offer for $8.5 million.

“Overall, most galleries are better off today than they were in 2019,” Alex Forbes, the vice-president of galleries and fairs at Artsy, told ARTnews, referring to the last pre-pandemic fair. “It’s always important for folks to zoom out and take in the longer trend, rather than just focusing on year to year. In my view the art market in particular tends to respond to uncertainty more so than, necessarily, the ups and downs of the S& P 500.”

The European Central Bank’s decision to cut interest rates last week, offers some of that needed sense of stability, according to Forbes. ”I’m optimistic in the long run, particularly as we’re coming out of maybe the period of peak anxiety around possible runaway inflation,” he said.

Despite the top line successes, many dealers told ARTnews of a “slow down” in sales at the fair, with dealers taking longer to close sales and having to “work harder” with their clients to get pieces sold.

A New York–based art adviser who wished to remain anonymous, told ARTnews that a market slump, and what she called “disastrous” auction sales, have given her access to excellent artworks that were out of reach a few years ago.

“They will call you up, and before they didn’t have the time, because they had like 50 people calling them,” she said. “They are doing a really good job. They are the only people in the art world who put their money where their mouth is, [and] they are working harder.” When asked, the adviser echoed others who said primary prices have not changed, or gone down, despite concerns they have gotten too high.

“We do the very best we can, and when things do get quieter, it’s always also a moment of opportunity of getting even closer to the relationships you have, and build more there,” Marc Payot, president and partner of Hauser & Wirth, told ARTnews, while nevertheless noting sales are taking more time at the fair.

Basel is the mega-gallery’s home turf, and it had one of the fair’s stronger presentations, including mostly works by women and two artists of color.

“We have always done well when the market was not as hot,” Payot said, because the slower pace allowed them to spend more time “building relationships” with clients and artists. Despite any market cooling, by day’s end, the gallery said it sold more works Tuesday than on the first day of the 2023 fair.

In terms of sales, Hauser & Wirth placed its most expensive work brought to the fair, Arshile Gorky’s, rare 1946–47 large work on paper, Untitled (Gray Drawing (Pastoral)), for $16 million. The gallery also sold Jenny Holzer’s red granite benches to an Asian museum for an undisclosed sum, Blinky Palermo’s Ohne Titel (Untitled), from 1975, for $4 million, and Louise Bourgeois’s Woman with Packages (1987–93) marble sculpture for $3.5 million. Coinciding with their museum-caliber Vilhelm Hammershøi show in their new gallery space in Basel, a 1906 painting by the Danish painter, depicting a woman pinning up her loose hair, was sold for an undisclosed amount.

At the time of writing, a large Philip Guston painting, and a serene, white, moonscape by Georgia O’Keeffe (both priced at undisclosed sums) had not sold.

“Almost everything was sold in-person today,” said Pace’s Rubell, calling the gallery’s first day at Basel “fantastic.”

She continued, “In years prior, there has been a good amount of pre-sales from previews, but this time we’re really trying to capture new interest, and this moment of suddenly engaging, and having that feedback and response—it’s really worked. The energy is very good.”

A sprawling Jean Dubuffet bench sculpture titled Banc-Salon, overhung with suspended kites above, was a welcoming attraction for visitors who stopped at Pace’s booth. By early afternoon, the gallery had sold three editions of a total of six, priced at €800,000 ($860,000) each, in collaboration with Galerie Lelong & Co. 

Pace also sold its star Agnes Martin painting, Untitled #20 (1974), which last sold at auction in 2012 for $2.43 million. Though they would not share the price, a source told ARTnews that the price was $14 million. In 2021, a similar work sold for $17 million at auction. First Nation artist Emily Kam Kngwarray, whom the gallery recently took on, also had her pieces sold: one for $250,000 and the other $220,000. Kngwarray had a retrospective at Australia’s National Gallery, and next summer will be featured at Tate Modern in London.

Thaddaeus Ropac, which historically does not pre-sell its booth, was humming early in the fair, with fast paced sales from the get-go. “Like the old days,” one spokesperson told ARTnews. The gallery sold a major Robert Rauschenberg work from 1985 for $3.85 million, several editions of a Georg Baselitz bronze sculpture for €2 million each, along with other works by the artist, priced between €1.2 million and €1.8 million.

At White Cube, a Julie Mehretu painting from 1999 went for $6.75 million; it was last seen at auction six years ago, when it sold for $2.5 million. A “monumental” Mark Bradford, titled Clowns Travel Through Wires (2013), also sold for $4.5 million. Jeff Wall’s The Storyteller (1986) sold for $2.85 million, along with works by David Hammons, Tracey Emin, Gabriel Orozco, Antony Gormley, Howardena Pindell, and others. At the time of writing, the Richard Hunt sculpture for $1.75 million and the Frank Bowling for $1.35 million were not listed as sold.

“It’s neither the end of the world nor is it speculation,” Belgian collector Alain Servais told ARTnews. But that can make for a lack of newsy buzz. In fact, Servais says pre-sales and a broader commercialization of the fair have helped sap the fair of its urgency so that, “the froth (or the buzz) is down, so the excess are down, but you’re still selling.” Now, “80 percent of the reason I go to Basel is for the networking,” he added.

Others felt differently. Wishing away the pre-selling model is “nostalgia,” Madrid-based art adviser and curator Eva Ruiz, a friend of Servais, told ARTnews. She said she sees excitement in the way people share what they’ve seen and talk about in the early moments of the fair. “I still see collectors excited to be there the first day,” despite having seen a PDF in advance. “They still want to rush to see the work, and to be the first to buy,” she said.

As to whether Art Basel Paris might soon eclipse the Swiss fair? Ruiz said other regional fairs remain limited to their geographic locations. Basel is the exception. “Art Basel, Basel is seen as the prized, first art fair to visit,” she said, before adding that there is “room” for two European fairs. Americans, in particular, she said, are happy to come back to Europe for the Paris fair.

On the fair’s upper floor, where mid-sized and smaller galleries have their booths, New York’s Canada gallery featured color- and material-rich abstractions by Joan Snyder, which have attracted a lot of attention. They sold and reserved her pieces for $180,000 and $190,000. The artist is enjoying some overdue attention in her 80s, selling above her estimates at auction and set for her first solo exhibition with Thaddaeus Ropac in November. Canada gallery also placed a 2013 painting by Joe Bradley for an undisclosed sum. Co-founder Phil Grauer agreed collectors were calculating and taking their time.

“They’ve got time, it’s not a rush,” he said. “But there’s still desire and interest and enthusiasm.”

“They will go up to the artworks, and lick them, rub up against them. They are very curious,” said Roman Mathis, one of several farmer’s hosting the event. He said he had to work late into the nights leading up to opening day, repeatedly adjusting the fencing around the contemporary art installations, as weather conditions regularly shifted where and how works by over 150 artists, including performers, could be shown.

Following last-year’s widely acclaimed event in a former mayonnaise factory, BSC took a gamble this year in convening art and nature so literally in this outdoor venue, with works installed in fields, planted in forested nooks, or tucked inside barns, especially given Basel’s unpredictable weather. While severe storms have been averted thus far, the first day alone saw a mix of rain and shine, and by evening, as showers poured down on visitors, many were grumbling.

“The biggest challenge for us has been navigating with the changes in climate, and not knowing what fields we can use,” because of heavy rains, said Paris-based dealer Robbie Fitzpatrick, one of BSC’s co-founders. It has forced the team to play it by ear, and accept that “we don’t know, we’re flexible.”

In fact, two works that were to be displayed have been withdrawn due to rain, according to Fitzpatrick: Jean Tinguely’s tractor sculpture, Klamauk (1979), which can’t withstand “a drop of rain,” and another “high-value” work, Beni Bischof’s Made on Earth by Humans (2023), a souped-up DeLorean car (of Back to the Future fame).

But some artworks actually welcomed the inclement weather. The suspended circular drums in Margaret Raspé’s Regenrommein (Raindrums), 1988/2023, reverberate with sound them. It is one of the event’s poignant highlights. Since the 1960s, Raspé has addressed issues of climate and ecology through various mediums; a related film is also on view in the forest, along with videos by other artists.

Locating all the works on view is also part of the adventure for this year’s BSC, though daily tours are offered. An interactive map on the website informs visitors of where to wander. Though cell reception can be spotty, it’s a perfect excuse to get lost amid the undulating green fields and wildflowers.

As pieces were still being installed on opening day, part of the affair’s go-with-flow attitude, Fitzpatrick said, “People are asking me where the artworks are. The artworks are everywhere!”

It may not be an easy walk in the field, but it is an experience more than worth the journey that feels lightyears away from the commercial bustle of the Messeplatz, where Art Basel opens to VIPs on Tuesday morning. “This project is not an art fair, and it shouldn’t be confused with that, and the aim is really to present all of these different facets that comprise the ecosystem of our artistic community. The emphasis is really on the artists,” said Fitzpatrick.

Basel Social Club is technically a nonprofit event that is free to visit and includes participation from commercial galleries, artist-run projects, and foundations like the Pinault Collection and the Beyeler Foundation, who present a range of artistic practices and artists, from the very young to the historically established. Artists are given carte blanche, and commercial participants pay a flat fee of 2,500 Swiss Francs (around $2,788), while artist-run projects can participate for free. This year, the event has added a concert to its programming, headlined by Haddaway & Wolfram  on Wednesday night.

Young dealer Mischa Lustin of London’s Galerina said BSC “is a better fit for us because we have friendly relationships with the people organizing,” adding that the event is “a little more fun and a little less cringy” than a typical art fair. He described Galerina as “practically non-commercial,” with a marked rock ’n’ roll edge. On cue, he opened his leather jacket to show several “smuggled” artworks by Sarah Staton pinned to the garment’s inner lining. Jewel-like, mini sculptures made of gold-plated bronze, they are priced between 100 to 900 Swiss Francs ($111–$1,003).

Other memorable highlights include Himalayan artist Aqui Tami’s ephemeral, vulva-shaped sculpture made out of the muddy earth and titled Shrine for Boju. She said the work “honors our grandmother, the divine feminine presence” and later performed a ritual of thanks with the piece.

Cloud Canyons (1963/2016), the late artist David Medalla’s white, rain-proof sculpture of overflowing biodegradable soap columns was popular among the many visiting children who ran after the sudds as they blew away. Priced at about €250,000 ($268,000), the piece was brought by Berlin’s Mountains gallery. (The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles this week opens a major survey for Medalla, who died in 2020.)

On, Sunday, amid a sunny break in the clouds, Paulo Nazareth’s iconic performance Moinho de Vento/Windmill (2018) was re-enacted with 13 local immigrants come from Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, kicking off BSC’s live programming. Dressed in white, the performers solemnly walked through the green fields while holding Dutch ceramic coffee grinders, which they silently ground, leaving a trail of beans behind. We were told the grounds are not harmful to the surrounding environment.

One particularly intriguing example is the forthcoming show “Berthe Morisot à Nice, escales impressionnistes,” (“Berthe Morisot in Nice, an Impressionist Stopover”) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret in the seaside city, which runs June 7 through September 29. It will travel to Genoa’s Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cutura afterward. Morisot (1841–1895) was a central figure of Impressionism; she exhibited in seven out of eight of the movement’s shows, including the first one. Yet still today, when most think of the founders of the movement, few mention Morisot. The Nice exhibit attempts to correct the record by showing not only paintings she created there but also works by women in her Riviera circle.

With about 60 artworks by Morisot related to the wintry periods she spent in Nice in 1881–82 and 1888–89, complemented by around 40 pieces by other women artists, the exhibit is among the first to recognize the breadth and wealth of the feminine art scene in Nice at the time. In fact, one of the show’s curators told ARTnews that in conducting new research into the museum’s own under-examined collection, they discovered that no fewer than about 650 women were making art professionally in the region during the Belle Epoque, between 1877 and 1914. These women came from all over, representing some 20 nationalities.

“While we were researching more about Berthe Morisot and her period, we realized hundreds of women exhibited in Nice’s salons, gave art classes, or simply worked on the French Riviera,” said Johanne Lindskog, director of the museum and cocurator of the show. “It’s crazy, actually, and a spectacular quantity, which has allowed us to reestablish a certain historical reality about the presence of women in [the] Riviera’s art scene.”

These artists included the better-known Eva Gonzalès (1849–1883), who studied under Édouard Manet, Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1884), Louise Breslau (1856–1927), and Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), as well as artists whose names are less familiar: Thérèse Cotard-Dupré (1877–1920) and Alice Vasselon (1849–1893). “And, of course, they all knew each other and Berthe Morisot, either because they exhibited together or were in the same network,” Lindskog said.

Why were so many women making art around Nice and nearby environs like Cannes and Monaco? Perhaps following the example of Paris’s Académie Julian, which accepted women, art ateliers for women began to pop up, run by the likes of Jean-Jacques Henner, who encouraged his students to work and exhibit in Nice. In this cosmopolitan southern French city, women found a thriving art market and patrons who supported them. Moreover, the French Riviera, with its pictorial landscapes, was near Italy, where artists traditionally went to study classical and Renaissance art. Finally, many of these women painters themselves came from relative wealth and had second homes near the coast, an area prized for its warm weather and related health benefits. These women of means depended a little less on their husbands and fathers and were freer to explore their personal and artistic interests.

They also made work in a variety of styles that often dipped into, or was in dialogue with, the “new painting” that was Impressionism. Breslau, for instance, is known for her naturalistic realism but occasionally showed the influence of the Impressionists, whom she knew—notably Edgar Degas and the important Impressionist dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. “There’s a crisscrossing of painting that comes in contact with Impressionism, and hybrid works that are not entirely one or the other,” Lindskog noted.

The curators hope to underscore the hybridized aspect of the art made at the time, favoring a less rigid depiction of Impressionism and the context from which it sprang—an approach also seen in the blockbuster Impressionism exhibit currently at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, which emphasizes Morisot’s participation. “Museums have tended to favor a thematic, chronological approach, which has given the public the false impression that events occur[ed] in a segmented manner, one after the other,” said Lindskog. “Our wish is to reestablish a certain historical accuracy around what people saw at the time and what interested them. What are the points of contact and associations? It’s this complexity that is interesting.”

In their research, curators including art historian Marianne Mathieu also came across new evidence contradicting the belief that all Impressionist painting was executed swiftly. Mathieu and Lindskog found that Morisot would spend long periods in her studio preparing her final paintings, and that she made relatively few “final” works, suggesting she could take her time, given her financial security. In addition, Lindskog said colleagues discovered previously unknown artworks by Morisot’s husband, Eugène Manet, who was her informal dealer and production assistant, as well as by her daughter, Julie Manet. It would appear that the family painted together, often following Morisot’s lead and replicating her compositions.

As curators “begin to research Impressionism in alternative ways to simply lining up masterpieces along a wall,” Lindskog said, they continue to discover new information about the lives of the artists, which contributes to what we know of as Impressionism. “As we look closer at the real conditions in which these artworks were created, with a more social approach . . . we inevitably discover people and participants that we hadn’t noticed until now.”

With wide-reaching partners from Dior, Adidas, and Stella McCartney to the UN and the World Bank, Parley for the Oceans has an ambitious remit to end the world’s dependence on plastic, and its latest collaboration, with the mega art fair company Art Basel, is just the latest in these no-small plans. 

Launched at Art Basel Miami Beach in December, the organization bills its new “Art for the Oceans” collaboration as a “global fundraising initiative to protect oceans, climate, and life against plastic pollution, climate change and biodiversity loss,” and it will play a role at Art Basel Hong Kong this week.

Parley, as it is often called for short, entering the art world might seem like it’s come out of the blue, but since its launch in 2012, the organization has worked with over 30 artists, including the likes of Julian Schnabel, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer, Katharina Grosse, and Doug Aitken. It would seem, then, that its joining forces with the world’s most important art fair would be the logical next step. What’s more, Gutsch, who closed his design firm to create Parley, said the idea for the organization began at Art Basel in Switzerland, when he learned about the work of environmental activist Captain Paul Watson. Their meeting directly spurred “the epiphany that led me to dedicate my whole life to the oceans,” Gutsch has said.

At the Hong Kong fair, Parley will sell its limited-edition, artist-designed tote bags, made from plastic recuperated from nature. A single bag funds the removal of 20 pounds of plastic waste. They will also offer one-hour guided tours of the fair, highlighting artworks that share a connection to the environment and artists who have previously collaborated with Parley. (Tours cost $388HKD, around $49 USD, with proceeds going to the environmental cause.)

In an email, Art Basel Hong Kong director Angelle Siyang-Li told ARTnews that this collaboration with Parley is a way for the fair to develop both immediate and long-terms plans on how to reduce its carbon footprint. “Sustainability is a pressing issue for art fairs and the entire art world,” she said. “Art Basel is strongly committed to reducing its environmental impact as well as using its platform to encourage wider change across the art world.”

In Miami, Parley also featured artist-designed surfboards, which they chose not to ship to Hong Kong to limit carbon emissions, though they can be sent to any interested takers. For that launch, Schnabel, who has been an early Parley collaborator, exhibited three of his works as part of their partnership with Art Basel, and said at the time he had participated as a way to support “Parley’s work to change the destiny of our planet. Protecting the oceans goes far beyond protecting marine wildlife. Protecting the oceans means protecting humanity.”

Meanwhile, beyond its recent journey into art fairs, Parley also commissions artworks, both limited prints and larger installations, as a way to help fund its advocacy programs, including environmental education, plastic cleanups, recycling, and research into plastic-alternative materials, like the recuperated marine plastic that its bags are made from. Future plans include large, site-specific installations at the Art Basel fairs and beyond, as well as other programs like creating an artist residency.

But more than raising funds, Gutsch said he sees these first few art fairs as “introductions” into the larger art world, to spur both awareness and future collaborations. Beyond these art-related ventures, Parley also generates income from its commercial collaborations with brands like Adidas and Dior, as well as via direct donations and grants. However, Gutsch declined to answer questions about how much was raised at its Miami fundraiser in December, or about Parley’s budget, a nonprofit with 200 “core” employees. “We need a lot, into the 10’s of millions of dollars,” Gutsch said.

Parley relies on thousands of collaborations with other groups to work toward an “end to the plastic crisis,” which involves plans for building recycling and sorting hubs in three countries where the group has concentrated efforts: the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and the Dominican Republic. Once that goal is achieved there, Parley hopes to duplicate their “end-to-end solution” to plastic, built on a strategy that entails: Avoiding plastics/emissions, Intercepting plastic waste and pollutants, and Redesigning materials, methods, and mindset, or AIR. “It works. We’re very efficient… we just need to grow it now,” Gutsch said. The group’s 2023 report counted some 1 million participants in their education programs and cleanups in 57 countries, over 574,000 volunteers in global programs, and over 8.1 million kilograms of debris removed from nature and coastal areas.

“Parley,” in pirate lore, is a French word for a “conference or discussion, especially between opposing sides.” That notion seems to resonate in today’s divisive times, especially when it comes to the immediacy of climate change. Gutsch sees it as a way to describe the group’s method and challenge ahead, to parley—or talk—to art world elites, who aren’t exactly reputed for leading environmentally friendly lifestyles.

“The ecological footprint of the top end of the art market remains incredibly high, because of the almost incessant air travel,” Olav Velthuis, a sociologist focusing on the art market at the University of Amsterdam, told ARTnews in an email. Art fairs, too, are relatively high-polluting events, because they are often held in temporary venues, require shipping artwork, and attract jet-setting collectors who fly private—the bread and butter of major fairs.

The 2023 Art Basel and UBS survey of global collecting noted that while 57 percent of high net-worth collectors surveyed were willing to pay premiums for more sustainable purchases, 77 percent said they planned to travel to more fairs or overseas events than the previous year. “Although most collectors were aware of and concerned over the sustainability of the market, this has not fully filtered down to their actions or resulted in any significant reduction in their plans to travel,” the report concludes.

This lack of reduction in private air travel has already sparked protests, including one staged by the UK-founded environmental group Extinction Rebellion on March 9 that involved blocking the roads to Maastricht’s airport during TEFAF. “This segment of the art market is simply not sustainable,” Velthuis said, recommending a radical shift to a more local model. “Members of the art world, including Art Basel, urgently need to discuss on a more fundamental level how the contemporary art world and art market are organized. So far, I don’t see much willingness to engage in that discussion.”

For Gutsch, that is where Parley comes in. Asked if he sees any contradictions in working with a high-polluting milieu, Gutsch had a ready response. Far from the organization being “pure” itself (“we are no saints” and “we are all natural-born hypocrites at this point,” he said), Parley has already collaborated with major corporations and countries with particularly high carbon emissions. Eventually, he says the “ultimate potential” of the Art Basel collaboration, is to “drastically improve” the fair’s footprint.

“Our approach is to be in the room to collaborate,” he said. “Because if I would shy away from polluters or from events that are polluting, I would also have to shy away from governments that are polluting. … I’m actually doing the total opposite.”

He continued, “I am an innovator. We, as an organization, are change-makers. We go to the battlegrounds, where the most damage is being done, and in that sense, you can call Art Basel a battleground.”

While art fairs might be a key battleground when it comes to climate activism, Gutsch said Art Basel has already shown “courage” by choosing to collaborate with Parley, and his goal with this collaboration is to address the full-scope of the polluting, high-net-worth lifestyle that convenes around week-long art events like these, by converting collectors, both to reduce their emissions in their personal lifestyles, as well as in their wider social and professional circles.

“Somebody who can afford to buy an Andy Warhol, or a Basquiat, or a [Julian] Schnabel, usually has a lot of influence, so they can call up their leadership team, and say: ‘Let’s get out of plastic, let’s get out of fossil fuel,’” Gutsch explained. “We want to increase that group of high-net worth individuals that are exposed to us, because I don’t blame and shame anyone. I want to change them. I love sinners!”

Like many art fairs, Art Basel has begun to take steps toward greater sustainability in recent years, and Siyang-Li, ABHK’s director, said the event is “strongly committed to reducing its environmental impact.” One example is its active membership in the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), which requires certain commitments from participants, including developing a “Decarbonisation Action Plan,” a regularly updated, step-by-step carbon reduction strategy that includes setting a “near-zero waste target,” measuring emissions, and auditing waste, while guiding against “bad habits and social convention.”

Siyang-Li added, “We understand the immense value of collective effort. That’s why our collaboration with Parley for the Oceans and also with the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC) are central to our strategy. Together, we aim to harness the collective expertise and commitment of the art world to drive meaningful change.”

The Decarbonisation Action Plan is part of the GCC-member goal of reaching a 50-percent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030, which “is entirely possible” to do, a spokesperson for the group told ARTnews. The GCC has also witnessed positive change in the arts sector over the last four years, sighting over 1,150 new members, and “rapid progress in climate consciousness,” as well as a “readiness of many to begin to take action on the issues,” according to the spokesperson. The question remains whether that progress will be fast enough.

A key ingredient to these efforts are the artists, whom Gutsch said have a special “convening power.” He asked, “How do you make something like protecting the oceans, and our future, relevant to people that are otherwise so busy? I think the artist has the unique role in society to burst open these bubbles where everybody tends to hide.” Art can empower its viewers to feel a “readiness, an openness, which is something that we need, to create empathy for our cause,” he said. “Empathy is really what this is all about.” 

Most observers cite French president Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 speech in Burkina Faso—when he said he wanted “the conditions met for the temporary or definitive restitution of African heritage to Africa”—as the start of the new era in restitution. Similarly disruptive was a 2018 report on African cultural objects in French museums that Macron commissioned, authored by Bénédicte Savoy, head of modern art history at the Technical University of Berlin, and Senegalese academic Felwine Sarr. It estimated that 90 to 95 percent of the continent’s artistic heritage is located outside Africa, and urged repatriation of requested artifacts.

Since that time, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and recently, Switzerland have created national guidelines or panels to evaluate restitution claims and return artifacts acquired during the respective colonial periods. In addition, Belgium and France have adopted laws in recent years to facilitate the process and, in 2024, Austria and France are expected to propose new legislation along the same lines. Germany made waves in 2021 when it agreed unconditionally to transfer 1,100 so-called Benin Bronzes to Nigeria; it has so far delivered 22. 2023 saw renewed efforts, particularly around proactive provenance research and restitutions. Last May the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced a relatively large new unit dedicated to provenance research, following repeated seizures of antiquities by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. And, this past October, Germany and France’s culture ministries announced an agreement to launch a joint fund to research provenance of museum artifacts deriving from formerly colonized African regions.

“It’s as if we’ve changed eras,” Savoy told ARTnews recently. “It’s as though the Berlin Wall has fallen.”

In Europe, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Despite progress, some countries and institutional collections have stalled restitution efforts.

When Savoy and Sarr’s report was released in France, critics complained that it went too far in alleging that most artifacts from former African colonies were very likely acquired unethically. In April, a second government-commissioned report, written by onetime Louvre director Jean-Luc Martinez, tightened restrictions on requirements for restitution. It was designed to guide lawmakers drafting legislation to enable the deaccession of plundered artworks, particularly from Africa. Currently, most objects in France’s national collection cannot be restituted without the vote of parliament. The bill is the most controversial of three so-called “framework” laws: The first was voted into law this summer, and concerns Nazi looting—as reported in last fall’s ARTnews Top 200 issue; the second, on human remains, was signed into law December 26. The last framework law, on colonial-era restitutions, is by far the most controversial and is already considered to be overdue. And while France has returned 26 artifacts to Benin and a sword to Senegal, the number of returned objects has fallen well short of vague initial promises.

Rima Abdul Malak, France’s minister of culture, told ARTnews that “case-by-case” restitutions of objects would become more feasible when the third law is adopted, giving professionals necessary criteria and a plan of action.

The United Kingdom parliament, meanwhile, passed the Charities Act in 2022, in which sections 15 and 16 “would allow national museums to return material in rare cases where there is an overwhelming moral obligation to do so,” Alexander Herman, director of the UK-based Institute of Art & Law (IAL), told ARTnews. However, enforcement of those sections has been temporarily blocked. And the Parthenon Marbles remain at the center of a seemingly endless series of negotiations between Greece and the UK, which has so far been reluctant to relinquish ownership.

In Germany, the return of some Benin bronzes to Nigeria faced backlash when it was revealed in March that the 16th-century artifacts would not go to a planned national museum of West African art, co-funded by Germany, but instead, to Ewuare II, the 40th oba, or ceremonial king, of the Kingdom of Benin (British forces ransacked the king’s palace in 1897). In response, some European institutions paused their plans to return items to Nigeria, while several important German lawmakers called the transfer “a disaster.” That some of the bronzes were made from melted-down brass manilla bracelets, which the Kingdom of Benin received in exchange for slaves, has only added to the controversy.

Others defended Nigeria’s right to do what it pleased with recovered property. “Do we really want to go back to the attitude of the 1970s, when we Europeans equated the return of cultural assets to Africa with loss, destruction, and selling out?” Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Berlin’s public museum body, asked in a May statement. While he did not “fear that the bronzes would now disappear,” Parzinger did call for “clarification,” adding, “it is important that the Benin bronzes are shown publicly, as was agreed.”

None of these developments seemed to shake Savoy. “In politics, you have to take a few steps back to take a large step forward,” she said, quoting received advice. In short, even if her approach is not widely adopted, Savoy’s more radical advocacy has helped nudge whole systems in ways that would have been considered impossible just six years ago.

Last year, Savoy and Cameroonian cultural historian Albert Gouaffo presented a new study on looted objects from Cameroon. It estimated that German public museums currently hold 40,000 artifacts from the country, taken during Germany’s short and violent occupation at the turn of the 19th century. None have been returned yet, but that is likely to change. The Cameroon government said it had created a restitution commission to work toward that end.

Public Awareness Is Shaping Restitution Efforts

As debate heats up in parliaments around the globe, so too have public conversations around restitution. For Savoy, rallying public opinion is critical, because national collections, where most objects are held, are the property of citizens. When well-informed citizens pressure governments and institutions, that’s when change is often made, she said.

In many formerly colonized countries, information about looted or stolen artifacts is also advancing.

“More communities [in Cameroon] are interested in restitution, but also in reparations for the people killed, sometimes in the hundreds,” Richard Tsogang Fossi, a fellow at the Technical University of Berlin, who worked on Savoy/Gouaffo’s Cameroon study, told ARTnews.

Meanwhile, Yrine Karitou Matchinda, a doctoral candidate at Cameroon’s University of Dschang, interviewed local residents, often deep in rural areas, where older generations could recall how religious relics were used. But that memory is dwindling.

“The first thing you notice, is that there is a great absence,” Matchinda told ARTnews. “We lost track and the transmission of this knowledge,” which is why, Matchinda said, most Cameroonians know little about the items taken from their region during German occupation.

“There is always an interest to know about the objects, and a wish to see them come back … It’s about wanting to show future generations how their parents lived, so they can reconnect to their ancestral past,” she said.

Indeed, contrary to common assumptions, local leaders have been requesting restitutions since many countries in the Global South achieved independence in the 1960s, according to Savoy’s 2022 book, Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat.

In Nigeria, “everybody is now aware, and curious,” about the looted Benin City palace treasure, Mark Olaitan, curator at the National Museum, Benin City, told ARTnews. He added that the Nigerian government has been working on a storage facility for the artifacts, which are currently “in safe hands.” He gave no further details about their whereabouts or plans for future display. The head of Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments did not return requests for comment.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been working this year to create a system for handling restituted artifacts from European museums, after receiving an inventory of 84,000 Congolese objects in Belgium last year. Indonesia established a restitution team to work with the Netherlands and other European countries on returning artifacts, while activists in Nepal have agitated frequently since 2021 for the return of religious statues to the country.

In Europe and North America, wider public support for restitution is often traced to the racial justice movement ignited by the police killing of George Floyd, according to Leila Amineddoleh, a New York–based art lawyer who has advocated for the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece.

“Part of this movement is a recognition that heritage is important to everyone. It should be accessible to everyone, and the people in the origin nations as well,” she told ARTnews.

Amineddoleh has received multiple calls asking what to do about artifacts in family collections that are now seen as a “liability.” Many believed they were showing support for a culture—and artwork—they hoped to promote as equal in relevance and value to Western art when the pieces were purchased decades ago. Now, some of Amineddoleh’s clients are simply returning items to their countries of origin, not to “burden their children” and to avoid bad publicity from later seizure. While a market still exists for works from looted areas, she added, it most often takes place privately.

The Fate of the ‘Encyclopedic’ Museum

The impulse to err on the side of returning objects is visibly spreading, particularly at large institutions.

Alex Nyerges, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) told ARTnews that the museum’s trustees have consistently supported cases of possible restitution. Earlier this month, the VMFA repatriated 44 ancient artifacts from Italy, Egypt, and Turkey following a New York State and federal inquiry.

“Our philosophy is that we are merely guardians of our collections. If there is a question of title, we always do the right thing,” he said.

To that end, Nyerges said he felt museums should not shy from acquiring artifacts with insufficient provenance (as opposed to “questionable provenance,” which is a red flag), because there is a better likelihood of restituting items found in museums than in private collections. But not all museums are consistently cooperative. This fall the Cleveland Museum of Art sued the Manhattan District Attorney’s office over the seizure of a headless male bronze statue, citing a lack of “persuasive proof” for doing so.

Though a majority of the UK public has consistently favored restituting the Parthenon Marbles, according to recent polls, the government position has changed little since it rejected Greece’s claim in 1984, IAL director Herman writes in his new book, The Parthenon Marbles Dispute, published late last year. The government views the sculptures as a legal acquisition, which their laws prevent them from deaccessioning, and it insists on the importance of seeing the marbles within the global historic context provided by the British Museum, where they are housed.

That last argument, however, was weakened when the British Museum announced this past summer that it has been subject to systematic theft, allegedly by a staff member. More than 2,000 objects are said have been lost, stolen, or damaged over the course of three decades.

“The right to call itself ‘the museum of the world’ … is wearing thin,” UK lawmaker Sharmishta Chakrabarti said during a December House of Lords debate on the Marbles. “I fear the government is taking the concept of culture war to new and ever more literal levels … the government’s marbles are long since lost,” she said.

While restitution has been political from the get-go, to some, that can cloud judgment.

Art historian Bernard de Grunne, of the eponymous Belgian gallery, which deals in tribal fine arts, told ARTnews he believes restitution advocates are overlooking countless examples of fairly purchased items due to political aims.

“It’s not an objective, historical issue. It’s become a political issue and a pressure point,” he said. “I think the West did a great service to save what was left of these artistic heritages of Africa. I think a majority of it would have disappeared.”

At the heart of the debate is the concept of the Western encyclopedic museum, such as the British Museum or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Critics have long noted that citizens of the Global South cannot easily access these museums, whose collections comprise significant works from those cultures. Some have argued that such artifacts can be exhibited in their countries of origin without necessarily “emptying” the institutions that hold them, by organizing traveling exhibitions and long-term loans. A conference this past May in Dakar, Senegal, brought together 60 museum directors from Africa and Europe who pledged to cooperate on just such efforts. Others question whether the requesting country will exhibit restituted works to the public, and conserve them as national heritage.

“We are still stuck in what we call the ‘universal museum,’ and the sacralization of objects,” art lawyer Corinne Hershkovitch told ARTnews. “To say that another country is not capable of conserving [artworks]—those are our norms, which we are imposing … We are still far behind being able to discuss these questions in a dialogue between equals, on equal footing.”

“We better leave now if we’re going to catch the minister,” Vincent Krier, a member of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), France’s second largest union, told the crowd of about150. The plan was to march to the offices of Rima Abdul Malak, the minister of culture, and pressure her “face to face” to meet their demands for job security amid plans that the center will close for renovations for five years, starting in 2025. It will begin progressively closing after the Summer Olympics in 2024.

Pompidou workers went on strike in mid-October over those concerns, the latest in a series of strikes since plans for the arts complex’s renovations were first announced. Last month, negotiations between France’s five major trade unions and the culture ministry over the strike stalled.

Despite the length of the strike, it has only caused the institution to close for eleven days total so far, thanks to alternating groups of workers opting to picket. When security personnel, for instance, go on strike, the museum is forced to close. On Thursday, however, only the Kandinsky Library was closed, having just joined the movement the day before. But, in yet another sign of the strike’s expansion, the unions announced on the same day they decided to extend the strike to January 15.

Once at the ministry’s offices, located a half mile away near the Louvre, the crowd packed into the lobby, chanting “Pompidou en colère!” [The Pompidou is angry], as whistles blew, people clapped, and some drummed on a reception desk. After some time, Nathalie Ramos, a representative of the CGT-Culture union, and a leading figure of the protest movement, which is arguably the largest since the museum’s opening in 1977, addressed the crowd.

“We’ve just given the minister an end-of year gift — the extension of the strike notice at the Pompidou!” she said.

No one seems to contest that the Pompidou’s modernist edifice, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, is in a state of critical disrepair. The ministry of culture has promised to spend about $285 million on necessary renovations, including asbestos removal, fire safety measures, and improved access and energy efficiency. However, the long closure period, which many expect to last longer than the projected five years, came as a blow to workers who were initially told it would take only three. Plus, staff say they have been kept in the dark on what the project means for them.

“We don’t know why they can’t at least maintain part of the museum open – they have shown no proof justifying such a long closure,” Ramos told ARTnews. “The problem is there is a lot of opacity on how things are being done.”

In addition, workers have said they are increasingly upset about the center’s “cultural project,” or program for its re-opening, about which they also feel uninformed. That initiative involves a noted increase in loans from the museum’s collection to cultural sites around the globe, so as to help fund the approximately $200 million the program is expected to cost, in addition to the structural budget mentioned. While some of those lending contracts, recently brokered by Pompidou president Laurent Le Bon, promise over $30 million in income over the next seven years, according to Le Monde, workers say it’s not worth the damage it risks to a collection constantly on the move. Plus, they have expressed misgivings about the human rights record of places like Saudi Arabia and China, where the Pompidou just signed and renewed, respectively, contracts for future working relationships and lending.

“We know [Le Bon is signing these contracts] for the money, but it weighs on us. Right now, we get the sense we’re working for Saudi Arabia and China, and it’s a problem — an ethical problem,” Aurélie Gavelle, who is a conservationist at the Pompidou and a member of the UNSA union, told ARTnews. “No amount of money can justify it.”

In an email, a Pompidou representative said that the museum loans about 6,000 artworks annually. “We lend, and we benefit from loans — that is the life of museums and collections. Of course, this is all subject to very strict rules and protocols, which unfortunately don’t prevent a few accidents of various degrees, which remain limited,” they said.

Further, according to the museum, the number of striking employees has decreased from 200 at the start of the strike to figures varying between 46 and 8 employees in November.

However, new departments, such as the Bibliothèque Publique d’Information, a library inside the Pompidou, joined the strike last week, along with the Kandinsky Library. Additionally, it appears that the movement is spreading to other museums. Employees and skilled craftspeople from the Louvre and the national library, Bibliotheque nationale de France, and the National Ceramics Museum in Sèvres, among others, attended Thursday’s protest, sharing their concerns about declining numbers of jobs in areas such as renovation and skilled labor.

Gavelle, who spoke to ARTnews while walking towards the ministry of culture Thursday, noted all these concerns have amplified a general sense that staff “cannot work serenely and in good conditions.”

Pompidou staff have also objected to moving the collection twice in less than a year’s time, because a new storage facility to house them in the town of Massy, south of Paris, will not be ready until 2026. The dispersal of both their jobs and the collection, “will have a colossal impact on our working conditions,” said Gavelle, who wondered why renovations can’t wait until the new storage facility is ready.

In mid-November, Malak, the culture minister, attempted a response via open letter. She echoed the museum’s president, who also said they had tried, but were unable to find a single site for most of the the Pompidou’s activities and workers. The Grand Palais will host exhibitions and many of the 1,000 Pompidou employees, along with other museums in Paris, and the new site in Massy. Malak also ensured that no workers would be forced out of a job, and that they would be promised the same job or “an equivalent” one upon the museum’s reopening in 2030. She and the Pompidou would not, however, promise they would not resort to some subcontracted jobs, for employees in the private sector, once the museum opens – a major issue for workers, who want to keep the same number of public servant employees at the opening.

“It is too early to freeze the establishment’s organization structure, for what will be needed in 2030,” Malak wrote. “I’m aware of the long period of this closure, but it is necessary.” In the meantime, the center “will be more active than ever during these five years, with a rich program led by your president.”

On Thursday, Malak never did meet the protesters face-to-face, declining to come out and speak to the crowd. No doubt, however, she got the message.

As the Paris art market prepares for its busiest season with the opening today of the second edition of Paris+ par Art Basel, the local scene is basking in the warm autumn glow of the international art world’s good favor. This, despite the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza, France’s raising its security alert to the highest level following the stabbing of a teacher in the northern part of the country this past Friday, and the Louvre and Versailles being evacuated Saturday out of precaution following bomb and security risks, respectively.

Still, art world revelers were not deterred from convening at openings over the weekend, including those at two blue-chip galleries’ new French outposts: Mendes Wood DM in the Place des Vosges and Hauser & Wirth’s 19th-century hotel particulier near the Champs Elysées. That these inaugurations—and other gallery opening receptions—took place over the weekend this year, as opposed to during the week as they did last year, is worth noting.

Dealer Nathalie Obadia, whose eponymous gallery recently expanded its Paris footprint, said, as has long been speculated and buoyed by Brexit, Paris may indeed be draining some of Frieze London’s mojo: visitors “are either ignoring Frieze, or only going for one day, and then coming to Paris right away. It shows Frieze is no longer prioritized,” she said.

While Obadia’s view may be hard to prove, Paris has become a hot destination for collectors, advisers, and others coming from outside Europe, who are attracted to the City of Light’s fast-growing roster of international art galleries, private art foundations, and experimental alternative spaces in walkable distance from its world-class museums, not to mention its luxurious hotels, coveted fashion and design, and gourmet restaurants. The Parisian contemporary art scene is blooming—and the sophomore edition of Paris+ is certainly potent fertilizer. This week will also see several satellite fairs—Paris Internationale, Asia Now, AKAA Art & Design Fair, and the inaugural Design Miami/Paris—crop up across the city.

“With Paris+ everything is more international!” Guillaume Piens, who runs the regional fair Art Paris each spring, told ARTnews in an email. With more and more galleries coming, “this is a major, historic turning point for Paris,” Piens said.

Nevertheless, the second edition of an art fair can be tricky; once the hype of the first act subsides, will the fair be able to stand on its own and have long-term impact on the city’s art scene?

“Last year there was the question of whether the first edition signaled that Paris is back,” said Paris+ director Clément Delépine, referring to the city’s former status as the world’s leading art center. “We’ll need to compare [results] over time to identify a trajectory,” he said from a fair office room on the Champs Elysées. But “if the galleries are bringing the masterpieces they plan to show, it means they’re confident in finding a Paris audience, and in selling them … This is clearly a Parisian moment that, for now, hasn’t run out of steam.”

Obadia said that several clients have confirmed they will be in Paris this week for the fair, which could itself pose a problem on the two VIP days, beginning Wednesday, given that Paris+’s temporary home, the Grand Palais Ephémère, is smaller than the iconic Grand Palais, to which it will return, post-Olympics renovations in 2024.

Despite the uptick in attention on Paris each October, locals wonder whether this recent allure will translate into real growth to the French art market, now the fourth largest globally and accounting for about half of all art transactions in the European Union. The numbers from the auction houses suggest there is still much progress to be made: French fine art auction sales still lag behind its UK neighbors. Despite consistent growth, French houses accounted for only 6 percent of the global secondary market in the first half of 2023, whereas those in the UK accounted for about 17 period in the same period, amid an average global drop in sales of 20 percent, according to Artprice. Auction sales in Paris remain “much more conservative” than those in competing cities like London, New York, or Hong Kong, according to Artprice’s head economist Jean Minguet, as the major houses generally do not auction coveted lots by blue-chip artists and rising stars in Paris.

“Galleries are coming in, and it’s great, but is the pie big enough to share?” asked dealer Magda Danysz, who has spaces in Paris, Shanghai, and London. “What financial results can we show for it, and does it benefit the French scene?”

Obadia, however, remained optimistic, saying that “the reason so many foreign galleries are coming to France, is also to go after French collectors … I’ve seen a new generation of French art enthusiasts who are really building ambitious contemporary art collections—and that’s completely new.”

But Paris+ did not arrive in the French capital without an air of controversy. Art Basel booted the longtime hometown fair, FIAC, from its Grand Palais slot. And with it, some French galleries long on the exhibitor list did not make the cut last year. Danysz’s gallery is one of them, having been waitlisted for Paris+ last year. As an alternative, she exhibited at the Asia Now fair at La Monnaie de Paris. This year, she decided against all fairs to focus on the program at the gallery and promoting French painter Rakajoo, who has an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo opening this week.

Still, like other galleries interviewed that were not selected for Paris+, Danysz was unequivocal about the clear impact of Paris+ in drawing international clients; in fact, she said her business has seen a rise in sales this year. That includes foreigners “we wouldn’t have met without this effervescence” of Paris +, she said.

Despite whispers to the contrary last year, both FIAC and Paris+ included similar percentages of French-originating galleries, between about 25 percent and 30 percent, on their exhibitor lists. Though Paris+ officially says it has closer to 40 percent French galleries, as it counts any gallery with an outpost in France, including the blue-chips that have only been operational on French soil for less than four years, like David Zwirner (opened in 2019), Hauser & Wirth, and Mendes Wood DM.

By week’s end, there will already be talk about the third edition and whether this spotlight on Paris is more than just a trend. “It’s likely to last because it’s about a whole ecosystem, which is considerably strengthened by Paris+,” Alain Quemin, an art sociologist and professor at University of Paris 8, told ARTnews.

Delépine, the Paris+ director, used a French saying—Il y a du biscuit (there’s a lot to chew on)—to sum up the range of impressive art exhibitions on view leading into the week.

Striking a more serious note concerning the ongoing crisis in Gaza, Delépine said, “It’s undeniable that our fair is taking place within the context of a humanitarian catastrophe. In moments like these, we hope that our fair can also be a space where we can unite, a vector of mutual support, comprehension, solidarity, humanity, and collective consciousness.”

“We’re in a situation where we’ve gone from avoidance, avoidance, avoidance, justifications for holding on to Nazi-looted art, the inalienability of works in collections, to unanimous votes,” Elizabeth Campbell, director of the Center for Art Collection Ethics at the University of Denver, told ARTnews. “It’s a sign of tremendous progress.”

The new law is far-reaching. It will allow stolen art, books, and other cultural property in France’s inalienable public domain—even work looted beyond its borders—to be returned to its rightful owners. Like some other European countries, France’s Heritage Code holds that collections in its public museums are shared public property, and therefore “inalienable,” meaning they cannot be sold or removed. The new law provides an exception. In the past, restitution claims had to be addressed by the arduous passage of case-by-case deaccessioning laws, as they were with the February 2022 law that authorized the return of 15 artworks from national museums, including the Musée d’Orsay’s only painting by Gustav Klimt, and one by Maurice Utrillo. That law came years after some claimants received recognition as the works’ rightful owners.

And, yet, the new law was overdue. France and its public museums have long been criticized for decades of inaction at best, and, at worst, and in rare cases, flatly refusing to return artworks to families of Holocaust victims and Jewish refugees who had the misfortune to make claims when these issues were more commonly swept under the rug.

“Basically, what’s happening in France now is that restitution is being made possible at last,” Wesley A. Fisher, research director for the Claims Conference–World Jewish Restitution Organization’s Looted Art and Cultural Property Initiative, told ARTnews. While the legislation comes nearly 80 years after the war’s end, with few directly connected still alive, “most countries have not done what France is doing at the moment,” he said.

Campbell analyzes France’s handling of restitution, along with that of two other formerly occupied European countries, the Netherlands and Belgium, in Museum Worthy: Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe. In the book, due out later this year, Campbell describes how all three countries for decades justified holding on to artwork lost by and plundered from Jewish families, when nobody came forward relatively quickly to claim it. The book follows her 2011 work, Defending National Treasures, which questioned the prevailing narrative in France that top curators at French museums, notably the Louvre, had worked heroically to safeguard artwork sequestered from persecuted Jews. Instead, she demonstrated how, despite earlier, successful efforts by some to protect art from Jewish collections, in 1941, museums began opportunistically taking official steps to acquire art from Jewish collections sequestered by the French state under prevailing anti-Semitic law, to fill gaps in their holdings. After the Liberation they returned those works to surviving families, though not always easily.

In an interview with ARTnews, Campbell painted an inconsonant picture of how Western countries have handled WWII restitution, where seemingly proactive efforts are almost as easily countered by examples to the contrary. France is one of only five countries that has a dedicated commission for restitution and research of Nazi-looted art. Others include Austria, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Germany, whose German Lost Art Foundation (DZK) far outdoes its neighbors in terms of funding and manpower. This year, the DZK earmarked €5.3 million for artwork plundered in the context of WWII, versus the €220,000 allotted to France’s commission. However, France lagged behind Austria and the UK—in 1998 and 2009, respectively—in passing deaccession laws that allow the removal of artwork lost or looted during the Nazi period from a collection owned by the federal government without extraordinary legal measures.

“All countries have more work to be done,” Campbell said, pointing to the 44 countries, including France, that signed the groundbreaking—but nonbinding—Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art in 1998. That agreement called for proactive steps toward identifying and restituting Nazi-looted art, but little action followed those promises at the time. The United States’ mostly privately run museum system leaves it up to individual institutions to research provenance, and no strict enforcement mechanism for restitution exists, though in 2016, the country unanimously passed a law preventing US museums from continuing to use expired statutes of limitations as grounds for rejecting restitution claims.

In France, at least 100,000 artworks were plundered from the country’s thriving art scene and Jewish collections. That low estimate includes works sold under duress in France by families hoping to escape, and by government-appointed administrators who oversaw seized Jewish property, auctioning it to willing buyers, including knowing French museums. After the war, about 60,000 artworks were returned from Germany to France by the Allies. Among them, some 45,000 were restituted following requests, but roughly 13,000 unclaimed objects considered less valuable were sold by the state. The remaining approximately 2,200 unclaimed artworks were labeled Musées Nationaux Récupération (MNR) and selected to be housed in public French museums. Overlapping with what academics often called the “silent years” or the “trente silencieuses,” referring to the roughly 30 years following the 1950s, only 4 MNR artworks were restituted between 1955 and 1993, because institutions did not seek out their owners, and restitution was not a top priority. That is, until 1995, when journalist Hector Feliciano published The Lost Museum [Le musée disparu], which blew wide open the story of Nazi looting and MNRs (National Museums Recovery registry).

Many interviewed felt that the “silent years” resulted from a deep denial in France about the culpability of the so-called Vichy government, led by Philippe Pétain, as well as a desire to focus on rebuilding and moving on, shared by many Jewish survivors. The regime, in power from July 1940 to August 1944, deported at least 75,670 Jews to death camps. The French silence was notably broken in 1995 by then president Jacques Chirac in a landmark speech, when he became the first French leader to admit the state had “seconded” the Nazi occupiers in their “criminal folly.” Yet even today, a French Resistance narrative persists, originating with General Charles de Gaulle, minimizing the parliamentary-elected government based in Vichy as a de facto fake French entity. The war years, in this line of thinking, were a mere “parenthesis” in French history.

Before the 1990s, “it’s true that France was a little behind [in terms of restitution] and had a hard time looking at that [wartime] period,” Fabienne Colboc, a member of the National Assembly and the new restitution law’s rapporteur, charged with studying and amending the measure, prior to presenting it to parliament, told ARTnews. “Even if it’s difficult … even if we’re ashamed, we need to recognize what the French state did during that period.”

Pierre Ouzoulias, a left-leaning senator whose grandparents and great-grandparents were communist French Resistance fighters, pushed for the new law to name explicitly the French government’s clear role in said Nazi plundering. That effort led to the only major point of debate in parliament, with far-right legislators unsuccessfully calling for references to the French government under Pétain to be labeled “illegitimate,” while earlier versions of the bill skirted the sensitive issue with a jumbled alternative moniker: “de facto authority claiming to be ‘government of the French state.’” Ultimately, the law places responsibility for the spoliation of Jews on “the French State between 10 July 1940 and 24 August 1944,” when the Vichy government was in power, in addition to “Nazi Germany [and] … the authorities of the territories that it occupied, controlled or influenced.” The law is thus the first to name the “French state” responsible for the government-sponsored spoliation of Jews. An earlier law acknowledges “racist and antisemitic crimes” by the “French State,” and another, following the Liberation, invalidates forced sales and spoliation under governments working with or under the “enemy,” including the “government of Vichy,” without mentioning anti-Semitic persecution.

“We can plainly see that France still has not taken time to mourn for what happened under the occupation, with Vichy,” said Ouzoulias, commenting on the debate, and noting that he hopes that, as word spreads about the new law, more will come forward with claims.

After the parliament’s vote, I walked across the Seine River to deliver the news to Corinne Hershkovitch, known as “Madame Restitution.” The trailblazing art and intellectual property lawyer is recognized for securing the return of artworks to heirs of Holocaust victims and refugees via court order, when their requests were refused. Her life’s work was launched by a 1995 meeting with the grandson of Jewish-Italian collector Federico Gentili di Giuseppe, whose collection was seized and auctioned in 1941 in Paris. After the grandson discovered The Lost Museum, he was reminded of how his mother, Adriana Gentili di Giuseppe, who fled France during the war, often told him about a visit to the Louvre in 1950. There, she saw her father’s paintings, and asked the museum for their return. They refused. She asked again and was refused in 1955 and 1961, because the institution believed the sale was valid.

“Those bastards at the Louvre don’t want to give me back my father’s paintings,” Adriana would tell her son, according to Hershkovitch. The works, made between the 16th and 18th centuries, included a Moretto da Brescia and a Bernardo Strozzi. They were labeled MNR, meaning they were not state property, and their owners were unknown. But the political climate was far different then. The restitution of such works today would likely be a no-brainer, particularly given that, following publication of The Lost Museum, and government-led efforts enforced in 2013, researchers have been painstakingly seeking the owners of the remaining 1,800 MNRs of unclear provenance. In 1999 a French appeals court voided the initial sale to the Louvre, ordered the paintings’ restitution to Giuseppe’s heirs, and forced the Louvre to reimburse the family’s legal fees.

On that fateful day last June, I was ushered into a room hung with stark expressive paintings by Algerian-French artist Adel Abdessemed, many depicting migrants and victims of war. Hershkovitch sat at the short end of a long table, and only a few minutes in, threw out any preconceived notions I may have had about her views on the new law. Years of battling the establishment, when it seemed as though no one—not even some leaders in the French Jewish community—felt she should pursue the issue, had forced Hershkovitch to consider the complexities of what comes next.

“Of course [the new law] leads in the right direction,” Hershkovitch told ARTnews, but “I’ve come to a point where the most important thing is not restitution. It’s what remains. The memorial aspect.” She said compensation and an agreement between parties was often preferred. “It’s only in conserving a trace of [history], that we can hope [the Holocaust] doesn’t happen again,” she said.

While Hershkovitch’s restitution cases, which pitted her against France’s most venerated art institutions, were “essential for breaking through the status-quo, and for recognizing its importance, restitution only really has value if done to those directly connected to the person who was spoliated. Now, we are getting further and further away,” she said. “This law is coming so late in terms of all that has happened these last 30 years.”

For years, it was “not in the interest of curators” to question provenance of potentially Nazi-looted works in their collections, Hershkovitch said, echoing similar views by Campbell. The new law is nevertheless part of a “revolution,” she said, in how museums consider provenance. “Questioning the presence of these artworks in museums, is also the questioning of museums themselves, and it opens the door to a new approach to what a museum can be,” she said.

The Nazi restitution law is only the first step. The French government has plans to pass two more “framework” restitution laws, meaning laws stipulating guidelines that allow the deaccessioning of an object from the public domain under certain conditions. The initiative also sends a much-awaited message that President Emmanuel Macron is addressing the growing scrutiny into museum acquisitions, which in today’s zeitgeist, have become fraught and highly symbolic testaments to the nation’s complicated past. The two other framework laws will address the repatriation of human remains—numbering in the tens of thousands in French institutions—and the repatriation of art taken from Africa and other regions during the colonial era. The latter, for which the government has yet to release a bill, is expected to face heated debate and delays.

In a country that has frequently struggled to reckon with its past, the Nazi restitution law still featured hand-wringing by right-wing lawmakers reticent to acknowledge the extent of French wrongdoing. France’s colonial history is an even more sensitive wound, covering centuries and seeping deep into all layers of society, with debates regularly stoked by conservative leaders known to insist on the “positive” aspects of France’s empire of some 60 million colonial subjects. A controversial 2005 law even required schools to teach about the “positive role” of French colonialism; it was repealed amid public outcry. Speaking to ARTnews, Patrick Lozès, president  of the Representative Council of Black Associations of France (CRAN), directly linked the “same movement from those who have said that colonialism supposedly had positive aspects,” with what he describes as a “fear” of accelerating restitution to former colonies.

Indeed, there is little guarantee that legislators will come together to pass a framework law for restituting art from former French colonies. Considering how long it took for the state to admit culpability for the Vichy regime, several parliament members said that, while they hope the remaining framework laws receive broad support, few expect it to acknowledge wrongdoing in the context of France’s once vast empire. Ouzoulias, the left-leaning senator, said that while it made sense to justify WWII restitution by linking it to the French state’s responsibility “for the colonial years, we won’t be able to manage it … we’ll have to find other criteria,” he said. “[Otherwise] the bill won’t pass.”

The absence of any similar recognition of wrongs done could lead to a perception of a double standard. Already, Lozès, who has long advocated for art restitution to Africa, argued that a recent government report by disgraced former Louvre director Jean-Luc Martinez, which proposed guidelines for the third framework law, was a clear “regression” from Macron’s 2017 promise to return “African heritage to Africa.” Lozès called it a “paternalistic” reversal of the much broader recommendations stipulated in a 2018 report. The new recommendations place greater limitations, like ensuring the claimant properly display and conserve the work. “It’s neocolonialism. It has no other name,” Lozès said. “It is a recuperation of the restitution issue by senior officials … and certain members of national museums.”

The lack of consensus around condemning French colonial actions is why Hershkovitch is concerned the Nazi restitution law will further complicate the passage of the third framework bill. In doing so, it could “divide communities,” she said, referring to minorities of immigrant and former French colony backgrounds, as well as Jews, who she worried might be singled out as benefiting from special treatment. Members of parliament interviewed for this story similarly noted the danger of that dynamic, but agreed the laws needed to be voted separately owing to their distinct categories, rather than lumping them into one, three-pronged measure, as Hershkovitch preferred.

“My fear is that there won’t be a law for cultural goods [referred to as African art],” due to controversy, “and that will be a catastrophe,” Hershkovitch said. “Everyone is so happy about this law for the 1933–1945 period … but what are we going to do now for the law on cultural goods? How will we ever be able to go as far?”

Institutional handling of Nazi-era restitution claims has also been subject to skepticism from an increasingly curious public, according to a 2018 report by David Zivie, who heads France’s Mission for the Search and Restitution of Cultural Property Looted between 1933 and 1945 (M2RS). But, Zivie told ARTnews, institutions are making significant, concrete changes, both in steps toward restitution and their thinking. Zivie led a surge of new restitutions, helping bring the total number of returned artworks from France to about 200 since 1950, following the initial 45,000 works returned in the five years following the Liberation.

“There are still some people who feel that when a painting is removed and restituted, it creates a little gap, too much of a gap in the museum,” Zivie said. “[But] that is no longer a very pervasive point of view. I think things are evolving positively, even if not fast enough. … Our role is to be favorable to restitutions, to push and encourage our colleagues in museums to do more research (into provenance) and explain that … any doubt should nevertheless err on the side of the families making claims.”

France began seriously addressing restitution around the late 1990s, similarly to other Western European countries. The Mattéoli Mission launched in 1997 to research the plundering of Jews in France, and to recommend modes of compensation, leading to the 1999 creation of the Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation (CIVS), which evaluates claims, and is attached to the prime minister’s office. In 2013 the government established a group of experts to search for heirs of the unclaimed MNR works, and in 2019, Zivie’s M2RS was formed within the Ministry of Culture.

The new environment in France has provided hope to Oliver Kaplan, who is currently searching for artworks, with the support of the M2RS and the CIVS, from the art collection of Jewish businessman Georges Levy. While Levy was interned in France’s Drancy camp, he wrote a letter to Kaplan’s grandfather, the former grand rabbi of France, instructing him to sell his art and give the proceeds to Jewish victims of war. But Levy was deported to Auschwitz, where he died in 1943, and the Nazis seized the collection. The new French law, according to Kaplan, is part of a broadening awareness on restitution that has helped his family reach agreements on returning some works, without needing to assemble all the hard evidence necessary to prove legal title. But, even so, Kaplan’s efforts highlight how difficult it is to recover such artworks: releasing too much information about the collection might scare private individuals from selling the works.

“We hope when another one of the works is discovered,” Kaplan told ARTnews, “it will be a chance to track down the rest of the collection. Maybe it was kept together, and never dispersed. We just don’t know.”

Meanwhile, museums have begun hiring a small number of researchers dedicated to provenance issues, as educational opportunities in the field emerge. The Louvre led the way, in January 2020, when it recruited art historian Emmanuelle Polack to coordinate the museum’s painstaking provenance research for acquisitions between 1933 and 1945, plus unclaimed MNRs. Thanks to that laborious ongoing detective work, Polack told ARTnews that progress has been made in identifying questionable dealers who may have worked with the Louvre, as well as spotting signs of known, plundered Jewish collections. In her published writings about the French art market during the Occupation, Polack describes the Louvre buying what she deemed spoliated artwork from the Armand Isaac Dorville collection, in an ongoing case. She was also a member of the German task force investigating some 1,500 works found in the Munich home of Cornelius Gurlitt, whose father was an art dealer for Hitler’s planned museum in Linz. Her appointment is an oft-cited symbol of evolution within French institutions aiming for greater transparency.

“In the last ten years or so, we’ve welcomed a small change in mentalities, and I see it in younger audiences,” Polack said. “Young people don’t understand the problem. … They want clean museums, transparent, perfectly clear museums, and, if possible, displays of a work’s provenance.” Polack, who lost family in the Holocaust and is determined to “do this work so my children will no longer need to,” has organized “study days” at the Louvre, in which wartime acquisitions are examined, helping the public “understand that for us, it’s not a problem to confront, without hesitation. We look at provenance,” she said. But in something of a contradiction, when asked what she meant by “the problem,” she indicated that younger generations didn’t understand, Polack stonewalled. “I have a position at the Louvre Museum,” she said. “I cannot revisit old stories. I wasn’t here. I have no judgment to make … what matters to me is to go towards the future …”

I’d been warned by the Louvre press department that Polack could not answer questions that might be seen to compromise her relationship with her employer, likely because of her role in helping the Dorville family’s claim. That view puts her in opposition to the Louvre and several other museums, which remain in a legal standoff with the Dorvilles. French museums, including the Louvre, returned 12 paintings to the Dorville heirs last year in exchange for the cost museums paid for the works. Their reasons for doing so were the “troubling” circumstances around the acquisitions, and that the museum knew about the collection’s Jewish origins, but the CIVS could not confirm it had been looted. The case will be heard in a Paris appeals court this fall and the family, co-defended by Hershkovitch, is asking for the restitution of 9 additional works, including a Eugène Delacroix painting in the Louvre, and an Édouard Vuillard work in the Musée d’Orsay, plus recognition that the initial sale involved despoiled works.

The Dorville conundrum illustrates a gray zone in the new law: it doesn’t spell out the definition of spoliation, which is left to the CIVS. “Even if a painting was paid for at a normal, market price, if the motive of the sale is to escape anti-Semitic persecution, we consider it an item which should be restituted, because it’s a forced sale,” Michel Jeannoutot, CIVS president, told ARTnews.

As it became evident that my talk with Polack would leave some questions unanswered, I ventured one last query about the Louvre’s refusal to return paintings to Gentili di Giuseppe’s daughter in the 1950s. “It was not a time I experienced at the Louvre,” she said, emphasizing her job is to focus on working with the museum now to research art plundered during the Nazi era.

How, then, does one talk about the significance of current changes at museums dealing with these issues, itself inextricably linked to understanding provenance, without discussing, and perhaps constructively criticizing prior management of restitution? While Polack may not be free to publicly address the Louvre’s less glorious chapters, here, again, examining past actions of a beloved public institution, itself a symbol of French culture, is curiously fraught.

I took my questions to the Services des musées de France, which has been examining claims since the 1950s, and was criticized for its past inaction on MNRs. “The manner in which restitution requests are handled has greatly evolved over the last decades, notably since the Gentili di Giuseppe affair … [which] enabled situations of forced sales or sales under coercion to be considered spoliations,” a representative of the ministry said in an email. French institutions don’t always have enough evidence, or “come to the same conclusions as legal heirs” about whether sales were forced, they said. But such legal wrangling remains rare, they added, noting that, of the 184 MNR artworks restituted since 1950, only 10 were returned under a judge’s order. Another 50 were restituted on the initiative of the ministry and museums.

Fair enough. Progress is being made even as the country’s restitution efforts remain a sensitive and complex topic. That point was not lost on Polack, who broke slightly with protocol during our talk, and leaned in with a smile. “I often laugh about finding myself here at the Louvre,” she said. “I’d say it’s the marriage—and you’ll understand—of the carpe and the lapin,” a French expression that describes a mismatch. “It’s a strong symbol.” 

A version of this article appears in the 2023 ARTnews Top 200 Collectors issue.

Creuzet’s exhibitions typically carry paragraph-length titles that point to the show’s underlying themes, as did this one that recently traveled from LUMA Arles in France to LUMA Westbau in Zurich: “Orpheus was musing upon braised words, under the light rain of a blazing fog, snakes are deaf and dumb anyway, oblivion buried in the depths of insomnia.”

Not unlike the mythical Orpheus, who descended into Hades to retrieve his love Eurydice only to lose her at the last moment, we too travel into Creuzet’s world, set somewhere below the surface of wakeful consciousness. There, in his reimagined version of an immersive opera, we’re invited to experience forgotten memories told in song accompanied by hanging skeletal sculptures of landscapes, spirit creatures, panel paintings, and holograms of artifacts come to new life from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. If we peer and listen closely, pieced together narratives surface, overlapping before they too fade away, transformed into something else with every new turn.

Creuzet’s work is a hard-to-pin sensory exploration that sparks the imagination. It’s this friction between the strange and unknown that makes us question the familiar, an exercise at the heart of Creuzet’s practice. He wants us to question everything.

That is increasingly possible through Creuzet’s work, as it becomes more visible internationally, with the latest feather in his cap being the French Pavilion; he will be the first Black man to take it over. Other major exhibitions include solos at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2019) and Camden Arts Center in London (2022), as well as appearances in Manifesta 13 in 2020, the 2018 Gwangju Biennale, and the 2017 Lyon Biennale. In 2021, he was nominated for the esteemed Prix Marcel Duchamp, administered by the Centre Pompidou.

Yet, the prestigious platform of Venice seems to have no bearing on Creuzet. “For me, it’s just a title. One step. One exhibition,” he told ARTnews in a video interview earlier this year from his Paris studio. “It’s about continuing with my work, which is to share various imaginations with others. And in a sense, to question the world, our context, our history, our present. … Nothing has changed.”

In essence, he’s interested in reaching the widest audience possible—“art only exists when we give it to others to see”—because that is the way to “generate areas of space for movements of emancipation and movements of the imagination,” he added.

Within those spaces, Creuzet challenges preconceived categorizations, particularly ones that relate to his own lived experience, such as the African and Caribbean diasporas, the significance of artistic and literary voices from those diasporas, the legacy of colonialism, and the struggle to share our planet’s resources. For Creuzet, these subjects are personal and inescapable.

Born 1986 in a working-class Paris suburb, Creuzet was raised in Martinique, where he was introduced early on to artists from the Caribbean, thanks to his family’s love for culture. “Being surrounded by that [artistic] nourishment fascinated me—it made me dream,” he said. He still remembers the blue enamel ceramics by local artist Victor Anicet that are evocative of local pre-Columbian ceramics and the music of Eugene Mona. The “enigma” of his childhood is the source of Creuzet’s “imaginary reservoir,” with Martinique its “emotional heart,” said Creuzet who returned to France in 2006 when he was 20 years-old to pursue a standard educational track at French art schools; he is now a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

“I’m always left trapped, because the Other … endlessly boxes me into this one identity,” Creuzet said. “I try to be what I have to be. But in one way or another, I’m constantly reminded of my condition as a Black man. … It makes me realize there is still a lot to do in terms movements to emancipate and decolonize the body, knowledge, culture, and arts.”

Throughout our hour-long conversation, Creuzet often responded in open-to-interpretation metaphoric French prose (certain nuances, of course, have been lost to translation), which should come as no surprise given that he is also a prolific poet. “I answer this way, because I don’t want to reduce everything to one thing,” he said, pointing his finger into the air in front of him.

“Julien’s vision is needed right now,” said Sibylle Friche, a partner at Chicago’s Document Gallery, one of three that represents him. “The decolonial turn in recent art is not just a trend. It is part and parcel of former imperial nations like France coming to terms with the less savory aspects of their history—work that has only begun. Julien addresses colonialism poetically, which draws attention to its affective consequences as much as its material traces.”

At his LUMA exhibitions, Creuzet’s human-scale, drawing-sculptures, made of bent poles smothered in a colorful, gummy paste, at first appear abstract, but slowly reveal themselves to be spirit-like beings. In one, a fairy emerges from a dark blue ooze, as painted-over, pre-Columbian demons mock us. Elsewhere are mesmerizing holograms of African artifacts dancing bélé, a genre associated with slavery’s abolition in Martinique.

In his practice, Creuzet orchestrates self-described operatic installations using a range of mediums and collaborations with other artists, including musicians and dancers. Through those collaborations, as well as drawing from the writings of Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, and André Breton, among others, Creuzet wants to “complexify … the way different African and Creole cultures have actually played an important role in the current manifestations of contemporary France, and by extension, the contemporary world,” said Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, director of exhibitions and programs at LUMA.

There’s also a sense of hope, even joy, imbued in these works, a nod to Creuzet’s own feelings about this “moment of crystallization” and “emancipation” that we are witnessing.

“We are living through a changing context,” Creuzet said, pointing to issues as wide ranging as Covid, the energy crises, and efforts in France and elsewhere to restitute looted artworks from Africa. Society is “asking individuals to try to situate themselves in terms of who they are, where they come from, how they feel in their skin and in their bodies, and heads,” he said.

In his art, Creuzet aims to discuss socio-political issues like these in a language he hopes can reach beyond the art world’s institutional boundaries. “Julien’s work feels so urgent because of the many references and transnational connections he makes, that go beyond the bubble of contemporary art discourses,” said independent curator Cindy Sissokho, who with Céline Kopp will curate the French Pavilion. “It’s a practice that is liberating, opening up imaginaries and therefore possibilities that expand discourses about the African diaspora.”

And Creuzet’s international acclaim will likely only continue to increase in the near future. In addition to the Venice exhibition, Sissokho and Kopp will also organize a solo exhibition of Creuzet’s work later this year at the Magasin in Grenoble, where Kopp is director. Co-produced with Brown Arts Institute and David Winton Bell Gallery, the show will travel to the US starting in 2024, marking Creuzet’s first major solo institutional exhibition there. Beginning this month, he will participate in the 2023 Liverpool Biennial, and in November, he will present a new commission as part of the Performa biennial in New York. His work is also featured in the traveling exhibition, “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today,” which debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and will open at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in October.

With a method reliant on archival and on-the-ground research, Creuzet sticks to a constant, daily work ethic. “Art is deeply about daily research. I never stop nourishing and cultivating myself. I never stop learning,” he said.

His art-making is one that forces him to “se debrouiller,” or manage with what he’s got. “I always thought of art as a door to survival or fresh air, an absolute, visceral necessity,” he said. For years, and because of financial and material constraints, Creuzet’s pieces were largely composed of found objects. They still maintain that aspect, though his production means have recently expanded, and he’s incorporated new, technically advanced elements, including virtual reality.

Today, Creuzet says he “gets the most pleasure from sharing” with others. “Generosity is the most beautiful thing,” even when much of the world is currently set up to make it “difficult to share essentials, like water and food. It’s hard to share the same planet. It’s hard to simply be.”

He continued, “I’m learning not to point fingers in an inquisitive way anymore, because I don’t think it helps improve the situation. I think everyone has to do the work of emancipation and decolonization, and we still have far to go. … I’m now trying to figure out how to engage in a form of activism and denunciation, but with less pain.”

“There are very large assets … areas that have not been developed yet, especially in the tourism field, or others,” bin Salman said. “I believe that the size of these assets will be one trillion riyals.”

Bin Salman’s tourism plan centered around AlUla, a desert region that has been described as an open-air museum for the 30,000 historical sites that dot the landscape, some dating back as far as 7,000 years. The most important is Hegra, the country’s only UNESCO World Heritage site and a Nabataean wonder of more than 100 tombs carved out of sandstone cliffs. Saudi Arabia is spending more than $35 billion over the next seven years, to turn the region, and Hegra, once a crucial trading post along the Silk Road, into a new kind of international crossroad, an official told Art in America.

The Kingdom hopes to draw over 2 million visitors to the region per year, a tall order for a country that up until a couple years ago allowed visitors only for religious pilgrimages.

France has been at the center of the project almost since the beginning, signing a 10-year, €30 million ($32.4 million) per year deal in 2018 to provide “expertise” in the development of luxury lodging, fine dining, horse-related sporting activities, artistic and cultural exhibitions, and artist residencies. Already, an international airport, a 12-mile greenway and tramline, numerous hotels, and an Arab history museum have opened or are in development.

But contemporary art, set amid AlUla’s ancient ruins and ocher desert canyons, is considered key as a symbol of Saudi Arabia’s much-touted liberalization and growing activity in the art market.

While the development has already seen its share of arts initiatives, it reached a new level in mid-March when France’s premier contemporary art museum, the Centre Pompidou, announced a long-gestating contract to help develop a museum at AlUla. But the project, like France’s greater involvement in AlUla, has left all parties to navigate the delicate politics of a long isolated and repressive kingdom gradually opening to the world.