For decades, Levai oversaw the New York branch of Marlborough, a gallery founded in London in 1946 by Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer. The gallery then expanded to New York in 1963.

While Marlborough gained an international following for its high-quality exhibitions, the gallery more recently became mired in behind-the-scenes disputes over how the business was run. Marlborough began winding down operations this past June after 80 years in operation.

Born in Paris in 1937, Levai attended Sciences Po, studying political science and philosophy, and later took an internship at Galerie Kahnweiler, a storied gallery in the French capital known for boosting the profile of artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Lloyd, the Marlborough cofounder, was his uncle, and family ties led him to become the leader of New York operations in 1963.

Marlborough’s New York gallery staged acclaimed exhibitions for artists ranging from Mark Rothko to Robert Motherwell, and Alex Katz to Marisol. But one exhibition in particular, a Philip Guston show held in 1970, came to define the gallery.

That show marked Guston’s return to figuration after an abstract period and featured paintings containing a person that appeared to wear a Ku Klux Klan hood. The show polarized critics, though it is now considered key within Guston’s artistic development. (The scandal over those works would resurface once more when, in 2020, the National Gallery of Art controversially postponed a Guston retrospective, fearing that audiences would misunderstand these paintings in particular.)

At the same time, Marlborough faced widespread scrutiny after Rothko’s daughter accused the gallery of improper business practices. In 1975, some directors at Marlborough were found guilty of having defrauded the Rothko family, tarnishing the gallery’s reputation. (Levai was not among those directors.) Yet Marlborough continued maintaining a steady presence in New York, even opening several locations in the city prior to its closure earlier this year.

Max Levai, Pierre’s son, joined Marlborough in 2012 and ultimately became its president. In 2020, the gallery announced that it would shutter. Then, several months later, dueling lawsuits between Max and two board members centered around allegations of financial mismanagement, with the trustees claiming that Pierre withheld works. Max claimed he had been ousted from his position and made the decision to close the gallery while Pierre was sick with Covid, an allegation that the gallery denied.

Both lawsuits were settled. Marlborough continued to remain open for four more years.

Franz Plutschow, a Marlborough board member, told ARTnews earlier this year, “We are indebted to our expert and dedicated employees, including those who will continue to work with us as we now wind down the business. As we do so, we are mindful that the extraordinary breadth and depth of our inventory testifies to the relationships formed over the decades with some of the most important artists of the modern era.”

Nicole Eisenman’s painting Seder (2010) features objects familiar to anyone who has celebrated Passover: a shank bone, lettuce leaf, and boiled egg, all assembled on a Seder plate; an open horseradish container, its contents expectantly awaiting consumption on Hillel sandwiches; and open Haggadahs, their pages wilted from years of use. In the foreground, bulbous pink hands break a piece of matzah in two, a reference to the moment when one half is set aside for the afikoman. We are invited to view this Seder through the matzah breaker’s eyes, with Eisenman channeling a specifically Jewish perspective on the scene. 

What would it mean to see not just this one painting but Eisenman’s entire oeuvre through the lens of her Jewishness? That’s a rich question posed by curator Mark Godfrey in the catalog for Eisenman’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which has arrived stateside after a run in Europe. 

Prior surveys similar to this one have shown that Eisenman’s queerness and gender are inseparable from her art—something that can be seen in Seder, where, on the Seder plate, one can spot an orange, an untraditional symbol for women and members of the queer community who have historically been sidelined within the Jewish community. But her Judaism has largely been unconsidered, and that makes this show important. I came out of it thinking that Eisenman is one of the great Jewish artists working today. 

Eisenman’s Jewish perspective is most obvious in her work of the ’90s, which approaches religious material in a way that can only be called sacrilegious. Take her 1999 drawing Jesus Will You Shut Up, which depicts a guy at the wheel of a car being hounded by another driver trying to speed by. The titular phrase, commonly uttered in the face of a person who won’t stop honking, is here made literal, with a mopey-looking, crucified Jesus nearby. “OH SORRY,” Christ says in the drawing, to which the driver responds, “NOT YOU, YA IDIOT”—a dismissive remark that barely acknowledges Jesus’s presence. (Sadly not included in the MCA exhibition is Eisenman’s 1996 drawing Jesus Fucking Christ, which depicts exactly what its title implies.) 

Paintings of Jesus Christ over the centuries are generally meant to inspire deference and piousness, whereas Eisenman sees the subject in decidedly profane ways. In Lemonade Stand(1994), clusters of figures come together to piss into jugs and sell their urine to unsuspecting passersby. Mannerist painters like Tintoretto painted similar masses assembled to witness crucifixions and baptisms. Were he alive to stand before Eisenman’s Lemonade Stand, Tintoretto would probably be scandalized. 

In subverting the Christian-centric Western canon, Eisenman offers a Jewish point of view that would never have made it into the artistic record of, say, Tintoretto’s 16th-century Italy. And though the canon has been opened to people who may have once been seen as outsiders, Eisenman remains closely attuned to art history as an exclusionary force. 

The Chicago show marks the debut of The Visitors (2024), a painting in which a group of gallery-goers admires art that vaguely recalls Eisenman’s, including a canvas showing a woman masturbating. Everyone seems oblivious to the trench-coated men at the gallery’s door, who were lifted by Eisenman from a photograph of “Degenerate Art,” the Nazi-organized 1937 exhibition that sought to strike down modernist art that evinced a “perverse Jewish spirit.” Eisenman’s ancestors departed Vienna during the ’30s as the Nazis rose to power, and the artist has said, in an interview quoted in the catalog, that she considers it her “job” to “process the sadness of my family.” 

In The Visitors Eisenman shows that oppression still exists and that there are people out there who seek to deny queer and Jewish perspectives like her own. But the painting is hardly intended to inspire terror. At the bottom of the canvas, a figure in a maroon sweater—someone who looks like Eisenman herself—reaches a hand into the pocket of a man who appears to be a patron and pulls out his wallet, getting ready to take the money and run. As usual, she gets the last laugh. 

Invader, an anonymous French artist who has gained a loyal following across the globe, also took to the streets this week, putting up a new work that is visible from the Seine. He made the world aware of the piece this week by posting a picture of it to Instagram, calling the work “a special piece for the olympics.”

The work, like many others by Invader, resembles a blue pixelated form, its contours vaguely recalling an athlete on the move. A representative for the artist reinforced that interpretation in a statement to the Associated Press, saying, “Invader told me to say that he wanted to celebrate the Olympics in Paris with this mosaic. The space invader is running and he wears some of the colors of the Olympics signage.”

According to the AP, this new work is the 1,512th debuted by Invader on the streets of Paris. Other works by him have appeared in cities ranging from Hong Kong to Rome.

Despite the fact that Invader’s practice is technically illegal under French law—it qualifies as vandalism—officials in the country have pledged support for him. The New Yorker reported last year that Anne Hidalgo, Paris’s Mayor, has an Invader piece hanging in her office. And while it was not clear whether this new piece, formally titled PA_1512, was formally sanctioned by the Olympics, he did tag the accounts for 2024 Paris games and the city of Paris in his Instagram post.

Much of his art takes its inspiration from arcade games. “The main point of my work is that I give physical materiality to the pixel,” he told the New Yorker.

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Guerrero, the first curator with a specified focus on Latinx art ever to work at the Whitney, has organized a range of acclaimed shows for the museum, including surveys dedicated to Puerto Rican art after Hurricane Maria and Mexican muralism’s impact on American art. She is currently at work on “Shifting Landscapes,” a show featuring works from the Whitney’s collection that deal with how artists conceive of worlds both real and imagined.

Sawyer, who was hired last year as a photography curator, is readying a solo show for Mark Armijo McKnight that is due to open this month. Prior to the Whitney, he worked at the Brooklyn Museum, where he recently organized an expansive exhibition about zine culture and a retrospective for late photograph Jimmy De Sana.

The two will now be charged with providing a survey of the American art scene as it stands now. Because the Whitney Biennial is founded upon that ambitious premise, it is closely watched—and frequently controversial, polarizing critics and artists alike.

This year’s edition, curated by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, has likewise been divisive. Though praised by certain outlets, including ARTnews and Art in America, others have claimed the show is overly safe.

“As the 2024 Biennial draws to a close, we’re delighted to pass the baton to another superb team of Whitney curators in anticipation of the 2026 edition,” Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s director, said in a statement. “As much as the Biennial is a showcase of current artistic talents, it is also a platform for visionary curators like Marcela and Drew.”

The statement came roughly a week after the performance itself, which involved a group of performers voguing a catwalk. Some observers said that the lengthy catwalk and the formation of the dancers were references to the Leonardo painting, claiming that one dancer who wore a star-shaped crown was meant to symbolize Jesus.

Others have noted that there were many differences between the performance and the painting, and one art historian even said a more accurate reference point may be Jan van Bijlert‘s Festival of the Gods (1635), which depicts Roman deities, not Christian subject matter.

But this was not enough to dissuade the detractors, who alleged that the drag queens had insulted Christians. Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the United States’s House of Representatives, called the performance a “war on our faith.” Elon Musk, the owner of X, wrote on his social media platform that the performance was “disrespectful of Christians.”

An Olympics spokesperson subsequently apologized for any offense caused, noting that it was not intentional. And Thomas Jolly, who served as artistic director of the opening ceremony, said that the performance was meant as “a big pagan party in link with the God of Mount Olympus.”

Even as the controversy appeared to die down, the Holy See weighed in this week because, it said, it was moved to “deplore” the event.

“At a prestigious event where the whole world comes together to share common values, there should be no allusions ridiculing the religious convictions of many people,” the Vatican said in a statement. Freedom of expression matters, the Vatican said, but only in so much as it is not “limited by respect for others.”

The show, due to open September 12 at the gallery giant’s West Hollywood location, will feature landscapes, abstractions, and more that all contain an Angeleno flavor, per the gallery. Although there will be representations of Los Angeles landmarks here, the gallery allows that some works will not explicitly depict the city, since the show’s approach is “far from literal.”

Certain works, such as paintings of rippling water by David Hockney and Calida Rawles, will allude to the backyards of many Los Angeles homes that have swimming pools. And a Vija Celmins painting of a hand firing a gun will be enlisted to speak to Hollywood genre filmmaking. Naturally, a number of famed LA-based artists, from Mark Bradford to Ed Ruscha, will figure in the exhibition.

Martin said in a statement, “I’m thrilled that ‘L.A. Story’ is the focus of so many wonderful artists and a wonderful gallery, Hauser & Wirth, which is just across the street from the Troubadour, where I first stepped foot on Santa Monica Blvd., which began my L.A. sojourn.”

Martin, who appeared several times on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list during the 1990s, has some prior curatorial experience: he helped organize the Hammer Museum’s Lawren Harris show in 2016.

The private course, located in the city of Newark, opened in 1910, and ever since, golfers have been allowed to play on earthworks that are thought to have been built somewhere between 2,000 and 1,600 years ago. The Ohio Historical Connection, a historical society that manages cultural heritage in the state, acquired the deed to the land in 1933 and has leased it to the Moundbuilders Country Club ever since.

The earthworks, formally known as the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks and more casually called the Octagon Earthworks, are considered historically important. They were nominated in 2018 for inclusion on the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites, although their status is still pending.

UNESCO’s citation for the earthworks labels them the “most representative surviving expressions of the Indigenous tradition now referred to as the Hopewell culture.” They create rolling hills and uneven surfaces, and are thought to envision the cycles of the Sun and the Moon.

In 2018, after UNESCO began to consider the earthworks for World Heritage status, the Ohio History Connection sued Moundbuilders, seeking the full rights to the land. The suit was meant to ensure greater public access to these earthworks, which have historically been off limits for much of the year to those who aren’t members of Moundbuilders.

Four years later, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the Ohio History Connection could move forward with its plans to open up access to the earthworks. Justice Michael P. Donelly, in his majority opinion, said that doing so would “help preserve and ensure perpetual public access to one of the most significant landmarks in the state of Ohio.”

But a settlement was not reached until Thursday, when the Ohio Historical Connection announced that it had reached an agreement to take over the land starting January 1.

Megan Wood, executive director of the Ohio Historical Connection, said in a statement that “our guiding principles throughout this process have been to enable full public access to the Octagon Earthworks while ensuring Moundbuilders Country Club receives just compensation for the value of its lease on the property. And now we have accomplished those things.”

Speaking to the New York Times, David Kratoville, Moundbuilders board president, said the club would now be faced with a significant change. “I don’t know what we’ll land on with a name,” he told the Times. “My priority is getting a deal done.”

Although Sikander had previously stated that she planned to leave the sculpture as is, she addressed her decision at length on Tuesday in a Washington Post op-ed. She once again called on the work’s exhibitor, the University of Houston, to make another statement about the beheading and speculated that the decapitators may have thought they could get away with their act because of a hurricane that blew through Texas at the time.

The sculpture, titled Witness (2023), faced pushback from anti-abortion groups earlier this year, with one claiming that the work promoted “satanic” imagery because it alluded to horned beings associated with Abrahamic religions. But, Sikander told Art in America earlier this year, “There is nothing Satanic about them.”

Sikander previously said that her female figure, who has two spiraling braids, was meant as a tribute to the “spirit and grit” of “women who have been collectively fighting for their right to their own bodies over generations,” particularly in the wake of a 2022 Supreme Court decision that severely curtailed abortion rights in the US.

In July, Witness was beheaded at the University of Houston. Video footage of the beheading showed that the event took place in the middle of the night, during Hurricane Beryl.

“When we are witnessing a regression of women’s rights around the world, especially in the United States, art can function as a vehicle of defiance,” Sikander wrote in the Washington Post this week. “It can also be a path toward rectification. It’s clear to me that the people opposed to the statue object to its message of women’s power.”

Noting that “art to cultivate imagination, build empathy, bridge political divides and further our common humanity,” Sikander concluded, “We should leave the statue the way it is: a testament to the hatred and division that permeate our society.”

The list, which also includes sites such as Stonehenge, the Taj Mahal, and Chichén Itzá, is intended to recognize places of cultural importance. It currently includes more than 1,200 sites globally.

Brancusi’s five sculptures were grouped together in one entry. The most famous work of the five, the 98-foot-tall sculpture Endless Column (1937–38), resembles a tower of cast-iron forms that rise into the sky. That work is considered a major example of modernist art for the way it distilled objects to their basics, representing them through abstraction.

Also included in the group are The Table of Silence, a place where viewers can sit on minimalist chairs, and The Gate of the Kiss, an arch whose form alludes to another famed Brancusi sculpture showing two people embracing.

These sculptures were crafted by Brancusi, a Romanian by birth who spent significant time in France during the 20th century, to honor those who died defending Târgu Jiu during World War I.

UNESCO praised the ensemble of sculptures for the “remarkable fusion of abstract sculpture, landscape architecture, engineering, and urban planning conceived by Constantin Brâncuși [that] goes far beyond the local wartime episode to offer an original vision of the human condition.”

Raluca Turcan, Romania’s culture minister, said “the granted recognition forces us to protect the monumental ensemble, to keep it intact for future generations and for humanity’s cultural memory.”

Brancusi has received a swell of attention in Europe recently. In 2023 he was the subject of a retrospective in the Romanian city of Timișoara, marking the first time the artist had received such a show in his home country in half a century. This year, the Centre Pompidou in Paris staged another, separate retrospective that featured nearly 200 of his sculptures.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York on Friday, claims that Hedges and his gallery, the Santa Monica–based Hedges Projects, were consigned these works via invoices dated between June 2022 and May 2024. Hedges and his gallery are accused of owing $298,772.72.

Hedges has called himself “the go-to guy for Warhol photography,” claiming in his biography that he owns the biggest private collection of photographs by the Pop artist. He has curated shows of Warhol’s photographs, including one in 2020 at Jack Shainman Gallery held prior to the onset of the pandemic in New York. He also staged a selling show of Warhol’s art with Gagosian gallery in 2022.

The son of a collector of self-taught artists, Hedges focused full-time on art starting in 2013, the year that he departed the world of investment banking, according to the Art Newspaper. In addition to collecting art, he has served as a trustee to the Dia Art Foundation and has been a patron of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, and the Tate museum network in the UK. He is currently curator for the arts at the the Hotel Bel-Air and the Beverly Hills Hotel and Bungalows in Los Angeles.

Jack Shainman Gallery was founded in 1984 and currently represents artists such as Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Kerry James Marshall, Nina Chanel Abney, and Rose B. Simpson. In January, the gallery opened a new 20,000-square-foot space in Tribeca.

Friday’s lawsuit did not detail the artworks Jack Shainman Gallery had consigned to Hedges and his gallery, noting only that the two were supposed to sell these works to collectors. According to the suit, Hedges and his gallery “kept and used those funds for their own purposes and benefit.”

“Hedges Projects is saddened to learn about the lawsuit filed by Jack Shainman Gallery,” the gallery said in a statement. “Hedges Projects and Jack Shainman Gallery have had a successful business relationship since 2018. It is unfortunate that Jack Shainman Gallery decided to file a claim while the parties are in the midst of business negotiations. We strongly disagree with the claim, and plan to assert counterclaims of our own, if necessary.”

A representative for Jack Shainman Gallery declined to comment.